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Chief Editors: Aanvi (23b2139@iitb.ac.in), Ashish Ranjan (23b2216@iitb.ac.in)
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The video is eleven seconds long.
A street. Dust is still moving through the air the way dust does after something has ended. A building that is no longer a building. It is a suggestion, a memory of load-bearing walls. In the foreground, which takes a moment to understand, there are shoes. Several pairs. Arranged, as shoes are arranged, when the feet that wore them have not gone far.
The camera does not linger. It was not made to linger. It was made to be watched in the time it takes to decide whether to watch the next thing.
In a lecture hall in Powai, a student watches it twice. Not out of grief. Out of the small confusion that sometimes precedes grief, if grief is going to come at all. Then the feed moves. A meme. A food review. A dog doing something a dog should not be able to do.
I put the phone in my pocket. The professor is still speaking, so I better get some notes down.
The world has become extraordinarily visible. Never before have we had such immediate access to wars, famines, protests, floods, displacements, and humanitarian crises unfolding across the globe. Yet visibility and attention are not the same thing. Information arrives constantly, but significance rarely does, and perhaps that is what makes this moment peculiar. We know more than ever before, but seem to be affected by less and less.
A war begins on another continent, and fuel prices rise. A disruption in global supply chains alters costs across industries, and a climate disaster reshapes patterns of migration, food and work. By the time any of this reaches a campus in Powai, it rarely arrives as the consequence of someone’s suffering. It arrives as a webmail about the mess menu. Tolerable and nobody’s fault in particular. We read that one. Even sent a message in the group chat about it. The crisis arrives in a form familiar to us before the people living through it do.
“It’s almost as if the world is on fire and we seem to have become accustomed to the warmth.”
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The email opens to the view of a beach that seems to have been drained of its usual colour.
Murky waters recede, leaving behind something forgotten in their wake.
The sand is ashen brown and ever so often, bright colours peek through. Colours left behind by people like us. Colours that do not belong.
Each one a consequence of what was nothing but a mere inconvenience.
I skimmed through it while finishing my sandwich, registered the words ‘pollution’ and ‘climate change’, and closed the tab. Who’s waking up at 8 AM on a Sunday to be surrounded by garbage anyway?
We set foot into this university as starry-eyed freshers, after having spent months in consistent, almost meditative pursuit of a goal. For most of us, this came as a result of years of learning to tune out anything that did not align with that pursuit, including pushing aside meaningful social interactions, socio-political awareness, or more generally, the inherent ability to look beyond the tunnel of our own journey. It is worth acknowledging then that this conditioning cannot be unlearned with the flip of a switch. Instead, as with a tightly coiled thread, it needs to be consciously unwound over time.
IIT Bombay is exceptionally good at teaching people how to solve problems. Over four years, students learn to break complex systems into manageable components: a bridge’s load distribution, a supply chain’s bottlenecks, a market’s equilibrium. We learn optimisation and modelling. We learn to ask what works and how to make it work better.
These are valuable skills, but they are also habits of thought. And like all habits, they shape what becomes visible. Wake up to the sound of a roommate’s alarm, walk to an 8 AM lecture past the crowded night canteen still smelling of last night’s frankie, sit through three hours of derivations on a whiteboard, then head to the same mess for the same rotation of dal and rice, before disappearing into a lab or an assignment until 2 AM. Four years of this rhythm stop feeling like subjects and start feeling like the shape of the world itself. What gets discussed is what stays in mind and eventually becomes the basis of attention and urgency. No one explicitly says that social questions matter less. Reward structures built around what the zeitgeist deems worth chasing, whether it’s scoring that internship, acing that exam, or landing that placement, often communicate priorities more effectively than ethics and sermons ever could.
It was to counter this STEM-centric influence that the HASMED1 (an umbrella of Humanities, Social Sciences, Management, Entrepreneurship and Design) courses were integrated into the curriculum, and even made compulsory in the first year itself. The HASMED components were introduced as a way to humanise STEM education, with a vision of producing engineers capable of independent thinking and inculcating ethics and sensitivity. Science and conscience, after all, share the same Latin root scire, to know. Science asks us to know the world around us and conscience asks what the knowledge demands of us. We have mastered the first; the question remains whether twenty credits can teach us the latter.
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In an endless stream of content demanding attention, the result is not ignorance, but saturation. And saturation can resemble indifference even when it is not. The question is not whether students know what is happening in the world. The question is why so much of it feels distant, even when it is not.
“In an endless stream of content demanding attention, the result is not ignorance, but saturation. And saturation can resemble indifference even when it is not.”
A crisis arrived–not in a country most of us couldn’t place on a map, not in a language that needed subtitles, but woven in the same tapestry we know best—the education system. This was the very same machinery that had sorted us, weighed us, and delivered its verdict on us. When that machinery was found to have fingers on the scale, something that had been lying quiet woke up. Students who had never used their feeds for anything heavier than reels posted. Students who had muted the news finally unmuted something. Many of them left their rooms and stood together for a cause they believed in. This could be reduced to self-interest, but that would be both unkind and imprecise. What stirred people was recognition, perhaps the oldest trigger of human feeling.
Renowned ethical philosopher Peter Singer once posed a question that has the quality of a trap. If you walked past a shallow pond and saw a child drowning in it, would you wade in? Most people answer this in the affirmative without hesitation. Singer then asks what the morally relevant difference is between that child and a child dying of hunger somewhere you will never donate to. The drowning child is proximate, visible, and present. That is the only distinction. Distance, he argues, is not a moral fact; it is merely geography, and geography has no business determining the weight of a life.
While a compelling argument, it is also an impossible one to live inside. Singer is not wrong in saying that proximity is an arbitrary basis for compassion. But the standard of moral feeling described is also one that would require a person to be perpetually undone, to carry the full weight of every preventable death in every country simultaneously, while also attending lectures and submitting assignments and figuring out what to eat for dinner. What his argument illuminates is not a prescription for how to feel, but a mirror held up to the shape of our attention, showing us, precisely and without flattery, where it reaches and where it stops, and the fact that where it stops has less to do with the magnitude of suffering than with how far away it is happening.
We feel what we can imagine ourselves living through. We are familiar with the dread of walking down the exam hall, carrying nothing but an admit card, a transparent pouch and the weight of years of preparation and expectation into a few hours under fluorescent lights. An eleven-second footage of rubble offers no such familiarity.
Calling this simply a failure of empathy, however, takes the nuance off the matter. Our attention does not develop in a vacuum. It is cultivated, disciplined and, often without our noticing, allocated by the environments we spend our formative years inside.
It is worth pausing here. Our case, perhaps, is more nuanced than something reduced merely to “lack of empathy”. The world isn’t and was never meant to be hardlined in black and white; its beauty lies in the hues of grey that taint its canvas. Oftentimes, what appears to be indifference may instead stem from a sense of conflict aversion. The helplessness felt in acting as a distant witness to something far beyond our control. The discomfort of speaking out over something we may not fully understand. The option of avoiding adding yet another thing to an already crowded mindspace. For some of us, it all just makes pushing everything away with a single swipe the easier choice. Whether that choice is understandable isn’t for us to say, but what’s worth looking into is when that choice turns into a habit, a way of being. The fact still remains – our ability to vicariously experience things has taken a hit in these changing times.
Outside the lecture hall, the campus continues as usual. Students hurry to classes. Interview preparations continue. Assignments accumulate. Club meetings pile up. The world remains noisy.
Somewhere, another notification appears.
Another flood. Another protest. Another war. Another crisis.
This article will arrive among them. Some readers, such as yourself, will finish it. Some will skim it. Some will save it for later and never return. The majority? They’ll likely move on. That is not necessarily a failure. It may simply be another illustration of the condition this piece is trying to describe. After all, in a few moments, this article too will become something else that has been scrolled past.
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1 For a deeper look at what HASMED was meant to achieve and what it has become in practice, read our earlier piece, The State of HASMED Today. ↩
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