The Contagion of Caring

-By Rudrangshi Saha

Most of the world’s disasters aren’t born of apathy– apathy is harmless, even tender in comparison. What ruins nations, families, democracies, timelines is the epidemic of excessive caring: A chronic inflammation of opinion

Lodged too deep in the throat to swallow back.

Walk through a market and you’ll hear it; not bargaining, not laughter, but unsolicited devotion to the language you speak. The alphabet must match the flag, and the flag must match the face, and the face must match the blood, and the blood must match the imaginary ancestor

someone stitched up together in a forwarded message.

Step into a competitive space, and the temperature drops ten degrees. Suddenly people care more about your surname than your skillset, your postcode more than your portfolio, your “background” more than the background you fought your way out of.

And if by cosmic accident you are anything but

tall, fair, straight, male, wealthy– congratulations.

You become a magnet for a species of overzealous caretakers who monitor your existence like a threat to national security. The kind of caring that audits your pronouns, your undertone, your waistline, your gods, your politics, your chromosome arrangement, sll under the guise of “just saying.”

I, too, have been attended to by such caretakers. They hovered like bureaucrats of the body, filing reports on everything I was not: my hair, my height, my diction, my caste, my lack of caste, my shadow, my silence, my lack of silence, my spine, my "softness", my refusal– to be what they rehearsed for me.

Governments fall, earthquakes rise, oceans boil, freedoms crumble; but the global council of the Overly Concerned still finds time to debate:

Who loves whom in Uganda,

What women wear in Iran,

What comedians say in Mumbai,

What students protest in Delhi,

What journalists report in Gaza,

What farmers demand in Punjab,

What drag queens perform in Tennessee.

The surveillance is universal.  The caring is metastatic.

Everywhere, the same mythology: that scrutiny is patriotism, policing is culture, discrimination is tradition, and cruelty is a form of civic duty.

Entire regimes are curated by people who “care” far too much.

About temples, 

About sentiments, 

About headlines,

About territories,

About cows, 

About rights-

Ah sorry, not about rights.

And funnily enough, somewhere in all this devotion, the actual problems: hunger, humanity, jobs, justice, sit in the neglected corner; waiting for someone to water them instead of debating their religion.

Think of it; a world where people simply stop caring:

Where they were born?

Who they pray to?

Which gender they’d like to love?

What shade their face registers under the sun?

Which border their breath crossed to exist?

So you're a guy and you like a guy?

Cool. But what am I to do?

Imagine a world where caring is directed inward, not outward— where people tend to their own fractures before critiquing someone else’s bones.

Most of the world’s chaos would evaporate if people loosened their grip on other people’s throats,

other people’s bodies,

other people’s histories,

other people’s futures.

Call it a radical philosophy,but here it is:

Stop caring where someone is from.

Start caring who they are.

And if that’s too complicated—

then stop caring altogether.

Not hate. Not cynicism. Just the discipline of minding your own damn being

before rearranging another’s.

Maybe then, one morning, the world will wake up a bit less bruised,

A bit less censored,

A bit less carved open by a million moral scalpels- a world no longer built by people who mistook obsession for concern, and control for compassion.

We don’t need more caring. We need less of it. We need fewer custodians of other people’s existence.

We need fewer self-appointed guardians of purity, culture, nationhood. We need fewer people explaining humanity to humans who are just one step away from finally living it.