Darpan letter · No. 624 September 2026

Bear your own heat

On a heavy morning’s news, the threefold suffering of Sāṅkhya, Patañjali’s four attitudes of mind, and Kṛṣṇa’s answer to the student who fears that unfinished work is lost

प्रिय साथी,

Today’s papers were heavy, and I will not pretend otherwise. The Climate Impact Lab estimates that this year’s Super El Niño could cause about 15,800 additional heat-related deaths in India between September and February, give or take 1,600, while nearly 40 per cent of our coal-fired power plants report critically low fuel stocks. Maharashtra’s Chief Minister said the drought is likely to be worse than that of 1972; Latur and Dharashiv have had only half their normal rain. A young seafarer from Uttar Pradesh, Suraj Yadav, died after a missile struck his ship off the coast of Oman. And, closest to home for you, the Enforcement Directorate alleges that a former chairperson of the Chhattisgarh Public Service Commission received ₹45 lakh for favouring two candidates in the 2021 State service examination. That is an allegation, and he will have his trial. But I suspect it is the line that stayed with you longest.

If you closed the paper feeling heavier than when you opened it, that is not weakness. It means you read it as a citizen and not only as a candidate. Our tradition has something to say about a morning like this, and it begins in an unexpected place.

The classical text of the Sāṅkhya school, Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṅkhya Kārikā, does not open with a god or with the making of the world. It opens with pain: दुःखत्रयाभिघाताज्जिज्ञासा तदपघातके हेतौ — duḥkhatrayābhighātāj jijñāsā tadapaghātake hetau — because we are struck by the threefold suffering, there arises the desire to know what removes it (Kārikā 1). The traditional explanation sorts the three: ādhyātmika, from within, of body and mind; ādhibhautika, from other beings, a missile or a bribe; ādhidaivika, from the forces of nature, heat and cold, and rain that does not fall. Today’s paper carried all three. Now look at what the verse says suffering produces. Not despair, and not denial. Jijñāsā, the wish to know. Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s own aim was larger, and he goes on to argue that visible remedies never end suffering once and for all. But his first move is the one an administrator needs. Pain is where inquiry begins.

The Yoga school, Sāṅkhya’s sister darśana, put it in three words: हेयं दुःखमनागतम् — heyaṃ duḥkham anāgatam — the suffering that has not yet come is what can be avoided (Yoga Sūtra 2.16). Vyāsa, its classical commentator, says in his Bhāṣya on the sūtra just before (2.15) that this teaching is arranged like medicine: the disease, its cause, health, and the cure. Read the heat report again with that in mind. Those 15,800 deaths have not happened. They are anāgata. Michael Greenstone of the Climate Impact Lab said the report “allows decision-makers to see exactly where emergency actions can be taken now to save tens of thousands of lives in the coming months.” That is Patañjali in the language of a laboratory. And India has done it before: after a deadly heat wave in 2010, Ahmedabad drew up South Asia’s first heat action plan in 2013, treating the heat not yet come as heat that can be avoided.

That is what to do with other people’s heat. For your own, the Gītā has a different word. Early in the second chapter Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna: मात्रास्पर्शास्तु कौन्तेय शीतोष्णसुखदुःखदाः। आगमापायिनोऽनित्यास्तांस्तितिक्षस्व भारत॥ — the touch of the senses with their objects gives cold and heat, pleasure and pain; they come and they go, they do not last; bear them, O Bhārata (2.14). The word is titikṣā, patient endurance. Many of you are reading this in a rented room where the fan only moves the warm air around. Titikṣā is for that. But notice to whom it is said and why: to a man about to act, about his own sensations, so that his hands will not shake. It is never advice for a farmer in Dharashiv or a family waiting for a son to come home from Oman. An officer who preaches titikṣā to the suffering has read the verse upside down. Bear your own heat so that you are free to relieve someone else’s.

Then there is the news itself, and how to hold it so that it informs you without poisoning you. Patañjali gives four attitudes for four kinds of situation: मैत्रीकरुणामुदितोपेक्षाणां सुखदुःखपुण्यापुण्यविषयाणां भावनातश्चित्तप्रसादनम् — by cultivating friendliness towards the happy, compassion towards the suffering, gladness towards the virtuous and equanimity towards the wrongdoer, the mind becomes clear (Yoga Sūtra 1.33). Try it on today’s paper. Karuṇā for Suraj Yadav’s family and the farmers of Marathwada; compassion moves towards suffering, where panic only moves away. Muditā for the good that was also there if you looked: the nineteen other Indian seafarers on his ship were evacuated by the Royal Navy of Oman, and the Supreme Court, in Shishu Pal, gave a homemaker’s unpaid cooking, cleaning and caregiving a minimum notional value of ₹30,000 a month, recognising that such work supports the paid workforce. Maitrī for the friend who cleared the exam this year while you did not. And upekṣā for the alleged bribe in Chhattisgarh.

Upekṣā does not mean looking away. The case will be tried, and one day you may be the officer who acts against such things. It means you do not let the wrong move into your mind and rearrange it. The cynic reasons that if a seat can be bought, study is for fools. Notice what he has done: he has let the person accused of buying a seat decide his life for him a second time. Patañjali’s promise is cittaprasādana, a mind made clear. A clear mind is not a numb one. It is the only kind that can act well.

One more story, smaller than the others. The economist Surjit S. Bhalla wrote that he has voted for three decades, that his name and address have not changed, and that he believes in the purpose of the revision of the rolls. An officer checked his papers and found nothing wrong. Yet the application stayed incomplete. Incomplete in what respect? He writes that nobody could tell him, and he was generous to the man at the table: “he is a cog, not the machine.” Keep one thing from this for later. One day you will sit on the other side of that table. When you tell a citizen her file is incomplete, tell her in what respect.

Keep the other for now, because I know how that word feels to an aspirant: the mock score without a comment, the result list without your roll number and without a reason, the private sense after months of work that you are still incomplete and cannot say where. Arjuna asked about exactly this. What becomes of the person who has faith but whose effort falls short before the goal (6.37)? Does he perish like a scattered cloud, छिन्नाभ्रमिव नश्यति (6.38)? Kṛṣṇa answers with one of the gentlest lines in the Gītā: पार्थ नैवेह नामुत्र विनाशस्तस्य विद्यते। न हि कल्याणकृत्कश्चिद्दुर्गतिं तात गच्छति॥ — Pārtha, neither here nor hereafter is there ruin for him; for no one who does good, my dear, comes to a bad end (6.40). He calls Arjuna tāta, the word an elder uses for a child. A few verses on he says why: पूर्वाभ्यासेन तेनैव ह्रियते ह्यवशोऽपि सः — by that very earlier practice he is carried forward, even without willing it (6.44).

Kṛṣṇa is speaking of lifetimes. You need only apply it to attempts. The Article you traced to its clause, the answer you rewrote three times, the habit of reading a report to its last table: none of it is destroyed when a result does not come. It carries you. The Gītā does not promise you the rank. It promises that honest work is not lost. Think of the homemaker’s case again. Work that no payslip ever recorded was found, in the end, to have held a household up.

For your preparation, one practical thing. When you write on today’s heat and drought cards, borrow Vyāsa’s medical order: the harm, its causes, what health would look like, and the means. Most answers jump from the problem to a list of measures. The one that pauses to say what a good outcome is — no heat death that an early warning could have prevented — reads like the work of someone who could run a district. And tonight, draw four boxes on a page: the happy, the suffering, the virtuous, the wrongdoer. Put one item from today’s news in each, one line apiece, with the attitude Patañjali asks for. It takes ten minutes, and the weight of the morning becomes something you can use, which is what jijñāsā was always for. Then close the notebook and sleep. Steadiness is built in the body too.

Be proud of this, and for the right reason. Ours is not the only civilisation that thought hard about suffering. But it thought about it with unusual method, and from many schools at once: Sāṅkhya opened its text with it, Yoga built a discipline on it, and the Buddha’s first sermon at Sarnath set out duḥkha as the first noble truth. None of them answered pain with denial, and none with despair. They answered it with inquiry, discipline and compassion. That inheritance is not only in old books. It is in a court that put a value on a homemaker’s care, in a city that learnt to prepare for heat before it came, and, I hope, in the officers who will one day tell a citizen in what respect. You are preparing to be one of them.

Bear your own heat. Help carry other people’s. And when anything — a portal, a result list, a voice in your own head — marks you incomplete without saying in what respect, remember what Kṛṣṇa told a frightened student: न हि कल्याणकृत्कश्चिद्दुर्गतिं तात गच्छति। No one who does good, my dear, comes to a bad end.

— आपका साथी, दर्पण

Sources: Sāṅkhya Kārikā 1 · Yoga Sūtra 2.16 (with Vyāsa’s Bhāṣya on 2.15) · Bhagavad Gītā 2.14 · Yoga Sūtra 1.33 · Bhagavad Gītā 6.37–6.40, 6.44