The Light and the Line
What Karthigai Deepam taught me about ego, empathy, and shared discipline
I started 2025 at the Maha Kumbh, seeing how massive collective faith can be managed with near-silent order. I closed the year at Tiruvannamalai for Karthigai Deepam, where fire is revered. Both trips were profound. But the Deepam queues showed a kind of chaos that stayed with me.
This experience brought back a popular argument: we see public trash and bad behavior because people lack empathy for fellow Indians, assuming someone else will clean up. The exact viral post does not matter. The idea does.
My time at Tiruvannamalai suggested the truth is more complex than a simple “empathy deficit.” We cannot use one brush to define who we are.
The Deepam: Fire and the Test of Ego
For context, Tiruvannamalai, the spiritual heart of the Deepam, is a town located in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, near Chennai. It is a town where many Indian masters attained enlightenment, notably Ramana Maharishi. Karthigai Deepam is celebrated as an immensely powerful day. It marks the moment Lord Shiva appeared as an infinite column of fire, a Jyotirlinga.
The goal of visiting the place on this day is spiritual: to witness the divine light and destroy ego and ignorance.
The spiritual goal is high, but the path to it is full of human actions that seem to contradict the devotion we carry.
Contradiction 1: The Civic Switch
There is Empathy Deficit: The argument says we lack empathy when we litter.
But this question struck me: if it is only a lack of empathy, why does the same person often follow rules the moment they step into a foreign country?
The difference may not be in our hearts alone. It is also about systemic clarity and certainty of consequence.
Abroad: consequences (a fine, clear public disapproval) are immediate and predictable.
At home: consequences are often unclear or inconsistently enforced. Systems learn to absorb the chaos. When rules are blurred, people default to self-preservation.
Contradiction 2: Anger in the Pursuit of Peace
The deepest test was watching people push and fight with police officers just to enter the temple. One angry outburst added to the chaos.
How do we carry such anger while seeking a space of peace and devotion?
This is the Scarcity Trap. The anger isn’t directed at the police; it’s aimed at the perceived scarcity of the divine moment.
People focus so intensely on achieving the goal (getting darshan) that they sacrifice the process (patience and respect) needed to reach it. They lose their peace while aggressively trying to find it.
The queue is the final exam. It’s the moment the ego—the very thing the Deepam fire is meant to burn away—flares up right before the moment of spiritual connection.
Contradiction 3: Systemic Chaos vs. Individual Kindness
The most powerful surprise was the human factor. Amid the pushing, my friend and I decided to leave the temple. Twice, police officers stopped us. They did not just let us go; they went out of their way to ensure we were safe and comfortable. They offered us water and biscuits and even promised we would have a better divine experience when the final lighting took place.
With 16,000 people inside, this extraordinary individual care felt like a profound contradiction to the public chaos we had witnessed moments earlier.
The lesson is this:
Chaos is not the whole picture. The “empathy deficit” is not total. It exists in the unmanaged crowd (the litter, the aggression), but individual empathy flourishes when the system pauses to deliver care.
I believe we cannot define our culture by its lowest common denominator (the trash); we must also recognize the highest forms of individual service.
The journey to the Deepam is a mirror. I saw our civic shortcomings, our impatience, and, gratefully, our capacity for unexpected human kindness.
A Thought for the New Year
As I reflect on the gap between our high spiritual intention and our public actions, I feel this misalignment is one of our most important challenges. How do we ensure inner purpose translates into disciplined, ethical action in the real world?
The key learning is this:
Life is full of contradictions. We cannot define human behaviour with one broad stroke. Faith shapes the inner life. Systems shape the shared life. We need both to rise together
Related with this one at multiple levels.. Gave me goosebumps!