Maybe the Body Is Not Broken
Acronyms and Terms
DNA — Deoxyribonucleic Acid, the inherited biological instruction system inside living organisms.
MRI — Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a machine used to create detailed images of the inside of the body.
SSRI — Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, a class of antidepressant medicines commonly prescribed for depression and anxiety.
DSM — Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the psychiatric classification handbook used mainly in the United States.
Maybe the body is not broken.
That sounds like the sort of sentence a madman mutters while standing barefoot on a tramline talking to pigeons. Which, to be fair, in this heat, in this city, with this electricity bill, is not entirely impossible.
But listen.
I have been wondering lately whether bipolar depression and anxiety are sometimes less like “errors” and more like an old machine reacting honestly to a completely insane environment.
Not nobly. Not poetically. Certainly not romantically. There is nothing romantic about staring at a wall fan for forty minutes because your mind feels like wet cement and your chest feels as if somebody has parked a scooter on it.
Still.
The thought stays.
Because if you look carefully at modern life, really look at it the way a suspicious Bengali uncle inspects fish at Gariahat market, poking it from twelve angles before buying, the whole thing begins to seem slightly deranged.
Take an ordinary day.
You wake up at 5:12 in the morning because some dog has decided the end times are near and must be announced to the neighborhood immediately. The room is already warm. The ceiling fan rotates with the enthusiasm of a retired government clerk. Your phone glows beside the pillow like a radioactive biscuit.
Before even brushing your teeth you have already absorbed: bad news, job anxiety, world politics, three advertisements, two scams, one successful former classmate in Canada smiling beside a lake, and a video explaining why your life would improve if you bought magnesium supplements from Singapore.
Meanwhile your actual body — the old animal body, the one carried down through caves and forests and mud and famine and predators — is still basically expecting: food, tribe, sunlight, movement, rest, safety.
Instead we give it Wi-Fi and panic.
Then we become surprised when the wiring starts smoking.
This is the part people skip over.
Human beings talk about the brain as if it were some futuristic supercomputer. It is not. It is a nervous goat wearing spectacles.
The body you live inside is prehistoric equipment operating inside a completely artificial ecosystem. We built glass towers, stock markets, LinkedIn, performance reviews, online dating, algorithmic advertising, twenty-four-hour outrage channels, and social media feeds that behave like slot machines designed by cocaine merchants.
Then we ask: “Why are people anxious?”
It is like throwing a goat into a casino and becoming concerned about the goat’s emotional regulation.
The strange thing is this: anxiety actually makes perfect sense.
A caveman who heard rustling in bushes and said, “Probably nothing,” did not become your ancestor.
The anxious fellow survived.
The fellow who checked twice survived.
The fellow who slept lightly survived.
The fellow who worried about danger survived long enough to produce descendants who now sit in Kolkata apartments catastrophizing over e-mails from HR departments.
Evolution is very efficient in the short term and hilariously careless in the long term. Like most politicians.
So now the old alarm system keeps firing continuously because modern life never resolves anything cleanly.
A tiger either eats you or it does not.
Modern problems linger like unpaid relatives.
Job insecurity. Rent. Family pressure. Health scares. Social comparison. Middle age. Loneliness. The WhatsApp school group. God help us, the WhatsApp school group.
Nothing finishes.
The nervous system remains permanently half-alert, like a security guard whose tea break keeps getting interrupted.
And bipolar depression adds another layer of comedy to this circus.
When mania comes, the brain suddenly behaves like a television shop during Durga Puja sale season. Everything lights up at once. Ideas arrive in truckloads. You feel intelligent, fast, insightful, chosen even. You start planning books, businesses, philosophical revolutions, fitness routines, maybe even a complete restructuring of civilization before lunch.
Then depression arrives carrying a baseball bat.
Not sadness. People misunderstand this.
Sadness is human weather.
Depression is gravity.
Ordinary sadness says: “Things are difficult.”
Bipolar depression says: “Nothing has ever worked, nothing will work, and by the way here is every embarrassing memory from 1997 for review.”
The mind becomes a cruel archivist.
And here is the uncomfortable part nobody likes discussing.
Sometimes I suspect the depression is not entirely malfunction either.
Sometimes it feels like the body hitting emergency shutdown after too much overload.
Like an overheated transformer.
Like Calcutta during peak summer when suddenly an entire neighborhood loses power because the system simply cannot take one more air-conditioner.
Maybe the brain occasionally pulls the main switch because modern life keeps demanding impossible voltage.
I am not saying mental illness is fake.
Anybody who has spent nights unable to move from bed while their own thoughts chew them alive knows this is physical. Chemical. Real.
But reality can be two things simultaneously.
The suffering can be real, and the environment causing it can also be insane.
Those are not contradictions.
What fascinates me is how quickly society moralizes all this.
If you are depressed, people quietly suspect weakness.
If unemployed, irresponsibility.
If anxious, oversensitivity.
If middle-aged and single, perhaps some invisible character flaw involving destiny, attitude, or shampoo.
Society worships functionality.
It does not particularly care whether the machine is happy. Only whether it continues producing output without making alarming noises.
And if you stop functioning, even temporarily, the world becomes very awkward around you.
I know this feeling intimately now.
Middle-aged lower middle-class life in Kolkata has a particular texture to it. It smells faintly of damp walls, frying oil, old books, mosquito coils, sweat, incense, Dettol, and disappointment.
Outside the window somebody is always repairing something with a hammer.
There is always one uncle walking around in a vest carrying fish.
There is always one coaching center promising success in government exams to children who already look exhausted at sixteen.
You make tea. You check e-mail. Nothing.
You refresh again. Nothing.
You open an old document pretending to work while internally negotiating with existence itself.
Then suddenly some absurd thing happens. The LPG gas delivery man arrives arguing about change. Or the neighbor’s pressure cooker whistles like a dying submarine. Or rain appears out of nowhere and for six minutes the entire lane smells like wet dust and mango leaves and old concrete.
And oddly enough, for those six minutes, life becomes bearable again.
That is the irritating thing about being alive.
Even when the mind becomes a haunted house, tiny ordinary things continue sneaking in through the cracks.
A good cup of tea. Clouds before a storm. The first breeze after unbearable heat. A stray cat sleeping with total philosophical confidence on somebody’s scooter seat. An old Mohammed Rafi song from a distant radio.
The nervous system is ancient, yes. But it is also stubbornly responsive to small mercies.
Modern culture keeps telling us happiness must arrive as transformation: new career, new body, new city, new relationship, new purpose.
But maybe survival is often smaller than that.
Maybe survival is simply reducing the number of unnecessary attacks on the nervous system.
More sleep.
Less doom-scrolling.
Less comparison.
Fewer artificial emergencies.
A little walking.
Some structure.
Medication if needed.
Somebody kind to talk to.
A room where you do not feel judged every minute.
That is not glamorous. It will never become a motivational seminar.
But honestly most of life is maintenance, not transcendence.
People want dramatic redemption arcs because movies have damaged our expectations. In reality most human beings are not conquering Everest. They are trying to keep the refrigerator working and their mind from collapsing simultaneously.
And perhaps that deserves more respect than it gets.
I still do not know whether bipolar depression and anxiety are illnesses in the strict sense, or exaggerated survival systems trapped inside a civilization moving too fast for biology.
Probably both.
The body is old. The world is new. And somewhere between those two facts sits the modern human being, sweating in a Kolkata summer, checking his phone again, trying to understand whether he is failing to adapt to the world —
or whether the world itself has quietly become something no nervous system was ever designed to survive.