The Courage to Be Disliked in a Sweating Calcutta Room

The first symptom of wanting approval is not philosophical. It is not a noble sorrow wearing a shawl and quoting poetry near Rabindra Sarobar. It is much smaller and more insulting. A bead of sweat slips down your spine in a rented South Calcutta room, the ceiling fan turns like it has lost interest in democracy, your underwear sticks to you with the confidence of a government file, and your phone glows in your hand like a tiny crematorium for self-respect.

Somebody has not replied.

That is all.

No earthquake. No invasion. No tiger at the door. No telegram from the British announcing famine, plague, or algebra.

Just one person has seen your message and not replied.

Yet the body behaves as if the village has gathered under a banyan tree and voted you out.

The heart tightens. The stomach becomes a small unlicensed factory. The ribs acquire a nervous squirrel. You look at the screen again. Nothing. You look away with dignity for four seconds. Then you look again, because dignity is a wonderful thing in principle, like clean public toilets and affordable dental implants.

Still nothing.

This is where modern life becomes comic in the cruelest possible way. We carry machines more powerful than the computers that sent rockets into space, and we use them to discover, every seven minutes, that we are not as urgently loved as we had hoped.

There is the blue tick.

There is the last seen.

There is the online.

There is the typing.

There is the not typing.

There is the silence with a timestamp, which is not ordinary silence. Ordinary silence is a pond, a field, an afternoon nap. Digital silence is silence wearing a wristwatch and smirking.

And because I am a highly educated man, trained in computers, statistics, clinical systems, American deadlines, and the general art of being slightly ruined in two continents, I respond with the maturity of a goat tied outside a butcher’s shop.

I check again.

You may laugh, but check your own phone first.

The human being is a ridiculous animal. We have invented calculus, antibiotics, packet biryani, satellite navigation, and the ability to send a dancing duck sticker to a man who is emotionally drowning. Yet under the cotton shirt, behind the spectacles, below the middle-class politeness, we remain the old primate who knows that being disliked once meant danger.

Not metaphorical danger.

Actual danger.

No food. No fire. No protection. No one to keep watch while you slept. No one to say, “Brother, leopard on the left.” The tribe turning away was not a social inconvenience. It was death by hunger, fever, mosquito, teeth, weather, and bad luck, probably in that order.

So now, in 2026, in a room where the rice cooker is sulking on a plastic stool and the news on the phone is offering its daily buffet of fraud, heat, outrage, celebrity divorce, and national improvement by press conference, the nervous system still runs ancient software.

It cannot properly distinguish between being expelled from a prehistoric camp and getting fewer likes on a post.

This is the joke evolution has played on us.

Charles Darwin, sitting in Down House with his beard arranged like a philosophical shrub, did not imagine that one day a sweating Bengali man would feel mammalian panic because some online half-wit failed to validate his paragraph. But natural selection is not a polite professor. It is a blind butcher with excellent memory. It kept every tribal alarm bell that helped our ancestors survive and handed it down to us without asking whether WhatsApp had made any adjustments to the human condition.

Then along comes Alfred Adler.

Adler is irritating because he asks the question we do not want asked. Sigmund Freud, the great Viennese plumber of the unconscious, looked backward into childhood: mother, father, shame, desire, repression, cigars, sofas, dreams, damp basements, emotional fungus. Adler, standing nearby like the practical cousin at a family quarrel, says, yes, yes, very moving, but what are you doing with this feeling now?

That question is rude.

Worse, it is useful.

One must be careful here. Anxiety is not a choice in the way tea is a choice over coffee. Nobody wakes up and says, “Today I shall enjoy chest tightness, stomach acid, trembling hands, fear of failure, and the faint sensation that my entire future has been boiled in dirty water.”

No.

But feelings can serve purposes even when they hurt. That is the nasty little hinge of the matter.

Fear can keep you from applying.

Panic can keep you from speaking.

Fatigue can keep you from beginning.

Shame can keep you obedient.

The body becomes a corrupt ministry issuing stay orders against your own life.

Do not try, says anxiety. You may fail.

Do not speak, says shame. They may laugh.

Do not begin, says fatigue. You are already late.

Do not love, says pride. You may be refused.

Do not write, says fear. Someone may see through you.

And because rejection is public, because failure is public, because the brain still thinks society is a village with sharp tongues and sharper sticks, not trying begins to feel safe.

This is how a person becomes embalmed in explanation.

I know this trick. I have performed it with professional competence. I am not writing from Mount Virtue with a white bedsheet, strong knees, and a balanced breakfast. I have avoided people, work, phone calls, shaving, bathing, desire, effort, risk, and the basic barbaric act of stepping outside. Then I have placed a respectable shawl over the whole mess.

Trauma.

Class.

Temperament.

Depression.

Heat.

Family.

India.

Corruption.

Bad luck.

Middle age.

The economy.

My teeth.

My mood.

My past.

My difficult brain.

The fan.

The landlord.

The price of fish.

The general moral decline of civilization.

And much of it is true.

That is the trap.

A lie can be thrown out. A half-truth moves into your head, opens a bank account, and starts receiving parcels.

Yes, the past matters. Humiliation leaves sediment. Class matters. Money matters. Illness matters. Family can wound. School can wound. A country can wound you in small daily installments until your soul starts resembling a government road after monsoon. But even after all that, the present keeps asking one ugly question.

What are you protecting now?

Not why are you wounded.

What are you protecting?

That is the little knife.

Approval is the cheapest painkiller. Society sells it in tiny doses. A nod. A like. A comment. A “well said.” A “proud of you.” A “you are right.” A “good boy,” which at fifty-one is especially comic, because the boy has disappeared, the knees have begun negotiations, the hairline has withdrawn like a defeated army, and still some invisible schoolmaster inside wants a red star.

Social media did not create this hunger. It made a factory out of it.

Earlier, you wanted approval from family, neighbors, office people, para people, maybe one boss with dandruff and imperial dreams. Now the entire planet has become a leaking examination hall. Every thought is submitted for grading. Every meal, grief, joke, cat, political irritation, book, illness, holiday, face, opinion, and half-boiled philosophical belch is placed on a digital thali for strangers to sniff.

And the tragedy is not that people judge.

People always judged. They judged before writing, before agriculture, before the invention of decent sandals. Somewhere one cave man looked at another cave man’s stone tool and thought, poor finishing.

The tragedy is that we now volunteer for continuous measurement.

We put a little machine in our pocket that asks all day: are you still socially edible?

Then we complain that we feel digested.

Here is where Adler becomes useful, though still annoying. He gives us the separation of tasks. It sounds at first like something printed on a seminar handout by a cheerful man with excellent socks. But underneath the soft name is a hard little weapon.

Your task is to live according to your values.

Their task is to react.

That is it.

Not easy.

Simple.

Easy and simple are different things. Knowing how a toilet works is simple. Fixing one after a guest has committed a major constitutional violation in your bathroom is not easy.

My task is to speak honestly, work decently, write without begging, love without crawling, help without becoming a servant, refuse without staging a Bengali opera, and contribute without dissolving.

Their task is to like, dislike, misunderstand, applaud, ignore, gossip, envy, scroll past, diagnose me casually, declare me arrogant, call me failed, say I have changed, say I have not changed enough, say I think too much, say I am bitter, say I am mad, say I am wasting my life, and generally process me through whatever internal garbage machine they operate.

I cannot manage that.

The attempt to manage other people’s perception is a full-time job with no salary and no retirement benefits. You keep adjusting, smiling, explaining, defending, polishing the public statue, trimming the inconvenient parts, softening the honest parts, fattening the agreeable parts, until the actual person inside has been reduced to one small pellet of compliance.

And Bengalis know this disease intimately. Indians know it. Middle-class families have practically built a temple around it.

We call it adjustment.

We call it respect.

We call it family values.

We call it keeping relations.

We call it not making a scene.

We call it culture, which sometimes means a large ancestral cupboard where everyone stores their cowardice and then lights incense before it.

Be liked.

Be decent.

Do not speak like that.

Do not laugh too loudly.

Do not fail publicly.

Do not say you are lonely.

Do not say you are broke.

Do not say you are afraid.

Do not start again at this age.

Do not leave that job.

Do not refuse that invitation.

Do not admit that the grand social circus no longer impresses you.

And above all, do not say no.

Because the moment you say no, the parasites discover morality.

You are selfish.

You have ego.

You have become difficult.

You think too much.

You have changed.

Society cannot run like this.

Society, apparently, is a sacred machine powered entirely by the silent suffering of people who did not want to disappoint their relatives.

This is why the courage to be disliked is so often misunderstood. It does not mean becoming a cold, rude, self-advertising donkey with podcast opinions. It does not mean saying “I am authentic” and then behaving like a cracked plastic bucket with a beard.

Authenticity is not permission to fart in the common room and call it freedom.

You can be kind without being owned.

You can cooperate without being domesticated.

You can help without becoming household furniture.

You can love without kneeling.

A bridge serves the city by standing firm, not by melting into the river to prove humility.

There is a small science hidden here. Not laboratory science exactly, but the science of boundaries. A living cell must cooperate with other cells, but it must also keep its membrane. Too much wall, and nothing enters. Too little wall, and everything leaks in. Health is not isolation. Health is controlled permeability.

A person is like that.

Not a prison.

Not a puddle.

A membrane.

This is where my own life becomes both example and warning label. I spent years thinking approval meant safety. If people understood me, I was real. If people praised me, I was saved. If people disliked me, I had been reduced. So I kept making little offerings at the temple of other people’s opinion. A sentence here. A silence there. A compromise. A swallowed anger. A delayed decision. A life postponed in polite installments.

And then comes the humiliating discovery.

People are not thinking about you that much.

This should be comforting. Instead it is insulting. You imagine a grand tribunal of critics somewhere, all wearing black robes and discussing your failure under a chandelier. In reality, most people are thinking about gas, money, their children, cholesterol, revenge, lunch, blood pressure, rent, school fees, office politics, their waistline, their EMI, and whether the photo made them look old.

The great audience is mostly scratching itself.

Even criticism is often autobiography in disguise. A person attacks your risk because they abandoned their own. They mock your loneliness because theirs has better curtains. They call you arrogant because your refusal reminds them of their obedience. They advise you from inside the very cage they never escaped.

Not always.

But often enough.

So when the hesitation comes — write or do not write, apply or do not apply, call or do not call, leave or do not leave, begin again at fifty-one with bad teeth, a nervous stomach, and a bank balance that looks like satire — the question is not, will they approve?

Of course they may not.

Some will approve after you succeed. Some will disapprove while you are becoming. Some will call you brave later, after calling you foolish now, because society has a magical memory problem when success arrives wearing polished shoes.

The better question is: whose task is this?

If it is mine, I must carry it.

If it is theirs, let them cook in it like overboiled mutton.

This does not make life noble. It does not repair loneliness. It does not cool the Calcutta room. It does not refill the bank account. It does not fix the tooth, improve the knees, answer the message, change the weather, or erase the old broken glass lying in the drain of memory.

It gives back only one stolen object.

The steering wheel.

Not the road. Not the traffic. Not the weather. Not the drunk bus driver of history. Just the steering wheel. Sticky with sweat. Held badly perhaps. Held late. Held by a man who may still crash into a tea stall of his own making, but at least is no longer sitting in the back seat asking every passing idiot for directions.

Tonight, if someone dislikes me, misunderstands me, unfollows me, ignores me, rolls their eyes, or silently files me under difficult person, I will try to remember this small clean rule.

My task is mine.

Their reaction is theirs.

Then, naturally, I will check the phone again like a trained monkey with a literature degree.

Outside, Calcutta will keep sweating.

Inside, the old tribal squirrel will scratch at the ribs.

And I, great hero of autonomy, atheist, debtor, reader, writer, rice-cooker operator, and part-time prisoner of my own nervous system, will sit in my damp room and practice the courage to be disliked by nearly nobody important.