Recently, I had a conversation with a psychologist about the ongoing majoritarian socio-political situation in India. Later, as I was reflecting on how mental health professionals generally conceive and practice psychology, two characters from very different stories came to my mind.
The first character is Mullah Nazaruddin, who has lost a needle. He spends hours searching for it under a streetlight near his home. Eventually, his neighbours join him. After a few more hours of search, one of them asks him where exactly he lost the needle. Nazaruddin replies that he lost it somewhere far away. Confused, the neighbour asks why then he is searching here. Mullah replies, because there is no streetlight where he lost it.
The second character is a mother from the 1960 movie Two Women. In the story, the mother and her 12-year-old daughter are living in Italy during World War II. The mother is shown as solely dedicated to her daughter’s care and protection, without any wider concerns or engagement with the larger world. When the mother learns that their city could be under attack soon, she and her daughter move to her home village. They face many hardships on the journey, and when they hear that it is relatively safe to return to the city, they start their journey back. However, in the final leg of their flight, they are both gang-raped by a group of anti-Nazi soldiers inside a church.
The first character shows our general inclination to limit our inquiries to what is comfortable, readily accessible, or already known. This involves a self-deceptive wishful thinking, that we might find the lost needle (truth/ lost connections) under the nearest streetlight, even when we know deep down that the problem and its solution lie elsewhere. We also mislead our loved ones into this futile search in the wrong place, just as Mullah does with his friends.
The second character, the mother, seems oblivious to everything happening in the world except for her daughter’s well-being. She resembles many of us, as individuals and parents, who carry a self-deluding fantasy that we and our children can be safe even when the whole world is falling apart. This is the optimism of a gambler. One could also say that Nazaruddin’s approach in finding the needle leads us into the situation of those two women, where we are utterly helpless, not knowing when we will be displaced, raped, or even killed.
h o b o - b o d h i 