Author Archives: Johnbritto Kurusumuthu

Almost everyone answers this prompt by naming the writer they would most like to meet. I want to argue the opposite: that meeting them is close to the worst thing you could do to their books. One exception survives, and she would not have come anyway.

The Case Against Meeting Writers

The prompt contains an assumption I want to question: that meeting a writer would be better than simply reading one. That the book is a preview, and dinner is the full version.

I think it is almost exactly backwards.

A book is a writer’s best attention, gathered over years, revised and reconsidered, sentence by sentence. What we read is a person thinking more carefully than anyone usually thinks in conversation, with more time than any ordinary exchange allows.

Dinner is different. The writer is unrevised and improvising at the end of a long day. They may be tired, distracted, or answering for the hundredth time where they get their ideas. We would be trading a finished work for a first draft and calling it access.

There is another problem: I would know a great deal about the writer, while they would know almost nothing about me. I would probably perform—choosing my stories, monitoring my words, trying to appear interesting. The person I presented would likely be a less authentic version of myself.

But the strongest objection is what happens afterward.

Once you know a writer’s face, voice, and personality, you cannot completely separate them from the work. A writer’s opinions or mannerisms can change the way the sentences sound. What once felt like conviction may begin to feel like habit. The book, which had once belonged entirely to the reader, becomes partly the writer’s again.

So I would decline the invitation.

Reading is not a lesser substitute for meeting a writer. It is a different kind of closeness—perhaps a greater one. When I read someone properly, I enter their mind without the interference of personality. Neither of us has to be charming. I receive their attention at full strength, and they are spared my company.

There is one exception: Emily Dickinson.

I would have dinner with her, but I would not ask her anything. I would simply tell her that her poems arrived—that people more than a century later still turn to them when they cannot say something any other way.

That would not be an interview. It would be a delivery.

She did her work without knowing whether it had reached anyone. Yet it reached me, across 140 years, without a dinner ever taking place.

Perhaps that is the point.

A great writer does not need to meet us. Sometimes the work itself is the meeting.

Would you accept the invitation, if it came?

In response to the WordPress Daily Prompt: 13 August 2026.

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Word Count:499

The deepest message of the reflection is:

Faith in humanity is often restored not by extraordinary heroes, but by ordinary people willing to inconvenience themselves for a stranger—and then quietly walk away.

The Man Who Got Off at the Wrong Stop

In response to the WordPress Daily Prompt: 12 August 2026. What’s a moment when a stranger completely restored your faith in people?

I want to say it was something cinematic. A rescue. A grand gesture with witnesses.

It wasn’t. It was a man on a crowded bus who lost forty minutes of his evening for someone he would never see again.

It had been one of those days that hollow you out quietly — nothing catastrophic, just a long accumulation of small failures. I had been travelling since morning. My phone had died somewhere around midday and stayed dead. I was tired in the specific way that makes you stupid: the kind of tired where you stop reading signs, stop counting stops, and simply trust that the world will deposit you where you need to be.

It didn’t, of course. I looked up at some point and realised nothing outside the window looked familiar. Not unfamiliar in an interesting way — unfamiliar in the way that makes your stomach drop. I had gone past my stop. I didn’t know by how much. I had no phone, very little cash, and no clear idea of which direction back even meant.

I must have said something out loud, or perhaps my face said it for me.

The man beside me — middle-aged, a cloth bag on his lap, the look of someone at the end of his own long day — asked where I was trying to go. I told him. He winced, the way people do when the news is worse than you’ve guessed, and said I’d missed it by a good stretch.

Then he stood up, rang the bell, and got off with me.

Here is the part I keep returning to: he was not going that way.

He walked me back to the junction where I could catch the connecting service. He waited with me. When the bus came and I discovered I was short on fare, he paid it — waving off my protest with the mild irritation of a man who finds gratitude tedious. He gave me directions twice, because he could tell I wasn’t absorbing them the first time.

And then, before I could ask his name, he crossed the road to catch a bus going back the way we’d come — back to the stop he’d abandoned for me — and was gone.

I never learned who he was. He cost himself forty minutes, a fare and a half, and a longer walk home at the end of it. He gained nothing. There was no audience. There was no version of the story where it came back to him.

I think we misunderstand what restores faith in people.

We imagine it takes something enormous — heroism, sacrifice, the dramatic intervention. But grand gestures are, in a strange way, easy to explain away. They come with adrenaline, with witnesses, with the story the person gets to tell afterwards. There’s a self in them somewhere.

What that man did had none of that. It was inconvenient. That’s the whole point. He calculated, in about two seconds, that my bad evening mattered more than the last stretch of his ordinary one, and he simply acted on it and then removed himself before anyone could thank him properly.

Cynicism is a comfortable position. It’s also, I’ve come to think, a lazy one — it lets you stop paying attention. It says people are fundamentally self-interested, and then quietly declines to look at the evidence. But the evidence is everywhere, in small denominations. It’s the person who turns back to hold a door. The one who tells you your bag is open. The one who gets off at the wrong stop.

I have thought about him more than he could possibly imagine. He has almost certainly never thought about me again.

Somewhere out there is a man who does not know that a stranger has been quietly carrying him around for years as proof that people are, on balance, better than we fear.

I can’t repay him. That’s the design of it, I think — these debts aren’t meant to be settled backwards. They’re meant to be passed forward, into the hands of the next person standing at the wrong stop with a dead phone and a sinking feeling.

So I try. Imperfectly, and usually late.

But I try.

What about you? Who was your stranger?

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Word Count:800

I Would Choose It Again

If your future self could send you one sentence, what would you hope it would say?

Before you answer, notice something: most of us would not actually want the whole letter.

Imagine that the version of you twenty years from now could send back everything—every gain and loss, every relationship that lasts and every one that quietly doesn’t, the exact year things get hard and the exact reason. I don’t think many of us would read it.

We say we want to know the future, but what we really want is relief from the weight of not knowing. Those are different things. Full knowledge wouldn’t make the weight disappear; it would simply move the weight forward.

One sentence is different.

One sentence forces the future to choose. It has to compress decades into a single line and decide what, out of everything that happened, was the thing you most needed to hear while you were still in the middle of it.

So perhaps the question isn’t really, What would the future say?

It is:

What do I most need to hear?

And that is a much more revealing question, because the sentence we long for is often shaped by the fear we carry.

Mine took a while to find.

I kept drafting versions that were softer than the truth:

You’ll be fine.

It all works out.

Don’t worry so much.

They sounded kind, but they felt hollow.

A future self who has actually lived those years would not simply offer reassurance.

They would offer testimony.

The sentence I hope would come back is this:

“It cost you exactly what you were afraid it would cost, and I would choose it again.”

I notice what that sentence refuses to do.

It does not tell me that my fears were exaggerated. It does not promise that the price was smaller than it looked from here.

It says:

You were right about the cost.

The late nights were real. The things you set down in order to pick something else up stayed down. The seasons when you worked without applause, wrote without readers, built without proof—those seasons were as long as you feared they would be.

And then, somehow, the future overrules the fear anyway.

Because the deepest fear was never really about difficulty.

Difficulty I can plan for.

The more corrosive fear is this:

What if I pay the full price and the thing still doesn’t matter?

What if I spend the years, arrive at the other side, and discover that what I was building deserved less of my life than I gave it?

That is the quiet dread underneath much ambitious work.

Not simply:

Will I fail?

But:

Will I look back and wish I had aimed at something else entirely?

“I would choose it again” answers that fear.

It means the person on the other side, who knows what it actually took, has looked at the whole cost and still affirms the choice.

There is something else hidden in that sentence, and I find it quietly steadying:

Someone is there to send it.

The message presupposes a future version of me who has made it through whatever lies between now and then and has enough perspective to render a verdict.

On the days when the middle feels endless, that is not a small thing to hold.

But this is where the reflection turns.

That sentence is not a prediction.

It is a verdict.

And verdicts depend on evidence.

I don’t get to receive “I would choose it again” as a gift from the future. I am producing the record it will be based on today, mostly through choices too small to notice.

Which means the real work isn’t simply enduring harder.

Endurance alone does not earn that sentence.

Two people can pay identical costs—the same hours, the same sacrifices, the same fatigue—and only one of them may eventually be able to say, I would choose it again.

The difference isn’t necessarily effort.

It is what the effort was aimed at.

So the honest daily question is not merely:

Am I working hard enough?

It is:

Am I spending myself on something I would endorse from the far side of that spending?

Am I building this because it matters—or because I’ve built it this long and stopping would feel like an admission?

Am I saying yes out of conviction—or because I cannot bear to disappoint someone?

Am I continuing because there is purpose—or simply because momentum has become difficult to distinguish from purpose?

Momentum is a very good imitation of purpose.

From inside the moment, they can look almost identical.

In hindsight, they can be completely different.

And most of the choices that determine the difference are unremarkable.

What I read.

What I refuse.

Who gets my attention on an ordinary Tuesday.

Whether I keep a promise nobody is tracking.

Whether I spend another day becoming the person I would respect becoming.

The future cannot change what I chose.

But it can reveal what those choices meant.

Perhaps that is why meaning cannot be postponed until the destination.

We often imagine that the future rescues the present—that one day, when we finally arrive, the good outcome will reach backward and make all the difficult years make sense.

But perhaps it works the other way around.

The present helps determine what the future will be able to say.

Purpose is not something we necessarily discover at the destination and then apply backward to the journey.

It is installed along the way—or it isn’t there at all.

There is an old line about Jesus enduring the cross “for the joy set before him.”

What strikes me is what that phrase does not say.

It does not say that the joy made the cross painless. It does not say it made the suffering shorter or less costly.

It says something more profound:

The joy made it choosable.

The suffering was not cancelled by what came after. It was given meaning by what it was for.

That may be closer to how meaning actually works.

Meaning does not always remove the cost.

Sometimes it tells us why the cost is worth bearing.

Even the familiar promise that God knows the plans He has for us was spoken to people living in exile, with seventy more years of Babylon still ahead of them. They were not promised an immediate escape from the long middle. They were told to build houses, plant gardens, and live faithfully there.

The promise was not an exemption from the long middle.

It was permission to live fully inside it.

So let me hand the question over to you.

Don’t ask only what you would like your future self to say.

Ask what you need to hear—the sentence that would actually loosen something inside you.

If the sentence you want is You were loved, perhaps you are carrying a fear about whether you were.

If it is You finally rested, perhaps you have been afraid that your life would always be defined by striving.

If it is You were braver than you felt, perhaps courage is what you most doubt you possess.

If it is The people you worried about turned out okay, perhaps your deepest fear is that you cannot protect the people you love.

That sentence is not merely a wish.

It is a diagnosis.

Your longed-for sentence is a map to the thing you are most afraid isn’t true.

And then comes the harder question:

What would have to be true about this week for that sentence to be honest?

Not someday.

Not when everything is settled.

This week.

Because I am not waiting for the sentence:

“It cost you exactly what you were afraid it would cost, and I would choose it again.”

I am writing it.

Slowly.

Unevenly.

Through choices too ordinary to feel significant.

Through what I give my attention to, what I refuse, what I endure, what I begin, what I let go of, and what I continue to believe is worth the cost.

That is the strange arithmetic of a life.

The person you will become is not coming to save you.

They are being assembled by you, today, out of whatever you are willing to spend yourself on.

And perhaps the deepest measure of a meaningful life is not that it was easy, or even that it turned out exactly as you hoped.

It is that, having finally seen the whole cost, you could look back and say:

“Yes. Knowing what I know now, I would choose it again.”

The sentence we most long to hear from our future self often reveals the fear we are carrying today.

But we do not have to wait for the future to give us that reassurance.

We are not waiting to discover what our future self will say.

We are writing it now.

We are writing its verdict through the choices we make now.

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 11 August 2026.

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Word Count:1548

Rise & Inspire

WordPress Daily Writing Prompt  |  10 August 2026

The Unwritten Menu

On the best local dish I have ever eaten, and the difference between being served and being received

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Every eating house on a well-travelled road keeps two menus.

The first one is printed. It is laminated at the corners, priced in a hopeful hand, and translated into English for the benefit of people passing through. It is an honest document, and it is written for strangers. It tells you what can be produced quickly, what will not disappoint anyone, and what a visitor is likely to have heard of already. Nobody is deceiving you. They are simply making it easy.

The second menu is never printed. It lives in the head of whoever is cooking, in whatever came off the boat that morning, in what the family will eat at two o’clock when the counter has gone quiet. You will not find it by reading. You will only find it if somebody decides to tell you it exists.

The best local dish I have ever eaten while travelling came off the second menu.

A harbour town, late in the afternoon

I was in a coastal town in Malabar on official work. The meeting had run past its time, as meetings do, and by the time I found somewhere to eat the town had already eaten. The place had three tables, a ceiling fan turning without much conviction, and a boy stacking chairs at the far end with the particular slowness of someone hoping you will leave.

The owner handed me the printed card out of pure habit. I read it. Fried fish, biryani, chicken in three configurations. I was about to order something safe.

Then he asked me where I had come from. I told him. He looked at me for a moment longer than the question required, said something towards the kitchen that was not addressed to me, and took the card gently back out of my hands.

What arrived was fish cooked in an earthen pot. The gravy was dark and thick and sour with kudampuli, reduced until it clung rather than ran. Rice on a banana leaf. A spoon of something with coconut and green chilli on the side that I have never successfully identified since. It had been made that morning for the household, not for the counter, and there was exactly as much of it as there was.

What actually made it the best

I have eaten more accomplished food since. I have sat in rooms where the plating was architecture and the service was choreography, and I have been grateful for those meals too. None of them has stayed with me the way that clay pot has.

It is tempting to credit the recipe. The recipe was very good. But the recipe is not why I am writing about it years later on a Monday morning several hundred kilometres away. I am writing about it because a man who had never seen me before, and who knew perfectly well he would never see me again, decided that I did not have to eat like a stranger.

That is the whole difference, and it is worth stating plainly. The printed menu serves you. The unwritten menu receives you.

The two menus are not confined to eating houses

I have turned that distinction over more often than a single meal ought to warrant, because I have come to suspect it describes a good deal more than food.

Institutions keep two menus. Every organisation publishes a version of itself in the prospectus, the annual report, the citizens’ charter, the framed vision statement in the corridor. None of it is false. It is simply the presentable version, written for outsiders and inspecting authorities. What the institution actually is lives somewhere else entirely: in what happens when nobody is being audited, and in how the least powerful person in the building is spoken to on an ordinary Tuesday.

Places keep two menus. A great deal of what we call tourism is the business of printing one for a country and inviting the world to order from it.

And people keep two menus, which is the part that should trouble us most. We hand each other the laminated card constantly. I am fine. Work is busy. We must meet sometime. It is honest, it is adequate, and it is written for strangers. The difficulty is how many of the people receiving it are not strangers at all.

The unwritten menu is offered, never extracted

There is no technique for obtaining it, and anyone selling you one is selling you something else. You cannot walk into a place and insist on being treated as family; that is only a more aggressive form of tourism. The second menu is offered. It cannot be demanded, and it certainly cannot be earned by spending more.

What you can do is make yourself the sort of visitor to whom it is worth offering. Arrive without hurry. Ask a question that is not about yourself. Accept what is put in front of you without editing it. Be visibly willing to be surprised. None of that guarantees anything. It simply leaves the door open on your side.

But the more urgent half of this is the reverse, because most of the time we are not the traveller at all. We are the one holding the card. So the question that actually costs something is this: who am I still handing the laminated version to? Which colleague, which relative, which person who has been coming to my counter for years and has never once been told what the family is eating?

Twenty minutes, and then years

The clay pot came and went in about twenty minutes. I paid an amount so small I remember being embarrassed by it. I said thank you, and he waved it off the way people do when they have not done anything they consider remarkable. He will not remember me.

That is what the second menu does. The first one feeds you until evening. The second one feeds you for years.

So the honest question is not really what the best local dish you have eaten is. It is who decided you were worth cooking it for, and who is quietly waiting for you to decide the same about them.

John Britto Kurusumuthu writes at Rise & Inspire on faith, law, education, technology and the examined life.

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 10 August 2026.

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Word Count:1121

THE MISSING SUBJECT

What Schools Never Taught Me:
How to Disagree Without Contempt

Why Schools Teach Us to Be Right, but Never to Disagree

John Britto Kurusumuthu  |  Rise & Inspire  |  9 August 2026

There is a familiar question making the rounds: What is one thing you wish schools actually taught?

Most answers are practical—personal finance, taxes, cooking, mental health, or basic legal literacy. All worthwhile.

But I think the real problem is not what schools fail to teach. It is how they teach.

Schools are not short of subjects; they are overloaded with them. Classrooms are packed with information, yet surprisingly little of it shapes the people we become.

So the better question is not What should we add? It is:

Why does so much teaching leave so little behind?

The answer lies in the difference between information and formation.

Information fills the mind. Formation shapes the character.

Schools excel at the first. Society desperately needs the second.

If I could add only one lesson to every timetable, it would not be coding, investing, or public speaking.

How to disagree with someone without holding them in contempt.

I. Information and Formation

Information is what a person comes to know. Formation is what a person comes to be. Information can be transmitted in forty minutes, tested in three hours, and forgotten by the following monsoon. Formation is absorbed slowly—by imitation, correction, and repetition—from people the young person has reason to respect.

Schools are organised around the delivery of information. Teachers form children constantly, often without being paid to notice it, but the system rarely treats character as part of its design. We built an architecture for knowledge and then expressed surprise that it did not reliably produce judgment.

II. What It Is Not

This competency is often confused with three impostors.

It is not politeness. A person can be perfectly courteous and privately certain that the person opposite is a fool; children hear the contempt beneath the phrasing.

It is not debate. Debate teaches a useful craft, but it rewards winning an assigned side, not admitting error. Too many adults can still make a devastating argument but cannot say the four words on which every functioning institution depends: I had it wrong.

It is not agreeableness. The person who avoids all friction has not learned to disagree well; they have learned not to disagree at all. Committees fail when someone sees the flaw in March and says nothing until December.

What I mean is the capacity to hold a conviction firmly while holding the other person’s dignity just as firmly—to be genuinely unpersuaded and genuinely respectful at the same time.

III. What Its Absence Costs

After close to four decades in the drafting of law and public administration, I have learned that the quality of disagreement determines everything downstream of it.

A committee I served received more than a hundred submissions on a draft Bill—from doctors, lawyers, clergy, rationalists, survivors, and people who believed the proposed law went both too far and not far enough. The task was not to defeat them. It was to read each submission as though its author might be right.

Several were. The Bill improved precisely where we had been most confidently wrong.

When this formation is absent, public discourse treats opponents as bad people who need not be answered. Workplaces suppress or weaponise dissent. Families go quiet on whole subjects for years. Online spaces reward the most contemptuous version of every position, because contempt travels faster than care.

IV. Why School Is the Place

This formation belongs in homes and faith communities too. But that is precisely the argument for school: something this important cannot be entrusted to one site alone.

The classroom offers a room full of people a child did not choose, holding views the child did not expect, whom the child cannot simply leave. That is not an inconvenience to manage. It is the laboratory—the structured experience of unchosen difference most people will have before they are handed a vote, a job, a marriage, and a mortgage.

Teach the quadratic formula. But use the room for what only the room can do.

V. The Syllabus That Was Never Written

COURSE CIV 101 — DISAGREEMENT

Compulsory. Four years. No terminal examination.

Objectives

• State an opposing position in terms its holder would accept as fair.
• Distinguish between a person’s argument, a person’s interests, and a person’s worth.
• Change a held position on evidence, in public, without humiliation.
• Remain in relationship with a person with whom no agreement has been reached.

Unit I — The Person Opposite

Why the person who differs from you is not thereby your inferior; how contempt is produced, signalled, and received.

Unit II — The Strongest Version

Restate another’s case at its best before answering it; students must argue a position they dislike until its holders find the account fair.

Unit III — The Cost of Winning

Study occasions when someone prevailed but the relationship, the institution, or the truth did not survive it.

Unit IV — Living With the Unresolved

Learn how to continue in friendship, family, work, and citizenship with people who are not going to come round.

Mode of Assessment

Continuous and non-numerical. The student is not assessed by written examination, but by the sustained testimony of people with whom they have disagreed.

Prescribed Reading

At least one book by an author the student expects to disagree with—read to the end.

VI. The Lesson Beneath the Others

We spend years teaching children how to be right. We spend almost no time teaching them what to do when someone disagrees.

Yet every important part of adult life—family, friendship, work, citizenship, even democracy—depends on that skill.

A person who can disagree without contempt remains open to correction. A person who can accept correction never stops learning.

Perhaps that is the lesson schools have been missing all along.

Closing Invitation

What would you put on the timetable?

I’d love to hear your answer. And if you disagree with mine, even better—it gives us a chance to practise the very lesson this essay is about.

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 9 August 2026.

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Word Count:1050

Consider what a photograph would actually show: a dog at a gate, ears, ribs, the ordinary alertness of a street animal. It could not show four years of not crossing. Restraint does not photograph. Fidelity does not photograph. And most of what makes us particular is exactly that sort of invisible.

The Companion I Cannot Photograph

I must begin by failing half of today’s instruction.

The prompt asks for a photograph of my pet. I have none to offer. There is no dog asleep under the writing table, no cat arranging itself across the papers I happen to need. No collar hangs behind the door; no second bowl stands in the corner of the kitchen. By the ordinary reckoning of these things I am a man without a pet, and the honest course would be to skip the day.

But the prompt carries an assumption inside it, and examining assumptions is the only trade I have ever properly practised. It assumes that the animals in our lives are the ones we own. It assumes possession — that a creature must first be ours before it can be uniquely itself.

The animals I have known best never signed anything.

There is a dog who has kept the gate of this house for close to four years. Nobody bought her. Nobody brought her home. Nobody entered her in any register or paid anything for her. She appeared one monsoon, thin as a rumour, and stayed.

She is fed. She is spoken to in the mornings. When there is illness in the house she goes quiet, as though the news reached her before it reached the rest of us. In every ordinary sense, she belongs here.

And here is the one thing that makes her uniquely herself: in four years she has never once come through the gate.

The gate stands open most of the day. Three steps would do it. Visitors pass her, the postman steps over her, children run in and out with the gate swinging behind them. She watches all of it from precisely the line where the compound wall ends and the road begins, and she does not cross.

I have wondered what accounts for it. Perhaps something was done to her once, in another compound, by someone else. That is the likeliest explanation and I hold it with some sorrow. But I have decided — and I want to be clear that this is a decision and not a discovery — to read it a second way.

She is waiting to be asked.

Most living things, ourselves very much included, take whatever is not actively refused. We interpret an open door as an invitation, silence as consent, absence of objection as welcome. It is how we get through the day. This creature has kept to a distinction nobody taught her, that nobody rewards her for keeping, and that costs her something every single day: the distinction between entering and being received.

The first task given to the man in the garden was not to feed the animals or to fence them. It was to name them. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them — Genesis 2:19. Naming is not ownership. Naming is recognition; it is the acknowledgement that this one is not that one, that the particular exists and deserves a word of its own.

I have never named her. That is why I cannot honestly call her mine — and it is also why the little I can say about her is true.

Consider, too, what a photograph would actually show. A dog at a gate. Ears, ribs, the ordinary alertness of a street animal. It could not show four years of not crossing. The trait that makes her herself is invisible to any lens, because it consists entirely of something not done. Restraint does not photograph. Fidelity does not photograph. Patience does not photograph. And I have come to suspect that most of what makes any of us particular is a long private record of the things we declined to do, kept over years, witnessed by almost nobody.

This is worth carrying beyond the gate. The colleague who never repeats what was said in confidence. The neighbour who has had forty years of opportunity to be unkind about you and has not once taken it. The friend who does not ask the question you would struggle to answer. None of it appears in any photograph, on any profile, in any account we give of ourselves. It is simply held, day after day, at the line where the wall ends.

I think that is where God’s attention rests — not on the thresholds we cross, but on the ones we don’t.

So I have no photograph to share. I have an open gate, and a creature at the edge of it who has spent four years teaching me the difference between walking in and being welcomed in. If that is a failure of today’s prompt, I will take the failure gladly.

Some companions cannot be photographed. It does not follow that they cannot be described.

Who has kept a threshold in your life — an animal or a person — whose particular grace no photograph could ever capture?

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In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 8 August 2026.

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Word Count:939