One Bench

Ask people this question and the answers arrive almost pre-written: more civic sense, more kindness, more respect for public spaces, less indifference.

Noble answers, all of them.

I want to argue for something smaller.

The one thing that would improve my city is not better people.

It is a bench.

1. The honest answer is smaller than the noble one.

A bench in the shade. A working tap beside it. A footpath nobody has parked a vehicle across.

That is the whole proposal.

It sounds too modest to be serious, which is exactly why it is worth defending.

Cities are often improved through grand plans, major projects and ambitious promises. But sometimes the most meaningful improvement begins with something ordinary: giving people a place to sit.

2. You cannot install kindness.

Nothing in my experience in life suggests otherwise.

Character has never been successfully issued as a circular.

You can prohibit, penalise and prescribe. You can establish standards and impose duties. But no legal instrument can simply order strangers to become gentler with one another.

Every essay that asks a city to be kinder risks asking for a result without identifying the conditions that might make that result easier.

3. But you can create conditions in which kindness becomes possible.

A place to sit is a place to wait, to rest, to talk, to let an older person catch their breath.

People rarely meet when they are given nowhere to stay awhile.

A city with no place to stop forces everyone to keep moving. And when everyone is constantly moving, there are fewer opportunities to notice one another.

Indifference is not always a moral failure.

Sometimes it is a design failure.

Good public spaces do not manufacture virtue. They can, however, make ordinary acts of consideration easier.

4. Civic life has often depended on shared places.

This is not an entirely new idea.

Traditional Tamil houses often included a thinnai—a raised platform or verandah near the entrance—that created a transition between the home and the street. It could serve as a place for conversation, hospitality, rest and everyday social interaction. 

The Silappathikaram, attributed to Ilango Adigal, also gives detailed descriptions of Puhar, including its streets, markets and commercial life. The text offers a picture of an urban world in which movement, trade and social activity were closely connected.

Across South Asia, the Jataka stories include episodes involving wells, water and the provision of water to travellers or animals, sometimes explicitly connected with generosity and the earning of merit. 

In Islamic societies, the sabil developed as a public water fountain, providing water to passersby. Such fountains could be supported through charitable endowments (waqf), making access to water an organised form of public service. 

And in ancient Greece, the stoa—a covered walkway or colonnade, often associated with the agora—provided shelter and space for movement, commerce and public activity. The Athenian Agora itself was a major centre of political, judicial, commercial, social and cultural life. 

The details differ across cultures and centuries.

But the recurring principle is familiar:

Shared life needs shared spaces.

People cannot build community entirely through exhortation. They need somewhere to encounter one another.

5. Small hardware can accomplish what large projects sometimes overlook.

A flyover moves vehicles.

It may improve traffic flow. It may be essential infrastructure.

But it does not, by itself, create a place where neighbours meet.

A bench does something different.

It gives a pedestrian a reason to stop.

It gives an older person somewhere to rest.

It gives a parent somewhere to wait with a child.

It gives a delivery worker a moment to recover.

It gives two strangers the possibility of becoming two people who have noticed each other.

The bench is small.

Its social function is not.

6. Ask who is excluded when there is nowhere to sit.

The old.

Pregnant women.

People with disabilities or limited mobility.

Day labourers between shifts.

Delivery workers.

Anyone who spends much of the day on foot.

A city without adequate places to sit sends a subtle message:

You may pass through here, but you may not stay.

That is more than an inconvenience.

Public space becomes less public when some people can comfortably occupy it while others are effectively told to keep moving.

The absence of a bench can therefore become a quiet form of exclusion—especially for people who have the fewest alternatives.

7. The obvious objection is a fair one.

Benches get broken.

Taps run dry.

Shelters become neglected.

A space created for public use can be appropriated, damaged or left to decay.

And yes, the hardware still needs civic responsibility.

But the order matters.

Begin with the sermon and it may be forgotten by evening.

Begin with the bench and it teaches something every day, wordlessly, to everyone who uses it.

It does not make people virtuous.

It simply makes a small act of civic life possible.

Maintaining something is a far smaller ask of a city than transforming human character.

8. Finally, the word in the question.

Instantly.

It is usually read as a figure of speech.

Take it literally and it becomes a test.

More empathy. More responsibility. More neighbourliness.

None of these arrives instantly. If they arrive at all, they usually develop slowly, through families, institutions, habits and generations.

A bench is different.

It can be installed in the morning and occupied that same day.

There is another kind of “instant improvement” that cities already know well, and I do not mean that.

Paint before an inspection.

A cleared pavement before a VIP visit.

A temporary cleanup before an important event.

Those are improvements with the lifespan of a photograph.

The real test is what remains on Wednesday.

Cosmetic speed disappears.

A bench stays.

It keeps working.

And it requires no prior change in human behaviour before someone can use it.

So the answer is not that my city needs better people.

It is that my city may need to recover something it once understood:

People need places to pause before they can begin to notice one another.

Perhaps that is what a good city does.

It does not make us better by decree.

It quietly creates more opportunities for us to behave better.

And sometimes, the first step is simply giving people somewhere to sit down together and discover what they have in common.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 14 September 2026

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Word Count:1099

Just realised the longest trip I have ever taken required no packing, no booking and no passport. Still no sign of the arrival gate. Posted my thoughts on it.

The Longest Trip I’ve Ever Taken

The longest trip I have ever taken has no departure date, no itinerary, and no final destination. It is the journey from the person I was to the person I am still becoming.

What follows is the travel document for it.

1. The ticket was issued without my consent

Every holiday begins with a decision. This journey began without one. Nobody asked me about the century, the country, the language, the family, or the body I would be travelling in. I woke up already in motion.

This is why the old traditions describe the human condition as being led rather than going. The Exodus generation did not book passage out of Egypt. They were brought out, and what should have been a relatively short journey became forty years in the wilderness. The extra years were not a routing error. They became part of the journey.

2. Distance is the cheapest measure of a trip

We rank journeys by kilometres because kilometres are easy to count. But a man can fly eighteen hours, photograph a monument, and return exactly as he left. Another can sit in one room through an illness and come out unrecognisable.

So I want to argue against the most comfortable idea in modern travel writing: that going far changes you. It usually doesn’t. What changes you is not distance but duration under pressure — and you can suffer that without leaving your street.

3. Tourism consoles precisely because it ends

Here is one reason we love trips: they have return tickets. The discomfort is bounded. You can endure a bad hotel, a difficult language, a delayed connection, because a date on a printed page promises it will stop.

The journey of becoming offers no such mercy. There is no return leg. You cannot go back to being twenty-three, or unknowing, or unhurt. This is what makes it the longest trip, not the mileage — the fact that it is one-way.

4. The layovers are where the travelling actually happens

Nobody writes memoirs about the smooth flights. We remember the eleven-hour wait, the closed counter, the night on a metal bench.

The same holds inwardly. My character was not formed during the good years. It was formed in the delays — the applications that failed, the plans that stalled, the seasons where nothing appeared to move.

Buddhist tradition calls the beginning of the monastic life the “going forth,” and the Islamic hajj requires pilgrims to remain at Arafat until sunset. Both traditions understand something airports understand: waiting is not the interruption of the journey. It is a stage of it.

5. There is an excess baggage charge, and it is always collected

You may carry what you like at the start. Grudges, ambitions, other people’s opinions of you, the version of yourself you performed at twenty.

The charge comes later. Everything you carry, you carry uphill. The Panchatantra and Aesop repeatedly use animal stories to explore greed, attachment, and the cost of grasping — the monkey with its fist in the jar, the dog with the bone and the reflection. Their point is not that possessions are evil. It is that grip is expensive.

I have discarded more on this journey than I have acquired. That turned out to be the profit, not the loss.

6. You are never the only passenger

The traditions I have drawn from here do not describe the long journey as a solo expedition. Odysseus needs a crew, a goddess, a swineherd, a dog. The Exodus is a nation walking. The hajj is millions of people moving as one body.

The modern idea of the journey of self-discovery is strangely lonely by comparison. I think it is also wrong. I did not become who I am by looking inward. I became it through people — some who taught me, some who wounded me, some who simply stayed.

7. There is no arrival, and this is good news

Centuries ago, Thiruvalluvar wrote in the Thirukkural that the learned man belongs to every land and every town — that knowledge itself can make a person at home anywhere. I used to read that as a promise of arrival.Now I read it as the opposite. If every place can be home, then no single place is the destination. You are meant to keep moving.

So I have stopped asking when I will arrive. The question has no answer, and asking it only makes the road feel longer.

The longest trip I have ever taken is still in progress. I do not know the final stop. I have accepted that there may not be one.

But I have learned to read the departure board differently. It was never telling me where I was going. It was telling me that I had not stopped.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 13 September 2026

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Word Count:869

The Oldest Budget Travellers Were Not Trying to Save Money

Before travel was an industry, it was a discipline. The people who went furthest on the least were not economising. They were doing something on purpose, and money had almost nothing to do with it.

1. Lightness was the method, not the compromise. The Buddhist bhikkhu carries a word for a name: it means almsman, one who begs. The begging bowl was not a symptom of poverty but an instrument of it. Possessions generate obligations, obligations generate attachment, and an attached traveller is a poor observer. What the monk gave up was not comfort. It was the burden of managing his own comfort.
2. Some traditions made the invisibility of wealth compulsory. A pilgrim entering the state of ihram for the hajj wears two unstitched white cloths. There is no cut, no tailoring, no label, nothing a fellow pilgrim could read for status. The rule exists precisely so that the wealthy man cannot be distinguished from the labourer standing beside him. It is a deliberate demolition of the human ability to price a stranger at a glance.
3. The instruction was practical, not poetic. When the Gospel of Luke sends the seventy out, the direction is blunt: no purse, no bag, no sandals. The reason is structural rather than spiritual. A traveller who carries nothing must receive something, and a traveller who receives something arrives as a guest rather than a customer. Dependence was not a flaw in the design. It was the design.
4. The older frame put the obligation on the host. Thiruvalluvar devotes an entire chapter of the Thirukkural to virunthombal, the duty of hospitality, and directs almost all of it at the one who stays behind.¹ The guest is not required to be shrewd. The host is required to be generous. Somewhere between that world and this one, the entire burden of travelling well was transferred onto the traveller’s shopping decisions.
5. There is, of course, a distinction worth keeping. These traditions were shaped by different religious, ethical and social purposes, and it would be misleading to reduce them all to a single philosophy of travel or simplicity. Nor is modern budget travel inherently superficial: choosing a hostel, carrying less, comparing prices or travelling within a modest budget can be practical, thoughtful and deeply rewarding. The problem begins when frugality itself becomes a performance—when spending less is no longer simply a means to experience more, but another way of displaying an identity. The question, then, is not whether we travel cheaply, but what our choices are actually trying to buy.

Now the turn, and it is an uncomfortable one.

1. Contemporary budget travel has quietly reinstated everything the pilgrim shed. The hostel is chosen because it photographs well. A neighbourhood is worth a premium because it is “authentic,” which is a price attached to the appearance of not having paid one. The market noticed that frugality had become desirable and did the obvious thing: it began selling frugality.
2. Frugality is now a look, and looks have list prices. The merino shirt that never needs washing. The forty-litre carry-on that costs more than three checked bags would have. The capsule wardrobe assembled at considerable expense so that the owner appears to own very little. None of this is saving. It is appearance-spending relocated into a more flattering register.
3. The test is not the amount. It is the audience. Ask who a given expense is addressed to. A meal you will remember has an audience of one. A room you will photograph has an audience of several hundred. The first is an experience. The second is a costume, and costumes are expensive precisely because someone else has to see them.
4. The pilgrim traditions were not competing with anyone. That is the part that has been lost. The bhikkhu, the ihram-clad pilgrim, the disciple without sandals — none of them were performing restraint for an audience, because restraint was the baseline and not the achievement. Modern budget travel inverted this. It made thrift into a visible accomplishment, and the moment thrift becomes visible, it becomes purchasable.

So my tip stands, but it is not mine and it is not new: spend on experiences, not appearances.

Three unrelated traditions, separated by language, geography and several centuries, arrived at that conclusion independently and built entire practices around it. The travel industry has spent the last hundred years selling it back to us at a markup, repackaged as gear, as neighbourhoods, as curated scarcity.

The cheapest thing you can do on any journey is stop paying to be seen a particular way. Everything else on the list is negotiable.

¹ The Thirukkural is a Tamil classical text of 1,330 couplets, traditionally attributed to the poet Thiruvalluvar and generally dated to the early centuries of the common era. Its ninth chapter treats hospitality as an obligation binding on the householder.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 12 September 2026

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Word Count:853

We treat cartoon logic as something we outgrow. I want to suggest the reverse. Children face few consequences that last; adults face mortgages, diagnoses, court dates and reputations. We are the ones who need a picture in which the fall is real and the fall is not final. Every tradition that invented a trickster seems to have worked this out long ago. They did not build the figure for the children. They built it for the people carrying the weight, and then let the children watch.

Cartoons Were Never Lying To Us

The prompt asks who my favourite cartoon character is. I do not have one anymore. But I have a favourite cartoon quality: the freedom to imagine a world where failure is temporary, problems can be laughed at, and tomorrow always offers another adventure.

The usual thing to say next is that this is childish and we outgrow it. I want to argue the opposite. Cartoons are not unrealistic about failure. They may be the most honest account of it we have.

Watch what actually happens when the anvil falls

The coyote runs off the cliff. He hangs in the air, looks at us, and drops. He is flattened. Then the next frame arrives and he is whole again, already planning the next attempt.

We call this fantasy. But look closely at what the scene claims. It does not claim that the fall did not hurt. It shows the hurt in full. What it claims is that the fall is not the final word about him. Damage is real and damage is not permanent. That is not a lie about the world. That is a position on it.

Compare it with Sisyphus

The Greeks gave us the opposite picture. Sisyphus pushes his stone up the hill, and every time it nears the top it rolls back down. He begins again. Forever.

The shape looks similar to the cartoon. Effort, collapse, restart. But the meaning is reversed. Sisyphus repeats because he is being punished. His failure is designed to be endless. Nothing he learns changes anything. In the cartoon, repetition is opportunity. In the myth, repetition is the sentence.

Compare it with the Jataka tales

Buddhist tradition offers a gentler version. The Jataka stories tell of the Buddha’s previous births, in which he appears as a deer, a monkey, a merchant, a king. Some lives are noble. Some are foolish. No single life is the whole account.

This is closer to the cartoon. Failure becomes one instalment rather than a verdict. But there is a cost. The comfort depends on a very long ledger, stretching across lifetimes you cannot remember. The cartoon offers the same mercy in twenty-four frames. You get the fresh start now, and you get it in this body.

Compare it with Job

The Book of Job ends with restoration. He loses everything and receives more than he lost. Again the shape looks familiar.

But Job must first endure an ordeal, submit to a whirlwind, and be told that the reasons are beyond him. Restoration is granted, and it is granted on terms. The cartoon asks for nothing. No lesson is extracted. The coyote is not improved by being flattened. He is simply allowed to continue.

So three great traditions handle failure by making it permanent, or by deferring recovery across lifetimes, or by charging a price for it. The cartoon grants recovery freely. Of the four, it is the strangest and the kindest.

And it is also the oldest

Here is the part we miss. The animated character is not a modern invention. Every tradition issued one long before film existed.

West Africa gave us Anansi the spider, who schemes, overreaches, and is humiliated, and who returns in the next story unchanged. The Islamic world gave us Nasreddin Hoja, riding his donkey backwards, saying foolish things that turn out to be wise. South India gave us Tenali Raman, the court jester who survives by wit alone.¹ The Native American plains gave us Coyote, who is greedy, gets caught, dies in some tellings, and is somehow alive again in the next.

These figures share one licence. They are permitted to fail in public. And because they fail in public, the audience does not have to. The village watches Nasreddin make the mistake, laughs, and goes home lighter.

Notice who was in that audience. Not children. These stories were told in courts, markets, mosques and campfires, to adults who were taxed, bereaved, indebted and afraid. The trickster was adult medicine.

So the question turns around

I began by saying that growing up should not mean losing this quality. I now think that framing was wrong.

Growing up does not remove our need for the cartoon. It creates it. Children have few consequences that last. Adults have mortgages, diagnoses, court dates and reputations. We are the ones who need a picture in which the fall is real and the fall is not final.

Every culture that invented a trickster had already worked this out. They did not make him for the children. They made him for the people carrying the weight, and then let the children watch.

I do not have a favourite cartoon character. I have a favourite claim, and it is this: you are not what happened to you yesterday. Tomorrow you get redrawn.

¹ Tenali Raman was a poet and jester at the Vijayanagara court of Krishnadevaraya in the sixteenth century. His stories, originally Telugu, are retold across South India in Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 11 September 2026

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Word Count:959

I started out writing a simple reflection on my own money habits and ended up somewhere I did not plan. I went looking at what people concluded about money long before there was an industry selling the answer. Tamil, Stoic, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish and Christian thought disagree about almost everything. Yet on this one question they repeatedly return to a similar concern: wealth is judged not simply by how much there is, but by where it came from, what it is for, and what attachment to it does to the person holding it.

Seneca’s version stayed with me longest. A rich man can be poor, having arranged his life so that no sum is ever enough. Curious whether that lands the same way for anyone else here.

What the Old Books Knew About Money

The modern financial-mindset industry is relatively young. The question it claims to answer is roughly three thousand years old. Before deciding what my own attitude to money does for me, I found it worth asking what people concluded about this long before anyone could monetise the answer.

They did not agree on much. But across very different traditions, certain themes recur with a consistency that ought to make us suspicious of anything that presents a newly invented formula as ancient wisdom.

One. Wealth is judged by its origin, not its size.

Thiruvalluvar is blunt about this in the Porul.** Wealth gathered without compassion or by dishonest means is not ethically acceptable wealth, whatever the ledger says. The Kural does not romanticise poverty either, and refuses the easy piety of pretending money does not matter. It matters enormously. But the first question asked of any sum is where it came from, not how large it grew. That single reordering changes what a person optimises for.

Kurals 754 and 755 make this particularly clear: wealth acquired without wrongdoing can yield virtue and happiness, while wealth divorced from mercy and love should be rejected. Kural 756 then adds an important qualification by describing forms of royal revenue, including dues and the spoils of conquest. The three couplets therefore do not offer a simple modern formula about personal wealth; they place the acquisition and use of wealth within a wider ethical and political framework. (Wikisource)

Two. The rich man can be poor.

Seneca returns to this repeatedly. Poverty is not simply having little; it can also mean continually wanting more, and by that definition a man with an estate may be poorer than a man with a cloak.

The Stoics were not recommending destitution. They were pointing out that sufficiency is a mental state, and that a person who has not located it will not necessarily find it at any income. This is the most quietly devastating claim in the whole conversation, because it means the finish line can move at exactly the speed you approach it.

Three. How you earn is part of what you earn.

Right Livelihood sits inside the Buddhist Eightfold Path, not off to one side as a footnote about ethics. It asks whether one’s livelihood is conducted in a way that avoids harm, deception and other forms of wrongful conduct. Buddhist sources explicitly include dishonest or harmful ways of earning among forms of wrong livelihood. (Encyclopedia of Buddhism)

This is a claim about mindset in a deeper sense: the way we earn money is itself part of our ethical life. A livelihood built on deception is not merely a financial transaction with a moral cost attached; it is incompatible with the discipline of Right Livelihood.

Four. Excess is a specific fault with a specific name.

The Qur’anic prohibition on israf treats extravagance and wastefulness as a moral problem rather than merely a matter of taste. Naming the fault precisely does real work. It distinguishes wasteful excess from generosity and prevents frugality from becoming the only measure of responsible spending.

Five. Ownership may be custodial rather than absolute.

The stewardship strand running through Jewish and Christian thought, the concept of amanah in Islam, and the dharmic framing of artha as one legitimate aim bounded by others all arrive at related ideas of responsibility and limitation.

What you hold, you hold on terms. The practical effect is not necessarily guilt but a changed question: not “What may I do with this?” but “What is this for?”

Six. Debt was understood as a relationship, not merely a product.

The Torah’s sabbatical release of debts, the Islamic prohibition of riba, and the long medieval European argument over usury are not identical positions, and I would not pretend otherwise. But each treats lending as something with consequences for people and society rather than simply as a neutral transaction between a person and an instrument.

Whatever one concludes about the economics, the anthropology is worth keeping. Debt does something to the debtor.

Seven. The amount is not the whole point.

This is the convergence that interests me most. These traditions disagree profoundly about God, the self, morality, society and what happens after death. They should not be collapsed into a single philosophy of money.

Yet they repeatedly return to a related question in different vocabularies: the sum is not, by itself, the measure. The measure also lies in the disposition of the person holding it.

Set that against the contemporary claim that the right mindset produces wealth, and the inversion becomes striking. The older traditions are often concerned with what wealth reveals about character, responsibility and purpose. The modern version frequently makes character the input and money the result.

It has reversed the emphasis—and sometimes sold us that reversal as ancient wisdom.

I take the older view.

My financial mindset does not exist simply to generate money. Money exists, in part, to reveal what my mindset actually is.

Whether I am honest when the shortcut is available.

Whether sufficiency is a place I can arrive at or a horizon that retreats.

Whether what I hold, I hold on terms.

Judged that way, I am not certain I am doing well. But I am at least being examined on the right paper.

The alternative is to spend a life scoring highly on a test that no serious person in three thousand years thought was worth setting.

** A note for readers unfamiliar with the Kural

Thiruvalluvar is a Tamil poet-philosopher, generally placed somewhere between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE. The dating is genuinely uncertain, and Tamil scholarship has argued over it for a long time. What is not uncertain is his standing: the Thirukkural is one of the most widely read works in Tamil and holds a distinctive position in Indian intellectual life as a text claimed by readers from many traditions. It names no god, prescribes no ritual, and belongs to no sect. That is precisely why it travels.

The book contains 1,330 couplets arranged into 133 chapters of ten couplets each. Each couplet follows the characteristic seven-cir Kural metre—four metrical units on the first line and three on the second. The compression is the point. A couplet has little room for hedging, illustration, or the softening clause that a paragraph permits. You state the thing or you do not.

The work is divided into three books: Aram, on virtue; Porul, on wealth, statecraft and public life; and Inbam, on love. Porul is by far the longest of the three, running to roughly seven hundred couplets—more than half the book. That proportion is itself an argument. Valluvar does not treat material life as a distraction from the ethical life or as a lower rung to be climbed past. He treats it as an arena where ethics is actually tested, and he gives it the space that view requires.

This is why he can be blunt about money in a way that religious texts on the subject often are not. He is not simply warning you away from wealth. He recognises its importance and turns to the harder questions: how it was acquired, how it is used, and what it enables.

A text that regards wealth as spiritually suspect has to approach the topic obliquely. A text that recognises its practical importance can be direct.

Three couplets carry the particular argument I drew on. Kural 754 holds that wealth acquired without wrongdoing can yield both virtue and happiness. Kural 755 says that wealth acquired without mercy and love should be rejected. Kural 756, however, shifts to the question of royal revenues, reminding us that Valluvar’s discussion of wealth is not confined to modern individual finance. (Wikisource)

The translations vary, as they always do with Tamil compression, but the ethical emphasis of 754 and 755 is clear: the manner in which wealth is acquired matters, and wealth cannot be evaluated solely by its size.

That is a stronger and more interesting claim than the one most modern financial ethics makes, which tends to say that ill-gotten wealth is real wealth carrying a moral cost.

Valluvar invites us to ask a more fundamental question: what kind of wealth are we talking about in the first place?

For readers who want to go further, G. U. Pope’s nineteenth-century English translation is historically significant, while P. S. Sundaram’s Penguin translation offers a more readable modern rendering. Both are worth consulting, since no single English translation can fully capture the compression of the original.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 10 September 2026

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Word Count:1595

If your pet could talk, what is the first thing it would say? Most of us reach for something warm, some version of thank you. I did too, and I have never even owned a pet. So I went looking to see whether the great storytelling traditions backed me up. They do not. In scripture, in the Panchatantra, in Aesop, in the Jataka tales, in the Iliad, in Black Beauty, in Kafka, animals given speech use it to accuse, to warn, to bargain, to instruct. Almost never to thank. Which made me wonder what my own answer was really doing. This post is about that, and about why your pet’s silence might be the most valuable thing about it. I would love to know what you think your animal would say.

What the Animals Actually Say

I have never had a pet. So when this prompt arrived, I had no memory to consult, only an instinct — and my instinct produced a sentence almost immediately.

“Thank you for sharing your life with me.”

It felt right. It felt, in fact, like the obvious answer, which should have been the first warning. So before writing anything further, I went looking to see whether the record supported me. Whether, in the long human archive of animals granted speech, gratitude is what they choose to say.

It is not. It is almost never what they say.

The evidence

Begin with the oldest cases, and the pattern establishes itself quickly.

In the Book of Numbers, a donkey is given a voice after being beaten three times by her master, and she uses it to ask what she has done to deserve it. Her first words are a protest against cruelty. In the nineteenth book of the Iliad, Achilles’ horse Xanthos is granted speech by a goddess and immediately foretells his rider’s death — a warning, delivered once, before the voice is taken back. In the Quran, Solomon is given to understand the speech of birds and insects; an ant warns her colony to take shelter before an approaching army crushes them without noticing. Again: a warning, issued to her own kind, with the human overhearing by accident.

Turn to the didactic traditions and the tone changes but the function does not. The animals of the Panchatantra speak in order to instruct, and more often to scheme, plotting and counter-plotting their way through a curriculum in statecraft. Aesop’s beasts speak in order to indict — the fox, the crow, the ass in the lion’s skin, each one an argument about human vanity wearing fur. In the Jataka tales the Bodhisatta is born as animal after animal, and speaks to teach, to bargain, to renounce, and sometimes to expose the man who betrayed him.

Move forward to the modern era and even the sentimental cases hold the line. Anna Sewell gave a horse an entire autobiography, and Black Beauty used it to describe, patiently and in detail, what humans do to horses. Kafka’s ape, summoned before an academy, reports that he never wanted freedom at all — only a way out. Not thanks. A statement of the terms.

Scripture, fable, epic, novel. Across traditions that share no common ancestor, when the animal is finally handed language, it accuses, it warns, it bargains, it instructs, it testifies. The one thing it consistently declines to do is thank us.

What my guess was really about

Which returns me to my own sentence, now looking considerably less innocent.

“Thank you for sharing your life with me” is not a guess about an animal. It is a sentence written by the beneficiary of an arrangement and placed in the mouth of the other party. It ratifies the whole thing. It says the food and the collar and the closed door were a gift, and that the recipient understood them as such and approved.

I had not imagined an animal at all. I had imagined an acquittal.

And I suspect that is what most of us do, which is why the record and the instinct diverge so sharply. The traditions were composed by people willing to let the animal say something inconvenient. My version was composed by someone who wanted to be told he had done well, by a creature he has never actually had to feed at five in the morning.

The case for silence

There is a scene in the Odyssey that I keep returning to, and its power lies entirely in what does not happen. Odysseus comes home in disguise. His old dog Argos, lying neglected, recognises him — and dies. The dog does not speak. He is given no line at all. And the moment is unbearable precisely because nothing is said, because the recognition has to be carried across a gap that language never crosses.

That gap, I have come to think, is not a defect in the relationship. It is the site of the relationship. Everything a pet is understood to mean is meaning its owner supplied, daily, without receipt, into a silence that never confirmed a single interpretation. That unpaid labour of attributing an inner life to something that cannot corroborate it may be the most disinterested thing most of us ever do.

Speech would end it. The first sentence would arrive, and it would be either the accusation the traditions predict or the thanks I invented, and in both cases the work would stop. There would be nothing left to supply.

So perhaps the honest answer to the prompt is that the first thing my imaginary animal says should be nothing at all.

And that we should go on saying it for them, every day, and never find out whether we were right.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 09 September 2026

© 2026 Rise & Inspire.

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Word Count:989

There is a book I finished long after I knew it was not for me. I kept going because I had already invested the hours, told two people I was reading it, and could not stand the idea of leaving it unfinished. When I finally examined the regret, it would not stay attached to the book. It slid off and landed on me. I had not really read the book at all. I had read the consensus about it. The new post is about that, and about why I refuse to name the title. Curious whether you have one of your own.

The Book I Will Not Name

There is a book I finished long after I had stopped believing in it. I will not tell you which one. That refusal is not coyness. It is the argument.

1. I read past the point of persuasion.

Somewhere around the third chapter I knew. Not that the book was badly written, but that its central claim was thinner than its confidence suggested, and that its author had mistaken pessimism for depth. Every subsequent page confirmed what the third chapter had already told me. I read them anyway. Two hundred more.

2. I did not keep reading because the book improved. I kept reading because I had paid.

Not only in money. In hours, in expectation, in the small public commitment of having told two people I was reading it. The mind treats an unfinished book as a debt, and debts are settled even when settling them costs more than walking away. I finished it the way one finishes a meal that has already disappointed — methodically, joylessly, on principle. The principle was invented on the spot to justify the eating.

3. So the first verdict was straightforward. Yes, I regretted it.

I regretted the evenings. I regretted the four other books that waited while this one was served. If regret is simply the arithmetic of misallocated time, the case closes here, and the essay ends at three hundred words.

4. But when I examined the regret, it moved.

It would not stay attached to the book. Pressed, it slid off the object and settled somewhere closer to me. I had not been deceived by the author. The author had made claims and I had been free to weigh them. What had actually happened was that I had suspended my own weighing because so many people had already weighed and agreed. I did not read the book. I read the consensus about it, and used the book as evidence for a verdict I had accepted before opening the cover.

That is not the book’s failure. That is mine, and it is a failure I could repeat with a better book tomorrow.

5. Popularity is a measure of reach. It has never been a measure of fit.

We know this everywhere else. No one assumes the most prescribed medicine is the right one for their body, or that the most attended church is the one where they will meet God, or that the most common career is the one they should hold. We accept, in almost every domain, that scale and suitability are different questions. Books are the strange exception. A book that has sold widely acquires a moral authority that a widely sold anything else does not, and we begin to suspect ourselves rather than the text when the two fail to meet.

The book I will not name was popular. It was popular for reasons that were real and had nothing to do with me.

6. The second verdict, then, is different.

That book taught me what I want from a book. Before it, I could say I liked a book or did not. After it, I could say why: that I want a writer who is more curious than certain, who treats a difficult subject as difficult rather than as settled, and who leaves the reader with more room than they arrived with, not less. I did not learn this from the books I admired. Admiration is a poor teacher; it explains nothing about itself. I learned it from the one that failed, because failure has edges, and edges can be traced.

I have used that knowledge for years. It has saved me more hours than the book cost me. On the ledger, the book is in credit.

7. Which is why I will not name it.

The moment I do, this stops being an essay and becomes a review. Half of you would begin defending it and the other half agreeing too quickly, and everyone would stop thinking about their own shelf. There is a book you finished that you should have closed. You know the weight of it. You know exactly which recommendation put it in your hands, and you may still be slightly embarrassed about how much that recommendation mattered.

That book is not my business. But it is worth asking what it taught you, because the answer is almost never nothing.

I regret reading it. I would not undo having read it. Those two statements sit together more comfortably than they should, and the discomfort of holding them is, I suspect, most of what reading is for.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 08 September 2026

© 2026 Rise & Inspire.

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Word Count:904

Here is something I noticed while thinking about the best and worst airports I have passed through in India. Hyderabad is clearly the better one, and yet I can barely describe it. Thiruvananthapuram was the harder passage, and I can still recall the queue, the heat, the whole afternoon. Good infrastructure works by disappearing, which means it leaves us nothing to hold. Bad infrastructure interrupts us, and interruption is how memory records anything at all. I wrote about that gap, and about why the story we tell is almost never the same as the ranking we should trust.

The Airport I Rank Worst Is the One I Can Still Describe

Ask me for the best airport I have passed through in India and I will say Hyderabad without hesitating. Ask me what it looked like and I will struggle. I remember an impression of width and quiet, of moving forward without being stopped, of arriving at the gate earlier than I expected to. That is nearly all. Ask me about Thiruvananthapuram and I could give you the queue, the heat of the hall, the particular exhaustion of standing in a building that was designed for a smaller century.

This is the strange arithmetic of travel, and I think it holds beyond airports.

One. Excellence is built to disappear. A well-run terminal succeeds by removing every point at which you would have had to think. Signage answers the question before you form it. The line moves before you resent it. The result is that a good airport gives you nothing to hold. You cannot describe a smooth passage because smoothness has no edges. Hyderabad earned my highest rating by making itself unmemorable, which is the closest thing to a compliment infrastructure can receive and the worst possible outcome for anyone hoping to write about it later.

Two. Friction is the only thing that records itself. Memory does not archive comfort. It archives interruption. Every detail I can still recall from Thiruvananthapuram exists because something in that building resisted me, and resistance is a form of attention. The place made me notice it. Buildings that work do not require to be noticed, and so they are not.

Three. A bad airport asks something of you, and asking is a kind of intimacy. The efficient terminal treats you as a unit to be processed and does it so well that you never meet it. The struggling one draws you into a relationship. You have to negotiate with it. You find yourself watching the staff, judging the crowd, calculating your own chances. You become, briefly, a participant rather than a passenger. Nobody enjoys this. Everybody remembers it.

Four. Comfort produces no witnesses. Consider what actually gets said about travel. Nobody has ever held the attention of a room by describing an unremarkable connection. The stories that survive are delays, missed flights, an official who would not bend, a stranger who did. The airport I would recommend to you is not the airport I would tell you about, and we should be honest that these are two different rankings, using two different currencies.

Five. By the currency writing uses, the ranking inverts entirely. If the measure is what a place gave me to keep, then Thiruvananthapuram was the more generous of the two. It handed me something to carry. Hyderabad, doing everything right, sent me away empty. The best airport I have been to gave me a good day and no material. The worst gave me a bad day and a page.

I want to be careful here, because there is a lazy version of this argument that romanticises dysfunction, and it deserves resisting.

The value of the difficult passage is retroactive, and it is unearned. It arrives only after you are safely through, only if you were never really at risk, and only if the cost of the delay was measured in irritation rather than in something serious. I could afford to find that terminal memorable. Somebody in the same queue could not. For the traveller who is ill, or old, or carrying a child, or migrating for work with papers that invite a second look, that friction is not texture. It is the thing itself. My essay is their ordeal. It would be indecent to convert their afternoon into my anecdote and then call the exchange fair.

So the honest conclusion is not that bad airports are secretly good. It is that we have been using one word for two entirely different judgements and pretending they belong on the same scale.

Judged as infrastructure, Hyderabad is better and it is not close. That is the ranking that matters, because it is the one that determines how a hundred thousand people are treated on a given Tuesday. An airport’s job is to be forgotten, and forgetting is a public good.

Judged as experience, the failure wins, but only because experience is a scavenger. It feeds on whatever goes wrong. It has no interest in the days that were merely fine, which is why the best-organised parts of our lives leave the thinnest record behind.

The prompt asked me to name a best and a worst. I have. But the ranking I actually trust is the first one, and the story I actually have is the second, and I no longer think that gap can be closed. Some of the finest things we pass through are designed to leave no trace. We should be glad of them, and we should accept that we will not be able to say why.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 07 September 2026

© 2026 Rise & Inspire.

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Word Count:969

Daily writing prompt

What’s the most annoying trope in books or movies?

View all responses

I have been thinking about why certain storytelling habits irritate me and others do not. It is not repetition. The disguised stranger and the letter that arrives too late have been in use since the epics, and a good writer can still make them feel new.

What bothers me are the tropes that misdescribe experience. Screen grief lasts a single rainy scene. Redemption arrives at the graveside. A montage turns a novice into a master. Reconciliation happens in one conversation instead of the several awkward attempts real life requires.

I have written up six of them, along with a simple test I now apply to any story: does it know what it has left out? Would love to hear which one annoys you most.

Six storytelling habits that quietly misdescribe how people actually change

Not every worn device in storytelling is a fault. Repetition is how narrative works. The disguised stranger, the journey that changes the traveller, the letter that arrives too late — these have been in use since the epics, and a good writer can still make any of them feel like the first time. Familiarity alone is no crime.

The tropes worth being irritated by are a narrower set. They are the ones that misdescribe experience: that teach an audience to expect something of themselves, and of the people they love, which life will not supply. Here is the case, in six parts.

1. Grief that finishes

There is the funeral, the rain, the long look at the horizon, and by the next act the character is functioning normally. But grief is not a scene; it is a climate. Traditions that took mourning seriously built duration into the form itself — the seven days of shiva, the thirteen days of Hindu ritual observance, the Greek chorus still lamenting long after the body has been carried off. Modern screen sorrow has no duration. It has a montage. Audiences who absorb this learn to feel defective when their own grief is still there in month eleven.

2. Redemption that arrives in the last five minutes

The cruel father softens at the graveside. The tyrant weeps and is forgiven. Real change is possible — but it is slow, unglamorous and mostly invisible, made of small revised habits over years. Classical drama knew this. Greek recognition scenes usually come too late to save anybody, and the lateness is the whole point. A story that hands out transformation as a curtain gift trains us to wait for a moment that will not come, instead of beginning the work that would.

3. The person who exists in order to be lost

The wife with no interior life who dies so the hero can acquire a motive. The mentor who has no ambitions of his own and is killed at the midpoint. The lie here is not that people die. It is the suggestion that a human being can be a device — that some lives are load-bearing and others are scaffolding.

4. The single conversation that repairs everything

Two people finally say the true thing and the wound closes. Anyone who has attempted a real reconciliation knows the true thing usually has to be said several times, on different days, in worse words, with long silences in between, and that the first attempt often makes matters worse. Reconciliation is a practice, not a speech.

5. Evil that announces itself

The villain who explains his plan, wears the colour of menace, and is unmistakable from his first appearance. Actual harm is rarely so obliging. It usually arrives plausible, well-mannered, procedurally correct and entirely convinced of its own decency. Fiction that makes wrongdoing legible flatters us: it implies we would have recognised it. Most people who were there did not.

6. Mastery without labour

Three minutes of training set to music, and the novice is formidable. This may be the most quietly damaging of all, because the young absorb it first. It edits out the only part that actually matters — the long, dull, unwitnessed middle, where nobody is watching and nothing yet looks like progress.

The common thread is compression. Storytelling must compress; that is its nature and its gift. The failure is not compression itself but compression that forgets it is compressing — that presents the shortened version as the true shape of the thing.

So the test I would apply is a modest one. Does the story know what it has left out? The best writers signal the omission somehow: a line, a look, a scene years later that shows the wound is still there. That single gesture is the difference between a convention handled with care and a convention that lies.

Which of these has annoyed you longest — and which one, handled by the right writer, has actually moved you?

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 06 September 2026

© 2026 Rise & Inspire.

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Word Count:831

Five traditions examine a single wish: to relive the year when the family was together and life felt simpler. Greek nostos says the place has moved. Japanese mono no aware says the value would evaporate on arrival. Portuguese saudade says you never fully left. Hebrew zakhar says the past is an instruction, not a destination. Modern memory research says the film may be flattering the footage. What survives the cross-examination is not a longing for the past but a demand on the present. 

A short comparative essay on attention, memory and the ordinary evening you are currently not noticing.

WordPress Daily Writing Prompt · 5 September 2026

Five Languages Cross-Examine a Single Wish

If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?

The wish is simple. I would relive the year when the family was together and life felt simpler. I would change nothing. I would only like to stand inside those ordinary hours again, now that I know what they were worth.

It is such a common wish that it has been named independently in at least five languages, by people who never met, in centuries that never overlapped. Each names a different part of it. Set side by side, they stop sounding like sympathy and begin sounding like cross-examination.

One. Greek: nostos.

The ache is not for a time but for a return. The Greeks paired nostos with algos, pain, and gave us nostalgia, literally the pain of homecoming. Their epics make the point without mercy. Odysseus reaches Ithaca at last and finds it altered, smaller, occupied, requiring a fight. The verdict: the door you are asking to walk back through has since been repainted. What you want is not the house. It is the version of yourself who lived in it without noticing.

Two. Japanese: mono no aware.

The tenderness we feel toward things precisely because they are passing. The cherry blossom is not prized despite falling. It is prized because it falls. Applied to my year, this is an unwelcome finding. The ordinariness I mourn was not valuable and then lost. It became valuable by being lost. Restore it and it turns ordinary again within a week.

Three. Portuguese: saudade.

The presence of an absence. A fullness, not a void. Saudade concedes something the other traditions withhold, that longing is itself a form of possession, and that the year is not gone but held in a different shape. The verdict here is gentler. I am not separated from that year. I am carrying it in the only form it can now take.

Four. Hebrew: zakhar.

To remember, but never passively. In that tradition remembrance is an act with obligations attached. You recall in order to do something. This lens refuses my petition outright. It does not ask what I want returned. It asks what the memory now requires of me. Which call I make this week. Which chair I sit in while someone is still occupying the one beside it.

Five. Modern psychology: the reminiscence bump.

Autobiographical memory clusters disproportionately around a handful of years, and those years are not selected for happiness. They are selected for novelty and for the formation of the self. The finding is deflating and useful in equal measure. The year I want back may simply be the year my memory recorded at the highest resolution. Its perfection could be an artefact of storage.

The composite verdict.

Not one of these traditions grants the return. Greek says the place has moved. Japanese says the value would evaporate on arrival. Portuguese says you never fully left. Hebrew says the past is not a destination but an instruction. Psychology says the film may be flattering the footage.

And yet all five agree on the finding underneath. What I am actually asking for is attention. The capacity to register an ordinary evening while it is happening rather than forty years afterwards. No tradition offers that retroactively. Every one of them offers it now.

Which is the quiet cruelty of the question, and also its use. Somewhere this week there is an unremarkable evening that will one day be the year I would petition for. It is available at full resolution. It asks nothing of me except that I look up.

Background for readers who wish to verify or extend the five lenses used in the essay.

1. Nostos and nostalgia

Nostos is the Homeric term for the homecoming of a hero, and gives its name to an entire genre of returns, of which the Odyssey is the surviving masterwork. Algos denotes pain or grief. The compound nostalgia was not Greek but was coined in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, in a medical dissertation describing acute homesickness among Swiss mercenaries serving abroad. It was, for nearly two centuries afterwards, classified as a disease. Its migration from pathology to sentiment is itself a small history of how the modern self came to be understood.

2. Mono no aware

Usually rendered as the pathos of things, or a sensitivity to ephemera. The phrase was given critical weight by the eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga in his readings of The Tale of Genji, where he identified it as the governing emotional principle of Japanese literature. It differs from Western melancholy in an important respect. It does not protest transience. It accepts transience as the source of beauty rather than the enemy of it.

3. Saudade

Portuguese and Galician, with no exact equivalent in English. Commonly glossed as the presence of an absence. It carries an affectionate rather than a bitter charge, and it has a distinct cultural home in fado, the Lisbon song tradition, and in the literature of Portuguese maritime departure. Note the structural difference from nostalgia. Nostalgia grieves a lost time. Saudade holds a person or place continuously present in their absence.

4. Zakhar

The Hebrew verb for remembrance, appearing throughout the Hebrew Scriptures in a form that is consistently active rather than contemplative. To remember, in this usage, is to act upon what is remembered. Remembrance is covenantal and ethical, not merely wistful. This is the tradition that converts memory from a private comfort into a public duty, and it is the reason the essay treats the fourth lens as the one that refuses the request.

5. The reminiscence bump

A well-replicated finding in autobiographical memory research, first described in the psychological literature of the 1980s and studied extensively since. Adults asked to recall life events produce a disproportionate concentration from roughly ages fifteen to thirty. The leading explanations are the novelty of first experiences, the encoding advantage of self-defining events, and the availability of a stable narrative script for that period. The finding does not say those years were better. It says they were recorded more densely.

A note on method

The essay deliberately places four humanistic traditions and one empirical finding on the same bench. This is not to rank them but to test whether a wish that feels intensely personal survives examination from five directions at once. It does, but not in the form in which it was made.

The practical residue of the essay, for readers who prefer their conclusions unornamented.

The question posed by the prompt is retrospective. The answer it produces is not. That inversion is the whole point, and it is worth stating plainly.

First

The year you would choose is rarely the year of your achievements. Ask ten people and most will name a period of unremarkable stability rather than a period of success. This is information about what we actually value, and it usually contradicts what we spend our years pursuing.

Second

The standard of proof for a good year is lower than we think while living it. Presence of people. Absence of dread. Ordinary food, ordinary evenings, ordinary argument. These conditions are frequently met and rarely noticed.

Third

The failure being mourned is not a failure of circumstance. It is a failure of attention. That distinction matters because circumstance cannot be recovered and attention can be practised immediately.

Fourth

There is a test available. Name the year you would relive. Then list what specifically you would want returned. If the list contains events, the longing is for the past. If the list contains people in adjoining rooms, the longing is for presence, and presence has a current address.

Fifth

Somebody in your life is currently living inside the year you will later petition for. They do not know it. Neither do you. That is the only reason to look up from the screen this evening.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 05 September 2026

© 2026 Rise & Inspire.

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Word Count:1466