Author Archives: Naman Bansal

INDIA

Two Days Before My Harvard Graduation, 19 Children Were Shot Dead. Here’s What It Taught Me About Indian Schools.

Two days before my Harvard graduation, 19 children were shot dead in their own classroom, in the United States.

That’s the day I realized American schools aren’t as great as they seem – and Indian schools, whatever their real flaws, might actually be doing something right for our kids.

This isn’t a comparison of Harvard to anything. Harvard is a university; this is about school education – the K-12 years that shape a childhood. What follows are three specific, documented reasons I’ve come to believe the Indian school system, for all its problems, protects children from things the American system currently doesn’t.

One: physical safety

Gun violence is one of the biggest challenges facing schools in America today.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, which has tracked gunfire on school grounds since 2013, there were at least 144 incidents of gunfire on K-12 school grounds during the 2023–2024 school year — a 31% increase from the prior school year, and the second-highest total since Everytown began tracking in 2013 (Everytown for Gun Safety, 2024).

Growing up in an Indian school, that specific fear simply never existed for me and fortunately it also does not exist for young kids today as well. What hurts more, honestly, is how normal this has become in America – lockdown drills are now a routine part of childhood for millions of American kids, the way fire drills are everywhere else.

The tragedy that I am referring to in this piece – the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022 – killed 19 students and 2 teachers, making it one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history (Britannica, 2025).

Two: racism

Indian-American and Asian-American kids in U.S. schools report facing racial hate speech and harassment at rates that should alarm anyone paying attention. A 2024 peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence found that even in the years before the pandemic (2015–2019) – a period often assumed to be calmer than what followed – roughly 1 in 15 Asian American adolescents reported being targeted by hate speech at school (Gee, Cooc, & Yu, 2024).

Some of this starts as early as middle school. In an Indian school, a child doesn’t have to carry that heavy of a weight just for being who they are.

Three: the lunchbox moment

There’s a quieter but deeply specific cost too – one many Indian-origin kids growing up in the U.S. know by heart. It’s called the “lunchbox moment”: opening your tiffin at school, and hearing something like “ew, what IS that?” I can attest to this considering that my nephew is in middle school in Phoenix, Arizona and we have discussed this issue with each other.

One Indian-American, describing this exact experience to NPR, recalled it plainly: his mother would pack him “a deliciously cooked Indian dish,” and when he opened it at school, classmates would react with open disgust (NPR, 2024).

Enough of that, enough times, and kids stop packing dal. Stop packing achar. Some stop wanting to be who they are, at least at school. In an Indian school, I don’t remember me or my friends having to hide what’s on our plates. In fact, eating together, with different kinds of food cooked by our mothers, was something we looked forward to.

Some Indian-Americans report never feeling this shame at all, and a few writers have pushed back on the “lunchbox moment” becoming an overused, flattening trope for the entire immigrant experience (The Counter, 2020). I’m not claiming every Indian-American child goes through this – only that it’s real, common, and documented enough that dismissing it would be its own kind of dishonesty.

So why does this matter?

None of this means Indian schools are without their own real challenges – there’s still meaningful work to do to strengthen the system for every child. This isn’t a claim that one system is flawless and the other isn’t.

It’s a claim against those who believe that everything that is happening in Indian Education today is terrible and everything foreign is wonderful. It is also a claim that made me and my wife give up on the American school education because we got worried for our (future) kids being brought up in America.

It is because of these three specific things – physical safety, freedom from racial targeting, and not having to hide your own culture to belong. An Indian school childhood offered something an American one, for many kids, currently doesn’t.

Safety. Belonging. Not having to constantly prove you’re allowed to be in the room. That’s what I mean when I say Indian schools might be getting something right.

References

Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund. (2024, August 16). As back-to-school season kicks off, new Everytown report finds 31 percent increase in gunfire on school grounds during 2023–2024 academic year. https://everytownsupportfund.org/press/as-back-to-school-season-kicks-off-new-everytown-report-finds-31-percent-increase-in-gunfire-on-school-grounds-during-2023-2024-academic-year/

Gee, K. A., Cooc, N., & Yu, P. (2024). Hate speech against Asian American youth: Pre-pandemic trends and the role of school factors. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 53(9), 1941–1952. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-024-01987-8

Robb Elementary School shooting. (2025). Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Uvalde-school-shooting

Some Indian American Democrats see themselves in Harris. Others see the limits. (2024, October 8). NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/08/nx-s1-5131223/some-indian-american-democrats-see-themselves-in-harris-others-see-the-limits

Not all immigrants have a “lunchbox moment.” (2020). The Counter. https://thecounter.org/immigrants-lunchbox-moment-ethnic-food/

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INDIA

Before You Film the Broken Toilet, Meet the Teacher Behind It

You’ve probably seen it by now — people walking into government schools with a camera, asking teachers why the toilets don’t work, why the walls are broken, why things haven’t changed. And honestly? Asking for better schools is a good thing. India needs this conversation.

But before going further, here’s the scale of what we’re actually talking about.

The scale

India runs over 14 lakh schools in total. Of these, over 10 lakh — 10,05,245, to be exact — are government schools, according to the Ministry of Education’s own UDISE+ 2025–26 data. Those government schools alone are staffed by roughly 51 lakh teachers, based on the finding that government schools employ 50.9% of India’s more than 1 crore total teachers.

That’s the system at the center of this conversation.

The problems being pointed out are real

Broken infrastructure, missing basics — genuine gaps still exist across a system running over 10 lakh schools. Running something at this scale is hard, and there’s real work still to do. That part of the conversation is fair, and it’s worth saying plainly: wanting better schools is right. Asking the hard questions, pushing for better infrastructure, better resources, better systems — that work matters, and it shouldn’t stop.

What the cameras don’t show

Here’s what I don’t see enough of in this conversation: the person standing behind that broken door, doing their best with almost nothing.

Teachers don’t just teach. Many schools across the country — most of them government schools — run with just a single teacher. As of UDISE+ 2025–26, that’s 1,00,843 schools nationwide operating on a single teacher’s shoulders.

And it’s not even just teaching. These same teachers also take on responsibilities the country genuinely needs — election duty, census work, Aadhaar enrollment drives, community surveys. Important work. But it adds to everything already asked of them. India’s Right to Education Act technically restricts non-academic work assigned to teachers to elections, the decennial census, and disaster relief — but in practice, the range of civic and administrative tasks teachers take on has grown well beyond that, from voter list verification to government scheme surveys to mid-day meal monitoring.

What hundreds of school visits taught me

I’ve visited hundreds of government schools myself — in Rajasthan, in Bihar, in UP. And what stayed with me wasn’t the broken benches. It was the teacher who’d travelled two hours to get there. The one running a class of four grades at once. The one who was also, somehow, the person the whole village turned to for getting a child’s Aadhar card made.

I walked away inspired more often than I walked away disappointed.

The point

So yes — wanting better schools is right. Ask the hard questions. Push for better infrastructure, better resources, better systems. That conversation matters, and it shouldn’t stop.

But somewhere in that demand, let’s not lose sight of the people already giving everything they have to make it work anyway. Most of these teachers aren’t the problem. They’re doing their best with whatever they’ve been given.

And that deserves a little bit of our empathy too.

References

Kashmir Reader. (2026, May 4). Election duty, Aadhaar verification, census work: Govt school teachers are losing classroom time. https://kashmirreader.com/2026/05/05/election-duty-aadhaar-verification-census-work-govt-school-teachers-are-losing-classroom-time/

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (2025, August 28). UDISE+ 2024–25: School education report.

Press Information Bureau, Government of India. (2025, August 28). Ministry of Education releases report on Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2024–25 on school education of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2161543&reg=3&lang=2

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (2026, July 7). Report on Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2025–26 on school education in India.

Right to Education Act, 2009, (India). Restrictions on deployment of teachers for non-educational purposes.

The Federal. (2025, October 1). Students schemes, tree plantation and blood donation to census, poll duty — what’s keeping teachers busy. https://thefederal.com/category/the-eighth-column/govt-govt-aid-public-schools-teachers-non-academic-work-burden-elections-census-209448

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A Good Life

The World Where Our Memories Live

I have been thinking about memories. When I say memories, I mean those instances in our lives that we remember vividly: moments that shaped us into who we are today.

A fundamental question about these moments (or memories) is whether they existed in the past or whether they exist in the present.

And, is there a world where memories are a living reality because both the past and the present combine into what is truly present?

It’s interesting (at least to me) how I came to think about these questions. As I sat in the fourth row at an orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, I found myself closing my eyes and listening to every rhythm of this masterful piece, especially the second movement. Never have I listened to anything so beautiful, so vivid.

As I closed my eyes and listened, I found myself transported (without any ticket collector asking for a ticket) to a world of my own memories. It was a surreal feeling. Here I am, sitting in a beautiful hall with my wife and mother, but I am also not here.

Has it ever happened that you feel you are in two places at the same time? I am certain that I was.

As I sat in my chair, I saw myself traversing the times of my childhood. I saw that I am an invisible bird that is observing the younger me. I am not directly above – not at a perfect ninety-degree angle – but somewhere at an acute angle to myself. This bird, that is me, is trying to feel what this child – again, me – is feeling.

She is watching me so that she can tell the man listening what it is that I have been doing or feeling in that moment. Does that make sense? Maybe it does not, but that is okay. I am sure that not many people in their lives have had such an experience where they could feel themselves coming out of their body, going back in time, observing themselves flying overhead to observe themselves! It sounds absurd, right?

Yet here I am. The bird sees my father’s dead body being taken away as I, a boy of six years, played with my Lego-type toys surrounded by crying older women. She sees me on a hot summer day, coddled in my sunny storeroom, waiting for my mother to come back home from the office so that I can run to her. The bird sees me sweating profusely in that sweltering summer heat, believing that this is the way of life where you are supposed to shed that salty water every day, all day. She sees me being teased and molested. She sees me flying kites. She sees me playing rugby as a fourteen-year-old, with my friends in school, being extremely happy.

That bird sees me, and she sees many more moments; some make me teary-eyed, some make me smile.

If you listen to the second movement by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, you will understand what I am talking about. The ebbs and flows of the movement take anyone listening intently into the life they have lived so far and bring to their mind the freshness of the life we call the past. It brings to the surface things that matter to them, both good and bad, and that is the beauty of what Tchaikovsky put into this extraordinary piece of music.

I realised that I have been flying from one moment to another. Not that I had wings whatsoever, but I did have the power to move from one memory to another very quickly. Even though I did not have the power to choose which memory I wanted to visit next, I had the power to stop myself if I wanted to.

I held the strings to the bird’s flight, but I chose to let it fly.

The bird traversed places, and it moved across time. And as it did, I continued to feel the warmth of my chair, the touch of my wife’s hands, and the presence of my mother next to me.

The core of my being was travelling across time and space, and the medium was music. As I visited these moments, the warmth of my tears caressed my cheeks. The bird and I wondered whether to control this warmth spreading through me, but we decided not to.

I was there.

Right there.

As the symphony ended, I came back to my current reality. With tears in my eyes and a heart full of gratitude, I had relived those precious moments of my life.

But what struck me most was the vividness of what I had just been. Not what I thought I saw but what I was: a bird, travelling within the depths of my own being.

I started with the question of whether there is a world where memories are a living reality. I think there is, because I am sure I had flown there.

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Ideas

Why I Read – and my top 3 books of 2025

Why is it that one should read? Or for that matter, why should one read anything? For starters, I think basic reading is an operational necessity if one needs to function in this world. However, even that isn’t so easy to come by for many.

The 2024 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) suggests that almost one-third of Class 8 students in India can’t read at the expected level. I assume, however, that everyone who can read this article – or who will ever read it – has this basic ability to read.

My quest goes further. It is to understand why do we choose to read something that goes beyond our basic day-to-day functioning?

I think I have found my answer.

The reason I read is because I have this innate curiosity to learn about the world as accurately I can and to understand my place in it. I also read to be conscious. As Jeff Hawkins says, “Consciousness is the moment-to-moment memories of our actions and thoughts”. In a way, then, I read to be alive and to incessantly update my understanding of myself and the world.

Where it began for me

Like most things in life, the genesis of anything meaningful (or traumatic) can be traced back to our childhood. When I look back at my own childhood, I feel that I have always had a love for reading, but it was rather undiscovered.

In India, reading is more about the outcome – performing well on a test or getting through a job – instead of a process of enjoyment, discovery, or curiosity.

I first discovered reading as a process that I loved when I read and re-read Julius Caesar by Shakespeare in Grade 9. That was the first real inclination that I loved reading. But there was hardly any way that I could have built on that inclination. Money was short and mobility was limited. All I could read were school textbooks.

That has changed recently. I have been reading more and more courtesy of the ability to not only buy more books but by having spent days and nights developing my reading muscle. And that has really changed who I am. It has changed how I understand the world and my place in it.

How reading changed my perception of the world

Some of my beliefs have fundamentally changed. Here are a few examples –

Earlier belief
(when I would believe what was told to me)		Current Understanding
(based on what I have read)
You are born with talent. It’s in your genes or not. Talent can be developed. Everything and anything can be learned.
We (humans) are created by someone called God out of thin air.Humans are the result of billions of years of evolution and have emerged from a single-celled organism.
My moral choices will decide if I go to hell or heaven. Ex: Attraction towards opposite sex is morally wrong and you should feel ashamed of yourself.There is no hell or heaven. Attraction towards opposite sex is part of who we are as human species. That’s how we propagate our genes.
Money could very well define the true meaning of happiness.Money is important, but only a part of the true meaning of happiness
You always need to listen to your parents/elders because they are always right.Your parents/elders are humans too – and they are wrong many times. You have to learn how to outgrow them.
Your first instinct about something is usually right since it is coming from your gut.Your first instinct is mostly wrong as it depends on your old brain, which is driven by survival.
Eating sugar as much as you can is okay.Eating sugar has many negative consequences and is largely a function of the old brain wanting to gather as many calories as possible

There are many such examples that I can think of. The point is I would never have updated my earlier beliefs had I not read as much as I had over the last few years and applied those learnings in my life.

One may ask what’s the point of all this anyway? My current understanding can still be proven wrong. That’s where what one reads becomes important. My criteria –

  1. I read books that have stood the test of times or what we call are the classics, especially when it comes to topics like philosophy or religion.

  2. I read books written in simple language that explain peer-reviewed scientific concepts. I am not a scientist, so I often seek help – especially from my wife, who is a scientist – to check the understanding I gain from these books.

Reading in 2025

The year 2025 was a decent year for me in terms of what I read and how much I read. I am limiting this article only to full-length books and not including newspapers or online articles.

In total, I read 28 books, which comes out to roughly 2.5 books a month. I would have liked to read more, but this is the best I could do.

THE BOOKS I READ (In order)

  1. Brave New Words, Sal Khan.

  2. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, Eric Jorgenson.

  3. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari.

  4. Lifespan, David Sinclair.

  5. The Disciplined Mind, Howard Gardner.

  6. Changing Minds, Howard Gardner.

  7. How Economics Explain the World, Andrew Leigh.

  8. As Gods Among Men, Guido Alfani.

  9. Mindset, Carol Dweck.

  10. Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charlie Munger (half)

  11. Origin Story, David Christian (half)

  12. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley.

  13. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami.

  14. Harry Potter and the Sorcerers’ Stone, J.K. Rowling.

  15. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling.

  16. The Good Life, Marc S. Schulz and Robert J. Waldinger.

  17. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling.

  18. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank.

  19. The Happiness Files, Arthur Brooks.

  20. The Price of Our Values, Augustin Landier and David Thesmar.

  21. Career and Family, Claudia Goldin.

  22. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling.

  23. How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil.

  24. The Coming Wave, Michael Bhaskar and Mustafa Suleyman.

  25. The Journey Home, Radhanath Swami.

  26. Numbers Don’t Lie, Vaclav Smil.

  27. A Thousand Brains Theory, Jeff Hawkins.

  28. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Education

Patterns that emerged

Interestingly, as I look back, there emerged a pattern from what I read –

  1. The Future of AI and humans:

    I inherently got curious about AI and where it is going. I started the year with Sal Khan’s ‘Brave New Words’ which talks about how education will evolve with the coming AI revolution and ended up with Mustafa Suleyman’s, ‘The Coming Wave’ and Jeff Hawkins,’ ‘A Thousand Brains Theory’.

    Reading them makes me convinced that AI is NOT becoming more intelligent than humans in totality for many years to come. Yes, it will do some tasks much better than us but becoming better than humans in ALL tasks at once is probably a far-fetched dream.

  2. My childhood Wish List:

    As a young kid, I wanted to read the Harry Potter books but never had the chance. I also tried to read Anne Frank’s diary about her time spent in hiding during the World War 2 (read my post on her book) but found it too difficult to read. This year, I managed to finish four Harry Potter books and the famous diary.

  3. Understanding the World through Economics and Practicality:

    The book that made the greatest influence in this category has to be the one by Claudia Goldin called “Career and Family”. It’s the book that got her the Nobel Prize in Economics. The central idea of the book that in today’s world where women wants both career and family, couple equity matters.

    Another one is “How the World really works” by Vaclav Smil in which he says that despite what anyone says, the world will keep running on fossil fuels for many more years to come. Did you know that almost 83% of all our primary energy needs is still driven by fossil fuels? It was almost similar a couple of decades back too.

  4. Understanding Happiness:

    Since childhood, I always wanted to understand happiness. I have always believed that happiness is not driven by money or accomplishments alone. Rather it is a driven by good relationships.

    This belief was validated by Schulz and Waldinger’s book, ‘The Good Life’, which has to be the best book I read this year since it gives solid evidence by the virtue of being the longest study on happiness spanning more than 85 years.

    Some of what they said was also echoed by Arthur Brooks in his book ‘The Happiness Files’ but if I have to choose one, I will go with The Good Life.

  5. Books on education:

    Being an educationist, this category had to be there. But honestly none of the books I read this year gave me something new.

If I had to recommend my top three books of the year that everyone must read:

  • The Good Life
  • The Diary of a Young Girl
  • How the World Really Works

Add-on: Brave New World (a classic)

I don’t know what the next year will bring when it comes to reading, but I am hopeful that I read more than I did this year – and that I come closer than I am today to better understand this world and myself.

Any recommendations on what should I read in 2026?

REFERENCES

Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, Pratham Education Foundation
https://www.asercentre.org/aser-2024

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Anne and a boy writing in their diaries together
A Good Life, Ideas

To Live and Die Is to Express – Lessons from a Diary

The Question of Purpose

Purpose is such an intriguing word. Why do we choose to do the things we do in life? My dearest friend who dreams of becoming a filmmaker recently asked why he should bother pursuing anything worthwhile—or even something he loves—when, in the end, we all have to die?

It’s a profound question, one without a single, simple answer. Yet, few stories and moments often help us glimpse possible responses. For me, one such answer revealed itself in the pages of Anne Frank’s diary, written by a young Jewish girl who perished in the Holocaust during World War II.

Meeting Anne for the First Time

Called The Diary of a Young Girl, I first came across this book when I was just starting to explore the world of reading as a young eighteen-year-old. I remember trying to read it then, but as the saying goes, “you don’t choose your books; they choose you”— and in that moment, the book had decided to reject me.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to return to this book at this moment in my life. The thought about my life’s purpose shouldn’t be the cause because I do feel certain of it—to improve the lives of millions of underprivileged children in India—and yet, I still found myself drawn back to these pages.

Maybe it was a quiet intuition, or perhaps a kind of divine signal, that led me to it. I simply felt drawn to discover what this young girl of thirteen had written in those 330-odd pages before she and her family were taken from their hidden refuge and sent to the concentration camps. This time, the book let me in. And it has already changed my life.

Finding Myself in Anne’s Writings

Reading Anne’s diary made me think back about the time I had started to write my own diary (later discontinued) when I was in Grade 7 or 8—around the same age as Anne. Of course, in hindsight, what I was going through as a twelve-year-old was in no way close to what Anne endured. She was hiding from the Nazis inside a secret annexe in the middle of a war, unable to step outside, while I was simply navigating the small-er dramas of adolescence. But as a teenager, “your” challenges feel most important to you.

Perspective-taking and empathy takes time. Evidence from child psychology hints that empathy and perspective-taking continue to develop into the teenage years, with notable patterns emerging especially during the late adolescent period.

A six-year longitudinal study following adolescents from ages 13 to 18 found that perspective-taking increased consistently across adolescence, indicating that the ability to adopt others’ viewpoints develops substantially during the teenage years and continues to strengthen into late adolescence (Van der Graaff et al., 2013).

While perspective-taking shows steady growth, empathy itself follows a more complex developmental path.

A study summarized by Melbourne Child Psychology reported that cognitive empathy—the capacity to understand another’s perspective—emerges earlier for girls, beginning around age 13, while boys typically do not show similar growth until about age 15. By contrast, affective empathy, which reflects the emotional responsiveness to others, tends to dip in boys between ages 13 and 16 before rebounding later in adolescence, suggesting a temporary decline followed by recovery in emotional empathy during the teenage years (Melbourne Child Psychology, n.d.).

The beauty of Anne’s diary is that you can actually witness this growth many years before this research was contemporary. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, her writing reflects a deepening perspective and a widening empathy—especially in the way her relationship with her mother evolves. She begins with sharp criticism, often feeling misunderstood, but over time her words soften, carrying traces of compassion and self-awareness.

Shared Struggles of Adolescence

In Anne’s struggles, and growth, I found echoes of my own teenage self. Like Anne, I too wrestled with the urge to be independent—“please let me be… leave me alone!” I felt the need to push away adults—“I am my own person… don’t tell me what to do!” I carried confusing feelings about the opposite gender—“What is this feeling… am I in love?” And I wanted nothing more than to be seen as honest—“Don’t ever tell me that I lie…”

There were other areas of resonance too: Anne didn’t like Algebra, neither did I. Anne loved reading and thinking deeply about human emotions—so did I. Anne wanted to become a writer or a journalist—so did I. And despite the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jews, Anne believed in the good in people. So did I.

The Power of Expression

But there was more than resonance that made Anne’s life special and why she was different than everyone her age (and beyond) those days and today. She was special because she chose to give value to how she was feeling—and to express it with what she had in that moment. For her, that meant words. Unknowingly, she had found a purpose. And that made her immortal.

The most wonderful thing about reading her diary is that you don’t feel that she was writing for the world. Living a double life —on one side she could be caught at any moment, and on the other she might survive the war—she still kept on writing for herself. She wrote to understand herself, to become better.

And that’s what makes her lesson so powerful. As individuals, what we go through every day often seems too ordinary. It doesn’t feel important. We convince ourselves that in the noise of the world, our feelings and stories don’t matter. For the longest time—maybe even for our entire lives—we ask: who will hear what we have to say?

The fact that Anne must have felt this too, but still chose to express, is what makes her life and her story so extraordinary.

Time: Endless and Fleeting

There isn’t much time left. There is a lot of time left. Which statement do you think is true? Believing that we may die in the next moment—courtesy of life’s unpredictability—the first feels true. Believing that we have years ahead, the second feels true as well. The fact is that both statements are true at the same time.

The double-truths resemble Schrödinger’s cat—the famous thought experiment where a cat could be considered both alive and dead at the same time

As humans, we know deep down that our lives are totally unpredictable. We can go poof anytime. Still, we go on thinking that we have an “entire” life in front of us—until it is not. And when we believe our lives to be eternal, we postpone expressing our deepest feelings. We forget to tell others—and, most importantly, ourselves—what we truly think.

The Choice to Express

And yet, Anne did not forget or postpone. She wrote. She expressed. Even in the confines of an attic, even in the face of constant fear, she chose to give her feelings a voice. And through that simple, honest act, she continues to live.

That, to me, is Anne’s greatest gift: a reminder that expression itself can be purpose. It doesn’t have to be grand, it doesn’t have to be meant for the world—it just has to be true.

So, just like Anne, we too must continue to express, in whatever way we can. For some, that might mean writing; for others, it could be painting, singing, filming (my friend), teaching, or even simply speaking honestly to a friend. Expression doesn’t have to be grand—it just has to be true.

For me, that means writing more, and making space for my thoughts to breathe on paper (and online). It has now become not just an act, but an added purpose of my life. And perhaps, in doing so, I will leave behind a small echo—one that says: I too lived, I too expressed.

So let me ask you—when your time comes, will the world know that you lived, because you expressed?

REFERENCES

  • Van der Graaff, J., Branje, S., De Wied, M., Hawk, S., Van Lier, P., & Meeus, W. (2013). Perspective taking and empathic concern in adolescence: Gender differences in developmental changes. Developmental Psychology. Link

  • Melbourne Child Psychology. (n.d.). Helping Teenagers Develop Empathy. Link
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