In my youth, when I first read Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, published in 1915, it seemed to belong to a distant, shadowed landscape of European modernism—strange, unsettling, intellectually luminous, yet safely contained within literature. One reads differently at twenty, differently again at forty. Now, in my seventies, I find that the story has quietly crossed the boundary between page and world. Gregor Samsa no longer lies only in a narrow room of fiction; he appears, flickeringly, in the restless movement of our cities, in the blue glow of handheld screens, in the hurried footsteps of the young who labour without certainty, protection, or even the assurance of being remembered. Time, which softens many impressions, has sharpened this one. I do not merely recall Kafka now—I return to him as one returns to an unfinished question.

What troubles me is not hardship alone. India has known poverty and endurance, yet it has also sustained neighbourhoods of care, invisible threads of reciprocity, and a moral vocabulary that ensured no one disappeared entirely from the circle of recognition. The disquiet I feel today is subtler, almost soundless: the thinning of identity itself. In the expanding gig economy, I watch young men and women in perpetual motion—delivering meals, steering strangers through traffic, coding unseen architectures of the night, moderating conversations they will never join. They are everywhere visible yet nowhere known. Their labour is measured to the second; their lives remain immeasurable. Ratings rise and fall like small, indifferent tides. A missed day, a moment’s illness, an algorithm’s quiet judgment—and the fragile thread of belonging begins to loosen. Looking at them, I feel the faint, persistent echo of Kafka’s insect—not grotesque in body, but diminished in social presence, reduced to function without story.

Age brings with it an altered scale of perception. One begins to notice not only what is built, but what quietly recedes. I have lived through decades that promised continuity: institutions that offered lifelong work, professions that carried an inner dignity, and social contracts—imperfect, contested, yet real—that linked effort with security. The young inherit astonishing technologies, velocities of connection we could scarcely imagine; yet the ground beneath their feet feels less stable than ever before. They improvise brilliantly, adapt with courage, and move with a fluency that commands admiration. And yet, beneath this brilliance, I sense a civilisation learning to celebrate flexibility while gently withdrawing responsibility. Progress glitters; assurance fades.

Perhaps this is why Kafka returns with such quiet insistence. His question was never truly about transformation into an insect. It was about recognition—about what remains of the human when usefulness becomes the only language spoken. In the gig economy, usefulness is immediate and dissolvable. One is needed intensely for an hour, forgotten the next. Efficiency governs; covenant retreats. There is elegance in the system’s design, even a kind of technological poetry. Yet beneath that elegance lies an absence difficult to name: the promise that society fails to keep with its youth. Work exists, but work without protection becomes a delicate form of invisibility.

I find myself unexpectedly restless in the face of this reality. Old age is often imagined as a season of detachment, of philosophical acceptance. Instead, I discover a heightened tenderness towards vulnerability—perhaps because dependence no longer appears theoretical. To see millions begin their adult lives already exposed to such precarity evokes not anger, nor nostalgia alone, but a quiet sorrow that settles like evening light—gentle, persistent, impossible to ignore. One wonders whether speed has outrun wisdom, whether innovation has moved faster than compassion can follow.

And yet despair feels too simple, almost a failure of imagination. I have witnessed too much resilience in our people, too much unrecorded generosity, to believe that invisibility is destiny. History reminds us that systems forgetting humanity eventually confront their own incompleteness. The gig economy, still young, need not remain a landscape without shelter. It could grow toward something more humane—where flexibility walks beside security, where technology enlarges dignity rather than thinning it, where society renews its quiet promise to those who carry its future in their uncelebrated labour.

Reflecting on Kafka now, I am struck by another tenderness in his fate. He did not live to see the reach of his own words; recognition came largely after his death. Such is the mysterious endurance of the written thought: it travels beyond the writer’s breath, waits patiently in time, and awakens when the world becomes ready to hear. Ideas, like seeds, choose their own season. That a solitary imagination from a century ago can illuminate the anxieties of our digital present is itself a form of hope—the assurance that meaning outlives circumstance.

Age, then, becomes not withdrawal but witness. To grow old is to watch patterns gather across decades, to recognise when metaphor hardens into reality, and to feel—quietly, insistently—the responsibility to speak before silence turns into consent. My unease is, therefore, not complaint but care, a refusal to accept anonymity as the price the young must pay for opportunity. Care, in later life, often takes this form: a gentle persistence of attention.

Kafka, returning softly through the corridors of memory, offers not darkness alone but warning—and also invitation. Even in one’s seventies, the heart still hopes that stories might end differently than before; that recognition may arrive in time; that dignity may prove more durable than efficiency. I am reminded of this in the smallest of encounters: the brief moment at my doorway when a young gig worker places a packet into my hands, his eyes already divided between the present and the next demand waiting inside the earplug-connected mobile through which another customer’s voice is calling. He carries several packets at once, time folded tightly around him, and from me he seeks nothing more than a good rating—an invisible gesture that may shape his remaining day. Our exchange lasts only seconds, yet something in it lingers: the quiet asymmetry between a life measured in hurried deliveries and a life pausing long enough to notice. And so, the question returns, tenderly but insistently: whether somewhere, within the swift machinery of the modern world, space may still be made for the simple, irreducible presence of the human being—seen, named, and held in quiet regard.

When I pause at a traffic signal and see helmeted riders waiting in the dust-filled air, or glimpse tired eyes illuminated by midnight screens, I do not see insects. I see nascent citizens of a future still searching for its moral language. Their anonymity is not natural; it is constructed—and what is constructed may yet be reimagined. 

If my generation holds any remaining task, perhaps it is simply this: to insist, without bitterness and without noise, that progress must encompass compassion within it, or remain incomplete. For in the end, the truest metamorphosis is not Gregor’s, nor the world’s machinery of work, but the awakening of recognition within us. And if that awakening comes—even quietly, even late—then perhaps the story is still being written toward the light.

The best part of my career has been meeting eminent people and learning—often quietly—about the many facets of human excellence—something missed by those who pursue excellence in their own fields and live within their silos and echo chambers. Even now, when I travel less, Providence seems to arrange moments of rare grace: encounters with individuals whose mere presence teaches. In the presence of such people, I feel a calm, reassuring force—an affirmationthat human life, at its highest, is about the expansion of consciousness. It is about helping the mind escape the cage of instinct, habit and conditioning, and align itself with what is good beyond personal or immediate interest—towards the greater good of others.

It was in this spirit that I attended the Global Head & Neck Precision Onco Summit 2026 at Yashoda Hospitals, Hyderabad, to which I was invited by Dr. S. Chinnababu, with whom I co-authored a book on cancer, Live for a Legacy, in 2023; it has recently been revised and republished in a newedition. I listened to the inaugural keynote by the globally renowned head and neck surgical oncologist Dr. Anil K. D’Cruz, and within minutes, it was evident that this was neither a performance nor an exercise in persuasion. It was the voice of a man who has spent a lifetime standing at the frontier of uncertainty—where decisions are irreversible, margins are narrow, and humility is not merely a personal virtue—it is an ethical requirement of the profession.

Dr. D’Cruz’s presence is striking—composed, precise and unsentimental. There was no sugar-coating. ‘This is what surgery can do,’ he seemed to say. ‘Beyond this lies adventurism.’ What gave these words their uncommon force was the audience before him—the very best in the field, clinicians and scientists who themselves work at the frontiers of knowledge. Yet the hall was held in attentive silence. The profundity of his words was both compelling and commanding, for they arose from strength, not hesitation. Even as a lay observer, the ethical clarity was unmistakable. Each tumour is biologically unique; each patient carries a different physiology, psychology and social context. Wise care in head and neck oncology, therefore, demands strength of judgement—an intelligent, patient-specific integration of surgery, radiation and systemic therapy, increasingly informed by molecular profiling and immuno-oncology, and anchored in the courage to respect limits. Doctors are mere professionals in their chosen field; they are not gods.

The field itself has transformed profoundly. High-resolution imaging, PET-CT fusion and intra-operative navigation have refined precision. Microvascular reconstruction restores not just anatomy but speech and swallowing. Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) and image-guided radiotherapy have reduced collateral damage. Checkpoint inhibitors targeting the transmembrane proteins programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) and programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1)have opened new options for treating recurrent and metastatic disease. Yet tools, however advanced, do not absolve us of responsibility. They extend capability; they do not replace wisdom. Without ethical restraint, technology risks becoming excessive.

This restraint is increasingly difficult in a system where medicine is no longer practised by independent agents. Every doctor is embedded in institutions—hospitals, insurers, diagnostics, and supply chains—that shape incentives and choices. Excellence today requires not only skill but resistance to the gravitational pull of profit and spectacle. It requires an elevation of consciousness commensurate with capability.

I sat with Dr. D’Cruz as co-chair during Dr. Chinnababu’spresentation on cancer prevention by traversing the last mile—away from cities, into villages and hutments, where marginalised, poor and tribal communities live. Through the Grace Cancer Foundation, a creation of his own, Dr.Chinnababu has spent over a decade raising awareness and promoting early referral. The science here is disarmingly simple: when detected early, most cancers are curable with modest intervention; when detected late, treatment becomes prolonged, costly and uncertain. Prevention and early diagnosis lack glamour. They demand patience, logistics, trust and relentless follow-up—where conscience meets competence. And there is no money in it.

As I stood between Dr. D’Cruz and Dr. Chinnababu, I felt adéjà vu—an unmistakable sensation I had experienced many times before in the company of Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. Dr.Kalam is no longer with us physically, yet some individuals never truly depart. Their way of being—how they listen, decide, pause and act—never goes away, and lives as an imprint so deep that it reappears when the conditions are right. What I felt in that moment was not nostalgia or memory. It was recognition—an experiential truth that needs no explanation, only attentiveness.

Dr. D’Cruz’s own journey exemplifies a life devoted to knowing what is not yet known. Educated at St. John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, trained in surgery at the University of Mumbai, and forged over 38 years at Tata Memorial Hospital—including 28 as Professor and Head—he has helped define standards of care respected worldwide. Since 2019, as Director of Oncology at Apollo Hospitals, he has shown that disciplined excellence and large systems need not be incompatible. His legacy lies not only in surgeries and publications, but in generations trained to think before they cut, to ponder before they decide, and to respect biology over ego.

Watching Dr. D’Cruz draw firm ethical boundaries around intervention, and Dr. Chinnababu persistently widen the circle of care to include those whom systems routinely forget, I sensed the same inner alignment I had witnessed years earlier. It was the lived coherence between thought and action, between capability and responsibility. Such moments reveal themselves not through argument or ideology, but through experience—and it is from this realm of lived experience that thinkers like Sri Aurobindo spoke of a higher order of consciousness made visible in ordinary human work.

These are the people Sri Aurobindo described in The Life Divine—not saints withdrawn from the world, but individuals fully embodied in work, inwardly governed by something larger than ambition or fear. Such people do not announce their spirituality. They live it through precision, discipline and care. In medicine, this quality is unmistakable: the courage to say ‘no’ when intervention will harm; the choice of prevention over spectacle; the building of institutions rather than empires; the teaching of when not to act.

Sri Aurobindo argued that human evolution is ethical and conscious, not merely technological. The next step would be taken by individuals who master inner compulsions while remaining fully engaged with the world. At the Summit, I saw this principle enacted—quietly—by a master surgeon who knows his limits and a public-health clinician who refuses to abandon the poor.

This is not hero-worship. It is pattern recognition. In a time when medicine risks becoming algorithm-driven or profit-maximised, such lives are living correctives. They remind us that advanced tools—robotics, precision radiotherapy, immunotherapy and AI-guided diagnostics—are morally neutral until guided by consciousness.

Dr. Kalam once told me that the true test of a professional life is whether one leaves behind clarity rather than confusion. As I left the hall, that clarity lingered. It reaffirmed a belief I have long held: humanity reaches its highest expression not in dominance, but in service guided by knowledge and humility. These are the ones who transcend the known—and, in doing so, lift us with them.

I have been deeply engrossed in reading Shakespeare for a while. It remains one of the most astonishing paradoxes in literary history that Romeo and Juliet—a drama pulsing with murder, deception, impulsive rebellion and ethical transgression—has been remembered across continents and centuries, not for its violence but for a single, moonlit balcony. A recent film, O’Romeo, brought this truth to light by focusing on a passionate, high-stakes romance that mirrorsthe central, tumultuous love story of the classic play. Similar to the Montague/Capulet feud, O’Romeo roots in an intense rivalry within the modern-day Mumbai underworld, and though it does not replicate scenes, it clinically examines the perils of ‘forbidden love’.

Read plainly, the narrative is chaotic, almost startling in its speed and recklessness. A street brawl erupts within the first hundred lines. Romeo broods over a different girl altogether. Juliet, scarcely fourteen, is pressured into a marriage she does not want. Romeo trespasses into her home under the cover of night. Mercutio is slain in broad daylight, Tybalt falls in vengeance, Paris dies at the tomb, and Friar Lawrence—custodian of spiritual wisdom—concocts a dangerous sleep potion to fake Juliet’s death—so potent that he boasts it can borrow life from death. 

“And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death” (Act 4, Scene 1)

Immediately after Romeo kills Tybalt, he realises that his impulsive act of revenge has made him a plaything of fate. He must go into exile to save his life. He laments, in a moment of bitter clarity,

 “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (Act 3, Scene 1)

Nothing about this world is calm or orderly; it is a society fermenting with feud, pride, honour and haste. Yet, despite this tumult, the moment that humanity has chosen to preserve, paint, film, dramatise and fall in love with is the quiet, tremulous exchange beneath Juliet’s window—the instant when Romeo whispers, breath held like a prayer, that it is the east, and that Juliet is the sun!

On that balcony, the world of Verona briefly dissolves (Act 2, Scene 2). No feud intrudes. No parent watches; no dagger glints. No banishment looms. No potion is brewed. Instead, the scene glows with the innocence of discovery, and the trembling honesty of two young souls speaking without armour. For those few minutes, we glimpse love unshadowed by consequence. It is the only time they are entirely themselves.

“But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”

 Why does the world cling to this scene and not the events that shape the tragedy? Why is the balcony the emblem of the play, the cultural shorthand for love itself? The answer lies inselective human memory and irresistible human longing. We do not hold on to the full truth of an experience; we distil it. We are alchemists before we are historians. Juliet, aware of the danger, whispers fearfully,

“If they do see thee, they will murder thee.”

 Yet her voice softens almost instantly as love overwhelms caution. She confesses in lines that have outlived kingdoms,

 “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep.”  

Romeo, overwhelmed by her radiance, declares his own daring ascent,

“With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls”

In a way, Romeo and Juliet resembles the production of alcohol from coarse, sticky molasses. The raw materials of the play—the feud, the bloodshed, the rash decisions, and the priest’s deception—are thick, turbulent and unrefined. They bubble and ferment with heat, anxiety and danger. But when distilled, when separated from the heaviness of their origin, what rises is clear, fragrant and intoxicating: the pure vapour of yearning. The balcony scene is this vapour. It is the spirit extracted from the chaos—the moment when the residue falls away, and only emotion remains.

 The balcony endures because it transforms private longing into a public symbol. Shakespeare, with remarkable psychological insight, understood that audiences crave a moment of sincerity amid chaos. The balcony becomes the boundary between childhood and adulthood, between safety and danger, between the earth and the sky. It is not just a window; it is a frontier where the ordinary world ends and a myth begins—and myths endure because they contain something we need. The fights, the murders, the terrible haste—these are the slow-moving elements. The gentle glow of the balcony is the concentrated spirit that the world chooses to drink.

But why did this particular play, among countless tragic romances, become the universal template? Part of its power lies in its treatment of love not as possession but as revelation. Romeo and Juliet’s passion is not engineered, planned, or socially advantageous; it erupts with the inevitability of a storm. This rawness makes it universally recognisable. Every culture has known the fever of first love—the sense that feelings define destiny and that the world cannot possibly understand the urgency burning within.

Another reason lies in how Shakespeare endows recklessnesswith rationality, transforming the volatility of young love into something that sounds almost inevitable. Adolescence is often dismissed as impulsive, emotional and irrational; yetShakespeare dignifies its wildness by offering a poetic logic to passion. When Juliet muses, 

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”  

She is not merely defying her family’s feud; she is articulating the mind’s attempt to make sense of overwhelming feelings. In her reasoning, love itself becomes a force beyond labels, tribes, or inherited hatred—a self-justifying truth, like the rose’s fragrance.

Shakespeare thus allows recklessness to masquerade as clarity, giving young passion the philosophical defence it otherwise lacks. The audience, hearing such lines, accepts the lovers’ hurried devotion not as folly but as a kind of intuitive wisdom. We choose enchantment over caution because Shakespeare makes the illusion feel like the more profoundtruth.

This is why the story adapts so easily across cultures. In India, it becomes the tale of lovers divided by caste or community; in America, by race or class; in the Middle East, by tribe; in Japan, by tradition; in Europe, by politics or religion. The lovers become universal avatars of forbidden desire. Every society discovers its own feud within the Capulet–Montague hostility. Shakespeare’s poetry becomes the vessel into which each culture pours its own history, wounds and longings.

 In the end, the world does not remember that they died; it remembers that they loved. And that is the alchemy of the balcony: the moment when two ordinary lives rose into myth, proving that even in a universe of chaos, a single instant of pure feeling can become eternal. Shakespeare’s play closes with the Prince’s grave, a chastening reminder—

“For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” (Act 5, Scene 3) 

Yet even in that sorrow, the world chooses the radiance that came before it, for tragedy is merely the residue, while love is the distilled spirit that rises. And thus the alchemy is complete: from the ferment of violence and folly emerges one pure, enduring vapour—the balcony’s eternal light.