Indifference

Harsh Mander’s LILA PRISM Lecture on “Inequality and Indifference in India” was an insightful study on the unending quest of humanity to make a just society possible. Shiv Visvanathan, who served as Chair during the lecture, set the tone of the evening by mentioning the complexity embedded in Harsh’s understanding of the world. Harsh, following Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, began by placing three features as the fundamental triggers of our search for justice: empathy, dissent, and love of freedom. They make this search a universal category. Of these, he positioned empathy at the heart of his quest.