Few paradoxes in our time are stranger than feeling lonely in an increasingly connected world. This is not only an Indian condition – it is universal. Global health studies show chronic loneliness and isolation climbing since 2010, driven by digital displacement and societal shifts – a trend which has become more worrisome since Covid-19. The irony is that we have never b e en more reachable. Family WhatsApp groups stretch across continents. School and college groups resurrect friendships half a century old. Instagram keeps us in the lives of people we barely know. Video calls collapse distance, and we can reach almost anyone, almost instantly.

And yet it does not feel the same as two decades ago, when cousins turned up unannounced, and neighbours knew about your fever or your quarrel with your mother before you had finished having it. There were weddings, funerals, cricket on the radio, and the long, purposeless evenings of adda. Loneliness existed even then – but it struggled to take root in a life built on genuine interaction. Perhaps it is necessary to examine this beyond the distinction between virtual and physical communication. Being connected is not the same as belonging. Social psychologist John Cacioppo’s work on loneliness established an important point: loneliness is not simply the physical absence of people.

It is the subjective gap between the relationships we have and the relationships we need. People can therefore surround a person and still experience profound loneliness. Going back to Indian philosophy may provide some answers. The question of the self has occupied Indian thought for centuries. Aham – the “I” – is both indispensable and troublesome. It gives us identity, agency and individuality; but the philosophical traditions of India have repeatedly questioned whether this isolated “I” is the whole of who we are.

The Atman of the Upanishadic imagination points in another direction: towards a self that is not merely the ego........

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