Volume 5 · The Great Indian Bazaar · Essay 83

Foxhole Mentality

Foxhole Mentality is a lens. Nothing in the world changes when you pick it up, but quite a lot becomes visible.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

Watch how a rumour travels in a hostel: it gains one detail per room and loses one truth per floor. By the fourth floor it is unrecognisable, and by dinner it is fact.

Society is a long conversation; the only question is whether you are listening or merely waiting to speak. Carry it lightly. Ideas, like umbrellas, are useful only when actually opened.