With India’s young population (age 15- 29 years) projected to be 345 million by 2036, we have an opportunity to enable our future generation to be brilliantly creative people, problem solvers, changemakers with empathy for self, others and nature to know how their solutions affect others and the planet. Empathy is the ability to try to put oneself in another’s place and experience their feelings. Discovery of mirror neurons in Neuroscience has proven the existence of empathy in human beings. Yet when a 2022 study, published in the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, assessing MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) students for empathy and interpersonal reactivity for two years found a significant decline in empathy for all students, irrespective of gender, it points to an unaddressed problem, correlating this decline with psychological stress. When we force fit naturally empathic students into an education system, plagued with colonial legacy, glorifying scores over values, one-upmanship over collaboration, individual success over collective growth, we push them to look at others as the ‘enemy’, creating conflict and a fractured unsustainable world. When we ask young people to toughen up and not show vulnerability, we are asking them to wear a mask of invincibility. When empathy for self dies out, this mask starts wearing off showing signs of trauma and repression. 

The World Youth Skills Day 2023 recognises the essential role of teachers, trainers and educators in “providing skills for youth to transition to the labour market and to actively engage in their communities and societies”. These skills cannot be limited to vocational or hard skills. With the COVID-19 accentuated inequalities affecting long-term livelihoods and decent work for all, vocational training alone is not sufficient for a young person who lacks access to opportunities, choices, employment and a life of dignity because of their ascribed identity. The OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 report highlights that social and emotional skills including empathy are essential to be part of an ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse global workforce. Empathy is a transferable skill that can be applied in different situations to ensure peace and prosperity. When billions share a planet and its resources, education needs to be a lens for us to see our interconnectedness to other living beings and the planet, else our fears and anxieties become amplified in systems that celebrate comparative ‘success’. 

Let us not push our young people to excel without any compassion. It is pivotal to create systems which allow them to identify and accept their own and others emotions.  Empathy enables us to question the assumptions we make about what learning should look like for young people, without asking them. It invites us to understand the context of those living in adversity without judging them as ‘lazy’, ‘unambitious’ or ‘irresponsible’. It is time to bring empathy into our relationships, replace the ‘I’ with ‘we’, to co-create what makes us truly happy and thrive! Let us design systems which celebrate the unique strength of every young person and provide a safe space for them to share authentically, as vulnerability arouses empathy and kindness. 

Contrary to the “outside-in” approach of skill building, programmes to channelise empathy need to be experiential learning opportunities built around young people’s innate capacities for self-awareness and reciprocity. When we encounter kindness, it impacts how we feel about ourselves, about each other and we start caring about how healthy our relationships and communities are. It is time to align what young people define as success and how we measure success. Systems need to address existing and anticipated skill gaps and protect the most vulnerable by increasing access to opportunities for inclusive growth, enabling youth agency and bridging divides. We need empathy – for self, for fellow living beings, for our planet and natural resources to reconnect, act with compassion and co-create a sustainable world to thrive as a planet. This World Youth Skills Day, it is perhaps the larger ecosystem that needs to upskill themselves with what is needed most today- Empathy!

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Back in 2003, I was a rookie reporter and it had barely been a couple of months since I had begun working at a news agency in Mumbai. One of those days when you do not realize that something pivotal was about to occur and it would take close to a decade for you to be able to process it. That day the Bureau head was travelling out of the city, and I was in the office when the call came in from the Head Office to file a report on the Twin Blasts (Zaveri Bazaar and Gateway of India) that had occurred in Mumbai. I remember it being ironic that we got the information on the blast from our Delhi HO when we were right in the city of Mumbai! Along with my cameraperson we rushed to the blast site, which was then cordoned off by the police authorities.

As we walked to the bomb blast site, I remember seeing shards of broken glass lying everyone around, police and other people moving around collecting evidence. The injured people were taken to the hospital. Suddenly out of nowhere a man appeared before me, and since I was walking with a cameraperson, he knew that I was a media person, and he shoved a steel tray in front of me and said “Yeh lo iska bhi shooting karo (here film this as well)!” Flummoxed I stared at the tray and what looked like a blood covered part of the human brain! The man had been collecting human remains from the blast site. It took me around 10 minutes to process this scene and only when my cameraman pulled my hand asking me to move, I realized that I had been rooted to the spot without any movement. I remember feeling as if I had in that moment in some way failed the profession and had berated myself because I had let go of what I was trained at my university to stay objective and not react.

Later, I reacted as I had been trained to react – be objective, not allow the external to affect the internal and filed the story as I was supposed to, listing the number of dead and injured people. It had been a mechanical process I recall when I had proceeded to file my story and had gone home without really processing what those moments meant to me. As communications professionals, we have been trained to be objective to the point of being stoic and not letting our emotions get the better of us, and while that may be required in diverse kinds of settings, I realized that I also needed to acknowledge that it was ok to be human and respond emotionally. It was also ok to be sensitive and respond from a space of empathy in the way I reported. Often, we forget that our reporting from the field has in many ways helped us grow and has allowed us to seek answers for ourselves around our own perspectives on the vagaries of life.

For me, this unlearning of an old narrative and the building of a new one had taken time to come. The relearning of a new narrative meant that it was ok to be present for the moment and required me to know that sometimes responding can be a slow process and that was also ok. I had to in many ways look at being present in the moment with my whole being and experience these pauses and how they can help me. Building a new narrative and moving to a newer one requires one to move from an earlier held belief/ thought to a new, more compelling one and we move we are willing to move or have experienced why it is imperative to move. Taking a pause when action has been your constant response may not be easy and certainly was not easy for me. Sometimes it may mean taking a breather and responding from a space of wanting to know more or from a space of empathy and not always from a space of wanting to fix things. For me it meant that I needed to listen to my own instincts deeply and be aware of making space for me to pause and then respond. I have in many ways moved from a solutions-oriented approach to an approach that focused on building an understanding around a sustainable solution; which can seem cumbersome however I have found it helped me ground myself better.

It has been an evolving journey for me, not been easy to let go of that veneer of self-preservation and I also acknowledge that there may be moments when this unlearning will slacken, however it is a journey that I have embarked upon, and I hope to relearn-learn all that will help me be better every day.

Dr Varsha Pillai is the Associate Director of Narrative Building and Communications at Dream a Dream.

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