It is a quiet suffocation to sit in warmth while the rest of the world shivers. There are people sitting at polished tables, who might not be cruel, but who are devastatingly cushioned. They are wrapped in a protective insulation woven from safety, inheritance, and the lucky accident of their birth. They wear their privilege not like a weapon, but like a pair of noise-canceling headphones; the screams of the world are reduced to a hum that is easily ignored.
When you speak of injustice—of the laws that break bodies, of the poverty that erodes souls, of the systems designed to crush—they listen with a polite detachment. They nod. They might even offer a sigh of performative sympathy. But their pulses don't jump. Their appetite does not wane. To them, the tragedy is theoretical, a philosophical puzzle to be debated over a cup of tea, rather than a reality that demands reckoning.
One might say that they have taken Rawls’ noble "Veil of Ignorance" and repurposed it into a set of heavy drapes for their drawing room windows. But unlike Rawls’ experiment, where one designs a just world without knowing if they will be a pauper or a prince, these people have peeked at the cards. They know exactly who they are. They have draped the veil not over their own identities to ensure fairness, but over the windows to ensure a pleasant view. It is a selective veil—transparent enough to let in the light of their own success (whatever that is sans empathy - mubarak ho), yet opaque enough to block out the unsightly desperation of the street below (which they themselves occupied a while back).
They look at the smoke rising from the other side of town and see it only as a change in the weather, not a warning. They do not feel the phantom ache of wounds that do not pierce their own skin. Their calmness is not wisdom—it is distance. It is the luxury of deciding which battles are worth their attention.
And perhaps the most chilling realization is that the reason they are not moved is that the injustice is working exactly as intended: it is keeping the chaos at the gate, ensuring that their dinner remains uninterrupted, their sleep sound, and their hands dettol clean.
You sit there, in the terrible silence of their comfort, and understand that the opposite of love is not always hate. Sometimes, it is the indifference visible in the shrug, the apathy audible in the 'ch ch ch sounds' of pity that costs people absolutely nothing.