Life as Sakti

Two encounters. One ATM that swallowed my money in a blackout. One electrician who drew up a better plan than I imagined. They said everything about where human empathy has gone, and who still carries it.

Scene I: The ATM Room

My daughter and I had stopped at an ATM on the way somewhere, cash running low, the kind of errand you do without thinking twice. It was not my bank’s machine, but that had never mattered before. We barely use cash anymore; the transaction limits from other banks had never been an issue.

I entered my details. The machine started counting money in that rude, mechanical way it has: all clicks and whirring, indifferent to the fact that a person is standing on the other side of the wall waiting. I was looking around the ATM room, the kind of looking you do when there is nothing to do. It was not clean. A little sad, honestly. The kind of room that tells you something about how much the world values the people who need it most.

Then: a loud crack, the lights went out, and everything stopped. Including the machine.

I stood in the dark, caught between disbelief and the specific panic of someone whose money is neither here nor there. My phone buzzed. A message arrived with quiet efficiency: Rs 10,000 has been debited from your account. I looked at my wallet. Empty. I looked at the machine. Silent. The room was dark and dirty and absolutely unhelpful.

The money had left my account. It had not arrived in my hand. And the universe between those two facts felt impossibly wide.

I scanned the noticeboard for a helpline. There were many notices. It took a while to find the right number. By the time I had it typed into my phone, the power returned. The room lit up. I felt, briefly, hopeful.

But the ATM was not hopeful. It was methodical. It ran one process after another on its black screen, each line of startup code arriving at its own pace, unbothered by my presence. Almost fifteen minutes passed. I stood there, watching a machine reboot with more dignity than urgency.

When it finally came back online, it had nothing to say about the money.

Scene II: The Call Centre

I called my bank. There were five menu options. There were advertisements. There was hold music. When a human voice finally arrived, I was already standing outside in the sun because other people needed to use the ATM and I had no right to the room anymore.

The woman on the other end told me she was sorry, but there was nothing she could do. The money had gone to the other bank’s ATM. I needed to call them. I was frustrated, but I understood the logic. These things have procedures. I was about to hang up, ready to move to the next step, when she asked if I would be interested in a credit card. Or perhaps a personal loan?

I stopped.

I asked her, as calmly as I could manage, what state of mind she thought I was in. What situation she imagined this was. Whether she could see the distance between the moment I was living and the product she was trying to sell.

I gave her a piece of my mind. But even as I said it, I knew she was not really listening. Not because she was cruel. Because she was trained to do a job, and the job was to close a cross-sell. The script had a flag for “customer is about to disconnect” and the flag triggered an offer. She was following the script. The script did not include a field for “customer is standing in the sun, empty-handed, money lost in a blackout.”

She was not unkind. She was transactional. And that, I think, is the sadder thing.

I eventually called the other bank. They resolved it. A week later, the money was back. The system worked, in the end, the way systems sometimes do: slowly, mechanically, without apology.

Scene III: The Electrician

Some weeks later I called someone to sort out the internet cabling in my house. It was a mess: cables running along walls, exposed, ungainly. I wanted it tidied, either routed internally through the walls, or if that was not possible, organised neatly on the outside.

The man I called did not do what I asked. Not exactly. What he did instead was go and find our society electrician. Together, the two of them walked the flat. They talked to each other. They looked at angles and entry points I had not considered. And then they came back to me with a plan: not my plan, but a better one. A solution that was neater, more complete, and frankly more elegant than anything I had pictured when I made the call.

This man had a tenth-standard education. He had no certification in design thinking. Nobody had sent him to a workshop on human-centred methodology.

He had simply listened to what I needed, thought about what I actually wanted, and then built something better than I knew to ask for.

What We Have Become

What have we become as a society? That is the question that stayed with me through the week the money was missing.

Empathy is not a skill you are trained in. It is something you are born with. A child who watches another child cry does not consult a framework before deciding whether to offer comfort. We arrive in the world already wired for it. Something happens along the way. Years of schooling that rewards the right answer over the felt answer. Years of organisational life that measures outputs, not understanding. Metrics for resolution time, not for whether the person on the other end of the call felt heard.

We have made ourselves transactional. We do our job to get the salary to reach our account. And because we have become a transaction to our employers, we begin to treat others as transactions too. The circle closes quietly, over years, until one day a person calls in genuine distress and we offer them a credit card.

This matters beyond the moral question. It matters because empathy is the first and most basic requirement of building anything useful. Before you can solve a problem, you have to understand it. Not what the person said they need. What they actually need. What they are feeling. What the real gap is between where they are and where they want to be.

That first crossing, from what someone says to what they mean, is the foundation of every good product, every good service, every good relationship. And we are not making it. We are staying on the surface, copying what already exists, adding colour to someone else’s idea, and calling it a solution. Not because we are lazy. Because we have lost the habit of actually feeling the problem.

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The electrician with his tenth-standard certificate did more design thinking that afternoon than most product teams do in a sprint. He listened. He collaborated. He thought beyond the brief. He delivered something the customer had not imagined.

He did not know the words for what he was doing. He just did it, because nobody had yet taught him not to.

We talk a great deal about human-centred design. We run workshops on empathy mapping. We hire researchers to interview users and translate their words into journey maps. All of it valuable. But none of it substitutes for the simpler, older thing: the willingness to stand in someone else’s experience for a moment and ask, genuinely, what it must be like to be them right now.

That woman at the call centre was not malicious. The bank was not evil. But somewhere between the hiring and the training and the targets and the quarterly numbers, the space for that question, “what must this person be feeling right now?”, had been closed off.

We were born intelligent. We were born empathetic. We were born with the capacity to listen and feel and imagine and build things that genuinely help. Perhaps the work is not to learn more. Perhaps the work is to remember what we already knew.