75

“उन्हें बद्दुआ नहीं लगती, जिन्हें पहले से ही श्राप लगे हुए हों।”

I once heard someone say this.

The sentence sounded so negative that, for a moment, I wondered what kind of life must have taught someone to speak like that.

Then I looked at the person saying it.

There was no bitterness in his voice. No anger. No resentment. He was calm, confident, almost cheerful.

The words sounded cursed.
The person sounded cured.

And that contradiction stayed with me.

Perhaps he had faced something in life that had completely changed his understanding of suffering.

Because when you have already encountered the larger version of a curse, the smaller ones begin to lose their power.

Once life has taken you to its extreme, many of its lesser disruptions become things you simply learn to walk past.

It is not that you stop feeling.

Your scale of what deserves to shake you changes.

The Mahabharata offers a fascinating glimpse of this paradox through Karna.

Karna knew what it meant to be denied what others received so easily. He carried the wounds of rejection, humiliation and questions of identity throughout his life. He knew what it felt like to be judged before being understood.

Yet, strangely, a man who experienced so much deprivation became renowned for his generosity. He gave even when giving came at a cost to himself.

There is something deeply profound in that.

Suffering did not make Karna incapable of giving. It became one of the reasons giving defined him.

Perhaps that is what suffering can do to us.

It can make us bitter about what we never received—or, if we allow it to transform us, more generous toward what others may be missing.

The pain remains.

But its meaning changes.

Perhaps that is the difference between merely surviving suffering and allowing suffering to shape your character.

As a sailor, I can relate to this through a real-life scenario.

I think of a sailor who has once stood on the deck of a ship in a violent storm—the wind screaming, the sea rising like mountains, the vessel rolling beneath his feet, every wave reminding him how little control a human being truly has over nature.

After experiencing something like that, the next time the sea becomes slightly rough, he doesn’t panic.

The sea hasn’t changed.
The sailor has.

He has learnt what a real storm feels like.

A little swell doesn’t frighten someone who has already navigated towering waves.

And perhaps life works the same way.

After surviving something that once felt impossible, a harsh word doesn’t carry the same weight. A rejection doesn’t feel like the end of the world. Someone else’s anger doesn’t automatically become your anger.

You still notice the waves.
You simply know which ones are worth fighting.

That is why I have started looking differently at negative words.

We are often too quick to judge a sentence by its surface.

A thought may sound dark and still contain a light within it. A painful experience may leave a scar and still leave behind wisdom.

Even a negative sentence can sometimes give us a positive insight.

Perhaps the person who spoke those words was not celebrating suffering.

Perhaps he was simply acknowledging what suffering had taught him.

Those who have already endured great misfortune are not easily disturbed by someone’s ill-wish.

Not because they are invincible.

Because they have perspective.

They know the difference between what hurts and what truly matters. Between what deserves a reaction and what deserves to be released. Between a passing wound and a life-defining one.

Maybe that is what some of life’s hardest experiences leave behind—not immunity from pain, but a different relationship with it.

You don’t become incapable of being hurt.

You simply become more selective about what deserves to hurt you.

And sometimes, suffering doesn’t make you harder.

It makes you more compassionate.

Like Karna, who knew deprivation and still gave.

Like the sailor, who has faced a storm and no longer mistakes every rough wave for a disaster.

Perhaps the storm doesn’t make the sailor fearless.

It makes him experienced.

And life doesn’t necessarily make us immune to pain.

It teaches us its scale.

So perhaps the man wasn’t cursed at all.

Perhaps he had simply travelled far enough through life to understand something many of us take years to learn:

Not every curse deserves to be feared.
Not every negative word deserves a response.
Not every storm deserves panic.
And not every difficult moment deserves to become your whole story.