part2:how much is our understanding making a human truly human? I met a girl in my college who comes from a village quite far away. Every single day, she travels nearly two and a half hours to reach college and another two and a half hours to return home. Five hours of travelling every day, just to attend college. She reaches home around 8 p.m. But her day doesn't end there. She still has to clean the house, mop the floors, cook for her family, and take care of her responsibilities. And all this while, she is struggling with her own health. She told me something that stayed with me. She said, “I feel like I have every kind of disease in my body. Sinus, body pain, neck pain, migraine—there is pain from head to toe. Sometimes, I feel like dying.” Her parents are also suffering from serious health problems. She feels responsible for taking care of them, and she has a brother, too. But somehow, the responsibility has fallen primarily on her shoulders. She chose not to go to a college farther away because she wanted to stay close to her parents and take care of them. Meanwhile, her brother gets to stay in a hostel, live independently, and enjoy his freedom. Every day, she travels, attends classes, returns home exhausted, takes care of household work, worries about her parents, and manages her own illnesses. She takes medicines for different health problems, and the stress only seems to make things worse. When she spoke about her life, she seemed to have only one hope: to get a job, become financially independent, and make her parents feel that they could finally rest because their daughter was earning. But beyond that one hope, she seemed to have lost the possibility of imagining a life for herself. She told me that sometimes she didn't want to live this kind of life anymore. She wished she could leave her body and live freely, without the expectations of being a good daughter, without the constant responsibility of taking care of her parents, and without feeling that everything had to rest on her shoulders. And I kept thinking about her situation. It is easy for someone like me, standing outside her circumstances, to ask, “Why don't you ask your father to help? Why don't you ask your mother to share some of the work? Why do you have to do everything alone?” But how easy is it to ask for help when the people around you are already unwell? How easy is it to question responsibilities that you have been made to believe are yours? How easy is it to choose yourself when you feel that doing so would mean abandoning the people who depend on you? I realised that this is not simply a matter of household work or time management. This is someone trying to survive a life in which she barely has any space for herself. And it made me wonder: Are we seeing her as a human being, or are we seeing her only as a daughter who is supposed to take care of her parents? Where is the space for her own health? Where is the space for her dreams, her freedom, her happiness, and her individuality? Why is she expected to carry so much simply because she is a girl? Why does her brother get to experience freedom while she is expected to sacrifice hers? We talk about love, family, duty, and responsibility. But somewhere, in the name of these very things, we forget that the person carrying all these responsibilities is a human being, too. A human being who gets tired. A human being who falls sick. A human being who wants to live, not merely survive. And perhaps the saddest part is that she is not even asking for a luxurious life. She is simply hoping for a day when her parents are healthy, her responsibilities are lighter, and she can finally breathe without feeling guilty. But why should she have to wait until she gets a job, until her parents are taken care of, until every responsibility is fulfilled, to finally have permission to live her own life? Why can't we see her as a human being right now, before she has fulfilled every expectation placed upon her? Perhaps this is what we fail to understand: we become so attached to the roles people play in our lives that we forget to see the people themselves. We see a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife. We see duties to be fulfilled and responsibilities to be carried. But do we ever stop to see the human being behind all these identities? Are we really seeing humans as just humans? Or are we seeing them only through the responsibilities we expect them to fulfil?
