Acharya Prashant addresses a question about being unable to forgive those who insult her. He explains that any harm that can come to a person, including the hurt from an insult, is due to a lack of self-knowledge. We live and exist, frequently using the word 'I', but we never clearly or assuredly know who we are. We carry a vague feeling or a hazy figure of ourselves, but we do not know for sure who we are or what we refer to when we say 'I'. To illustrate this, he uses an analogy. If we don't know the name of a flower and someone calls it 'Lily', we might believe it because a probability exists. If someone says something absurd, like calling the flower a 'shoe', a doubt still lingers because we lack certain knowledge. Similarly, if someone calls the questioner 'Rekha' instead of 'Chetna', it wouldn't hurt her because she knows her name. But if she had amnesia (a lack of self-knowledge), she might start to believe she is Rekha. He further explains with a story from the Panchatantra about a Brahmin carrying a calf, who is tricked by four thieves into believing the calf is a dog. Because the Brahmin lacks firm knowledge, he is swayed by their repeated assertions and eventually abandons the calf, which the thieves then take. The world acts like these thieves, and because we don't know who we are, we are influenced by its opinions. This lack of self-knowledge makes us dependent on what others say about us. We become vulnerable to both praise and insults. Praise is the password that opens the doors of our mind. If someone can lift our mood with praise, we have already licensed them to sink our mood with an insult. We don't see praise as a problem, but it is, as it makes us vulnerable. The solution is to be 'ignorance-proof' to become 'insult-proof'. This is achieved through self-knowledge, which is the fundamental requirement for every person. The central question of Vedanta is 'Koham' (Who am I?), and its goal is freedom or liberation. A person who is truly alive has an unchanging inner core, the Self (Atma), which remains untouched by external circumstances. Otherwise, we are like fallen leaves, ruled by the winds of circumstance, and not truly alive.