We Burn Ravana Every Dussehra. Why Does He Keep Coming Back?

Every year, on Dussehra, we burn Ravana.

A ground somewhere. A crowd. A forty-foot effigy stuffed with crackers. Ten heads. We cheer when the arrow lands, record the explosion for WhatsApp status, buy jalebi on the way out, and go home.

And then on Monday morning somebody cuts into my lane and I want to kill him.

**We have been burning this man for thousands of years and he has an attendance record better than most of my colleagues.** He comes back every single time.

Which should tell us something. Either the method doesn't work, or we have been burning the wrong Ravana.

Because the real meaning of Dussehra isn't only the victory of Rama over Ravana. It's a reminder of a battle we keep postponing — the one against the Ravana we are carrying around inside us.

## My First Dussehra in Bangalore Felt Like a Tuesday

I should explain where I'm writing this from.

This is my first festival season in Bangalore, and I'm not feeling it. I keep waiting for the festive feeling to arrive and it keeps not arriving.

In Mumbai you don't have to look for a festival. It finds you.

The building committee starts arguing about decorations two weeks early. The lane is strung with lights by people who have no business being on a ladder. There's a pandal within walking distance of wherever you're standing, and another one after that, and the noise from both reaches your bedroom whether you participated or not. You step out at nine in the evening and there are four hundred people on the road, all of whom have also just stepped out, and somebody's mother hands you prasad you didn't ask for.

And there were friends. That's the bit I keep circling back to.

Festivals in Mumbai were never really about the ritual for me. They were about who I was standing next to during it. Pandal hopping with the same four idiots every year. Eating badly. Walking home at an hour that annoyed everybody's parents.

Here, I looked out of my window on Dussehra evening and it was a Tuesday.

Nothing wrong with Bangalore. The city is simply going about its business, politely, the way it does. But a festival you have to make an effort to locate is a different thing from one that comes and gets you.

**I've learned this year that a celebration isn't an event. It's a crowd of people who agreed to the same date.**

So instead of heading to a ground to watch Ravana burn, I ended up at home with a long talk on Dussehra playing, which I had fully intended to half-listen to.

It reframed the entire festival for me. This isn't a religious explanation of Dussehra. It's a note to myself about ego, anger, and the things we keep trying to defeat outside ourselves.

## Ravana Was a Scholar. That's the Part We Skip.

Here's what gets left out of the children's version of the Ramayana.

Ravana wasn't a brute. In the traditional accounts he was a formidable scholar, a devotee of Shiva, a musician, and a powerful king ruling a city of gold. He had knowledge, ambition, power and extraordinary ability.

None of it saved him.

Rama, meanwhile, spends much of the story in exile, walking through forests, living without a kingdom.

So the familiar framing — good man defeats bad man — is incomplete. **This isn't a story about a clever man losing to a better man. It's a story about what happens to knowledge when nothing underneath it holds it down.**

Ravana knew a great deal and had learned very little. You can understand the world and still fail to understand yourself. You can hold enormous power and have almost no control over the person wielding it.

I find this uncomfortably relevant to my own industry.

**We are surrounded by extremely well-informed people doing extremely stupid things.**

We have more information, more tools and more ways to optimise a life than any generation before us, and we are still losing to the oldest problems there are — ego, insecurity, envy, and the need to be right.

Intelligence tells you how to get what you want. **Wisdom asks whether you should have wanted it.**

## Ravana's Ten Heads: A Mirror for Our Inner Demons

The ten heads always struck me as decoration. They aren't.

The heads have been read differently across traditions, and I'm not going to pretend there's one official meaning. But the reading that stayed with me is this: our inner problems never arrive one at a time, and they never arrive labelled.

Ego doesn't walk around announcing itself as ego. Nobody has ever woken up and thought *I am being egotistical today.* It wears other faces.

**Anger is ego that got contradicted. Greed is ego that needs more proof. Jealousy is ego doing arithmetic with somebody else's life. Fear is ego protecting its reputation in advance.**

They look like completely different problems. They're one problem with a good wardrobe.

And here is the part that stopped me, because it's exactly what I've been getting wrong: **I keep assuming that suppressing an emotion means I've dealt with it.**

It doesn't. The anger you refuse to look at doesn't dissolve. It waits, and it comes out later at a volume wildly out of proportion to whatever triggered it — usually at home, usually at someone who had nothing to do with it.

We tell ourselves we've moved on because we've stopped talking about it. **Silence isn't resolution.** It's just keeping Ravana in a cupboard and hoping guests don't open it.

The point isn't to feel guilty about anger or envy. Those are part of being human. The question is whether you can recognise them **before they start making decisions for you.**

## Lanka vs. Maryada: Two Different Ideas of Strength

The contrast in the Ramayana that stays with me isn't good and evil. It's two theories of strength.

Ravana's power is entirely external. The gold city, the army, the wealth, the reputation. Everything he has can be counted, displayed, and taken away.

Rama's *maryada* is internal — boundaries, conduct, restraint. The discipline of staying inside a line you drew for yourself even when nobody is checking and breaking it would cost you nothing.

**One of them owned a kingdom. The other owned himself. Only one of those can be confiscated.**

I think about that whenever I catch myself measuring my life in things that can be listed on a slide. The designation. The salary. The next promotion. The approval of people whose opinions I don't actually respect.

Ambition isn't the enemy. But if my sense of worth depends entirely on what I can acquire or display, then I have handed my inner life to things that can change overnight.

**Real strength isn't controlling everything around you. It's remaining responsible for what happens inside you.**

## The Sculptor: Why Self-Improvement Is Mostly Subtraction

Somebody asked a sculptor how he carved such a perfect elephant out of a block of stone.

He said: *"I didn't carve an elephant. The elephant was already in there. I just removed everything that wasn't elephant."*

I don't know where the story originally comes from, but it has stayed with me — because it inverts how most of us approach this.

We think we have to become someone new. More discipline, more confidence, more knowledge, more habits. We approach ourselves like unfinished buildings.

**You don't have to build a better version of yourself. You have to remove the things standing in front of the one that's already there.**

The resentment. The performance. The score-keeping. The need to win every argument. The habit of measuring your life against somebody else's. The forty expectations you're carrying that were never yours to begin with.

We keep treating self-improvement as construction. **It's mostly demolition.**

And that's the quiet argument inside the effigy: the things that actually need burning aren't visible to anybody else.

## The Real Battle Is With the Ravana Within

Now the practical part, which is considerably harder than writing about it.

If Ravana is internal, then the people around me stop being opponents and start being instruments. The irritating colleague. The argument with my wife. The stranger in my lane. Each one shows me something that was already in me, because **you cannot be provoked by something you don't contain.**

That doesn't mean every conflict is my fault. Other people are responsible for their behaviour too, and some situations need a boundary rather than more introspection.

But the reaction is mine. The traffic doesn't make me angry. The traffic reveals that I was already angry and looking for an address.

Which changes the question entirely. Not *how do I win this argument* but **what in me just stood up so fast?** Not *why is this person so irritating* but *why does this particular behaviour have so much power over my mood?*

I'm not good at this. I want to be clear about that. I have had this insight and lost my temper within the same hour.

But progress here isn't never being angry again. It's noticing it sooner, and putting a little more space between feeling something and acting on it. **That space is the entire practice.**

## Sita Haran and the Hunger That Moves the Finish Line

One more part of the story I keep chewing on.

Ravana already had everything — power, wealth, knowledge, a kingdom made of gold. And he reached for the one thing that was not his, and that reach destroyed everything he already owned.

As a description of modern life, it's uncomfortably accurate.

The promotion that will finally settle it. The flat in the better neighbourhood. The salary that will finally make it feel like success. The next thing, and then the next thing after that, each one arriving with a quiet note attached saying *not this one either.*

Wanting a better life isn't a moral failure. Ambition builds things. **The problem starts when nothing you acquire is ever permitted to be enough.**

We rarely lose our peace because we have too little. We lose it because we cannot stop reaching, and we spend so long looking at what belongs to someone else that we never notice what is already in the house.

The lesson isn't to stop wanting. **It's to stop letting every new desire convince you that your present life is worthless.**

## Vipassana and the Half-Second Before You React

I sit for Vipassana, and I've written about meditation before. For a long time I quietly assumed the sitting *was* the practice.

It isn't. **Meditation isn't the forty minutes with your eyes closed. It's whether you can catch yourself reacting at four in the afternoon on a Thursday.**

Can you notice the reaction before it becomes a response? Can you register the anger without immediately obeying it? Can you feel the need to prove yourself and choose, just once, not to?

There's a half-second between being provoked and reacting. Often it's barely there. Often there's no gap at all. But when it appears, a different choice becomes available — and that half-second is the whole of it. Everything else is preparation.

The cushion is practice. **The real exam is a Thursday afternoon when you're tired, somebody is being unreasonable, and your ego is absolutely certain it deserves the last word.**

That's where I want it to show up. Not in how peaceful I look while meditating, but in how I treat people when I'm not peaceful at all.

## The Sadness That Made Me Think About the Festival

I'll be honest and say I was low on Dussehra evening. Missing the lights, missing the lane, missing the four idiots.

But I've noticed something about that kind of sadness, and it's the reason this post exists at all.

**It made me think about the festival for the first time in thirty-seven years.**

All those years in Mumbai I celebrated every single one of these properly, and I'm not sure I ever once asked what any of them were *for.* Why would I? The festival was already happening. There were lights and food and people and somewhere to be. **You don't interrogate a party you're enjoying. You attend it.**

It took losing the noise to hear what was underneath it.

Which, now that I write it down, is the argument of this entire post. We don't examine ourselves when things are comfortable. The looking only starts when something goes missing and leaves a gap where the distraction used to be.

**I'd rather have this Dussehra — slightly sad and fully awake — than twenty more of the loud ones I never once thought about.**

Though if somebody wants to string up lights in my lane next year, I won't stop them.

## What Is Dussehra Really Asking Us to Burn?

I'm not arguing we should stop burning the effigy. Rituals carry stories across generations. Communities gather, children watch, a familiar story gets another year of life. That has real value.

But after the fireworks, there's a question available if you want it.

The anger we justify. The jealousy we disguise as criticism. The pride that won't let us apologise. The greed that keeps moving the finish line. The fear that makes us control people we claim to love. **The ego that would rather damage a relationship than admit it was wrong.**

A forty-foot effigy burns in about ninety seconds. Changing one deeply worn habit takes years — and almost all of that work happens where nobody can see it. No crowd. No crackers. No photographs. No applause.

For me, if I'm being straight about it, the head I'd have to burn is the one that needs to be right. Not the angriest. Not the greediest. **The one that cannot let an argument end without having won it.**

That's my Ravana. I suspect he'll take more than one Dussehra.

The victory of Rama over Ravana is a story we celebrate once a year. **The victory over your own worst impulses is a choice you have to keep making.**

So this Dussehra I'm not asking which Ravana everybody else needs to burn.

I'm asking which of his ten heads I keep quietly protecting in myself.

Happy Dussehra. Burn the right one.

…Tune in for next.