Before the Facts Arrive: On the power of the first frame

Savio Saldanha SJ

22-September-2026

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22883874

 

            In her novel ‘First Lie Wins’, Ashley Elston writes that the lie that matters is not the little white kind. It is the deliberate one that sets the stage for everything after it, and once told, it becomes what most people believe to be true. Her narrator is a professional con artist. Most public misjudgments have no such author. They come from haste and from an institution protecting itself, and the audience receives them the same way.

            I thought of that line in recent days, when IIT Bombay issued a notice about the death of a student, Sahil Wakode. The notice announced his death and, in the same statement, said he had been found using a phone and ChatGPT during an exam. Protests followed, and then an apology from the institute, which called its earlier statements inappropriate because the circumstances were still under investigation. Some voices online then declared that he had been falsely accused, which is also a verdict, delivered before the investigation has finished. The family has alleged caste-based harassment. I leave that entirely to the investigation.

            I am writing about the order in which things were said. The first frame brought in the accusations. It was challenged within days, but it took protests and a police complaint for the withdrawal of the accusations and subsequently a public apology.

The psychology

            In 1946 Solomon Asch gave two groups of people a list of traits describing an imaginary person and asked them to describe him. One list read: intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn and envious. The other held the same six words in reverse order, beginning with envious and ending with intelligent. The two groups formed two different men. The first saw an able person whose shortcomings did not overshadow his merits. The second saw a problem, a man whose abilities were hampered by serious difficulties.

            Asch did not think the early words simply weighed more. He argued that we form a whole impression at once, and that the first traits set its direction, so later traits are reinterpreted to fit. Impulsive grew out of imaginativeness for the first group and became hastiness for the second. Critical, likewise, took a positive colour for one group and a negative one for the other. Asch studied an imagined person, not an institution, but a first public account works the same way. It gives the audience a story into which later facts have to be fitted.

            Hollyn Johnson and Colleen Seifert (1994) tested this with a story about a warehouse fire. Readers were told the fire was caused by volatile materials, and were then told this was wrong. Many still used the discredited cause when asked why the fire spread. They kept the explanation because it gave the fire a cause, and the correction left a gap. Their work also showed that a correction supplying an alternative cause reduced this effect, though it did not eliminate it.

 

The philosophy

            Augustine, in Contra mendacium, defines a lie as a false statement uttered with the intent to deceive. Aquinas takes this up in the Summa (II-II, q. 110, a. 1) and sharpens it: what makes a lie is speaking against one's own mind, saying what one believes to be false. The intent to deceive completes the lie but does not define it. A person who states something false while believing it true is mistaken, but he is not lying in the strict sense. The Catechism of the Catholic Church follows the same line (CCC 2482). By that standard an institution that speaks in haste may be wrong without lying. The hearer receives the same thing either way, and the effect does not wait for us to settle intent.

            Hannah Arendt asks, in ‘Truth and Politics’ (1967), why truth loses so often to falsehood in public life. She wrote about organised political lying, a far larger thing than a press notice, but her account of why facts are fragile scales down well. Rational truths, like those of mathematics, compel assent. Factual truths, about who did what, when and to whom, depend on witnesses and records, and they could have been otherwise. Because they are contingent, they can be denied.

            The liar, she says, knows in advance what his audience wishes or expects to hear, and he can build a story to fit. Reality is under no such obligation. It arrives unprepared, awkward and often disappointing, so a falsehood can be more plausible than the truth, and ready sooner. She adds that the greatest danger of organised lying is a loss of orientation. When lies and facts trade places often enough, people lose the sense by which they find their bearings in the real world.

            She also names where truth can be defended: in institutions meant to stand apart from power, such as the judiciary and the university. She tells a story about Clemenceau, who was asked in the 1920s by a representative of the Weimar Republic what future historians would say about who caused the First World War. He said he did not know, but he knew they would not say Belgium invaded Germany. Some facts, once established, hold. But establishing them takes time, and the first story does not wait. A police inquiry is the slow, unglamorous work of factual truth, and patience with it is a form of respect for the truth.

            René Girard begins with imitation. We desire what others desire and communities under stress drift into rivalry and mutual suspicion. His claim, developed in Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat, is that such communities restore peace by uniting against one victim. Everyone who joins the accusation is relieved of the tension, so the crowd's unity comes to depend on the victim's guilt. This is why persecutors are usually sincere. They believe what they say, because they need to. His theory is a claim about origins that cannot be tested, and a divided public is not the unanimous crowd he describes. The pull toward a culprit is still recognisable in any public dispute. His reading of the Gospels places him beside the Church. In the Passion, the crowd's certainty is exposed as a lie, and the victim is shown innocent. When John calls the devil a liar and a murderer from the beginning (Jn 8:44), Girard hears the two words as one: the lie is the accusation that makes the killing possible. It can fall on anyone. An institution can become a crowd's victim, and so can a professor, and so can a dead student's memory. Where a public gathers around a single explanation and finds relief in it, Girard's question applies: who is being made to carry this and what would the crowd lose if the accusation failed?

            Aquinas supplies the moral principle. In Summa II-II, q. 60, he treats judgment as an act of justice, which requires certainty about the matter judged (a. 2). Judging on suspicion wrongs the person judged (a. 3), and where doubt remains we should interpret for the best, unless there are evident signs of wickedness (a. 4). It is better, he says, to err often in thinking well of a wicked man than to err seldom in thinking ill of a good one, because only the second does an injury.

 

The Scriptures and the Church

            The Book of Proverbs saw the problem long before us: the one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him (Prov. 18:17). The proverb says he seems right. It does not say he is wrong, and that is the difficulty. The Catechism names the sins that follow from ignoring it. Rash judgment assumes a moral fault in a neighbour without sufficient foundation. Detraction discloses a fault to someone with no right to know it. Calumny asserts what is false and harms another's reputation (CCC 2477). Against these, the Catechism asks us to interpret a neighbour's thoughts, words and deeds in a favourable way, and to be readier to give a favourable reading than to condemn. Where we cannot, we should ask how the other understands it (CCC 2478). This is the Presupposition of Ignatius (Spiritual Exercises 22), whose wording the Catechism follows closely. Ignatius wrote it for the director and the person making the Exercises, and the tradition has applied it more widely.

            The Church asks this of institutions as well. Inter Mirifica (no. 5) recognises the public's right to information and says the news must be true and complete, within the bounds of justice and charity. The Catechism repeats this (CCC 2494). The same paragraph adds that not all knowledge is helpful, and that charity builds up. Those limits bind a press office. A student's file is not the public's property, and a man who has died cannot answer. Silence does not solve it either, because rumour fills a vacuum quickly. An institution can say what is known: that a student has died, that a family is grieving, that an inquiry has begun. The rest waits for the facts.

            The Church has been on both sides of this. For decades, institutional first responses to allegations of abuse defended reputations before listening to those who had been harmed, and the frame those responses set took years and great suffering to break.

            Pope Francis's 2018 message for World Communications Day, "The truth will set you free," traces disinformation to Genesis 3. The serpent created the first fake news, he writes, and its method is mimicry. It opens with something only partly true, asking whether God had forbidden every tree when he had named only one. Francis notes that false stories spread so fast that denials, even authoritative ones, often cannot contain the damage. He proposes no technique. The best antidotes, he says, are people ready to listen, and he asks for a journalism of peace that is truthful and refuses sensational headlines.

 

A discipline for the rest of us

            Most of us do not run press offices, but we all forward, post and repeat. Before I share a claim about someone, I now ask four questions:

1.      What was the first complete explanation offered, and by whom?

2.      Who would be seen as cruel or disloyal for asking more?

3.      Does the correction replace that explanation, or only regret its tone?

4.      And if this turns out to be false, can I make reparation?

            The Catechism is exact about the last one: every offence against justice and truth creates a duty of reparation, even after forgiveness, and it is measured by the extent of the damage (CCC 2487). If I share a claim and it collapses, deleting the post is not enough, because the frame I helped fix in other people's minds is still there. Reparation begins with saying, as publicly as I said the first thing, that I spoke too soon.

            For institutions, the discipline is older and simpler. Say what is established. Say that the rest is under investigation. Leave the character of the dead and the accused to those whose task it is to find the facts. IIT Bombay's apology says nearly that, but it came after the first notice had set the frame.

 

Conclusion

            Asch and the continued-influence studies describe how a first account takes hold. Arendt explains why the truth is always late. Girard explains why a gathered crowd defends what it gathered around. None of them tells us what to do about it, and that is where Proverbs, Aquinas and Ignatius come in. They give the reason to resist: the person being judged is owed a hearing, and that debt does not lapse because the audience is large or the story is tidy.

            What we say first, and what we repeat, acts on people who cannot answer back. Sahil cannot. His family is grieving, and whatever the investigation finds, they live inside the story that was told first. The professor, the institute and the students are also waiting for a truth that has not arrived. The Presupposition asks each of us to hold our judgment for all of them until it does.

            Let us pray for Sahil, for his family and friends, for those investigating his death, and for everyone who has been quick to speak about it, myself included. Let us pray that kindness, love and humanity prevail, that justice prevails.

 

When a Face Can Lie: What Deepfakes Teach Us About the Self

Savio Saldanha SJ

20 September 2026

DOI - 10.5281/zenodo.22858238

                My reflection on this topic did not begin with a news article. It began several months ago reading about what AI-generated images and deepfakes are doing to people, quietly, in numbers nobody is really counting. Most of what happens this way never becomes a story. This is especially a serious threat in places where the law hasn't caught up to the technology, or was never going to move fast enough to matter to the person it happened to. For every case that gets reported, there are certainly many more that don't. Both men and women are targeted this way, though what's done to women more often carries a specific sexualised cruelty.

                Out of the several cases that I read, one particular case did stay with me while I was working through this, and I want to use it carefully, because a reflection needs somewhere concrete to stand. Georgia Horton (https://bbc.com/news/articles/c75gvyk6d4yo) found out that Ethan Orchard, a man she had known since college and someone she considered a friend, had taken her photographs from social media and used artificial intelligence to turn them into sexually explicit images. He had done the same to two other women he knew. He was eventually convicted and sent to prison. Georgia decided to speak publicly about it afterward, not for sympathy, but because she wanted people to understand that this technology has a dangerous side most people are still treating as a joke. I'm not going to describe more of what was done to her mainly because it doesn't need repeating to make the point. What I want to sit with is something Georgia said plainly: none of this happened because a stranger attacked her in the street. It happened because someone who knew her, who she trusted, decided her face and body could be taken and remade into something she never was and never consented to. The same thing has happened differently to people this same week some of whose stories will never reach a court or a headline.

                That's worth pausing on before any philosophy enters the picture. Whatever follows here isn't an answer to what was done to her, or to any of the others. It's not meant to make any of it smaller, tidier, or easier to file away. But sitting with it long enough, an honest question does form: if a person's face and body can be taken and reassembled like this, entirely without their will, what was actually stolen? I think we can all agree on one thing as of now, that something real was taken. The question is what exactly, and what wasn't.

The self isn't what shows up on screen

                Centuries before any of this was technically possible, Descartes tried a version of the same question in his own mind. Suppose some deceiver could fabricate every single thing I see and hear. Could I trust anything? He found one thing that survived: even a total deception needs someone present to be deceived. I think, therefore I am. Somebody has to be home for a lie to land on. Here is what Georgia's case actually clarifies about that old argument. Descartes was only ever certain about his own case, from the inside. The cogito was never a test for detecting someone else's presence behind a likeness — it says nothing about whether an image of a person carries that person's thought, consent, or will. What was done to Georgia is proof of exactly that gap: a convincing image can be built entirely without the will of the person it depicts, in direct violation of that will. They used her likeness, but nothing in them was her choice, her thought, her consent. That distinction changes nothing about what she suffered. You might think there's nothing more to say here: a person's likeness was taken, full stop. But it's worth being precise about what was and wasn't touched. It does name something true and worth holding onto: whatever was in those images, it was not her lived presence, her will, or her consent.

What actually can't be copied

                Buddhist thought does not affirm a fixed, permanent, independent self behind our experience — but that isn't a denial that a person's experience, or the harm done to it, is real. It still insists that something real is happening in a person: a stream of actual, lived experience, one moment shaping the next, carrying memory and consequence forward. That continuous, lived stream is not something an image can hold, no matter how well it mimics a face. The pictures Orchard made had no experience, memory, will, or consent of their own. They were surfaces built from her data, not living centres of experience — with none of her lived experience, will, or consent actually inside them.

So in that narrow but real sense, what was copied was never Georgia. What was violated instead was something else entirely, and it deserves to be named honestly rather than resolved away by a philosophical technicality.

The wound is real even where the self isn't touched

                Here I want to be direct, because a comforting-sounding argument can do real damage if it's used carelessly. It would be insensitive to tell Georgia, ‘don't worry, your true self was never in those pictures,’ as if that settles anything. It doesn't undo what strangers said about her online. It doesn't undo the violation of being sexualized without consent, by someone she trusted, for other men's entertainment. Those are real and specific harms done to a real person and no metaphysical distinction erases them.

                What I think is actually true is that both things hold at once, without one cancelling the other: nothing essential about who Georgia is was ever in Orchard's power to touch or remake, and at the same time he still did something to her that a court rightly called criminal, that caused her real and lasting harm, and that deserves anger, not just analysis. A philosophy that only offers the first half of that sentence isn't consoling anyone rather it's avoiding her.

A face that makes a claim on you

                The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spent much of his life on one idea worth slowing down for. When you actually encounter another person's face, not glance at an image of it, but meet it, something happens before you've judged anything about it. The face itself makes a claim on you, Levinas said: something like do not reduce me to what you can see, I am not yours to use. That claim doesn't come from any feature you could photograph. It comes from the fact that a real person always exceeds any image taken of them.

                This is exactly what Orchard's images faked, and exactly what they could never actually deliver. Every man who looked at those pictures and treated them as an invitation was responding to something that made no genuine claim on them as an encounter with Georgia, because nothing was actually there to be encountered — only data arranged to look like an encounter. That is where I think the deepest wrong in this crime sits, underneath even the images themselves: it manufactured the feeling of having met a woman, judged her, and been given license by her, a whole moral event, when in truth no meeting had happened, and no license was ever hers to give. Every one of those persons owed Georgia the restraint that a real face demands, and everyone who didn't give it failed a test the fake image was specifically built to help them fail.

Being known, not just being seen

                Catholic theology has never located a person's worth in physical resemblance. Genesis says human beings are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’ (Gen 1:26–27), and the tradition has always read that as naming a capacity for relationship, intellect, and freedom, not a physical template that could be copied or corrupted by copying. The Psalmist says it more intimately still: ‘You knit me together in my mother's womb... my frame was not hidden from you’ (Ps 139:13,15). Before Orchard, before any camera, before anyone else's gaze fell on her at all, Georgia was already known this way completely by someone no lie could deceive. Jeremiah hears it as a word spoken before he even existed: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you’ (Jer 1:5). Isaiah makes the same claim in a different register, and it is the verse this whole reflection keeps returning to: ‘I have called you by name, you are mine’ (Is 43:1). That is not a description of how anyone looks. It is a description of how a person is held.

                Paul pushes the same conviction into the body itself, which matters directly here, since it was her body that was stolen and misused: ‘Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit... you are not your own’ (1 Cor 6:19–20). The body is not incidental to the person in Catholic thought the way it might be in a purely Cartesian picture. But it is not reducible to an image of it either. The Catechism holds both of these at once: the human person, ‘willed for its own sake,’ bears within it ‘the divine image’ precisely in the soul's spiritual powers of intellect and will (CCC 1700–1705), and yet the Church has always taught that a person's reputation is not a trivial thing to protect: to expose someone unjustly, to falsify what they've said or done, to let others believe something untrue about them, are named directly as sins against truth and against the neighbour (CCC 2477–2478). What was done to Georgia is not new under a new name; the Church has always had words for it. It simply now happens at a scale and a speed her tradition never had to reckon with before.

                Vatican II said something that reads as though it were written with this exact harm in mind, decades before the technology existed to commit it. Gaudium et Spes lists, among the acts that ‘poison human society’ and ‘do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury,’ whatever ‘is offensive to human dignity’ (GS 27). And in 2024, the Church finally had to say it in language that names this precisely: the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith's declaration Dignitas Infinita devotes its closing section to what it calls ‘digital violence,’ naming directly the way ‘new forms of violence are spreading via social media,’ including ‘the sharing of images of a sexual nature without consent’ (DI 61–62). This isn't an old doctrine stretched to cover a new problem. It's the Church watching this exact thing happen and finding it needed a new name for a very old wound: dignity attacked not by a fist or a word, but by a fabricated image, at the speed of a share button. Orchard could violate Georgia's privacy, safety, reputation, and trust — the Church has never pretended those losses are small. He could not cancel the dignity she carries as a person made in the image of God.

A fullness that cannot be subtracted

                The Īśā Upaniṣad reaches a strikingly similar insight by an entirely different road, centuries before either Descartes or the Gospel:

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते।
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते॥

‘That is full, this is full; fullness comes forth from fullness. Even when fullness is taken from fullness, fullness alone remains.’

                This is obviously not identical to the Christian doctrine of imago Dei, and the two traditions shouldn't be collapsed into one another. Yet both refuse the same reduction: that a person is exhausted by whatever can be seen, displayed, or manipulated. Something enormous was taken from Georgia. This verse doesn't say otherwise. The theft was real, but it never exhausted the person it tried to define. In other words, there is more to a person than what we see.

The one workable thing

                Most writing about deepfakes stops at feeling uneasy about the technology, whoever the victim happens to be. Here is something concrete, and it follows directly from Levinas's point above: before looking at, believing, or sharing an image that claims to show a real person, ask one question. Has this person actually consented to be seen this way, or am I about to treat a stolen likeness as if it were a real encounter with them? If there's any doubt, don't look, don't forward, don't engage. That single refusal is small, but it's exactly the discipline Levinas asks of anyone who meets a real face: to answer to the person, not just to the image.

What's left unresolved

                Georgia's case did end with a conviction, which is more than most victims of this get, and more than most will ever get. But she was clear that the law still isn't enough, even where the law exists and works. The tools to do what was done to her are still freely available, and she said so herself. Somewhere now, the same thing is being done to someone whose name will never surface, in a country where no one will be charged, where there may be no law to charge anyone under at all. I cannot let one filmed, named suffering matter more than the thousands who may have been affected the same without a voice or a name the world will ever know. That would be its own kind of selective outrage, the very thing I have tried to hold myself against throughout this piece. Georgia is not the point, but a door through which the point became impossible to avoid.

                Knowing that no theft could reach the fullness of who any of them are doesn't undo the months of fear, or the fact that people looked at fabricated images and felt entitled to comment on what they'd like to do to another person's body. Theology can say truthfully what wasn't lost. It can't yet say how, what actually was lost, safety, trust, the ordinary freedom of existing as an image online without fear, gets given back. That isn't something an argument resolves. It's rebuilt, slowly, through better law where law can reach, through people refusing to look, and through communities choosing to stand with the person rather than with the image someone else made of them, wherever in the world that person is, whether or not we ever learn their name.

 A Pastoral Afterword

                If these reflections leave you unsettled, uneasy, or even defensive, pause before judging that reaction. Discomfort is not always a sign of error; often it is the first movement of conscience waking up.

                To anyone reading this who has been a victim of this technology or in any form however it reached you: nothing above was written to explain your pain away and nothing here asks you to feel less than you do. You are more than the image that was made of you. Not as a comforting slogan, but as the plain truth this whole reflection has tried to hold onto: whatever was taken, copied, or twisted was never the whole of you, and it was never going to be. That doesn't undo what happened. It also doesn't need to be resolved today, or explained fully, or forgiven on any timeline but your own. If what you need right now is simply to be believed and not analysed, that is enough, and this piece was never meant to ask more of you than that.

                To anyone reading this who recognises themselves differently, someone who has used this technology, looked at what it made, shared it, laughed at it, or turned to it in a private moment they'd rather not name, even here, this is not an accusation meant to shame you into silence. Shame closes a person off from exactly the kind of honest self-examination that could actually change something. What's offered instead is the same as always: an invitation to look again, gently, at something conscience may already be asking you to look at. Ignatian spirituality holds that God rarely speaks in the loud register of accusation. More often it's the quiet stirring that won't quite let a person settle, the unease that returns after the screen is off, the small resistance to doing again what was done before. That stirring is not your enemy. It may be the most trustworthy voice in the room.

                You are not asked here to make a public confession, to relitigate every choice you've made online, or to carry a guilt heavier than what's actually yours. You are asked only to listen, to the person a fabricated image can never fully replace, and to whatever it is in you that already suspected this technology was never as harmless as it felt in the moment.

                Remain with the unease, whichever side of it you find yourself on. Pray with it. Let it teach you. At the crossroads of conscience, God does not coerce; God accompanies. And for both the one who was wronged and the one still learning what they've done, that accompaniment is itself a sign that love, when it finally roots itself in truth, has not failed. It is only beginning to be purified.

You Belong to Nobody? A Second Thought on Smashing the Patriarchy

Savio SALDANHA

10.5281/zenodo.22121594

27 August 2026

 

    There is a verse in the Manusmriti, chapter 9, verse 3, that reads:

‘pitā rakṣati kaumāre bhartā rakṣati yauvane, rakṣanti sthavire putrā na strī svātantryam arhati’

            Which literally means that, "The father guards her in childhood, the husband guards her in youth and the sons guard her in old age. The woman is never fit for independence." It is not a stray line. The verse before it says women must be kept under control by the men of the family. The verses after it treat guarding a wife as the highest duty a husband has, and treat a widow's chastity after her husband's death as her defining virtue for the rest of her life. Read this slowly and you see what it actually does. A woman never becomes her own person. She is handed from one male guardian to the next. Protection, in this text, is another word for custody.

            This is the background against which Rahul Gandhi spoke to a crowd of young women in Pune last week, in the middle of a charged political season where Manusmriti gets thrown at the BJP and RSS almost as often as it gets read on its own terms. He quoted that verse, called it the Manusmriti mindset, and told the women they do not belong to their father, their husband, or their son. You belong to yourself, he said. Smash the patriarchy. Be loud, be proud.

            I agree with the diagnosis. What I want to sit with here is the line he offered as the cure. A rally is not a treatise, and it is worth engaging the sentence Rahul actually said, in full, rather than the shortened version of it that will end up on placards or circulated as memes. I have already come across several such photos with tagline, you do not belong to anybody but yourself. This is the better one than another shortened version which reads, you do not belong to anybody. This is where I see the danger. When Rahul spoke he addressed a real socio-political reality of the oppression of women. He spoke from this particular context. The photo memes take the tagline while ignoring the context, presuming readers already know it. I reflect on this phenomenon as a Jesuit, a teacher and a counselor who has some experience of working with the youth, women, tribals and the dalits.

What the slogan gets right

            Rahul was not making things up. The verse says what he said it says. And what it prescribes is not protection in any ordinary sense as some have claimed. A father who genuinely protects his daughter wants her safe and also wants her to grow into someone who can stand on her own. The Manusmriti does not want that. It wants the transfer of custody to never end. That is worth naming clearly, and smashing it is the right instinct. So when Rahul says a woman does not belong to her father or her husband or her son, he is right. Nobody owns another person. That much is not in question for me.

This was never only an Indian problem

    It is worth saying plainly that Manusmriti was not some isolated case of one culture getting this wrong. Aristotle, writing in Greece in the fourth century before Christ, said something with the same structure in his book on biology, Generation of Animals, book two, chapter three. He wrote that the female is, in effect, a deformed male, and that menstrual fluid is semen in an incomplete form, lacking what he called the principle of soul. In his Politics, book one, chapter thirteen, he goes further and says the woman has the capacity to reason but not the authority that reason needs to rule, which for him settles her place under the man's authority in the household.

    Two civilizations, arriving at the same idea: women are a lesser, incomplete version of men and that incompleteness justifies permanent male authority over them. That should tell us something. This is not a defect of one text or one region. It is a pattern in how men in power have thought about women across most of human history, dressed up differently depending on where you stood, biology in Athens, dharma in India.

    Neither tradition stayed frozen there. Bhakti poets and later reformers pushed back against verses like this one from inside Indian religious life. The Greek and Roman thought moved past Aristotle's biology too. So both traditions were larger than their worst verse, and it would be its own kind of unfairness to treat one line of thought as the whole of either.

 

Where I got uneasy

            Rahul's actual sentence was "you belong to nobody except yourself." That is a complete claim, not a fragment, and it deserves to be read on its own terms rather than as loose talk that happened to leave a phrase dangling. I have already explained the shortened versions making rounds and how I look at them.

            If I or someone read on its own terms, here is what it says: there is exactly one legitimate owner of you, and it is you. Not your father. Not your husband. Not your son, just yourself. That is a real position, not a slip of the tongue. It is close to what a great deal of modern liberal thought says about the person, that I am self-possessed, and self-possession is the ground of my dignity.

            I still get uneasy here, but for a more precise reason than I started with. If the self is the last and only owner of the self, the self also becomes the last court of appeal. Nobody has a claim on you, which sounds exactly right against Manusmriti's father-husband-son chain. But it also means, followed all the way through, that nobody's judgment of you can ever outrank your own. I have sat with enough people in distress, students back in India buckling under exam pressure or being torn apart by what strangers said about them online, or going through serious relationship breakups to know that a self answerable only to itself is not always a self at peace. Sometimes it is a self with nobody left to check it, and nobody left to catch it either.

    To be fair to the other side of this, traditional embeddedness has its own well documented costs. Restricted mobility, restricted schooling and no real way out of a bad marriage to name a few. Nobody sane wants to trade freedom for those. The real question is not whether the old bonds were worth keeping. They were not. It is whether the right alternative to being owned by others is being owned only by yourself, or something else again.

What I would say instead

    As a Jesuit I would put it differently, and the difference sits exactly where Rahul's sentence ends. His sentence ends at yourself. I want to press on past that. Kindly be patient with me as I say that we all belong to God. This belief does not undo anything that Rahul said about not being owned by fathers, husbands, or sons. It agrees with all of it. But at the same time it does not let the self be the final resting place either. It means we are accountable, all of us, for what we do, and nobody, not even the self, gets the last word on that just by being the self.

    And next to it, morally, I say we are accountable to the society we live in. That is Gaudium et Spes speaking, the Second Vatican Council's document on the Church in the modern world, paragraph 24, which says a person cannot fully find himself/herself except through a sincere gift of himself/herself. Not through detachment from others but through gift. A self that belongs only to itself has nothing left to give and nobody left to answer to but its own judgment. That is not what any of us, man or woman, was made for.

    I say this as a Catholic, and I know the language is not available to everyone who was standing in that crowd in Pune. Most of those women were not going to walk home wondering what a Vatican council said forty years before they were born. A Hindu, a Muslim, an atheist woman in that stadium has her own ground to stand on for saying the same thing without needing mine, human dignity, equal citizenship, the plain constitutional fact that she is protected under the law regardless of what any dharmaśāstra says about her. I am not claiming my language is the only door into this argument. I am saying every version of it needs some floor under autonomy, whatever name a person gives that floor, or autonomy on its own will not hold the weight being put on it.

 

The harder question

    But there is a real problem hiding in what I just said, and I do not want to dodge it. What happens when the society you are supposed to be accountable to is itself the Manusmriti society? What happens when the accountability structure is the oppression? This is not a hypothetical for the women Rahul was addressing. Their families, their neighbourhoods, sometimes their own religious world, are shaped by exactly the mindset that the verse encodes. Telling them to be accountable to that society is not a moral answer. It is just handing the custody back to the oppressors. So accountability to society as it currently stands cannot be the last word. But that does not mean the answer is no accountability. It means the accountability moves. It moves from the society that exists now to the society that should exist.

    Mary's song in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verses 51 to 52, does exactly this: "He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly." She does not say she belongs to nobody. She names an order that is currently in power, the proud, the powerful on their thrones, and says God is against it. That is not a rejection of accountability. It is a redirection of it, away from an order that crushes people and toward one that does not yet fully exist but is being called into being.

    As stated earlier that redirection needs a floor of its own, or it becomes whatever the speaker wants it to be. Here is mine: no person handed to another as property, and each person treated with the dignity that is theirs by right. Every person answerable and every person answered to in turn. Dignity that does not depend on whose household you were born into. This is not an empty standard. It is exactly the standard the Manusmriti fails, and it is a standard anyone can check an order against, mine or Rahul's or anyone else's.

 

What Ignatius adds

    There is one more piece I want to bring in, because it is the tradition I was formed in. Ignatius of Loyola, in the Principle and Foundation that opens the Spiritual Exercises, paragraph 23, has a concept he calls indifference. It does not mean not caring. It means being free enough from disordered attachment to anything created that you are available to what God actually wants. He says we should not be more inclined to health than to sickness, to riches than to poverty, to a long life than a short one, but should desire and choose only what leads to the end for which we are made.

    Notice what indifference is not. It is not detachment from every relationship. It is detachment from whatever attachment gets in the way of the right one. Manusmriti's structure, where a woman exists to serve her father's household and then her husband's line, is a disordered attachment, a woman held not for her own sake but for what she secures for the men around her. Ignatian indifference would cut that attachment loose in a heartbeat. But it would not then leave a person attached to nothing. It frees a person for the deepest attachment there is, to God, and from that, to other people rightly. Rahul's slogan, read as opposition to a disordered custody, fits inside this. Read out of context, as opposition to belonging as such, it does not.

Where this leaves me

    So here is where I land. Liberation from an unjust structure and freedom from every accountability but your own are two different things, and it is easy to slide from the first into the second without noticing. The right-wing does this constantly when it defends structures like Manusmriti's in the name of tradition and order. But the language of liberation can do it too, when the self quietly becomes the only authority left standing.

    The correction Manusmriti needs is not "you belong to nobody except yourself." It is "you do not belong to your father, your husband, or your son, because you belong to God, and answerable to God, not just to your own judgment of yourself, is what makes you a person and not property in the first place." That is a harder sentence to fit on a banner. I do not blame Rahul for this; he made a statement from a different perspective than mine. I also do not say that my perspective is the only right one or the only one there is. There are several concepts on which we can base this argument rather than a Christian understanding of God, particularly in a pluralist nation like India. To the large number of Indian women who are Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh or other religions, or atheist, or agnostic, the Manusmriti critique can be a part of a broader secular or reformist project of individual rights and constitutional equality, or a call to re-center on their understanding of God.

    I worked with women outside the classroom too. Before I became a Jesuit, I spent nine years as a bank officer, and part of that work was helping set up self-help groups for women, many of whom had never held a bank account of their own before that. Since then, I have addressed rural women entrepreneurs, assisting in building small businesses, with no capital behind them and no one behind them either, except themselves. Almost every one of those women had spent years being told, in one form or another, whose she was before anyone thought to ask who she wanted to be. That is what this argument is actually about, underneath the theology. Not detachment from everyone who ever had power over her. A different, truer accountability altogether, one that starts with God, or with whatever floor she stands on, and does not stop at whoever currently holds power over her life.

 

 

From Chariot to Crossroads: Discernment lessons from Plato, Krishna and Ignatius.

Savio Saldanha

DOI- 10.5281/zenodo.22083353

Date – 24 August 2026

                After all these years as a Jesuit, I still consider myself a student of discernment. I sometimes find myself thinking almost desiring that I too receive this grace like Solomon. But experience and history teaches it is not always so simple. As I keep reflecting on this I take recourse to different traditions and cultures which have searched for the solution to this problem(?). I delve into the Greek, Indian and Western philosophies and theologies that show a probable way. I think of a chariot pulled by two horses, one obedient and one unruly. I read about a prince who lays down his weapons and hands the reins to his chariot to God. I walk with a pilgrim who lets his mule choose the road so that a stranger might live or die depending on which direction it takes. Three images, separated by centuries and continents, all asking the same question: who is driving?

Plato's horses

                In the Phaedrus, Plato pictures the soul as a charioteer holding the reins of two horses (246a–254e). One horse is noble and responds to command; the other pulls toward appetite and has to be fought. The charioteer is reason. Left alone, either horse would wreck the chariot — the noble one through excess of spirit, the unruly one through raw appetite. The soul only moves well when reason holds both.

                In the Republic, Plato gives the same structure a different shape: reason, spirit, and appetite (Book IV, 434d–441c). Justice in a person is reason ruling, with spirit as its ally, over appetite. He then maps this onto the city — guardians, auxiliaries, and producers — because for Plato the well-run soul and the well-run city are the same pattern at different scales. The charioteer image and the tripartite soul are really one argument: order is not the absence of conflicting forces, it's their right ranking under something higher.

Krishna, and a bow that still has to be drawn

                The Bhagavad Gita opens with Arjuna setting down his bow on the battlefield, paralysed by the prospect of killing his own kin. He asks Krishna to be his charioteer — and Krishna agrees, but not by taking over the fight. He drives, counsels, and clarifies, while Arjuna is the one who has to fire the arrow. By chapter 18, Krishna's counsel is still the same: act, but act without grasping at the fruit of the act (18.63 and surrounding verses). This is worth sitting with, because it's easy to read "Krishna is the charioteer" as "Krishna took the wheel and Arjuna went along for the ride." That's not what happens. The clearest statement of what Krishna is actually offering comes earlier, in chapter 2:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन। मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥ (2.47)

"Your right is to the action alone, never to its fruits. Let the fruit of action never be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction."

                That's not permission to step back or a passive surrender as is generally presumed. It's the opposite — a command to act, stripped of the grasping that makes action anxious. Krishna restores Arjuna's clarity about what he's already committed to doing. The guidance is real, but the war is still fought with Arjuna's own arms.

Ignatius and the mule — a false start, not a smaller version of discernment

                There's a well-known story from Ignatius's own account of his early life (Autobiography, no.14-15). Riding toward Montserrat not long after his conversion, he falls into an argument with a Moor about the perpetual virginity of Mary. The man rides on ahead. Ignatius, furious, can't decide whether to catch up and kill him for the insult or let it go. Unable to settle it himself, he lets his mule choose: if it turns onto the Moor's road, he'll follow and kill him; if it stays on the highway, he'll let the man live. The mule stays on the highway.

                   It's tempting to read the slackened reins as an early flicker of trust in providence, and there's something to that — Ignatius includes the story precisely to show, in his own words, how God was working on a soul that was "still blind." But the scholarship on the Autobiography is blunt about what this episode actually is. Reviewing the text's context and rhetoric, John McManamon notes that in letting the mule decide, Ignatius was abandoning the knightly code of honor that would have obligated him to avenge the insult himself — a move the Autobiography itself frames as immaturity, not wisdom (McManamon, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2016; drawing on Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle's Loyola's Acts, 1997). Ignatius was outsourcing a moral decision to chance because he hadn't yet learned how to test what's actually moving in him.

            By the time he came to write his own guidance for others, decades later, that had changed completely. What he eventually taught was not "wait for a sign," but the far harder discipline of paying attention to your own interior movements before you act — a discipline he'd had no access to on that road. That according to me is much closer to what Krishna does for Arjun than the mule ever was: not removing the choice, but clarifying the ground it's made on.

                Read in that order, the arc isn't Plato to Krishna to Ignatius as three points on a rising line, or three versions improving on each other. Krishna and the mature Ignatius stand together as two versions of the same claim: guidance sharpens the one who still has to act. The mule is the cautionary case of what happens when that guidance is skipped and chance is asked to stand in for it. I mean this at the level of the claim only, not their stature. A divine avatar and a canonized saint don't occupy the same order of being, and I'm not putting them on a scale against each other. What I'm saying is narrower: they're teaching the same thing about action. Arjuna's despair and Ignatius's rage at the insult are both impulses that have to be tested and cleared before they can be trusted. Only then does the action go forward. Krishna clears Arjuna's sight through counsel before he lifts the bow. The mature Ignatius teaches clearing your own interior movements before you choose. Neither says stop acting. Both say don't act on the first impulse.

What's left when the analogies run out

                None of these images, read carefully, license passivity. Arjuna still draws the bow. Ignatius, once he's past the mule, still has to sit with a decision and choose. Plato's reason doesn't get to retire once it's in charge — governing the horses is a permanent job, not a one-time victory. The chariot doesn't move on its own even with the reins in the right hands. It moves because someone is still driving and someone is still fighting.

                I kept coming back to this during my annual retreat — the same movement, on different days, in different prayer periods, refusing to resolve into either extreme. Not "I will handle this myself," and not "I will step back and let God handle it." Something narrower than both: hand over the direction, keep your hands on the work. I'd sit down expecting to have finished with the question and find it waiting for me again the next day, in a different disguise. That repetition was the point, I think. Surrender that only has to happen once isn't surrender, it is relief. The kind that has to be renewed each time you sit down is closer to what Arjuna is doing with the bow still in his hands, and closer to what Ignatius was still learning on that road to Montserrat. That's the whole of it, really. Not a single act of letting go, but a grip you keep adjusting — loosened where you were gripping out of fear, tightened where you'd let it go slack out of avoidance.

                As I bring this reflection to the story of Solomon, I find that even the wise king had to keep discerning and growing. He did make mistakes along the way, like his extravagant lifestyle and the increased taxation which led to the future splitting of the kingdom of Israel.

                So I feel that I will never be able to call myself a master of discernment. I shall be a student throughout my life, praying, reflecting and growing in this grace. My chariot may be driven by God, but at the same time I will be driving and choosing my way ahead.

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