Dear J,
I have been listening to your talks continuously over the past few weeks, and each one has given me something new to reflect upon. Among them, your recent video explaining why you personally counsel readers and respond to their family and personal problems struck me as particularly important. It clarified a question that many people have, and I believe your explanation deserves wider attention.
Today, psychological counselors, therapists, and family counseling experts are available in almost every city. They perform an important social role, and for many people their guidance is genuinely useful. Their methods are built upon established psychological frameworks, and for the majority of people these approaches provide practical solutions to common emotional and interpersonal difficulties.
However, the people who come to you are often different. They are not merely individuals seeking immediate solutions to domestic problems. Most of them are serious readers, writers, artists, teachers, researchers, and intellectually inclined people whose inner lives are shaped by literature, philosophy, history, and deep reflection. Their emotional conflicts are often intertwined with their intellectual convictions, moral dilemmas, aesthetic sensibilities, and existential questions. Their problems cannot always be understood through standard psychological templates.
A conventional counselor naturally approaches these issues with established techniques and predictable solutions. Those methods are appropriate in many circumstances, but they may not reach the deeper layers of an intellectually sensitive person. Such individuals often do not need someone merely to reduce their anxiety or resolve a conflict. They need someone who can understand the way they think, appreciate the values that shape their lives, and recognize the complexity of their inner world.
This is where your role becomes unique. Your advice does not emerge from a fixed psychological model. Instead, it comes from a lifetime of reading, observing human beings, studying literature, philosophy, history, and spirituality, and engaging with thousands of people from different walks of life. You look at a person’s problem not as an isolated incident but as part of an entire life, a personality, and a cultural context. That gives your responses a depth that is difficult to find elsewhere.
Your readers trust you not simply because you are a writer, but because they know that you understand the intellectual and emotional world they inhabit. Literature itself is an exploration of the human mind, and your long engagement with literary characters and real human experiences enables you to perceive dimensions of a problem that others may overlook.
In many of your responses, I notice that you do not merely offer advice. You help people understand themselves. You encourage them to see their situation from a broader perspective, to examine their assumptions, and to develop greater emotional maturity. This is very different from offering ready-made solutions. It is an education in self-understanding.
I therefore feel that you should continue this work. Intellectuals and serious readers also require guidance, but their needs are rarely addressed by conventional counseling systems. They need someone who can converse with them at the level of ideas while remaining deeply humane. Your counseling fills that gap in a remarkable way.
I hope you will continue answering such letters and discussing personal dilemmas in your videos. I am certain that these conversations help not only the individual who asks the question but also thousands of silent readers who recognize their own lives in those discussions.
With warm regards,
M.Santhanam
