Dear Jeyamohan,
I watched your talk on the problems that exist in relationships today on your website. It is an important and deeply relevant reflection.
As you pointed out, much of the violence and conflict in relationships arise from one fundamental impulse: the desire to change another person. This is something I often tell the people around me as well. We cannot truly change another human being. If we attempt to do so, it inevitably requires some form of coercion. Change imposed from outside is never gentle. Iron has to be heated and hammered into shape. Stone has to be broken before it can be carved. Such force may alter the object, but when applied to human relationships, it destroys the relationship itself.
Every individual is shaped by a unique combination of experiences, memories, aspirations, failures, and circumstances. A person’s character is not something that can be redesigned according to another’s expectations. No one has the authority or the power to remake another human being in their own image.
What each of us can truly do is to transform ourselves. We can strive to live our own lives with greater clarity, dignity, compassion, and integrity. Often, that silent example influences others far more deeply than any attempt at correction or persuasion. Real change, when it happens, comes from within; it cannot be forced from without.
I believe that if this simple truth were widely understood, many of the conflicts within Indian families would disappear. A great deal of domestic violence—whether physical, emotional, or psychological—begins with the assumption that one’s spouse, children, or parents must conform to one’s own expectations. When we abandon the urge to reshape others and instead learn to accept them as they are, relationships become spaces of freedom rather than control, and love replaces domination.
Your talk brings this insight into sharp focus. I hope many more people listen to it, because it addresses one of the most fundamental causes of suffering in modern relationships.
Raja Kumarasamy
