Annual trips to my Bua's (aunt) house in Pune was almost like a ritual for us during Diwali – the

festival of lights when families come together and celebrate. On one such trip in 2018, instead of the
usual festive ambience, I found my aunt crying, my mom comforting her, and my uncle and father
having a serious discussion outside their view. Confused, I gestured towards my sister in search of an
explanation who took me aside and explained that she had been diagnosed with Borderline
Personality Disorder. The term made little sense to us and we turned to Google for some awareness
and answers. What we discovered would change the course of my life for years to come.
As a 12-year-old, the idea that people’s mental lives were more fraught with angst and anguish than
appeared on their faces was one that deeply terrified me, certainly because of the condition of my
sister, but also because of a deeper, existential perturbation; the horror of realizing how little we know
about people who are not ourselves.
And that impelled me to try and become more understanding of the minutiae of people's mental life. It
began with me studying everything I could scour around BPD, but the more I read, the more I realized
that underneath the madness lay a structure which I could eventually disinter.
I developed a more general interest in reading psychology along with my regular coursework, and
then I became engaged in helping organize workshops and seminars at school, and in my society to
ensure that those around me could also perambulate upon the engaging journey I was undertaking. In
the future, I hope to explore further by delving into interdisciplinary studies and merging psychology
with cultural studies and sociology.
This was predominantly because as I had tried applying my understanding to social settings, I had
realized that the idea of mental illnesses remained an object of taboo in the post-colonial landscape of
India. It seemed that this came out of sustained social repression being based in a disciplinary society
working upon antiquated notions of morality, and that particularly exacerbated the effects of mental
illnesses on those who found themselves on the fringes and margins of the social hierarchy - the poor,
Dalits, women, and so on.
Growing up as an Indian woman, my experience with mental health was intertwined with societal
taboos and gender expectations. The cultural context deeply influenced perceptions of mental health,
amplifying the challenges faced by individuals, particularly women.
Ultimately, what I understood was that the study of the psyche and mental life of ordinary people is
no ordinary job because of the deeply embedded social milieu in which it is formed. Consequently, it
required a concomitant probe into the individual as well as the cultural context across various
dimensions of identity to develop a theory of mind sophisticated enough to limn the rich inner world
of people we often deem uninteresting.