Manuhe manuhor baabe
Jodi he okonu nabhabe
Okoni xohanubhuti re
Bhabibo kune nu kua?
Xomoniya…
(“If human beings do not live for one another,
If they do not think about each other
with a little empathetic concern,
Then who will, my friend?”)
This iconic song by the Bard of Brahmaputra, Bharat Ratna late Dr. Bhupen Hazarika, echoed across various institutions in Assam as the state celebrated his birth centenary on September 8, 2025.
The resonance of this song, which calls upon the most basic yet profound human quality of compassion, carries a force that once rallied the region under the Assamese cultural identity. As an anthem of humanity, it carried the ethics of empathy.
Yet, as this song was performed across various cultural gatherings in the state, especially in Guwahati, one could not help but observe a paradox. Being in this city, we can perhaps look over our shoulders and see how the people have lost touch with the depth of this song, one which has been reduced to an occasional cultural performance or, at best, a hum on the lips of the people who loved it.
The changing and somehow fractured life worlds of the people in this city lack humane compassion today. We have very little or no time to understand each other. Understanding, empathising, and being in someone else’s shoes are emotions limited to stories, narratives, and articles like this.
People continue to jostle in traffic without courtesy, litter in public without remorse, exploit others for self-interest, and engage in verbal and structural violence. One can thus opine that in an era dominated by individualism, consumerism, and media spectacle, the essence and the empathetic core of Bhupen da’s songs find little resemblance.
While the melodies are enjoyed, the meanings,about poverty, injustice, displacement, and fraternity, are sidelined. This disjuncture between what was performed on Bhupen da’s birth centenary across the state and the practice that runs every day tickled our sociological imagination.
German Sociologist Max Weber, in his book Economy and Society (1904), proposed the idea of Verstehen as a methodological approach in conducting socio-scientific research. This conceptual notion is both an art and the science of interpretive understanding.
It is an attempt to see the world from someone else’s perspective, and to grasp the meanings people attach to their actions. Bhupen da’s song, in many ways, is a poetic reflection of the same imperative, articulated to stir the minds of the people concretised by individualism.
In a society caught up with instrumental rationality, or as Weber would say, zweckrational (actions guided by calculations of best means to achieve a goal), this song and its lyrics are reduced to mere rituals.
This is particularly true in urban localities (read big cities) wherein such pathological existence has become the new normal. In Erving Goffman’s sense, what remains is a dramaturgical display, rather than a lived moral practice.
The erosion of empathy and the ritualisation of Dr. Hazarika’s message are not abstract concerns alone; they manifest tangibly in the rising levels of stress, anxiety, and alienation documented in contemporary urban India. According to an Ipsos global survey conducted on World Mental Health Day 2024, 53% of urban Indians report having dealt with stress to the point where it affected their day-to-day activities in the previous 12 months.
One in four Indians (22%) has encountered a stressful situation on multiple occasions, and 31% have gone through stress at least once. Urban India’s stress and anxiety statistics only serve to validate what sociologists have long noted: modernity, for all its promises of advancement, frequently undermines the very pillars of compassion and community.
According to Karl Marx’s analysis of alienation, people in a capitalist society grow estranged from one another as well as from their labour. This estrangement is evident in the modern Indian metropolises, where consumerism, efficiency, and competition rule the daily rhythms.
Dr. Hazarika’s insistence through his lyrics that humans must live for one another seems to be a counterpoint to this alienation, but the hustles of city life, social media spectacles, coupled with the general apathy, drowns out his plea.
To explicate the pathological condition of human existence in the modern world, Abhijit Pathak has drawn attention to the insights of Sociologists Georg Simmel and David Riesman.
Pathak notes how in his classic essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Simmel identified urban life as engendering a condition of “heartless indifference,” wherein individuals cultivate a “blasé attitude”- an emotional detachment developed as a coping mechanism against the overwhelming stimuli of metropolitan existence.
Similarly, he also foregrounds Riesman’s (1950) notion of the “lonely crowd” that captures the paradox of individuals who are physically surrounded by others yet remain socially and emotionally disconnected.
In rapidly expanding urban centres such as Guwahati, this tendency towards detachment manifests in people’s growing numbness to suffering and their cultivation of indifference as a protective shield. Within such contexts, the songs of Bhupen Hazarika, once infused with ethical imperatives of empathy and solidarity, risk being relegated to the status of cultural artefacts – performed on ceremonial occasions and celebrated as markers of collective pride, yet seldom translated into practices of lived compassion.
If one takes Max Weber’s idea of Verstehen seriously, then the task is not merely to sing or hum Hazarika’s lyrics, but to enter into the lived world of those who suffer – the displaced, the poor, the marginalised, and the ones who feel lost in the glamour of city life.
Even without such markers of social stratification, and in general, to the human being next to you. To understand “manuhe manuhor baabe” is to practice it: to interpret it as an ethical command that demands concrete social action.
Yet, the trajectory of modern cities reveals a different reality: a society where compassion is commodified into performance, empathy is reduced to hashtags, and human connection is increasingly hollow.
In addition to being an emotional issue, the city’s crisis of compassion is also a sociological one. The gap between social practice and cultural memory is widening as urban India rapidly moves towards a consumerist, AI-driven, and individualised future.
On 13th September, 2025, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Guwahati to inaugurate the year-long celebration of Dr. Hazarika’s centenary, let this occasion serve as a reminder of his songs’ enduring symbolic significance.
If his appeal for empathy is not reclaimed as a lived ethic instead of a performed nostalgia, we run the risk of turning into the lonesome mob that Riesman predicted- one that applauds the surface of meaning but is oblivious to the deeper moral melody.
In reclaiming the gravitas of his song, we are reminded that empathy must move beyond ritualised performances and into normalised, and internalised everyday practices.
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s views on this or any other issue. Aashirwad Chakravarty is a Ph.D research scholar at Cotton University and a lecturer at National Law University and Judicial Academy, Assam Moureen Kalita teaches Sociology at Krishna Kanta Handiqui State Open University, Assam.