Individuality is the ability to understand and respond || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2014)

Questioner: Personality is what the society gives, and individuality is what we are. When we look around, we see that we do everything as per the society. We know of our ourselves as what society tells us. So what is the difference between these two? A person is never an individual. He has some or the other thing from the society. Every time he has to impress the society. Individuality is a very rare thing nowadays. How can we be individual?Acharya Prashant: What is your name?

Q: Kushagra.

AP: Kushagra, first of all, you are not very old. You do not know of the other times. Do not say that ‘nowadays’ individuality is less. The world has always been like this. Whatever the state of the world is, it was not very different in any age. Most people have always been stupid and fake. We are not living in any special times. We are not more privileged than people of any particular era.

So you are asking me something. Right? And there was Devendra, and there was Danish, and they too asked me something. Do I really have the freedom to say anything to you? And by anything I mean, ‘just about anything’. If I say anything, that won’t even be freedom. That would be looseness. So when you ask me a question, in some way I have been channelized to give a particular answer.

(Pointing at different people sitting in the audience) He asked me a different question, he asked me a different question, and his question was different. Right? Now in that way, I am a slave to all of you because you decide the question and in deciding the question, you have restricted the range of the response. Have you not? So you can go ahead and claim that we are your master because we set the topic, and then you speak on that topic.