The Inner Classroom

The Universe Speaks Every Language

By Sheetal Bagaria

Yesterday, I attended another Wisdom Nugget session at Kolkata Centre for Creativity. It is one of those rare spaces where people gather not merely to listen to celebrated speakers, but to pause, reflect and carry home a little more wisdom than they arrived with.

The speaker that evening was Devdutt Pattanaik.

But strangely, my attention kept drifting away from the stage.

Standing beside him was a young woman interpreting every single word into sign language.

From the welcome address to the lamp lighting, from mythology to humour, she translated everything with extraordinary grace. Her hands moved with rhythm, but it was her expressions that captivated me. Her eyes widened with wonder, her smile appeared exactly where the story smiled, and every emotion seemed to come alive on her face. She wasn’t merely translating words. She was giving them another life.

I wished I had asked her name.

Instead, I came home with a question.

Who was she doing this for?

Was there someone in the audience who couldn’t hear? Was she assigned to one person? Or had Kolkata Centre for Creativity simply decided that wisdom should be accessible to everyone, whether they understood spoken words or not?

I never found the answer.

As Devdutt Pattanaik spoke about Bakasura, my eyes once again wandered to the interpreter.

The evening’s conversation revolved around Bakasura, the insatiable demon from the Mahabharata whose hunger could never be satisfied. He used Bakasura not merely as a mythological character, but as a metaphor for the part of us that is forever wanting more.

More possessions.

More wealth.

More recognition.

More security.

The tragedy, he reminded us, is that Bakasura doesn’t live only in the Mahabharata. He quietly lives within us. Every time we believe that happiness lies in the next purchase, the next achievement or the next possession, we unknowingly feed that endless hunger.

We all heard those words.

We smiled.

We nodded.

We applauded.

But as I looked around, I couldn’t help wondering…

As we walked out of the auditorium, would we leave Bakasura behind, or would Bakasura quietly walk out with us?

And then I looked at the interpreter once again.

For a moment, it felt as though the universe itself was saying,

“Please… don’t miss this.”

If words don’t reach you, let me try another language.

If one way of teaching doesn’t touch your heart, perhaps another will.

That thought stayed with me long after the evening ended.

Perhaps this is how life has always worked.

It keeps speaking to us.

Through a scripture.

Through a teacher.

Through a friend.

Through silence.

Through joy.

Through disappointment.

And sometimes…

through the graceful hands of a stranger we may never meet again.

Maybe the Divine is never silent.

Maybe it is endlessly compassionate.

It knows that we don’t all understand the same language.

So it keeps changing the language, never the message.

Yesterday, I thought I had gone to listen to Devdutt Pattanaik.

Instead, I came back remembering a woman whose hands silently reminded me that truth is far too precious to be spoken only once.

Because when the lesson is important enough…

the Universe doesn’t stop speaking.

It simply speaks another language.