“The world is burning. And we are all feeling the heat.”
That opening thought from Kailash Satyarthi’s book Karuna framed our conversation at SALA 2026. In a world rich in information yet scarred by inequality and conflict, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate (2014) offered a simple way forward: compassion must move beyond feeling into action.
“Compassion is not a soft emotion. Compassion is a power. It’s a force.”
He described it as “disruptive” and “transformative,” capable of confronting suffering embedded in institutions and social customs. His shortest definition of compassion was also his most practical: “mindful problem solving.”
Satyarthi told a story from his book Karuna about three sisters who encounter an injured man on their way to school. The first feels sorry for him but continues on. The second shares his distress so deeply that she cannot concentrate in class. The third gets him treated, then returns to fill the roadside ditch that caused his injury. Sympathy noticed; empathy felt; compassion addressed the cause and enlisted others to help.
That distinction has guided his decades of work against child labor and slavery. When I asked how compassion could reach people who disagree fiercely with us, even those who respond with hatred, he urged a shift in perspective. Their arrogance or hostility, he said, is a sign of suffering. “Compassion leads to make the bridge,” he said. It takes “patience” and “consistency,” but it keeps communication possible.
He knows the cost of that approach. Recalling a 2004 operation to rescue girls trafficked under the cover of a circus in Uttar Pradesh, Satyarthi described a man pressing a revolver near his neck. A camera crew was filming; a police officer warned the gunman that the recording would be evidence. Satyarthi, his son, and a colleague were subsequently beaten and taken to a hospital in Lucknow. The police registered a case against him, he said, which was later dismissed.
He could have devoted his scarce time and resources to settling scores. Instead, he tried to understand the traffickers’ fear: freeing children threatened their business. “I always thought that I’m getting more and more stronger, and these people are getting more frightened.” While that did not excuse their violence, it helped him keep his attention on the children.
In the carpet industry, he recalled, some manufacturers eventually came to see that he was challenging child slavery, rather than attacking them personally. Some joined the effort to change their own industry. In Jharkhand, he said, he also spoke with Maoist groups in areas where his organization sought to free children from mica mining and get them into school. He argued that education could equip children to claim their rights and challenge injustice. “I’m also trying my best to bring justice,” he told them.
His refusal to accept inherited injustice began early. On his first day of school in Vidisha, a boy his own age sat outside the gate working as a cobbler. When young Kailash asked why the boy was not in class, adults told him poor children had to help their families. The cobbler’s father explained that he, too, had worked from childhood, as had his father before him. Satyarthi remembers wondering why one child was expected to learn while another was expected to work. “I refused to accept this,” he said.
At 15, during celebrations of Gandhi’s birth centenary, he tested the promises of local leaders who spoke against untouchability. He invited women from a community treated as “untouchable” to cook a meal and invited the leaders to eat with them. The women came. The leaders did not. Satyarthi ate the food, then faced condemnation at home for crossing caste boundaries. He recalled being required to eat separately. That night, he resolved to give up his caste surname, Sharma, and become Satyarthi, a seeker of truth.
These memories give Karuna its urgency. For Satyarthi, compassion starts with awareness of another’s suffering, deepens through connection and feeling, and culminates in action. He wants to develop a “compassion quotient,” or CQ, that could help people examine and strengthen those capacities. He said researchers and advisers were working on measures, while acknowledging that the project was still taking shape. Its value, in his view, would be judged by outcomes: justice, equality, peace and sustainability.
An audience member asked whether acting compassionately requires unusual courage. Satyarthi reversed the premise. When another person’s pain becomes impossible to ignore, he said, the drive to respond can generate courage and ingenuity. His example was a mother who, seeing her child injured, tears cloth from her own sari to make a bandage. She does not wait for a plan or a reward.
That focus on the work also colored his memory of learning he had won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. He was at his desk searching for the cheapest flight to a speaking engagement, careful with money intended for the cause. A breathless journalist called, and colleagues rushed in to embrace him. He laughed that his old dream had simply been to meet a Nobel laureate and take a photograph together. Instead, he took a selfie of himself!
The challenge, he said, is to extend that instinct beyond those closest to us. “All that is required is to enlarge your circle of compassion.” For Satyarthi, the measure of that circle is what we are willing to change together.
