Wit & Attitude Quote by Satish Kumar

There is a pointed accusation buried in Satish Kumar's gentle phrasing: withdrawal isn’t purity, it’s privilege. By calling spiritual escape “pretending,” he punctures the flattering story many of us tell ourselves-that opting out is an ethical choice rather than a convenient one. The line “individual enlightenment” is doing double duty: it names a sincere human longing while also mocking the consumer version of it, where salvation becomes a private hobby and suffering becomes background noise.

The “remove ourselves from the world” setup targets a familiar posture in modern wellness culture and certain strands of religious renunciation: the fantasy that you can step outside history, politics, and responsibility. Kumar’s subtext is ecological and economic as much as spiritual. Detachment, in this frame, doesn’t float above harm; it often depends on systems that keep running so the detached person can remain comfortable, fed, and safe. The world doesn’t stop demanding labor, care, or sacrifice just because you’ve decided to seek serenity.

Then comes the deliberately blunt “go to hell, so to speak.” It’s a rhetorical gut-punch, yanking the reader from incense-smoke abstraction back to consequences: war, hunger, climate breakdown, exploitation. Kumar, as an activist steeped in Gandhian and ecological thinking, is arguing for a spirituality with skin in the game-one that treats inner work as fuel for solidarity, not a substitute for it.