Grief, like emotions tend to be, is a strange thing. It makes us blind. It makes us irrational. It makes us want to spread it across. It makes us want to make the non-grieving grieve, too. Grief, then, can be a parasite and parasitic, both.
But does it excuse hurting others? Does it excuse painting the innocent guilty? Does it excuse making perpetual aggressors out of a community whole?
I hope not. And I hope something as tragic as the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s excuses something as incendiary and aggravating as The Kashmir Files (2022). The horror of the first can’t, shouldn’t, and doesn’t make it okay for the second to further the Hindutva project, to make a community already marginalized/discriminated against scared even more.
And that’s also why something like Baramulla (2025) is not merely a welcome creation, but somewhat of a roadmap for others to follow, an exercise in empathy without sanitising a horror.
A Haunted Family, A Haunted Home
In the Kashmiri town of Baramulla, the son of a former MLA goes missing. A vanishing trick in a local magic show ends up being more than a trick as the (faux) magician witnesses (real) magic. The magician is promptly arrested, but the kid remains lost (vanished?) still.
Motif from Kashmir Shawl: Pheerozee (Turquoise Color), No. 23 (1822–23)
To solve the case, the police officer DSP Ridwaan Sayyed (Manav Kaul) is summoned, who arrives with his family. A past incident haunts the family, and their house seems to have a life of its own. Strange sounds, strange smells, strange sights, and strange sensations cloud this already-distressed family. In some ways, it mirrors the valley itself, renovated as it is on the surface but infested behind the varnish.
Meanwhile, more kids are disappearing as Ridwaan chases on clue after another, largely clueless. The family, being associated with a police officer, isn’t welcome in the town, and hostility seems to be their new, obnoxious neighbour.
The Living Amidst the Dead
Kaul, as usual, wears the skin of this protagonist seamlessly: a father, a husband, a police officer – all his roles in jeopardy – while he tries to do his best within the circumstances of his own and others’ making.
A still from Baramulla
His family – his wife, Gulnar (Bhasha Sumbli), daughter, Noorie (Arista Mehta), Ayaan (Rohaan Singh) – aren’t kept as mere props just in service to the plot, but are shown as fully-realised characters, each with their internal lives. Ayaan craves for a friend to play with; Noorie doesn’t want to be associated with her defense personnel of a father; Gulnar posts on her personal blog, also conducting her private investigations into the house as the story progresses.
Ghosts, there are many, supernatural or otherwise. Militancy haunts the valley, as do the curfews. The creepy metaphor of the tulip recurs, somehow connected to the disappearances. Shadows, imaginary or otherwise, occupy the house. The word kaafir is painted outside as the family grows increasingly cornered.
But the incendiary ghosts of its predecessor-in-certain-ways are missing (thankfully!).
To Choose Empathy Over Incitement
In the early 1990s, almost a hundred thousand Kashmiri Pandits were forced to flee the Kashmir valley. While the state (and national) government watched, offering no support as several high-ranking Pandit officials were murdered, thousands of families moved to refugee camps.
It’s almost impossible to talk today of the representation of Kashmiri Pandits’ plight in art and cinema, and not talk of that (in)famous Agnihotri creation, The Kashmir Files. Some great cinematography and performances don’t (try to) hide the obvious revisionist narrative it tries to propagate, the community it tries to implicate, the ideology(ies) – or its subscribers – it tries to denigrate.
A still from The Kashmir Files
The word genocide is repeatedly, conspiratorially emphasised, as is the revengeful-wronged sentiment it flares. Muslim kids chime at a mosque, “Raliv, Galiv ya Chaliv” (convert, leave or die). A JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University, that much maligned institution) professor tells a student, “Pin it on the government! Don’t blame the terrorists.” In the climactic scene, a Hindu boy is shot by a Muslim terrorist.
As was its intention, though denied by Agnihotri repeatedly, it flared communal tensions and led to deaths and harassment aplenty.
To all this, you may wonder, “Yes, Kashmir Files was crass and hogwash, but it doesn’t excuse Baramulla’s subtler subtexts!” And you won’t be wrong. But what Baramulla does right should also not be ignored. It portrays a valley in flux, trapped between simultaneous forces. It shows grief without propaganda. It doesn’t point to easy answers.
It doesn’t weaponise pain.
Flawed People and Skewed Sympathies
I saw it (Yo lo vi) from the series The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra) by Francisco de Goya (1810-1863)
Is it perfect? Certainly not. The police force is shown as benevolent, misunderstood figures, while all blame is shifted to militancy and aggression by the locals. The State, here, is wounded but essentially well-meaning; it’s the people who keep making the wrong choices. Too many on-the-nose depictions are scattered around: of terrorists farming kids, of misguided locals, misguided kids, misguided politicians, misguided misguided…
At the same time, it’s necessary, important to examine our (not-so) past wounds that continue to fester in modern society, be it 2002 or 1984, 1947 or 1990, and Baramulla does so without falling into jingoistic sentimentalities.
As a grief outlet, Baramulla ruminates more, lashes out less.
(This article contains heavy spoilers for the first season of HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ and some mild spoilers for NBC’s ‘The Good Place’.)
Gentlemen, lend me your ears. More accurately, lend me your moral intuitions and a sturdy pair of spectacles, for we are about to peer down the railway tracks of the most famous and deliciously tormenting ethical conundrum in modern history: The Trolley Problem.
It is a thought experiment so perfect, so simple in its terror, that it has spawned an entire field of inquiry known colloquially as “Trolleyology.” It is the philosophical equivalent of a perfectly mixed cocktail: two parts Utilitarianism, one part Deontology, garnished with the grisly prospect of a decision made in panic.
One Foot in Front of the Other
The problem, in its pristine form, was laid down by the British philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967. Imagine, if you will, a runaway trolley hurtling down the main track. Ahead, five hapless workers are tied down, oblivious to their fate. You, a mere bystander, stand next to a lever. If you pull it, you will divert the trolley onto a side track. The catch? There is one person tied to that side track.
The choice is stark and cleanly arithmetic: do nothing, and five die, or pull the lever, and one dies.
The Choice of Hercules by Annibale Carracci (1596)
Most people, when presented with this scenario, opt to pull the lever. It is the cold, hard logic of Utilitarianism: the moral choice is the one that maximizes overall good, or in this case, minimizes the death toll. Five lives saved, one lost. A regrettable net gain of four human souls. It is a decision rooted in the principle of beneficence (the duty to do good), pitted against the principle of non-maleficence (the duty to do no harm).
But philosophy, like a good single malt, is never satisfied with the first sip. This initial case, while troubling, merely set the stage for the true torment.
What Did the Poor Fat Man Do?
Here is where we introduce the man who, through no fault of his own, became a philosophical meme. Allow me to present the Footbridge Case, later popularized by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson:
The trolley is still hurtling toward the five. This time, however, you are standing on a footbridge overlooking the track. There is no switch. Next to you stands a man of considerable girth. A man, shall we say, sufficiently hefty to stop the trolley if he were to fall onto the tracks.
Now, the question is: Would you push him?
The Judgement of Solomon by Giorgione (1500)
The equation is identical: one death to save five. Yet, a large majority of those who would happily pull the lever in the first scenario recoil in horror from pushing the man.
Why the visceral difference? This is the luscious heart of the problem.
For Foot, the key lay in the distinction between two kinds of duties: negative duties (duties not to harm) and positive duties (duties to aid). She argued that the negative duty not to directly kill the man is a more stringent moral claim than the positive duty to save the five.
The Harvard paper on the subject (an “Exercise in Moral & Legal Reasoning,” no less) highlights the elegant analytical maneuver that separates the two cases.
In the original trolley case, by pulling the switch, you are merely redirecting a pre-existing threat. You are choosing between two undesirable outcomes that are already in motion. In the Footbridge Case, however, you are introducing a new threat: you are actively using the innocent man as a means to an end, a human brake-pad, which violates the Kantian principle of treating humanity never merely as a means, but always as an end in itself.The poor, fat man is a philosophical lightning rod, forcing us to admit that morality is not just a numbers game; it is also about how we choose to kill, or, perhaps, how we manage to not kill.
Ethical Problems Too Abstract. Might I Interest You in a Hyper-Realistic Simulation?
For those who find such abstract reasoning a bit too clean for a high-stakes ethical slaughter, one need only turn to the afterlife bureaucracy of NBC’s ‘The Good Place’.
The demon-turned-ethics-student Michael, fed up with the airy nature of Chidi Anagonye’s lectures on moral philosophy, decides to make the thought experiment a real experience. He constructs a hyper-realistic, fully immersive simulation of the trolley problem in a Season 2 episode, “The Trolley Problem”.
A still from The Good Place 2.06 The Trolley Problem
Chidi, the indecisive moral philosopher, is placed at the controls. He is forced to repeatedly choose whether to kill one or five, and his classic paralysis causes him to freeze, resulting in the death of the five workmen by omission. The trauma is compounded when Michael ups the ante, making the single victim a man Chidi knows, his “boot-buddy” Henry, whose bloody boot (and “guts”) splatter Chidi’s face upon impact.
The brilliance of The Good Place is its tongue-in-cheek thesis that context is catastrophe. The show argues that ethical purity is impossible in the messy, hyper-contingent reality of human life. By the end of the simulation, Chidi is a broken man, realizing that intellectual knowledge of an ethical dilemma does little to steel one’s nerves when faced with the visceral reality of commission. Abstract morality is easy; real morality is a splatter of guts and existential dread.
Love and Heartbreak in the Times of an Apocalypse
But what happens when the trolley problem stops being about a random stranger and becomes about the only person who makes an impossible world bearable?
The climax of the first season of HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ is, in essence, an inversion of the classic utilitarian dilemma. Joel Miller has shepherded Ellie, a young girl who is immune to the Cordyceps infection, across an apocalyptic America. When they reach the Fireflies’ hospital, he learns the terrible choice: the only way to synthesize a vaccine is to kill Ellie by removing the part of her brain where the immune fungus grows.
A still from The Last of Us 1.09 Look for the Light
The choice is Utilitarianism’s Triumph (Ellie’s death to save the world/the many) versus Personal Deontology’s Defiance (Ellie’s life, protected by Joel’s violence, dooming the world/the many).
Joel’s decision is the ultimate anti-trolley problem. He doesn’t merely refuse to pull the lever; he pulls the emergency brake, sets the entire train on fire, and murders the conductor (and a few dozen track workers) to save the one. He chooses the individual love he has found over the abstract duty to save humanity. It is an affirmation that for a human being, especially one consumed by grief and attachment, morality is not a simple equation. It is a messy, deeply selfish, and human choice.
They Are Studying This Concept for What Now?
The most bizarre, and yet most real, application of the Trolley Problem today has moved from the philosophy seminar to the engineering lab: How do we program a driverless car (AV) to handle an unavoidable accident?.
Should the car be programmed to be a utilitarian hero, swerving to save a busload of schoolchildren at the expense of its lone passenger (you)? Or should it be loyal to its owner, protecting the passenger at all costs (including the school bus)? For a delicious come-aliving of this dilemma, read Shehan Karunatilaka’s story, A Self-Driving Car’s Thoughts As It Crashes, collected in The Birth Lottery and Other Stories (pub. 2022).
The Parable of the Blind by Pieter Brueghel (1568)
This is a dilemma so immediate that policymakers have weighed in. The German Ethics Commission for Automated and Connected Driving, for example, has declared that autonomous systems should not be allowed to distinguish between people based on personal characteristics such as age, gender, or profession when making an unavoidable collision decision. The car, they seem to argue, must be ethically blind, which effectively rules out the very possibility of the utilitarian calculus that defines the problem.
However, the industry itself often dismisses the entire exercise as a “misguided dilemma”. They argue that AVs, unlike runaway trolleys, are designed to drive so safely that an unavoidable, split-second, five-versus-one catastrophe is a statistical near-impossibility. The real ethical concerns are far more mundane, yet insidious: Who is liable for an accident? And how do we build the system’s “social contract” with human drivers?
In the Eye of the Hurricane
So, after all this deliberation, after the trolley, the fat man, the comedy, the apocalypse, and the autonomous vehicle, do we have a solution?
No. And that, dear reader, is the magnificent point.
The great value of the Trolley Problem is not in finding a universally acceptable answer. Most philosophers indeed agree that one doesn’t exist. Its value lies in the “Exercise in Moral & Legal Reasoning” it facilitates. The problem forces us to articulate our reasons, test our principles against different cases, and observe how a slight change in circumstance—from flipping a lever to pushing a man—upends the entire moral framework.
The ultimate conclusion of Trolleyology is that human morality is not a monolithic theorem but a tension between competing, powerful urges: the logical urge to save the many and the human, emotional urge to avoid causing direct, personal harm. In the end, the question is maybe not what you would do, but why you would do it.
And until the day an AI solves the conundrum to the satisfaction of both Immanuel Kant and a grieving father in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the trolley will keep rattling down the track, forever testing the structural integrity of our ethics, one scrumptious, horrific scenario at a time.
[1.6] Ethical Considerations of the Trolley Problem in Autonomous Driving: A Philosophical and Technological Analysis – MDPI. (2024). https://www.mdpi.com/2032-6653/15/9/404
