When silence is best response to foolishness

During my years at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Medford, a quiet historic town just outside Boston, Massachusetts, I once sought an appointment with a dean whose career spanned public service and global policy. I met her during one of her regular breakfast-hour appointments. I had arrived at the university after growing up in Chandigarh and Mumbai. The distance between those worlds — in culture, pace, and power — was something I was still learning to navigate.

The meeting itself was unremarkable in setting, but it arrived at a decisive moment. I was leading the Fletcher South Asia Society, and the season was sharp with rivalry. Discourse had drifted from dialogue to manoeuvre. Intent was reinterpreted to suit ambition, and criticism was deployed not to refine ideas, but to establish advantage.

I asked a question I had rehearsed carefully, wanting it to sound logical rather than wounded, principled rather than personal: how does one respond when targeted unfairly?

She paused. Then she said, quietly, that not every provocation merits a reply, and that one must sometimes choose between overcoming a battle and winning the war. Some provocations, she observed, exist only to reduce the conversation to their terms. That perspective stayed with me.

She operated on the scale of decades, not moments — attentive less to the noise of the present than to the arc of consequence over time. What she offered was not instruction so much as orientation: a way of seeing power, restraint, and timing. What she taught me was the discipline of silence.

Silence starves foolishness of oxygen. It reflects discernment. It withholds attention from those who seek it for its own sake. It allows time to reveal what argument cannot. Most of all, it preserves clarity, dignity, and purpose.

In the years since, silence has often been my strongest response — and my most reliable ally.

Divyashri P Rajwade, Chandigarh