Regret is the school in which character finishes its education

Daniel Pink's The Power of Regret (2022) reports the result of the largest survey of regret ever conducted — 16,000 respondents across 105 countries. The finding contradicts the self-help shelf: the most universal human emotion is not happiness. It is regret. The Mahabharata's Karna, dying on the battlefield at Kurukshetra, regrets above all the question he never asked his mother Kunti — whose son he truly was. Aurangzeb's last letters to his sons in 1707, copies preserved in the National Archives, read as confessions: 'I came alone, I go as a stranger.' Regret, well-used, is not paralysis. It is the school in which character finishes its incomplete education — the honest tutor of the second half of life. The republic, like the person, becomes more itself when it can name what it got wrong.

Personal regret is the first classroom. Pink distinguishes four enduring categories: foundation regrets (savings not made, health not preserved), boldness regrets (chances not taken), moral regrets (lines crossed), and connection regrets (relationships allowed to fade). The twelve-step recovery tradition, beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939, devotes two of its twelve steps (Steps 8 and 9) to making lists of those one has harmed and offering amends — a structured pedagogy of regret converted into reparation. Bronnie Ware, a hospice nurse in Australia, published The Top Five Regrets of the Dying in 2012 after recording the dying wishes of thousands of patients. The top regret was not 'I wish I had earned more' or 'I wish I had achieved more'. It was 'I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.' The second was 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard.' The list keeps teaching the same lesson: life evaluated retrospectively values courage and connection, not accumulation. The Buddhist concept of kshama — patience and forgiveness toward oneself for unconscious harm — provides a parallel structure: regret acknowledged, intention transformed, conduct corrected.

National regret is the second classroom. Germany's post-1945 culture of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung — 'working through the past' — became a state project, embedded in textbooks, memorials, museums and trials. The artist Gunter Demnig's Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, have been installed in over 1,400 European cities since 1996: small brass plates set into the pavement outside the last freely chosen home of a Holocaust victim. The viewer walking past must literally stoop to read the names. Australia's Sorry Day of 13 February 2008, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in Parliament to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children removed from their families across the twentieth century, was a national rite of acknowledgement. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, completed in 2015 and addressing the residential-school system, generated 94 calls to action. India's record is more uneven. The 1962 China defeat produced the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report, which remains classified six decades later — a national regret literally locked away. The Mizoram Peace Accord of 30 June 1986, signed by Laldenga, brought thirty years of insurgency to an end and is widely regarded as one of post-Independence India's most honest acts of political reconciliation. The 1984 anti-Sikh violence in Delhi has produced several judicial commissions but no national apology. Each example demonstrates what national regret can do: not paralyse, but reset.

Institutional regret is the third and least developed classroom. In 1976, in the depth of the Emergency, the Supreme Court delivered ADM Jabalpur v Shivkant Shukla (also called the Habeas Corpus case), holding that the right to life under Article 21 could be suspended during a proclaimed Emergency. The dissent of Justice H R Khanna cost him the chief-justiceship. Four decades later, in Puttaswamy v Union of India (24 August 2017), the same Supreme Court explicitly overruled ADM Jabalpur. Justice D Y Chandrachud, whose father Justice Y V Chandrachud had been in the original majority, wrote that the decision 'was an aberration in the constitutional jurisprudence of our country.' That single sentence is institutional regret entering the legal record. Similar gestures appear elsewhere: the 2017 Andhra Pradesh government's apology for delayed response to the Vakapalli sexual-assault case; the various draft Public Apology Bills circulating in Parliament since 2023; Chief Justice Chandrachud's 2024 lecture at the National Police Academy explicitly addressing systemic regret as a tool of police reform; and the Supreme Court's overruling of Suresh Kumar Koushal v Naz Foundation through Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India (September 2018) which decriminalised consensual same-sex relations.

A counter-view deserves attention. Regret, taken to excess, becomes rumination — the repetitive replaying of past wrongs without forward movement. Clinical psychology distinguishes useful regret, which generates action-impulses, from useless rumination, which simply re-experiences the wound. Nations that obsess endlessly over historical grievances can freeze in their own past. The Northern Irish Troubles, the Israel-Palestine entrenchments, the Hindu-Muslim partition memory — each shows what happens when a society cannot transmute regret into reconciliation. Regret must teach, then release.

The discipline, therefore, is structured. Acknowledge specifically what went wrong. Repair, where repair is possible. Reform, where reform is the only honest amends. And then move. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1995-98, despite its acknowledged limitations, remains the most ambitious modern attempt to systematise this discipline. The Rwandan Gacaca courts, conducted across the 2000s, processed nearly two million cases related to the 1994 genocide through community-based justice. Each model has strengths and weaknesses, and each demonstrates that structured public regret is a republican capacity, not merely a private feeling. The Mizoram model, in a smaller register, achieved similar reset. India's larger pending exercises — on Emergency excesses, on Sikh victims of 1984, on the displaced in Kashmir, on tribal histories of dispossession, on the long under-acknowledgement of Dalit historical experience — wait their turn.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote in his journals in 1843: 'Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.' Regret is the rear-view mirror that helps the driver drive — not stop. A republic that can acknowledge its errors and improve is stronger than one that pretends never to err. Character, in persons and in nations, finishes its education in the school of regret. Those who refuse to enrol stay novices forever, repeating the same mistakes with more confidence each time. Those who enrol — soberly, specifically, without theatre — graduate into the kind of maturity the second half of life and the second half of a republic both require. The hardest sentence in any language is also the most freeing: I was wrong, and here is how I will do better.