Making Suffering Legible

In a meeting room in New Delhi, surrounded by officials, think tanks, banks, and consultants, someone says, “We need a measurable indicator.” I know this sentence well enough that I almost don’t even hear it.

It is the kind of sentence I have heard hundreds of times. No one says it carelessly. Around the table, laptops are open, a presentation is projected on the wall, and we are talking about climate risk: heat, water, livelihoods, disasters, resilience, what can be measured, what can be funded, what a ministry can justify to another ministry.

I know this language well. It is part of my job.

I have spent enough time in rooms like this that the translation now happens almost automatically. A district where wells are failing becomes a water-security problem. A coastline where fishing has become less predictable becomes a livelihood risk. A summer that no longer feels like the summer people remember becomes heat exposure. Eventually, all of it has to become something a system can act on: a plan, a budget line, an indicator, a sentence that can survive a government meeting. What unsettles me is how quickly the translation happens.

Governments need evidence. Budgets need categories. Somewhere, somebody has to put a number against a problem. Without that translation, suffering can be completely visible to the people living through it yet somehow invisible to the institutions meant to respond.

But a phrase occurred to me once and has bothered me ever since: making suffering legible to institutions.

What, exactly, has to happen before a life becomes legible?

A government cannot fund a woman saying, “I don’t know whether my son should stay here or leave.” But it can fund climate-resilient livelihoods.

It cannot put into a budget the fact that afternoons have slowly become unbearable, or that a household now arranges its day around heat in ways it never used to. But it may fund a heat-risk intervention.

Both sentences are true. That is what makes me uncomfortable.

Years ago, during a consultation in Northeast India, I met a woman whose story I remember precisely because nothing dramatic happened.

There was no flood that day. No destroyed home. No photograph of devastation.

She was talking about work. A fridge wasn’t holding its temperature reliably. The produce was spoiling faster. Certain tasks now needed to be done early in the morning. Her working day had shifted around the heat almost without anyone formally deciding that it should.

The thing she seemed to miss most wasn’t even something tangible.

It was predictability. She did not say “climate change.” She did not say “resilience.” She said, in effect, that things had become harder than they used to be. And while she was speaking, I noticed myself translating.

Energy access. Livelihood risk. Heat exposure. Resilience.

I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Those categories were useful. They were the vocabulary that might eventually make her problem visible to people with money and authority. But I remember feeling uneasy at how quickly they came. I had started categorising what she was telling me before I had quite finished listening to it. Somewhere along the way, I had become very good at converting people’s lives into language that could travel upward. Anyone who works in policy probably knows this feeling. An experience arrives in all its untidiness, and your mind begins sorting it.

Livelihood issue. Gender dimension. Energy constraint. Institutional gap. The category closes around the experience so neatly that, if you aren’t careful, you can mistake the neatness for understanding.

And yet categories are necessary. A country cannot write a plan containing millions of individual stories. A ministry cannot build a budget around every private fear. Public policy is inevitably an act of reduction. We gather lives that are unlike one another, find what they share, give the shared thing a name, and try to act on it.

But I have started wondering more about what disappears. Her week has to be translated several times before a national system can recognise it. By the time it becomes a programme or a budget line, it may finally be actionable, but it no longer quite resembles the life from which it came.

No one along the chain has necessarily done anything wrong. That is what troubles me most.

There is no obvious villain.

The person listening is trying to understand. The consultant is trying to translate. The official is trying to allocate limited resources. The ministry is trying to defend a budget. The state is trying to make decisions that apply to people it will never meet. Everyone may do their job correctly.

And something may still disappear. Climate change makes this problem particularly strange because so much of it is not initially lived as “climate change.” It is lived as a worse summer. A failed crop. A water tanker arriving more often. A power cut at the wrong hour. A road washed out again. A hospital becoming unbearable in May. A father wondering whether there is still enough work here for his son.

And this is where I have begun to think differently about the word resilience. Resilient cities. Resilient agriculture. Resilient communities. Resilient people.

It is almost always a compliment. But the longer I work around climate and disasters, the more I wonder what we are actually praising. People adjust because they have to. A household with resources installs better cooling, buys backup electricity, insures a crop, pays for water, moves work indoors. We call this preparedness. Prudence. Choice.

A household without those options adjusts too. Someone takes on debt. Someone migrates. A meal changes. An expense is postponed. Work begins before sunrise. A bad season is absorbed quietly because there is nowhere else for the loss to go. We call this resilience.

The difference sometimes feels less like capacity than privilege. Both households are reorganising themselves around a changing world. But only one gets to do so without having the reorganisation treated as evidence of vulnerability.

Perhaps this is what unsettles me most about the language of resilience: it can make endurance sound like a quality someone possesses rather than something circumstances have demanded from them.

There is also something strange about the identities our systems assign. A person has a difficult year, then becomes vulnerable, then a beneficiary, and finally, if things go well enough, resilient. I use all of these words. I am less certain than I used to be about what they do to the people they describe. 

India makes the question even harder because there is no single way to experience a changing climate here, even when policy requires us to speak as though there is. A heat wave in Delhi, flooding in Assam, a drying Himalayan spring, and an altered monsoon can eventually sit under the same heading: climate vulnerability. At a national level, perhaps they have to.

But no one lives at the national level. We live in a house, a body, a particular afternoon. Disaster gives us a before and an after. A photograph. A date. But much of climate change does not arrive like that. It arrives as inconvenience. Then adjustment. Then another adjustment. Then a way of living that would once have seemed unacceptable but has gradually acquired the dull familiarity of normal life. Sometime much later, an institution gives it a name.

I have become suspicious of the instinct to solve this tension too neatly. Better indicators matter. Better consultation matters. But neither changes the basic difficulty of trying to understand another person’s life from far away.

So, I return to the meeting room in Delhi. Someone has suggested the word resilience for a section heading. Someone else asks whether we can measure it. It is a reasonable question. I probably would have asked it myself. I still believe in the plan. I still believe in indicators. Numbers are not the opposite of care; sometimes they are the only way care survives contact with bureaucracy.

But I hear the word differently now. When someone says “resilience,” I find myself thinking first not about how we will measure it but about the person underneath it.

What did she change? What did she stop expecting? What became normal that should never have had to become normal?

And what did she lose before the rest of us arrived with a word for her ability to endure it?