Scene 1: The Decision to Go Public Until now, their recovery had been private. Quiet. Root-like. The unposted moment, the langar, the eulogy, the ritual, the hand on the shoulder—these were acts of healing in small rooms. But something had shifted after Chapter 22’s “cellular alarm.” They had begun receiving messages from strangers. Aarav’s DMs were not the usual “bro, which club?” anymore. They were: “Can you tell me how to stop scrolling at night?” “I ignored my grandmother for five years. She’s alive. What do I do now?” “My husband and I live like roommates. How do I break the transaction?” “I feel guilty even resting. Why?” “I don’t want to compete anymore. Am I weak?” Meera had received a message from a woman she didn’t even like from her corporate circle: “I saw your post about eating together. I cried. My mother eats last. She always eats last.” Kabir received a message from his lead developer at 2 AM: “Sir, I went home early today. My father was awake. We drank tea together. It felt like oxygen.” It wasn’t a trend. It was a thirst. Dr. Farah had been observing something clinically fascinating: the pain was not in the young people’s “weakness.” The pain was in their mismatch—between their biology (made for tribe, touch, story, festivals, interdependence) and their environment (built for speed, solitude, performance, consumption). Shukla Master called it Sanskriti–Shock. “Don’t blame the children for drowning,” he said. “We poured the water.” Kabir spoke the uncomfortable truth. “We outsourced parenting to algorithms,” he said quietly. “We gave them the internet and then moralized at them for living online.” Meera added, “We lost the courage to live our own culture with dignity. We abandoned our festivals and replaced them with sales. We replaced elders with influencers.” Aarav, who once treated values like old furniture, said the harshest line: “We didn’t respect our own parents. Why would they respect us?” Silence followed. Not shame. Clarity. Then Dr. Farah made the call: “We are going to reverse the flow. If poison is coming through screens, let medicine come through screens.”