Anton Chekhov once attended a dinner party in Continental Hotel to celebrate the anniversary of the abolition of serfdom. It was 19 February 1861. It was cold and livid weather outside, while in the hall, elite groups drank wine and toasted their freedom. The coachmen were standing outside in the street in the bitter cold, awaiting their celebrating masters, while the liveried waiters circled round the tables. Chekhov scribbled in his diary:

“To dine, drink champagne, make a racket, and deliver speeches about national consciousness, the conscience of the people, freedom, and such things, while slaves in tail-coats are running round your tables, veritable serfs, and your coachmen wait outside in the street, in the bitter cold — that is lying to the Holy Ghost.”

This note came to me one evening with a light drizzle tapping the window glass, to clear the fog I was sipping black coffee. I paused on these lines. Chekhov even a sensitive artist, whose characters striked in the light’s pace, saw the contradiction between the celebration of freedom and the persistence of social hierarchy. But while I admire his moral insight, I also felt a ripple of disagreement. Waiters and coachmen about whom he had mentioned, though still serving, were no longer surfs, but the paid labourers. They were not bound to the land or owned by masters. Afte duty they went to their homes—free, if not powerful. In a world of partial truths, should we not accept the slightly distorted condition over complete bondage? Chekov’s words, piercing as they were, carry the spikes of conscience perhaps too burdened to allow any celebration. I see it as a creamy layer of milk—the beautiful excess of a great artist—which is hard to heart. It is not a useful lens fro a reformer.

This dilemma—between moral idealism and practical realism—seems to be recurring now, in another form.
Recently I read a group of writes launching a signature campaign to condemn Israel and accused of genocide. The letters were impassioned, the vocabulari morally charged, But something essential was missing. The inciting element—Hamas’s sudden and brutal attack, which reignited the fire was carefully omitted or minimized. It was as if the history of suffering started from the retaliatory strike, not from the hand that first lit the fuse. This type of attitude is prevalent in India also, especially in the past when writers started ‘award-returning campaigns.
This is where I began to worry. Writers have a duty to stand with the wounded, but not to amputate the context. When a writer forgets who struck the match, their fire becomes one of performances, not principle. In such moments, outrage can turn into a gesture more theatrical rather than ethical. Justice can’t be served by slogans and signatures that erase provocation.
Just as Chekhov struggled to digest the aristocratic liberals, today’s writers must also pause and ask: is our signature an act of justice or of alignment? Are we speaking out of depth, or out of a collective momentum? Not all silence is cowardice—sometimes it is a struggle to retain nuance in the world that has no patience for it.

Literature and conscience are not enemies, but they demand balance. Chekhov teaches us to see the cracks even in celebration. But life reminds us that cracks are not always crimes—they are part of movement, of messy progress. Between a serf’s chained ankle and a waiter’s silent coat, there is a difference, even if the distance feels insufficient. The role of a writer, then, is not just to feel outrage, but to measure it—to refine it into a thought that holds both the pain and the proportions of the truth.