Peace has no warranty or a customer care number: Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri

At the India Today Conclave South in Kochi on September 30, Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri, president of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, began by questioning the very premise of his session, ‘Peace in a Broken World’. If the world is broken, he asked, then who broke it, and is it still under warranty? He offered an answer too: human beings broke it, and only human beings can repair it.

Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri argued that perfect peace is an illusion. No individual, nation or political party can be wholly truthful or non-violent, so peace can only ever be relative. Forget that, he warned, even every conference is “chasing a mirage with a PowerPoint”. Thus, his simple working rule: live and let live.

Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri read four wars as a lesson—Kurukshetra, Ashoka's Kalinga campaign, Operation Sindoor and today's conflicts—spelling out WARS as “Woe, Awakening, Response and Selfishness”. He called the Indian military’s May 2025 Operation Sindoor as a measured response that halted before a full-scale war while insisting that the grief of victims’ families did not end with the ceasefire declared between India and Pakistan.

Citing peace scholar Johan Galtung, Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri separated negative peace, that is the silence of guns, from positive peace, which to him is the presence of justice and dignity. He then turned the lens inward: caste discrimination, violence against women, outrage-driven television and social-media misinformation all feed conflict at home.

Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri compared the 2025 global military spending of nearly $2.9 trillion against a 23 per cent fall in global development aid the same year. His peace prescriptions for nations: keep talking, follow through on agreements, rebuild, protect frontline volunteers and pursue justice with compassion. For individuals, he offered three questions before forwarding anything about a conflict. Is it true? Is it fair? Will it help people understand each other?

Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri closed with the Japanese traditional art of kintsugi, urging the audience to fill the world's cracks with the gold of compassion.

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SESSION HIGHLIGHTS | Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri

• “When I first saw the title of this session, my first question was: who broke it? And is it still under warranty? Unfortunately, the warranty expired somewhere around the Stone Age, and there is no customer care number.”
• “Negative peace without positive peace is like a pressure cooker with its whistle blocked. It stays quiet for a while and then everyone in the kitchen finds out at once.”
• “I sometimes suspect that if peace suddenly broke out, a few news channels would have to shut down for lack of content.”
• “Each of us carries in our pocket a weapon of mass distraction. It can spread suspicion or it can spread understanding.”
• “A person at war inside will eventually find someone outside to fight.”

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