The Noise We Learned Not to Hear

The Latur earthquake did not arrive with warning.

On 30 September 1993, at 3:56 a.m., the earth moved beneath Marathwada with a force of 6.4 on the Richter scale. In less than a minute, over 9,000 people were dead. Entire villages collapsed while people slept. What unsettled scientists most was not just the scale of destruction, but its location. This was not a high-risk seismic zone. The fault lay deep, ancient, and supposedly stable.

In time, science did what it does best. It explained the mechanics: an over-pressurised fault in Precambrian rock, possibly stressed further by reservoir-induced seismicity from the Terna River project. The explanation was rigorous, measurable, and complete. And yet, alongside these explanations, another conversation surfaced, quieter, uncomfortable, and quickly dismissed.

It spoke of violence that had become routine.

Marathwada, like many regions in India, had long housed intensive animal slaughter. By the early 1990s, India was already among the world's largest producers of meat and leather. Today, globally, tens of billions of animals are slaughtered every year for food alone. In India, millions are killed daily, efficiently, legally, and out of sight. Slaughterhouses are designed to minimise delay, not suffering. Pain is processed, not questioned. No serious person claimed this caused the earthquake. I certainly didn't. Science does not bend to symbolism. During my weekend reading, I saw a research paper linking this with the cause.

But the question that followed refused to leave me: What happens to a society that learns to live comfortably alongside systematic suffering?

Because violence does not need chaos to thrive. It thrives best when it is regulated, profitable, and invisible.

Over the years, I began to notice how this logic repeats itself everywhere. We normalise harm to animals because it feeds markets. We normalise environmental destruction because it fuels growth. We normalise human exploitation because it improves efficiency. We call it necessary. We call it unavoidable. We call it progress.

These are not small trades carried out at the margins of society. They are organised industries with balance sheets, lenders, insurers, and shareholders. When suffering becomes an entry in the export ledger, it stops appearing as suffering and begins to look like achievement.

I began to place these figures beside the market we invest in. Out of India's listed market capitalisation of roughly ₹461 lakh crore, about ₹12.6 lakh crore sits in businesses tied to alcohol, tobacco, pesticides, gambling, leather, and similar activities, barely three percent of the whole universe. The realisation was unsettling: stepping away from these industries does not abandon opportunity. It merely asks that growth come from the remaining ninety-seven percent, technology, healthcare, financial services, consumer staples, manufacturing, and renewables, businesses whose profits are not built on organised harm.

If the cost of conscience is only a sliver of the market, what exactly are we afraid of losing?

Comfort, perhaps. Familiarity. The habit of believing that every profitable activity deserves capital simply because it is legal.

Arithmetic Meeting Ethics

Jan Fund grew from that pause. Not from anger, not from symbolism, but from arithmetic meeting ethics. Excluding ₹12.6 lakh crore of market cap is not withdrawal from the economy. It is a choice about which part of the economy should compound with our savings. The data did not weaken the idea of non-violence. It gave it structure.

Once harm acquires quarterly growth rates, responsibility can no longer remain abstract. The fund is my attempt to answer that responsibility in the language I know, allocation, discipline, and patience, without pretending that returns require you to finance everything the market offers.

Jain philosophy had warned against this long before modern economics gave it vocabulary. Ahimsa was never just about refraining from physical harm. It was about refusing to participate in systems that make harm ordinary. Because once violence becomes routine, empathy becomes optional.

Two Truths at Once

What disturbed me about the Latur question was not superstition. It was what it revealed about us. How quickly we demand proof before accepting ethical responsibility. How easily we say, "There is no direct consequence," as if morality requires immediate punishment to matter. Anekantwada taught me to hold two truths at once without discomfort. The earthquake was geological. The violence was ethical. One explains the earth. The other explains us. Denying either is intellectual laziness.

Right faith means nothing without right knowledge. Right knowledge means nothing without right conduct.

Once you see how harm compounds, across animals, ecosystems, and eventually humans, continuing unchanged is no longer ignorance. It is choice.

A Refusal, Not a Reaction

Jan Principles Approach did not begin as a reaction to an earthquake. It began as a refusal to keep calling violence "normal" simply because it is legal, distant, or profitable. It is built on the understanding that harm does not need to explode to be real. Most of it accumulates quietly, until societies forget what restraint even looks like.

This fund exists to support ways of living that reduce harm rather than justify it. To act without certainty, without domination, and without spectacle. To recognise that when suffering becomes industrial, responsibility becomes collective. I no longer ask whether violence causes disaster. I ask something far more unsettling:

What kind of people do we become when we organise our lives around it? How can we align our faith with our investing? Jan Fund is my response, not emotional, not ideological, but deliberate. A commitment to non-violence not as symbolism, but as structure, practice, and accountability.