India, June 13 -- It looks different to every person who fights it.

In Japan and South Korea, people are so lonely, they may die and not be discovered for days. (In Japan, a country of 124 million, over 58,000 such deaths occurred in 2024 alone.)

In the US and parts of Europe, so isolated are some people's lives that this has happened in the workplace.

In India, amid the teeming millions, there is the loneliness in a crowd that Edward Hopper captured so evocatively, in his paintings of modern American life. There is also the loneliness of being. the only Dalit, a differently abled person, mentally challenged, or simply the head of a household in a system where such a man is expected to have all the answers and show none of the strain....