A child needed medicine. An argument began between the husband and wife. The wife called her family and they killed the husband. In Lucknow, a woman was shot dead by her estranged husband. He then killed his own sister, and turned the gun on himself. Why? They were getting divorced.I don’t know about you, but I cannot stop thinking about the terrifying idea that seems to hover around both these horrific crimes: when did being hurt become an excuse to hurt someone else? When did I am in pain become therefore, you must pay? Because that, ultimately, is the monstrous entitlement beneath so much violence.Not always the same kind of entitlement. Not always exercised by the same kind of person, or directed at the same gender. But the logic is chillingly familiar. You hurt me. You embarrassed me, rejected me, disagreed with me. And therefore — you must suffer.The argument could be about a child’s medicine. Money. Infidelity. Divorce. Custody. A WhatsApp message. A reel. A perceived insult. A refusal to obey. The trigger changes. The underlying belief does not. Somewhere, a human being decides that his emotional pain is so significant, so sacred, so all-consuming that another person’s right to live becomes secondary to it.And that is what I find impossible to comprehend. Because pain is not permission. Anger is not authority. Humiliation is not a hunting licence. And heartbreak, betrayal, rejection or rage — however devastating — are not death sentences you are entitled to hand out to another human being.Yet increasingly, it feels as though we are living in a world where people have lost the ability to sit with discomfort. Everything must be answered. Every insult must be avenged, every rejection corrected. Every disagreement must have a winner. And if you cannot control the situation, then perhaps you can control the person. Or, destroy them. That is the terrifying escalation. We have become extraordinarily good at talking about feelings and extraordinarily bad at managing them.We know the vocabulary of trauma. We know our triggers, how to announce our boundaries, articulate our pain and demand accountability. But some of us seem to have confused having feelings with being entitled to act upon every feeling we have.You are allowed to be furious, devastated, feel betrayed. You are allowed to scream into a pillow, leave a marriage, block a number, seek therapy, go to court, walk away, cry until your eyes swell shut, spend three months in bed watching bad TV and questioning every decision you have ever made.But you are not allowed to kill someone because you are angry, or to destroy someone because they destroyed your heart. You are not allowed to decide that because another person caused your suffering, their life now belongs to you. This should not even need saying, but clearly, it does.For women, this entitlement has a long and ugly history. A woman leaves a marriage, and suddenly her husband believes her decision is an assault on his masculinity. She rejects a man, and he believes it is humiliation. A woman chooses another life — and the man she has left behind believes that her freedom is something for which she must be punished.This is why so much violence against women is not about love. It’s about ownership. It’s the belief that if I cannot have you, no one can. That after everything I have done for you, how dare you leave? That my suffering is your responsibility.Horrifyingly, that rage does not stop with the woman. It spills over. Onto sisters. Mothers. Children. Anyone standing nearby. But this particular sickness is not limited to men or to violence against women. And, of course, violence does not become less violent because the perpetrator is a woman.A human life does not become less valuable because the person who takes it has also suffered. And that is the principle we must refuse to compromise on. Your pain explains you. It does not excuse you.Say it again. Your pain may explain why you’re angry, broken, why you said something cruel. It may help us understand the circumstances that brought you to the darkest moment of your life. But it does not give you ownership over another person’s body.Words matter because they reveal the moral universe we are building inside our heads. A universe in which suffering must be balanced like an account book. You hurt me by 10 points. Therefore, I must hurt you by 10, 20, 100, until the scales feel even.But they never do. Violence does not heal humiliation. Murder does not repair betrayal. Revenge does not resurrect dignity. It simply creates more grief.So perhaps we need to start teaching something more important than anger management. We need to teach emotional humility. The understanding that however intensely you feel something, you are still not the centre of the moral universe.My pain is mine to heal. Your life is yours to live. Somewhere between those two truths lies the line that separates suffering from savagery. We must learn never to cross it.— The writer is an acclaimed author