A young man is dead at the bottom of a gorge, his fiancée and another man are in custody, and within hours of the news the internet had already held its trial, delivered its verdict, and moved on to the next outrage. The Ketan Agarwal case in Pune has become less a tragedy to grieve than a spectacle to consume, and I notice that the loudest voices are not asking what happened so much as confirming what they already believe about women, about love, about betrayal. I am not here to defend anyone or to pronounce on guilt that the courts have not yet established. I am here to ask a quieter and more uncomfortable question. What does the speed of our certainty reveal about us?
The facts we have, and the facts we are inventing
Let us be careful, because care is the first casualty of a viral case. Ketan Agarwal, a 25-year-old real estate director, died after falling into a gorge at Lohagad Fort on 18 June 2026. As police investigators have stated, his fiancée, Siya Goyal, and Chetan Chaudhary have been arrested, and both reportedly confessed during questioning. That is roughly the extent of what is established. Everything else, the motive, the inner life, the “kind of girl she is,” is being supplied by strangers who have never met her, on the strength of a screenshot. Even the victim’s own family, who have demanded the harshest punishment if guilt is proven, have framed it around proof, a discipline the timeline has abandoned.
A confession given in a police station is not a conviction, and under Indian law such a statement is treated with deep suspicion for good reason. Between an allegation and a verdict sits the entire apparatus of justice, which exists precisely because human beings are so easily certain and so often wrong. Yet the public mind does not wait. It fills the gap between fact and feeling with story, and it almost always reaches for the story it already wanted to tell.
The Verdict Reflex
I want to give a name to the thing I keep watching us do, because naming it makes it harder to do unconsciously. I call it the Verdict Reflex: the nervous-system urge to reach a moral conclusion about a stranger faster than we could possibly have understood them, because certainty soothes us and ambiguity does not.
The Verdict Reflex is not stupidity. It is biology. The brain treats unresolved threat as a cost, and an unexplained death involving love and money is threat dressed as gossip. The amygdala, the brain’s rapid alarm system, does not wait for evidence; it wants a category, friend or foe, innocent or guilty, so the body can stop bracing. Judgement, in that moment, is not justice. It is relief. We are not condemning her to protect him. We are condemning her to settle ourselves.
The grief post, and why it disturbed us so much
The detail that travelled fastest was the Instagram tribute, the grieving words posted after his death that now read very differently in light of the arrest. People called it chilling, and I understand why. But sit with what actually unsettled you there. It was not only her. It was the discovery that a person can present one face to the world while another life runs underneath, and that the gap can be invisible until it isn’t.
That is frightening because it is universal. Every one of us curates. We post the holiday and not the argument that preceded it, the promotion and not the panic attack in the car park. The distance between the persona, the self we perform, and the self we actually are, is the ordinary human condition, not a marker of the criminal. The masks we wear are not always sinister; mostly they are just frightened. When we recoil at her curated grief, part of what we are recoiling from is the reminder that our own performed selves are thinner than we like to think.
Ask yourself this, honestly and only in your own head. When you judged her, were you reaching for the truth, or for the comfort of being on the right side of it? What in your own story would look damning if a stranger saw only the screenshots? And if you are certain you could never be misread, where does that certainty come from?
The harder seeing
There is a version of compassion that is really just excuse-making, and I have no interest in it. Saying “try to understand” is not the same as saying “it is acceptable.” If the allegations are proven, a man was killed, and nothing about anyone’s pain makes that anything other than a catastrophe for which there must be accountability. Holding that line is not cruelty. It is the floor beneath any serious conversation about human behaviour.
But there is also a version of judgement that is really just laziness, and that is the one going viral. The mature position is the difficult one in the middle: to refuse to excuse, and to refuse to flatten. To let the courts establish what happened, to let the victim’s family grieve without their loss becoming our entertainment, and to resist the seductive idea that a stranger’s life can be fully understood from a single damning frame. Real understanding and real accountability are not opposites. The people shouting loudest tend to manage neither.
We do not rush to judge because we love justice. We rush to judge because certainty feels safer than sitting with how little we actually know.
What this asks of you, not of her
I keep returning, in my own practice, to a simple discipline. Before forming a verdict on anyone, I ask whether I am seeking to understand them or to be done with them. The Verdict Reflex always wants the second. Growth lives in the first. You can hold someone fully accountable for an act and still accept people as more complex than your worst reading of them, and that combination, accountability without contempt, is one of the rarest and most adult capacities a person can build. It is also, not coincidentally, the foundation of every relationship you have, including the one in which you are the one being judged.
A real estate director died in Pune, and the law will do its slow, unglamorous work of establishing what happened. The faster work, the one that belongs to us, is harder to measure and more important to attempt: to notice the moment our certainty arrives, and to ask what it is protecting us from.
If you want to sit with this rather than scroll past it, take one judgement you reached this week about a person you do not really know, and write down what you actually knew versus what you assumed. The gap is where your real growth is. And if you would like to do that work with company, my door is open for a quiet fifteen-minute conversation.
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