Feeling for others is a virtue no doubt. In fact, it is a rare ability to commiserate with others, to suffer for their sufferings, to weep for their tears. There are killers who cannot look their victims in the eye. The pilot of Enola Gay, who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, lost his mind when he realised its horror. Deshbondhu Chittaranjan Das gave away his wealth to the poor because he was able to ingest their pain. It works like magic. The shock waves travel from heart to heart, and create the vicarious sense of one man's pain in another man's passion.

Prince Siddharta sneaked out of the palace in the middle of the night, because he saw the harsh facts of old age, sickness, and death in others, which bothered him too much. Mahatma Gandhi changed from western couture into loincloth, because he wished to become one with his oppressed countrymen. The Christians believe that Jesus Christ was crucified for the sins of mankind. Great people have always suffered for others, which is the trade secret of leaders, prophets, saints and messiahs.

But then it also has its professional hazard. Feeling for others is of sound mind if taken in the right dosage. An overdose can be deadly. It can delude the mind with inordinate impulses, knocking down its own safeguards. Iris Chang, the 36-year-old Chinese American author, committed suicide last month by self-inflicted gunshot. "She felt other people's suffering so intensely, to the point that it made her suffer," said her friend Barbara Masin during a memorial service.

There is a twist of irony in her story. Everything looked picture perfect for Iris Chang, until she wrote a book, which catapulted her to fame in 1997 at the age of 29. In "The Rape of Nanking", she described how the people of Nanking were killed by the invading Japanese Army, who raped and killed more than 80,000 women. She recorded many accounts of this tragedy, narrating how fathers were forced to rape their daughters, sons were forced to rape their mothers, and pregnant women were eviscerated and nailed to the walls.

In that process Iris Chang crossed the line. She took things to heart and became emotionally involved in the tragic stories she wrote about. She transformed in her experience and gave in to bouts of depression, which got worse when she undertook to write about yet another tragedy, the infamous Baatan death march in the Philippines during World War II, which killed 20,000 U.S. soldiers.

"Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, not by the intellect", writes Herbert Spencer. Life is absorbed and appreciated through the five senses: see, hear, touch, taste and smell. Feeling is a complicated work, a sort of regression analysis of all the stimuli captured through the network of senses. You feel for a person, when he is deconstructed through the various senses and then reconstructed again in your thoughts and imagination. The feeling is as good as your opinion of another person.

For that matter, people always feel for each other and they always have opinions. You love another person, or you hate him. Either you feel happy for another person, or you feel sorry for him. You respect him, or you disrespect him, what you see, hear, smell, taste and touch, constantly scan the horizon and push you to judge people and objects around you.

The judging does not stop even when the scanning is gone. The Vietnam veterans in the United States carry the psychological scars of that war as they grapple with the right and wrong of what they had done. That is equally true for the victimiser and the victim. The Korean women who were forced to become sex slaves during the Second World War still demand that Japan should compensate for its atrocities. We still grate at the mention of 1971, because its memory is loaded with despicable horror.

When you nurse the sick, feed the hungry, and shelter the homeless, you do so because you feel for others. The Gestalt psychology believes that we are built to experience the structured whole as well as the individual sensations. It is like watching a coursing string of lights. Even though only one light lights at a time, the whole event contains relationships among the individual lights.

One flower does not smell the fragrance of another. One tree does not shed tears for another. One animal does not show consideration for another. Human race is but an exception to that rule, when bodies echo within bodies and hearts clamour within hearts, when the wind of emotions blows in one soul and the pendulum swings in another, when one person's tune resonates in another's strings.

So, feeling for others is very much a human thing, a rare type of osmosis when one living body absorbs the emotions and sentiments of another, and shares the joy and sorrow with him. Perhaps it is amongst the greatest mysteries of creation that one human being has the capacity to pulsate in another. One lives and breathes through another's love and hatred, rouses his feelings and drains his energy, gives him hope and brings him nightmare, as if two people are locked in the steps, figures and poses of an eternal tango.

Thomas Hardy expounds in Far from the Madding Crowd: " It is hard for a woman to define her feelings in language, which is chiefly made by men to express theirs." It is not enough to feel, unless one has the proper language to express that feeling. A cry or smile is a portrait of feeling that speaks for itself. You can tell if the person is either sad or happy, because he wears it on his face.

But feelings without expression are flowers without blossom. People write, speak, sing, play music, paint, dance, laugh, weep, scream, and shout, because they have to let go of their feelings like heat radiating from boiler. Lives churn, people turn, and hearts burn. In the great frenzy of the cosmic mystery, the secret lies in the myth of eternal return. All things repeat, again and again, making history like a quilt of stitched time.

What returns in that repetition is not man, but feelings of man. Pattern of sorrow, pattern of despair, pattern of hope and pattern of joy, subsumed within the larger patterns of life and death, create the illusion of coursing lights. The light switches on when there is feeling for others. It switches off when there is none. Good and evil, greatness and meanness, virtue and vice, peace and war, all things blissful, all things baneful, take turns on this world.

It all depends on one thing. Feeling for others. It cuts across eternity and multiplies your life. The finite becomes infinite. How? You become the person you feel, and feel the person he feels, just like your face in the mirror when its reflection is seen in another mirror. Feel for others. If cat has nine lives, it will give you more lives than many. Try it!

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.