Rhiya Ahir, the girl from Mumbai who dared to stop a police van with one hand, while it was raining, has become one of the defining images of the CJP protest.

The first time I saw this photo, I said to myself that I could never do that; I don’t have that level of courage to stand up in front of a police van to try and stop it.

The more I looked at the image as it went viral on social media, the more it made me think about what courage is. If you try to understand courage, it is not the absence of fear; courage is acting despite fear. So, courage is intrinsically linked to action. But it’s also not something that simple; it has its layers too.

What is courage?

If you look at the definition of courage by prominent psychology researchers Christopher R. Rate and Sternberg, it fits well here. Courage has three aspects: it is a voluntary action in pursuit of a worthwhile or noble goal that involves taking a risk.

Rhiya fulfilled all three aspects.

When asked about the incident, she told The Indian Express that she had acted purely out of instinct after she saw a van full of protestors being taken away. She didn’t think much about it at that moment. All she wanted was to stop the police from taking the protestors away, as they didn’t even have a memo for it.

But she admits that she was scared. Despite that, she stood there for 40 minutes in the rain, hoping to be an obstacle and hoping that the detainees would be released. She was successful.

So, courage is when the value or goal becomes more important than self-protection.

Why are some people courageous and most not?  

Because if you watch the video of Rhiya standing there and stopping the van, there were people around her who were shooting videos, taking photos, and chanting slogans, but most were doing it from the sidelines.  

Maybe a certain amount of courage exists in all of us. But what kind of situation brings that out of us depends on the sum total of all our life experiences, our beliefs and values, and whether we think it is important enough to give us the impetus to act courageously.  

In Rhiya’s case, she says that she did the Bombay thing. She also says that she belongs to a family of faujis and maybe it’s in her blood.  

Courage is definitely contagious.

What started with a group of people protesting in Delhi quickly spread to all parts of India. More and more people joined the protest every day. There was a collective courage that built up. Courage became a shared feeling that was felt from the protest grounds to social media.

Maybe that’s why courage is considered to be one of the six universal human virtues. And it was prominently displayed by the youth in this protest.

Why does courage stand out? Why do we applaud courage?

Because biologically humans are wired to protect themselves. That’s our basic survival instinct. When there is danger, self-preservation is our default response.

That’s why when you look at the photo of a young woman stopping a police van with one hand, that courage feels remarkable as it’s a deliberate choice made by her.

Perhaps that’s why photographs like these endure. They don’t just capture a moment in history. They quietly ask each of us: What would I have done if I had been standing there?