Where Chivalry Went

On gentleness, small gestures, and the quiet ways care survives

Chivalry is dead.

That’s what someone told me. I was sitting in a Shatabdi at New Delhi Railway Station, dropping someone. I immediately looked around and watched men walking alongside their loved ones, holding luggage, calling out last-minute instructions, trying to slow down time in those final two minutes before the train moved.

“I don’t agree,” I said. “Maybe chivalry changed its costume.”

They smiled and replied, “Then where is it? I don’t see it anywhere.”

The train horn sounded. The platform shifted into motion. A thousand small gestures were unfolding at once. A father adjusting his daughter’s shawl. A husband passing a water bottle through the window. A son checking the seat number twice. A friend waving until the train left the platform, long after the person inside had stopped looking back.

Chivalry, as history describes it, belonged to medieval knights who followed a code of honor. Protect the weak. Speak with dignity. Stand with courage. Literature later dressed it as romance. Courtly love. Poems under moonlight. Roses and swords.

But life today does not offer grand gestures. It offers daily ones. Quiet ones. Unphotographed ones.

Khalil Gibran wrote, “Work is love made visible.”
If love can be seen in labor, perhaps chivalry can be seen in details.

Holding space when someone speaks.
Listening without preparing a reply.
Walking on the traffic side of the road.
Showing up when it is inconvenient.
Caring without wanting credit.

Maybe chivalry exists in how someone says, “Text me when you reach.”
Maybe it lives in the patience of waiting at a platform.
Maybe it breathes in the silence between two people when nothing needs to be proved.

My friend looked at me and asked, “So you think it still survives?”

I said, “If chivalry means gentleness, presence, and responsibility, then it survives every time someone chooses to care quietly.”

I got down. The train began to move. People started letting go of hands they did not want to let go of.

I waved at them and murmured,

Chivalry is not dead.
It simply stopped shouting.
It is now in how we stay.