Early in the twenty-third episode of the Deep Down Show, Barun tells a story that was still puzzling him while he prepared for the recording. A woman he knows holds a black belt with a degree, the kind of fighter he says he would feel safe standing beside. She and her boyfriend were riding home on a bike along a road with only fields and jungle on either side when eight or ten men surrounded them and demanded money. She handed over cash, then her helmet as security for the rest. No punch was thrown. "আরে ভাই, তুই এত ফাইট শিখেছিস," Barun remembers thinking. Why did she give up?
His guest is Gourav Banerjee, founder of Rezilienz Empowerment Private Limited, a karate practitioner of some twenty years who now runs safety training for schools, colleges and corporates. His answer reframes the episode: what she did on that road was self-defence. She assessed what she could afford to lose, put her life ahead of her helmet, and walked away unharmed.
Over eighty-three minutes the two work through what safety means in a year when, as Barun notes, rape and murder are daily headlines, from a recent incident in Durgapur to last year's RG Kar case. They cover fear, myths, weapons, the definition of a stranger, women's safety, the law, and a long detour through the origins of martial arts, from Kalaripayattu to karate and from Bengal's lathi khela to Sherlock Holmes. It is a বাংলা পডকাস্ট about সেলফ ডিফেন্স that spends surprisingly little time on fighting, and that is the point.
Why trained fighters lose street fights
Gourav grew up in the Dooars, in Jalpaiguri district, and practised karate from childhood. He came to Kolkata for work in an unrelated profession, kept training, and ran a small class mainly to cultivate his own practice. He never imagined a career in it.
The street changed that. He saw, and was part of, real fights where years of technique did nothing. "যেগুলো আমি শিখতাম সেগুলো তো এইভাবে কাজ করছে না," he says: what I learned was not working like this. He began reading psychology and talking to mental-health professionals, and reached a diagnosis. The real problem in a fight is not technique but fear, a survival response wired into the brain since we lived in caves.
He describes accomplished fighters being beaten by boys with no training. The untrained boy has a single-dimensional thought: I will hit. The ring fighter is thinking about his family and what happens at home if this goes wrong, and that hesitation loses the fight.
আগে নিজের ভয়টাকে নিজের মাইন্ড থেকে জয় করতে হবে।
Gourav Banerjee
First, conquer the fear in your own mind. That is why roughly 70 percent of what his organisation teaches is mental: situational awareness, fear management, and what he calls target hardening, meaning which body language makes one of five people on a street the attacker's choice. The same psychology, he adds, is why people fall for the scams happening everywhere right now.
Awareness, Avoidance, Action
Gourav's team adds an SQ, a Safety Quotient, to the familiar IQ, and its method follows three steps in strict order. Awareness: read the situation. Avoidance: if there is trouble somewhere, you do not need to go and see. Action, always last.
Applied to Barun's black belt, the assessment is simple. Surrounded in an unknown place, she had to decide what she could compromise to stay alive. Talking fast, folding her hands and leaving is expertise. "এক্সপার্ট ডাজেন্ট মিন যে ওইখানে তুমি মারামারি করবে," he says: being an expert does not mean you fight there, it means your intellect is sharp enough to de-escalate. Only if the men had stopped demanding things and physically come at her would the scene move to the skill test. The objective is never to harm someone and feel victorious; that, he says, is ego development and nothing else.
Myths and "self-defence literacy"
The first question new students ask is whether they will learn the eye-catching moves from films, the South Indian hero who flips ten cars, or unlock some hidden power to flatten ten men. Gourav answers this daily, which is why the first layer of his curriculum is education. He calls it self-defence literacy, and says even people running institutions cannot grasp that the training is not a belt programme.
Is that boring, Barun asks? For people arriving with movie expectations, perhaps. But Gourav pitches self-defence as a life skill like swimming or driving: in a group of ten boys, the two who have such skills are treated differently. Someone who knows how to fight, he argues, faces an interview board or office politics with a different perspective. It puts you ahead of the game.
One story worth a hundred
Asked for a case where training changed an outcome, Gourav tells of a female student who joined while surviving years of domestic violence, serious abuse and assault. As he notes, in our society not everyone can walk into a police station. His advice was to prepare herself physically, mentally and financially. She joined a nursing course. About six months later she phoned him.
স্যার, ফাইনালি আমি ওই অ্যানিমাল থেকে বেরিয়ে এসেছি।
Gourav Banerjee's student
Sir, I have finally come out from that animal. She had told her husband, eye to eye, that next time she would answer first and the police would come after. She is now an instructor with the organisation. For Gourav, that one story is worth a hundred. The legal side of marriage and abuse gets a very different treatment in the episode with advocate Nandini Bhattacharjee on men's rights and marriage law.
Why Ma Kali carries a khadga
The recording took place the day before Kali Puja, and Gourav says he speaks from a personal place. Every one of our gods and goddesses holds a weapon; they are well equipped and ready for battle, and none offers only abhaya, the gesture of reassurance, with nothing in the other hand. Just as people have creative expression through dance or song, he argues, humans have a combative expression that should not be deleted.
He tells the story of the village snake that terrified everyone until a sadhu told it to stop biting. It stopped biting and stopped hissing, and soon nobody feared it. When the sadhu returned he said: I told you not to bite. I never told you not to hiss. Knowing when to switch, Gourav says, is what stops you becoming a target from every angle. Devotion is not enough; alongside sattva we need some rajas.
He reads Kali's khadga as more than a blade: it also cuts the ষড়রিপু, the six enemies within. The balance of Shakti and Shiva, destruction and creation, runs through the universe and through each of us, and cultivating both forces is, in his words, the real self-defence training.
Your sharpest weapon is your intellect
The gods all carry a weapon, so should you? Gourav's answer is that the human being's greatest weapon is the intellect, sharper than any blade. A person cornered by five men in a dark lane can use a phone, or pretend that friends are walking just behind. He is not encouraging anyone to go out with a knife.
তুমি তোমার বুদ্ধিকে চাকুর মত করো, যাতে তুমি প্রত্যেকটা সিচুয়েশনকে কাটতে পারো।
Gourav Banerjee
Make your intellect like a knife, so you can cut through every situation. Within what the law permits his team does teach some tools, but a knife is a poor defence in an age when, as he puts it, the threat is on your phone and your PC. Barun adds his own extensions: the bangle on his wrist, the keys in his pocket.
The training order at Rezilienz reflects this. It begins with the inner battle, knowing your own vulnerabilities and strengths, before any opponent appears. Then come multiple attackers, then everyday objects, a mobile phone or a water bottle, as extensions of the body. If you know the weak points of the human body, he says, almost anything becomes a weapon.
He also dismantles a myth Barun has heard, that walking silently through a dark alley keeps you off an attacker's radar. Violence is either spontaneous or premeditated; a pickpocket may strike at random or pick his target in advance, and silence protects no one. What works is avoidance. We take shortcuts to save time, so take the long cut through a well-lit area. If the shortcut is unavoidable, keep the phone or bottle in hand and make a mock call: where are you, come quickly.
Who is a stranger?
Barun's definition is the obvious one: someone I do not know. Gourav asks him to rethink it. We are raised never to accept food from the person in the next seat, yet a large share of crime is committed by people the victim knows, the husband in domestic violence, the neighbour of many years.
His alternative uses the two of them. Barun and Gourav are colleagues. One day Gourav suggests coffee; Barun has never seen him in a cafe, so his awareness should rise slightly, without becoming robotic. After coffee Gourav offers a lift home; Barun has judged him by decent office behaviour but has never seen him drive. Every time someone takes you into a different space, the definition of stranger changes. Gourav adds that strangers have helped him enormously in life while people he knew let him down. Barun agrees: he chats and shares food on trains and buses, and once gave 250 or 300 rupees to two boys from Bardhaman who could not afford to eat; eight or nine years on, one has finished college, holds a job and is still in touch.
The harder question is family. How does a child know when a father or brother has become a stranger, especially when relatives say it is a family matter? Gourav's reply is that the stranger element lives inside known people too. The moment a father does such a thing, count him outside the designation: he was a father once, he is not one now. The cure is literacy from the elementary level, from the day a child understands that this is my body. He compares it to polio, which India beat by making people literate about it. Barun admits he first heard the phrase good touch, bad touch only four or five years ago, around age 26 to 28, while shooting a documentary on rape for his own Inspiring Goodness channel, which also made a short film called Happy Rape Day.
"সেফটি নিড আছে সবার"
When Barun raises women's safety, Gourav questions the framing.
আলাদা করে ছেলেদের সেফটি বা মেয়েদের সেফটি এই কথাগুলো যতদিন আমরা বলতে থাকবো, ততদিন সমাজে একটা পোলারাইজেশন থেকে যাবে।
Gourav Banerjee
As long as we speak of boys' safety and girls' safety separately, a polarisation stays: girls' safety implies girls are attacked, therefore boys attack, therefore enmity. Better to say everyone has a safety need, including genders beyond the two, and to empower whoever feels vulnerable in a specific situation. A woman returning from work at night can arrange a check-in call home; that beats a generic women's safety programme.
Barun counters with the numbers as he sees them: in 80 to 90 percent of rape cases the victim is a woman and the attacker a man. Gourav answers with a ship crossing an ocean. It does not treat every creature as an enemy, but it carries measures for the few that attack. Teach a girl the skill from childhood the way you teach her to swim, without judgement. But self-defence alone cannot fix this. "ছেলেরা শত্রু নয়, ওই অ্যানিমালিস্টিক নেচারটা শত্রু," he says: men are not the enemy, the animalistic nature is, and it can live in anyone. Cultural change is needed on both sides, including work on how a person becomes a rapist. When Barun suggests আসুরিক instead of পাশবিক, Gourav agrees.
He points at the family too. A girl told from childhood that she will soon be married off is being identified as a body by her own home. Tell her instead that she was not born only for marriage, that she has much to do and an intellect to sharpen.
Scapegoats, strength and the mirror
In a passage he flags as personal opinion, Gourav notes that the animals we sacrifice are the voiceless ones, the goat and the hen, never the tiger, which cannot be tamed. People attack whoever seems weak. Growing your own unique identity, he argues, is the real self-defence training, and posture is part of it: students learn a non-aggressive stance, because squaring up signals you came to fight, but a permanent I-want-no-trouble stance signals that you can never fight back.
On the thin man who gets mocked, Gourav speaks from experience; he was very thin, with shirts that did not fit. His answer is that a cheetah and an elephant never meet in battle, because each has its own domain. Find where your anatomy excels, run a marathon, and the boy who mocked you will look at you differently. Nobody mocks Hardik Pandya for being thin, Gourav notes, because he has proved himself on the field. Gym or martial arts, then? Look in the mirror, Gourav says, ask who you want to see in ten years, Bruce Lee or a bodybuilder, and join accordingly.
What the law allows
Barun worries about people who hear self-defence and think it means hit first and leave. Without citing sections, Gourav explains the principle behind the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which replaced the IPC and CrPC: answer a bare-handed attack with a knife and you have intensified beyond what the law protects. The aim is resolution, not jail. He uses the very common road-rage scene of one car bumping another, a problem he says is rising and one his organisation now trains people on. Start verbal, avoid, and only if it becomes life-threatening do you have the full right to defend yourself; if it is out of hand, go to the police. Conventional martial arts never taught him how to apply a punch to a situation; self-defence simplifies it, sometimes to a single slap taught from four or five angles.
From Kalaripayattu to karate, and lathi khela to Sherlock Holmes
The longest detour is history, and Gourav's organisation recently started a vertical exploring the roots of martial arts and the people who still keep them. Once, he says, every district in India had its own uncodified martial form; whatever way you hit was your art. Karate, by contrast, is codified, with a syllabus.
Kalaripayattu, the South Indian art, is linked to the Buddhist scholar Bodhidharma, who travelled to China by the South China Sea route and, at the Shaolin Temple, added mental and physical training to the curriculum. Scholars believe Kalaripayattu blended with native Chinese arts into Shaolin Kung Fu. Gourav tracks a word alongside: Sanskrit ধ্যান became Pali jhan, then Chinese Chan, then Japanese Zen. Later, Chinese traders in Okinawa mixed with the islanders and evolved a form inspired by the white crane, which became karate, meaning empty hand.
On Bengal's লাঠি খেলা he stresses he is a reader, not a practitioner. In his telling the Baro Bhuiyan kings kept lathial forces, and the Kolkata Police, created in the Victorian era, was inspired by lathi khela to adopt a six-foot lathi for mob control, because a swinging stick that long moves a crowd automatically. The practice travelled to England and fed into Bartitsu, the style behind the fighting scenes in the Sherlock Holmes stories and films, where Holmes swings a grandfather's cane. Bartitsu, Gourav says, mixed a Japanese art with Indian lathi khela.
Barun, who went to RSS shakha regularly as a schoolboy and learned lathi and musti-yuddha there, had never connected it to martial arts. Why did these forms fade? Anything that survives must change with the age, Gourav says, and nobody carried these arts forward; today wars are nuclear or cyber, not fought with six-packs. Kings banned practitioners, arts stayed within hereditary families, and the families drifted into other professions without structured teaching. He wants self-defence made a mandatory subject, and reminds Barun that Bengal's Swadeshi revolutionaries were as strong in body as in mind, practising musti-yuddha, exercise and yoga, while Rishi Aurobindo and Netaji Subhas Bose called for rajoguna. The decline of physicality, he says, is only forty or fifty years old.
Physical, mental, cyber
Until recently Rezilienz worked only on physical safety. Gourav says the team realised that dependence on virtual space is growing, and so is manipulation there. He is not a cyber expert; the organisation has people who are. The model now asks you to protect yourself physically, mentally and in cyber space; there is no 100 percent, but the best care keeps you ahead of the game. The DDS episode with cyber-security expert Abhishek Mitra goes deep on that third layer.
The organisation targets schools, colleges and corporates, because one institution reaches many people at once, and has moved from teaching to teaching plus consultation: a school has separate needs for children, faculty and infrastructure, down to an escape plan for a natural calamity. Children fill in assessment forms with their parents to flag where their safety feels compromised. A product vertical is developing a safety umbrella, on the logic that Indians love umbrellas: it swings like a baton, has an LED light and a glass breaker, will get GPS, and will be priced for a middle-class budget. The mission is to make ten crore Indians safety-aware by 2030.
Who is Gourav Banerjee
Gourav Banerjee is the founder of Rezilienz Empowerment Private Limited, which its description calls India's first integrated safety ecosystem spanning cyber security, digital intelligence and human resilience. He is from the Dooars in Jalpaiguri district, has practised karate and other martial arts for around twenty years, and came to Kolkata for work in a different profession before street experience and a study of fear pushed him to build self-defence training for everyone, not only children and college students. He calls the organisation a shared effort rather than his own, and closes by refusing the label of domain expert.
Why this conversation matters
Most safety talk in Bengal is a list of don'ts: do not go out after eight, do not take food from strangers, learn karate. This episode tests each against real situations and finds them wanting. It moves self-defence from the fist to the mind, replaces the stranger with the changing space, and asks men and women to fight the same animalistic nature rather than each other. It also recovers a history, from Kalaripayattu to lathi khela, that most Bengalis never learned. Barun's closing line sums up the spirit: fighter, never struggler. The awareness and avoidance layers here can be used tomorrow, and for anyone raising a child, the section on literacy and family is worth hearing twice. For another story of ordinary people building safety from nothing, see Karimul Haque, the Bike Ambulance Dada of Jalpaiguri.
Frequently asked questions
Does learning martial arts mean you are safe on the street?
Not by itself, says Gourav Banerjee. He has seen big ring fighters come home beaten because a fighter thinks about family and consequences while the untrained attacker has one single-dimensional thought. Around 70 percent of his organisation's training is mental: fear management, situational awareness and how attackers choose targets.
What are the three steps of self-defence in this episode?
Awareness, Avoidance and Action, in that order. First assess the situation, then avoid trouble wherever possible (take the long, well-lit route instead of the dark shortcut), and only when someone physically comes at you does fighting skill enter the picture.
What should you do if you are surrounded and have no weapon?
Gourav says the human being's greatest weapon is the intellect. Decide what you can compromise (a helmet or wallet, never your life), de-escalate by talking, use your phone to fake a call so attackers think others are coming, and treat everyday objects like a water bottle or your phone as extensions of your hand.
Who counts as a stranger according to Gourav Banerjee?
Anyone who takes you into a space where you have never seen them before. A colleague you know at the office is a stranger in his car, because you have never seen him drive. Awareness should rise a little whenever the space changes, since a large share of crime is committed by known people, including family and neighbours.
Is self-defence legal in India, and how far can you go?
Yes, but proportionately. Gourav explains that under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which replaced the IPC and CrPC, countering a bare-handed attack with a knife means you escalated. Try to resolve without harm, and if the situation goes out of hand go to the police. Only when your life is genuinely at stake do you have the full right to counter-attack.
Where did martial arts come from, and what is Bengal's lathi khela?
Gourav traces a route from South India's Kalaripayattu through the Buddhist scholar Bodhidharma to the Shaolin Temple in China, and from Chinese traders in Okinawa to karate, meaning 'empty hand'. Bengal's lathi khela, he says, inspired the Victorian-era Kolkata Police's six-foot lathi for mob control and travelled to England, where it fed into Bartitsu, the cane-fighting style linked to Sherlock Holmes.
Gym or martial arts?
Gourav's answer is to look in the mirror and ask who you want to see in ten years, Bruce Lee or a bodybuilder, and join accordingly. He argues every body has a domain where it can excel, whether marathon running, taekwondo or trekking, and cites Hardik Pandya as a thin man nobody mocks because he has proved himself on the field.
