Lest this be understood as a self-help kind of Special Report, here is a disclaimer. This is not to suggest to people that what they understand as negative emotions are not exactly negative or how they should deal with them and translate them into positivity. People have always instinctively known this and have used them to their advantage.

This is to alert us all against the positive thinking mantra that constantly warns against negative thinking. We at The News on Sunday refer to emotions like anger, envy, grief, sadness, anxiety, fear -- all widely understood as negative -- just to underscore how intrinsic they are to life and how they have come to aid humanity in the widest possible ways. They have transformed individual lives on a personal level to expressions of immense creativity, in arts and literature. Collectively, they have led nations to wage revolutions and seek freedom from oppressors.

Clearly, there are negative emotions that remain unchannelised and cause damage, to individuals, groups, nations and the world at large. This is exactly why there is this need to discuss it.

We in the Muslim world have just observed Ashura, the ten days of collective grief. This period of mourning, that has sustained for the last century and a half nearly, does a lot more than grieve for the tribe of Holy Prophet’s grandson who was martyred for a just cause. It reiterates a metaphor of right and wrong, asserting that a wrong in history cannot be considered right after a passage of time. It lets people forget their own grief in the face of a larger one experienced collectively, through rituals.

Read also: The power of negative thinking

Likewise sadness without which there could be no joy, and anxiety leading to everything worthwhile done in the world. The extraordinary performance of women and their forward march owes itself to the seething anger against the discriminatory and unequal world they had been subjected to for centuries if not millennia. Fear must be and does get conquered. These so-called negative emotions must be acknowledged and owned and not shunned.