I come back daily from work to news of bomb blasts and terrorist attacks in the Kashmir valley and it all just melts into the background of the Channel V’s and the MTV’s. They are now as much part of the daily news as the weather update and my mind doesn’t even give it a second glance. Today there was something different as I reached back home from work. As I turned the TV to the news channel, the reporter was bailing that Delhi was burning. My city, my home, saddi Delhi was reeling under the terrible carnage of serial bomb blasts. To find out that one of the sites directly affected was hardly a kilometer from where my house is was the biggest shock in my life. I always was aware of the danger of the terrorists ripping apart the place but somehow, it never occurred to me that the placid and congenial surroundings where I grew up, spent my evenings playing on the roads, took those long evening walks with my mother talking about everything from the latest math test scores to the recent love affair rocking the cousins down the street would become the graveyard of today. Those tense moments as I dialed the number of my house were probably the longest of my life and the news that my family was safe was the biggest relief that I have felt in the recent past that I can recall.
As my mother laughed on the other end and allayed my fears, my nerves calmed down and my mind wandered to the rest of the people who have been affected by the horrendous act of barbarism. It set me thinking about how the son who has lost his mother to this horrendous crime would be feeling. And I cannot even begin to imagine the pain of the father who had to pull the lifeless body of his child out from the mangled debris which served as reminders to the dance of destruction that played itself out in the evening. Scenes of the brother who had lost a sibling, a husband who had lost his wife passed one after the other on the TV screen and as I watched the wailing people line the hospitals, my eyes were filled with tears for this travesty of today’s reality.
The festival of lights turned killer today. Diwali brought death and destruction in its wake. Hundreds of unsuspecting people stepped out to the markets to shop on the festive occasion. Little did they know that the Diwali dhamaka posters on the windows of the shops were grim soothsayers of the oncoming doom. And I ask you where is the sanity of all this? We call ourselves the social animals. We call ourselves civilized human beings. And we dismiss the notion of cannibalism as a grim reminder of a so called uncivilized past. I tell you we might have progressed leaps and bounds in terms of "Science and Technology" but at the end of the day we are no more civilized than the most cannibalistic of creatures that end up eating their own offspring. Mind you even the most unsocial of creatures suckle their young till the time they are ready to fend on their own. And here we are the most well behaved of the lot that God sent down to populate this Eden killing our own brothers, butchering our own children, raping and pillaging through all that we created with our own hands. I ask those who proudly lay claim to having undertaken this inhuman cruelty in the name of some or the other equally insane motivation – how do they sleep at night knowing that the cause that they so proudly claim to endorse just gave birth to another that proves how wrong their fight is? Someone is fighting for a piece of land, someone wants revenge for how his people have been treated, a third wants a certain nameplate at the entrance to his home and there are ones who are pure mercenaries ready to do some hoodlum’s bidding to fill their own coffers. And so continues this never ending dance of hatred and destruction. In this insane march towards God knows what, scores fall by the wayside who never even got the chance to understand what it was that they laid down their happiness for?
What was the crime of the small girl who lost her legs before life slowly ebbed out of her mangled body in the arms of her father? What injustice did the mother commit in trying to get her son the ice cream he so wanted? Was the mistake of the wife who went to the market to buy a gift for her husband so costly that she had to give her life for it? I dare those barbarians who are celebrating this tragedy in their lairs to justify their cause in the light of something I don’t even have the words to describe- my vocabulary just doesn’t have the expression to depict this… this tremendous loss.
I am not saying that the people who did this started out just like this. I would still like to believe that inherently man is a good being and that only circumstances cause him to commit indecency. There must have been a just cause for causing heartburn originally for these people to have turned such barbarians. But someone somewhere has to start forgiving and someone somewhere else has to start acknowledging that gross injustices have been committed in the past and start asking for forgiveness. Only then can this vicious circle of hate be pacified. Otherwise, there is no reason whatsoever that in this world where love blossoms on the internet and people communicate across language, religion and caste barriers as freely as if sitting side by side in a hotel lounge for distances to creep in. There is no validity to the existence of notions of genocide when campaigns for saving people in the throes of crippling diseases find donors and sponsors from across latitudes and longitudes. I am not willing to submit to the fact that the only way to end this reign of terror is to foster more violence. Violence begets violence, terror begets terror and one Bush begets another Osama. Are the feelings of hate and destruction so enmeshed that even the innocent eyes of an infant cannot melt them away? Or are the feelings of harmony and compassion so fickle that the slightest of snubs can reduce them to mere figments of speech on the Aastha and God channels? They say God is all forgiving. I ask him to start punishing. If Brahma wants to see his creation not disintegrate into squabbling rats, Kali has to take centre stage. Its high time for Kalki to comes riding and restore sanity. If there is any truth to Vishnu’s tenth avatar, let him come now. If there is any more delay, I fear there may not be anything left to defend.
Today people laugh at the Gandhian philosophy of non violence to the extent that its formal usage is now within inverted quote marks in a sentence. The word only finds mention in order to garner votes in the name of the father of the nation or in the nostalgic reminisces of someone’s great old grandfather who fought by the great man’s side and won us our independence. For all other purposes, the natural reaction to terrorism is another act of violence. And then all is justified in the singular mission statement which says "One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter". So at the end of the day, peace and harmony for man reduces to a zero sum problem where for one to gain, the other has to lose. When will this achieve its saddle point? When will people realize that enough is enough? When will one man’s terrorist acknowledge his victim as his own brother and lay down his arms in respect of humanity? Not till the time we are still divided over political boundaries of control. Not till the time we are concerned about increasing gross Domestic produce at the expense of another nation. Not till the time socialism, communism, capitalism, democracy, autocracy, monarchy, oligarchy and all such ideals of "civil societies" acknowledge the root of human existence as co-dependence. Only then will the zero sum game truly reach its optimal solution and the imbalance of the world start to orient itself towards a static state of social entropy. When the entire world stands as one and counts itself as successors of a single species will brotherhood become a reality. If it takes aliens from outer space to come raining laser beams to unite us then be it. At least then we can say that my brother was killed in defense of another. If it needs a cataclysm on the global scale to embed the notion of commonality among humans, then I invite the ten plagues of Egypt to over run the entire earth. At least then all temples, mosques and churches will rise in unison to pray to God and save humankind and not India or Pakistan or America. If for Lashkar-E-Toiba to fight alongside the Indian Army it requires atomic weapon toting Martians, I myself invite this calamity. At least tomorrow’s newspaper will not curse Kashmir for today’s loss.
As my mother laughed on the other end and allayed my fears, my nerves calmed down and my mind wandered to the rest of the people who have been affected by the horrendous act of barbarism. It set me thinking about how the son who has lost his mother to this horrendous crime would be feeling. And I cannot even begin to imagine the pain of the father who had to pull the lifeless body of his child out from the mangled debris which served as reminders to the dance of destruction that played itself out in the evening. Scenes of the brother who had lost a sibling, a husband who had lost his wife passed one after the other on the TV screen and as I watched the wailing people line the hospitals, my eyes were filled with tears for this travesty of today’s reality.
The festival of lights turned killer today. Diwali brought death and destruction in its wake. Hundreds of unsuspecting people stepped out to the markets to shop on the festive occasion. Little did they know that the Diwali dhamaka posters on the windows of the shops were grim soothsayers of the oncoming doom. And I ask you where is the sanity of all this? We call ourselves the social animals. We call ourselves civilized human beings. And we dismiss the notion of cannibalism as a grim reminder of a so called uncivilized past. I tell you we might have progressed leaps and bounds in terms of "Science and Technology" but at the end of the day we are no more civilized than the most cannibalistic of creatures that end up eating their own offspring. Mind you even the most unsocial of creatures suckle their young till the time they are ready to fend on their own. And here we are the most well behaved of the lot that God sent down to populate this Eden killing our own brothers, butchering our own children, raping and pillaging through all that we created with our own hands. I ask those who proudly lay claim to having undertaken this inhuman cruelty in the name of some or the other equally insane motivation – how do they sleep at night knowing that the cause that they so proudly claim to endorse just gave birth to another that proves how wrong their fight is? Someone is fighting for a piece of land, someone wants revenge for how his people have been treated, a third wants a certain nameplate at the entrance to his home and there are ones who are pure mercenaries ready to do some hoodlum’s bidding to fill their own coffers. And so continues this never ending dance of hatred and destruction. In this insane march towards God knows what, scores fall by the wayside who never even got the chance to understand what it was that they laid down their happiness for?
What was the crime of the small girl who lost her legs before life slowly ebbed out of her mangled body in the arms of her father? What injustice did the mother commit in trying to get her son the ice cream he so wanted? Was the mistake of the wife who went to the market to buy a gift for her husband so costly that she had to give her life for it? I dare those barbarians who are celebrating this tragedy in their lairs to justify their cause in the light of something I don’t even have the words to describe- my vocabulary just doesn’t have the expression to depict this… this tremendous loss.
I am not saying that the people who did this started out just like this. I would still like to believe that inherently man is a good being and that only circumstances cause him to commit indecency. There must have been a just cause for causing heartburn originally for these people to have turned such barbarians. But someone somewhere has to start forgiving and someone somewhere else has to start acknowledging that gross injustices have been committed in the past and start asking for forgiveness. Only then can this vicious circle of hate be pacified. Otherwise, there is no reason whatsoever that in this world where love blossoms on the internet and people communicate across language, religion and caste barriers as freely as if sitting side by side in a hotel lounge for distances to creep in. There is no validity to the existence of notions of genocide when campaigns for saving people in the throes of crippling diseases find donors and sponsors from across latitudes and longitudes. I am not willing to submit to the fact that the only way to end this reign of terror is to foster more violence. Violence begets violence, terror begets terror and one Bush begets another Osama. Are the feelings of hate and destruction so enmeshed that even the innocent eyes of an infant cannot melt them away? Or are the feelings of harmony and compassion so fickle that the slightest of snubs can reduce them to mere figments of speech on the Aastha and God channels? They say God is all forgiving. I ask him to start punishing. If Brahma wants to see his creation not disintegrate into squabbling rats, Kali has to take centre stage. Its high time for Kalki to comes riding and restore sanity. If there is any truth to Vishnu’s tenth avatar, let him come now. If there is any more delay, I fear there may not be anything left to defend.
Today people laugh at the Gandhian philosophy of non violence to the extent that its formal usage is now within inverted quote marks in a sentence. The word only finds mention in order to garner votes in the name of the father of the nation or in the nostalgic reminisces of someone’s great old grandfather who fought by the great man’s side and won us our independence. For all other purposes, the natural reaction to terrorism is another act of violence. And then all is justified in the singular mission statement which says "One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter". So at the end of the day, peace and harmony for man reduces to a zero sum problem where for one to gain, the other has to lose. When will this achieve its saddle point? When will people realize that enough is enough? When will one man’s terrorist acknowledge his victim as his own brother and lay down his arms in respect of humanity? Not till the time we are still divided over political boundaries of control. Not till the time we are concerned about increasing gross Domestic produce at the expense of another nation. Not till the time socialism, communism, capitalism, democracy, autocracy, monarchy, oligarchy and all such ideals of "civil societies" acknowledge the root of human existence as co-dependence. Only then will the zero sum game truly reach its optimal solution and the imbalance of the world start to orient itself towards a static state of social entropy. When the entire world stands as one and counts itself as successors of a single species will brotherhood become a reality. If it takes aliens from outer space to come raining laser beams to unite us then be it. At least then we can say that my brother was killed in defense of another. If it needs a cataclysm on the global scale to embed the notion of commonality among humans, then I invite the ten plagues of Egypt to over run the entire earth. At least then all temples, mosques and churches will rise in unison to pray to God and save humankind and not India or Pakistan or America. If for Lashkar-E-Toiba to fight alongside the Indian Army it requires atomic weapon toting Martians, I myself invite this calamity. At least tomorrow’s newspaper will not curse Kashmir for today’s loss.
2 comments:
Brilliantly written. However, towards the end the tone changed from one of hope to one of desperation. We will never see the Lashkar-e-Toiba fighting alongside the Indian army, and even if they do, it will be without the knowledge or acknowledgement that both were fighting for each other as much as for themselves.
And if you are wondering/bothered aboout who I am, I am student of Metallurgical Engg. in IT-BHU, and a huge fan of your drumming, and lately, your writing. Please visit my blog if you find the time.
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