We the Humans?

These days I read these news articles, see these videos and a sudden weight falls on my heart. A kind of gut wrenching feeling which I cannot erase in totality. Something brims up to the full within me, may be a sorry, silent scream. Something uneasy. Like a very small yet existing part of your soul is hurt, bruised really bad and you can’t ease that pain. Amidst all the work and your tight schedule these articles, these videos with very graphic images or footage of the reign of terror, dead and wounded civilians, the smiling portraits of the harbingers of death and vengeful world leaders,  though are just images beamed onto your screen or just ink on a paper, jabs at you and you cannot rub some ointment on it and hope it will be fine next day because you know it is happening and you know it is true. And you don’t even know how to make them right.  You don’t know them, these people- the victims or the assailants. Then why feel any of it? Because these are the people just like you and me, leading their normal lives and having dreams and aspirations. Only theirs have been brutally snatched away for no fault of theirs. And this is what disturbs me. And it disturbs me to my very core.

I may be very far away from where the “war” currently is but the sorry state of human life makes me cringe and cry in horror. Like how unworthy has human life become all of a sudden? Have you seen the faces of those children in the war zone and fleeing from their homes? Their eyes are dead. They have been so scarred that I cannot imagine what it must be to be one of them.

All political affiliations and arguments aside, all diplomatic discussions aside, all strategic plots aside, you know who is suffering the most? These civilians. Caught up in the crossfire between war politics and scapegoats to international rivalries, these are the people- people who dream nothing but to lead a life where tomorrow holds possibilities, where they can earn their daily bread and come back home to a warm bed, where children have nothing but homeworks and tests to worry about, where the parents’ only worry about their kids is their academic performance and may be that girl or boy problem their teenaged kid is talking about, not one where they ask themselves if they will wake up to their child’s living or dead body the next day- who are hurt the most. It is these people like us, the “commoners”, the apparent “nobodys”, the “populate” that is suffering every day. They bombed their people who were leading their normal lives, so they bombed back in retaliation. And jeopardized in the exchange of fire between rivals whose politics is beyond their understanding, is that 5 year old kid who just wanted orange cake for breakfast the next day, or the new mother trying to manage home and work or the father deciding if his daughter would like the pink or the purple dress for her birthday. All of a sudden the world they so meticulously built vaporizes into thin air. The kid now has to worry if he will get food at all to eat the next day and the days after that. He just saw his elder brother not talking to him anymore, and his parents wailing till they had no more tears left to cry and he had to suddenly leave all his toys and his favorite video game behind and ride a tiny boat away from home, wrapped in his frail grandmother’s old blanket. He did not like it. It was cold and the sea is scary, but Father said it would be fine. But brother won’t be joining them and he did not understand why. The young mother now doesn’t know if she would be ever able to manage everything on her own for the entire length of her life because one half of her support system now just vanished. He had gone for a concert, never came back. The father dressed his daughter in the pink dress, yes she liked pink better, and lowered her six feet under the ground along with his soul.

I do not know what I can do for them. I do not know if I am allowed to feel the pain of these people who are apparent strangers. I do not know if it will all be the same again. I do not know if there will be a bigger war. But I do not want those nightmares to haunt me. I do not want those bad dreams to wake me up all weary and scared where I had dreamt of being in those places and losing people who matter. If mere nightmares can affect me to such an extent I cannot imagine what it must be to be living in one of them. 

Faith, trust and everything in between

It is a fast world. A very fast world. No time to stop. No time to wait. It keeps moving at a

ricocheting bullet's speed and every day we find ourselves at this odd position of trying to catch that bullet by our teeth, yes metaphorically!! Skeptics would often deem the world we live in today as a "crazy mess" where rules and norms are flouted for the sake of the final attainment and yet are in odd alignment to the organised chaos we all are subjecting ourselves to. But let's take a moment of quiet here and pan and zoom at those specific moments of our lives where the din of the everyday life calmed down a little, and a mellow tune wafted in the air around us. Some moments, whether lasting or fleeting that have registered themselves in our memories and no matter how old the brain gets those remain as new a new film roll, no noise, no disturbance, in contemporary parlance like a 2160p 4k HD video, no buffering. Everyone has those don't we? And often associated with those memories is/are someone/many of our own kind. This is human nature. And humans are social animals. Or have we become so nuclear in our choice of existence that we do not necessarily associate any good memories with anyone of our kind. I bet we haven't. Evolution hasn't caught up with us so fast. And hopefully Darwin's brainchild will not in this front throughout the existence of life as we know it, for if not for nothing, at least for the sake of satiating the most carnal of human needs. However as the current age would have it, our interactions with the likes of our kind have become more unattached than we would like them to be. Baring oneself to another has become a task requiring tremendous amount of conviction and the fathomable knowledge that may be that trust with which we entrust another be just another fodder for gossip. May be we miscalculate our relationships and the projectile motion of emotions fall to the target not intended upon. But it is what it is. Sometimes we fall back to what the human nature is, a solid head and a gooey heart. We cannot contain emotions every time in a lead canister and sometimes we have to take that leap of faith. We cannot decide what another makes of it. If he/she decides to dump that trust down the proverbial gutter or embrace and reciprocate it or may be it just doesn't matter at all. Because we do not control another. We do not dictate the terms of their life. We promised the forever bond, sharing a part of our frail and vulnerable energy with them hoping it will be forever safe, not tampered with, not taken as our weakness, not the other way round. But may be, just may be, in the best case scenario, their exists some fine balance in this universe where faith like a dimension invisible to the naked eye is an energy which can never cease to exist but only passed on from one to another. May be our frailties and fear are taken as nothing but another idiosyncrasy that defines us and not as our formidable weakness.This is an Utopian fantasy, agreed. But who said fables cannot be real? Is it too much to ask for? Or is there some fancy system of justice for those responsible for any disturbance in the fine balance?

I'll not fret over the answer for something tells me that time with all it's theatrics will reveal that unto me. 

Beyond Death....

They thought she was dead,
Bleeding from her core,
Wounds unfathomable and deep,
Seared on the surface where their weapons hit her body.
They thought they had killed her
Her voice forgotten
Her song unsung....

But deep within a spark lurked,
Weak but not vanquished
Small but invincible
And like a Phoenix from the ashes burnt
Rose she

And her frigid body
Cold from a century's old lesion
Her soul torn apart and crushed
Flopping on the floor like a rag doll
Mended...

Call it sorcery, or the scintillating glimmer of a new dawn
The broken pieces rejoined and bound together with newer strength
Jagged ends of her soul fit together like a jigsaw
She rose

To take on the kingdom which was once her
The wounds will not be forgotten
And the debt of each piece of flesh slit from her body repaid in flesh and blood
The new dawn had arisen
And with it a new HER.