16 October 2001, 02:41am IST
Harsh Kabra.
‘‘One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic’’, said joseph stalin. an anonymous thinker took it further, ‘‘one death is murder, a million deaths is foreign policy’’. the bloody tuesday treaded an extra step when a beautiful autumn morning witnessed human cruelty smash into symbols of a nation’s invincible financial and military domination. as people the world over were stunned into silence at the human cost of fanaticism, they were only underscoring human anxiety in the face of the magnitude of the crime. human crime disgusts as well as fascinates us. first, we avert our eyes. then we sample the grisly television and newspaper leads, staring at them for hours as developments unfold. every day comes fraught with its share of evil and every decade fathers a ‘‘crime of the century’’. is this really the first war of the 21st century, as the us president claims? or is this the greatest tragedy of american history, as the media is asserting? as far as our reaction goes, it is yet another instance of our infatuation with real-life dramas. haven’t we attempted to cling to each detail of the tragedy? haven’t we by now inundated our minds with sensational tidbits attempting to make the unimaginable imaginable? but the latest episode is serious - far more serious than we could have ever imagined. our obsession with tragedies is manifest in our controlled reactions as after all our floods, earthquakes and accidents, we are the most seasoned at courting bad news. hollywood has given us scores of horror movies from extra-terrestrial attacks to highly ingenious tools of sabotage and enough blood on the screen to undermine the essence of fear and misery associated with its real version. most people took time to believe the scenes of destruction were not straight from a movie. and yet, we have all wanted to know how the unspeakable acts were committed, merely to convince ourselves that we’re immune to the same wretched fate or perhaps to reassure ourselves that we are incapable of such heinous behaviour. according to the crime writer ann rule, ‘‘some people will put their heads in the sand, while others want to look evil right in the eye, as if the more they know, the safer they will be’’. so here we are intense and vehement, yet, even more perplexed. according to william blake, ‘‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’’. but despite all gory excesses, wisdom is not forthcoming. the history of religions and societies revolving around them has left us with many lessons, and yet there is a near-immunity to human misery, moral callousness and reluctance to learn. it is religion yet again, forcing us to lose sight of our nobler goals. political divides only exacerbate the ailment. ‘‘the charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different’’, said aldous huxley. one doubts whether disasters as mammoth as the one in america can ever mark the turning point of our history. one wonders whether they are the culmination or just the beginning. we are not required to imagine the plight of a distant part of the world we are served real-life images. the effort is worth the bother for nwe are being prepared for what lies in store for us. we have come to digest the irony that we may not share interests, but we are given to sharing tragedies. our share is earmarked in time. the bhagavad gita says, ‘‘there are two ways of passing from this world — one in light and one in darkness. when one passes in light, he does not come back; but when one passes in darkness, he returns’’. the darkness within us has cost us so many lives. can we afford to still remain caught in the painful choice between life and death? and all of us appear set to take turns in ending comparably. that, more than true sympathy and outrage, is the real reason for the global outcry. for, nothing is invincible today, except human nature. we have gained control of everything and lost control on ourselves. but, according to the qur’an, ‘‘god changes not what is in a people, until they change what is in themselves’’. the victims of the us carnage cannot be a mere statistic or future policies. they remind us of the need to think beyond ourselves, our religion, our country, our possessions. they remind us of our complacent desperation to distance ourselves from others’ problems, waiting for them to become our own before any action can materialise. it’s time to introspect and not allow the enemies of the civilised world capitalise on our fears.
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