(Please note: I love the human race in general. I do not have favoritism towards one clan or hatred towards another)
Even before I could get out of my bed
today, I decided to spend the entire morning with a cup of hot chai and The Hindu. Wish I had followed
this order. Instead I picked up The Hindu first only to spot this very cute
little kid.
I love his eyes, could not take my eyes off
him. Very sweet kid, but what is he doing in an army camp and what is he doing on the front page of The Hindu. My eyes moved to the next photograph.
This one was intense. It is obvious that
the kid was in some deep thoughts. I love his innocence and then as I continued
reading I was confused. Should I empathise with this child or shut the paper and
say he got what he deserved? After all, there was not an iota of sympathy in me
when Afzal Guru and Ajmal Kasab were hanged to death. I still fail to
understand why this nation is making such a hue and cry that Afzal Guru’s family
was not given a chance to be with him at the time of his execution. Well, families
of the nine people who died in the Parliament attack were not given a chance to see
the faces of their loved ones before they could die. Their wives did not know
that 13 December 2001 was the last time they were going to see their husbands. Anyway,
TV channels and their ways of working; we shall deal with this later. Coming back,
there was not an iota of sympathy in me even when this small boy’s father was
shot down by the Sri Lankan army. But why shoot down this boy and that too in a
very wicked way, exactly like how a butcher chops off a goat’s head. Give the
child biscuits and water and also five bullets down his chest.
I gulped down the chai more like a matter of habit. I was quite numb from inside, so
it didn't matter if that liquid had the right sugar or it was hot. I sort of
broke down, couldn't concentrate much on work and the boy’s face was haunting
me, over and over again. He would have grown up to be a sweepingly handsome young
man. But the Sri Lankan army thought he would grow up to become a handsome
and angry young man capable of revenging his father’s death. Fair enough and
that is after all what we see in movies, and it happens in real life and it can
happen with this little boy too. I do not doubt that. But he was just twelve
years old; just that old enough to be moulded into a good human being.
The army could have put in rehabilitation centre,
even somewhere outside of Sri Lanka, if that country did not have one. But instead
they choose to kill him. Is this world in dearth of people of who can spread
love, who can teach love? We don’t have the courage and the confidence and the willingness to change a small boy, to teach him how to love people, and who can
love him enough so that he doesn’t grow up with a sense of revenge. But we have
all the people who can celebrate Valentine’s Day with pomp and show. And hey,
this Valentine’s, I got several moral science lectures about how V-Day is not
just about celebrating the love between a man and a woman and that it is about
love in every form of the word. Depressing.
Let us do something about it. We can’t
bring back the dead child. But let us bring back the real love. And in the world we live in today even if we can ensure and
teach the little ones around us not to harm another human being (for a starter,
and other living creature as things progress), is as good as spreading love.
Michael Jackson is dead, but we can still
heal the world, for you and for me and the entire human race.
Om Shanti Shantihi.
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