Eight years have passed since the dreadful Manhattan Tuesday - the day when the world felt as though it were looking up from under a chimney hole on the TV screen. Yet it is inevitable that the world discusses or dissects it all over again, albeit in feebler tones given the time that has elapsed and revokes and relives the single binding emotion that rippled across the world years ago. First as horror, which later whittled down to fear and paranoia. It did not dilute for days and months. It stayed in us in varying measures. It outstripped our everyday sensibilities. We rechristened the emotion overnight. It suddenly had tags of a white turban and a flowing beard. It became a gargantuan surrogate to the emotion we feel when the lights go off abruptly in the night or an alley cat suddenly jumps across. Curious how our mundane domestic worries ballooned to take gigantic aspects! It suddenly had to do with getting on planes and living in high rises. To do with bombs and bullets. Terror took a definite form that day – the form of human beings completely devoid of it. Of human beings who took draconian oaths to destroy despite their lives. And silly, we had panicked that someday the extraterrestrials would invade and annihilate us!
Every year the anniversary of the event that would go down in history as one of the most uncouth demonstrations of the human spirit will be ‘laden’ with a palpable wariness. There will be a sense of foreboding. A presentiment of a recurrence. Folly. It would take sometime for us to realize that history repeats but in different versions. That the same would not happen again. Something else, but not the same. History hates to be typecast and the playwrights of the event would be well aware of it.
Strange are the ways of the new, aggrieved world. A world where there are no perfect rights or perfects wrongs. No perfect heroes or perfect villains. Where combat is the new order. Where wounds and pain are the only levellers. And death is the only upshot.
There is no clue to who would strike next. Or where. We are living a terribly frightful existence. There is no foolproof defense against maverick suicide bombers or schemers ready to take the gallows or decay in detention. On the other side there is no guard against the mighty force that can turn its heat on anything that rankles its whims and wits. Or anything it simply takes a fancy to. Caught between the two and ranged against its own idiosyncrasies, mankind is smarting. It is bleeding from its vital organs. And it needs palliatives. We need reprieve from the pain of our own devising and from the struggle we have taken upon ourselves. That is what we need to find in this anniversary week. And every week after this. Year after year.
The human spirit has failed miserably and it continues to crumble. The only power that can prevail over this eroding human soul and save it from complete devastation is the Divine. Religion, of the kind that guides, of the kind that teaches forbearance, of the kind that can help us see right from wrong and of the kind that heals, can be our only succour. Probably. It is a little like administering poison as anti-venom. The cause of pain turning into the antidote when dispensed in the right manner.
It is the only thing on my mind as I stand in the balcony of my flat at dusk in these holy, Ramdhan days, absorbed in the prayer call that draws the devout to its vortex. It gives the silence that preceded it an impeccable quality. It almost makes the presence of the divine in the air palpable. It marks the culmination of human endurance, determination and devotion. It is a slice in time when nothing except divinity prevails in the inky air.
Makes me wonder as I take in the brisling atmosphere around me, why and how do such delectable solemnity and serenity get marred by booms and bombs elsewhere in the world? What makes it so utterly urgent for men to sully the sacrosanct nature of these holy times?
Sometimes, nothing makes sense, not even faith and its manifestations.
Every year the anniversary of the event that would go down in history as one of the most uncouth demonstrations of the human spirit will be ‘laden’ with a palpable wariness. There will be a sense of foreboding. A presentiment of a recurrence. Folly. It would take sometime for us to realize that history repeats but in different versions. That the same would not happen again. Something else, but not the same. History hates to be typecast and the playwrights of the event would be well aware of it.
Strange are the ways of the new, aggrieved world. A world where there are no perfect rights or perfects wrongs. No perfect heroes or perfect villains. Where combat is the new order. Where wounds and pain are the only levellers. And death is the only upshot.
There is no clue to who would strike next. Or where. We are living a terribly frightful existence. There is no foolproof defense against maverick suicide bombers or schemers ready to take the gallows or decay in detention. On the other side there is no guard against the mighty force that can turn its heat on anything that rankles its whims and wits. Or anything it simply takes a fancy to. Caught between the two and ranged against its own idiosyncrasies, mankind is smarting. It is bleeding from its vital organs. And it needs palliatives. We need reprieve from the pain of our own devising and from the struggle we have taken upon ourselves. That is what we need to find in this anniversary week. And every week after this. Year after year.
The human spirit has failed miserably and it continues to crumble. The only power that can prevail over this eroding human soul and save it from complete devastation is the Divine. Religion, of the kind that guides, of the kind that teaches forbearance, of the kind that can help us see right from wrong and of the kind that heals, can be our only succour. Probably. It is a little like administering poison as anti-venom. The cause of pain turning into the antidote when dispensed in the right manner.
It is the only thing on my mind as I stand in the balcony of my flat at dusk in these holy, Ramdhan days, absorbed in the prayer call that draws the devout to its vortex. It gives the silence that preceded it an impeccable quality. It almost makes the presence of the divine in the air palpable. It marks the culmination of human endurance, determination and devotion. It is a slice in time when nothing except divinity prevails in the inky air.
Makes me wonder as I take in the brisling atmosphere around me, why and how do such delectable solemnity and serenity get marred by booms and bombs elsewhere in the world? What makes it so utterly urgent for men to sully the sacrosanct nature of these holy times?
Sometimes, nothing makes sense, not even faith and its manifestations.
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