Come Unity Can Be Ours

(This is something i found recently while going through my files. I had written this piece many years ago...maybe 7 years now...but it still chills my blood and haunts my dreams. The language is child-like compared to my normal style of writing. Don't know why I took this style...but i did...)

“I awoke one morning to find blood on my hands; not mine, but that of the child I had killed the previous day. I thought I had washed it off, but it seemed to be still there – staring, invisible, hurting, stinging, screeching. It suddenly felt wrong… so wrong. I wasn’t supposed to feel like this. I had killed before; I had taken lives. But why did I suddenly feel so different?

I got up and switched on the TV it showed the destruction that my men and I had caused. As I watched the scenes, they felt ghastly, even gross. The scenes were eating me inside. I was personally witnessing the mass destruction that I, along with a few others, had created. I felt a stab of guilt. What was happening to me? I realised I was personally witnessing the destruction of my soul, my own mind and my body along with that of my country. I said I was patriotic and loyal to my country. I loved my country. Then did destroying it mean loving it…? Whoa! That thought really hit me. It hit me so hard that I sat back on my sofa and had to hold the armrest for support. It got me thinking. Why had I done this? I said I was helping people. But did killing one part mean helping another part? Why was I doing all this? Why so much violence over one issue. Ayodhya, Gujarat, Mumbai, Godhra – violence everywhere. To build a temple or a mosque or something totally different? Have a puja or not? Kill or not to kill? In the end the whole thing comes down to one issue: communalism; Hindu-Muslim divide. To divide or to unify?

And yet I see places where people are one, irrespective of caste, creed or race. Hindus helping Muslims and vice versa. All religions helping each other. The only question is to live or not to live. I question myself for the third time: Why am I really doing this? For pleasure? What job is this? The money earned is blood money, no doubt… not mine, but somebody else’s.

The whole incident has set me thinking. Why not stop the violence, the bloodshed and the pain and really be patriotic and loving? Let’s make it a free country where one doesn’t worry about violence. Why I am thinking these thoughts do not ask. I’ve had a change of heart, you could say. My fellow terrorists, it took the blood of one innocent child to wake me up. How many will it take to wake you up to the reality of the shackles that bind our country? One, two… ten? Stop the violence now. Let’s make our country free: free to breathe, live and love. Let’s be truly patriotic and give up our violent and evil ways.

“Let’s stop existing and start living!”


Pas a Pas se va luènh