Manchester Attacks - Forgive & Begin Again

I was raised in a relatively posh boarding school in the midst of the serene mountains of Dehradun, India. Barring washing my boxers, I did not have to do any chores & got everything I asked for. At age 17, I moved to Australia. My mother paid almost a ransom for a tuition fee for my college education. And till age 25, I kept burning money like I was crown prince.

You know the funny thing is I doubtlessly believed that was real life. But, within three days of being back in India, I realized I had lived my life in a crystal bubble. Now, a decade later I know for dead certain that I was living in an elaborate bubble.

I was a first class citizen in India for the first 17 years of my life. I was a first class citizen in the first world of Australia. Then India woke me up with a smug smile & a machine gun & massacred the shit outta my bubble.

Here are the things I realized. I found that I was blind for 25 years. Not the eyes kind, the real kind. At first I thought I was hallucinating when I saw all these ridiculously poor people sleeping next to the disease-ridden sidewalks. When I saw a 77-year-old emaciated man carrying fat zamindaars [land owners] on hand-pulled rickshaw & people working for 14 hours in 45 degree heat while I drank flavoured coffees with pretty girlfriends in fancy coffee shops, I realized these people building our homes will never have a home of their own. Never. I realized all these years I couldn’t see them as I was blind & self-centred. I knew I’m not going back to Australia – I knew I can't run away again.

I found that “humans are not equal.” The life of a person in the first world is worth infinitely more than someone from the third world – India. I found that the day I will run out of money, I will be treated as filth. I realized that humans were divided into sects – the majority & the minority. I, a born Hindu, am the majority. I’m privileged. I’ve always been privileged.

For the past three years, India has had a right-wing populist government. Narendra Modi, the PM is a staid & pragmatic man. He is also the man who stood silent like death when Hindus went marauding & chopping innocent Muslims in Gujarat, India in 2002. The murderers had impunity for 48 hours, in which they perpetrated one of the worst genocide in India’s history – 2000-odd people died. This man is now India’s PM & he isn’t going anywhere at least in the next 7 years. He’s a visionary with partisan beliefs. Under his rule, the line of separation between the majority & minority has become bolder than ever. Dissent is now anti-nationalistic. Anti-government sentiment is now anti-country. Modi is now officially the person who can do no wrong. Anyone who disagrees with him is out-of-line. No, he isn’t Kim Jong-un of North Korea – he likes to kill softly.

I do not practice any religion. And I don’t have a shred of doubt that the atavistic orthodox religion – Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, et al – is measles of our society. It thrives on division and showcases god as a narcissistic hate mongerer.

In the neighboring Islamic countries [Pakistan & Bangladesh {Both were part of India not long ago}], I will be at risk of getting assassinated/lynched/hacked for writing blasphemously. In India, not so, but we will get there. Give us a few years. The trouble isn’t with believing in the almighty; the trouble is with religion itself & its application. Till religion persists, ridiculous fallacies such as killing random people will teleport one to heaven will live on. Basic common sense is that killing another human being who has done you no wrong will make the world a hateful, intolerant place. Islamophobia is the outcome of this outright stupid notion.

It’s time I let you in on something conspicuous yet conspicuously absent from the first world national newspapers {barring the token mention}. In multiple states in India, we’ve an inhuman law – AFSPA. I will not tell you what the acronym stands for, I will tell you what it does – it gives the authorities [police, army, military, et al] an unlimited license to kill, rape, molest, loot, and torture anyone they feel like with impunity. No questions asked. This law has been implemented in places, for decades, which are considered ‘disturbed’ according to who the fuck knows who.

Let’s pick a state – Kashmir. A predominantly Muslim state. In the past 21 years, anything between 43K and 110K civilians have been killed by the authorities. That’s roughly 5.6 to 14.4 people killed every day. How many times a person living in the first world hears about this. Even as I write this someone is getting shot dead.

In The Dark Knight, Joker says ‘You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!’ Killing Muslims and minorities is part of the plan. US army has killed tens of thousands muslim civilians over the years – including thousands of kids.

Every Kashmiri family has lost at least one member of their family to violence. A whole lot of young Kashmiris, younger than Salman Abedi, are psychologically battered. They unconsciously produce an ID card when they enter a bloody McDonald’s in New Delhi or Bombay. They are not able to sleep in peace as they don’t know if their brother, sister, friend, will be dead when they wake and there will be no justice.

We can’t be a sleep-walking, self-centred people like I was for 25 years, blinded to the injustices around us. We can’t keep living in the houses built by someone’s blood & cry foul when one of them rises in violence. When one of them gets corrupted by the fraud messengers of god. We can’t hate him. We have to forgive him. We’ve to be the bigger human. We’ve to shed a tear for Salman’s broken soul. We’ve to accept our fault. We’ve to accept that the world as it exists is because we’re more worried about our daily Instagram updates and likes than asking a hungry stranger if she’d like to share a meal with us. Instead of buying a jacket for a man who’s shivering in blistering cold, we walk right past him.

Before we ask questions & label Salman a bastard, we must ask ourselves what we have done to make this world a better place. What have we done to ensure that the hate that resided in Salman’s heart was pulled out & buried in this earth?

Don’t be mistaken. I’m under no circumstances justifying, condoning, and marginalizing what he did. Violence, of any nature, is abhorrent. Killing kids is despicable and death of humanity. What I’m saying is we must forgive Salman. We must forgive ourselves for sitting on our asses and letting the world become what it has become.

When the world’s biggest country is led by Donald Trump and England agrees to Brexit, there’s bound to be blood in the streets. The world is falling apart, but it’s not the first time it is. And no one else will fix it, but us. France has made the right decision to reject the right wing bastards by electing Emmanuel Macron.

We all must now rise collectively and do something that makes this world a better place every day before we hit the bed. Hate (no matter how despicable anyone's acts are) will only boomerang & bite us in the ass.