a little price for peace

A little price for Peace...
Last night I had a dream...a nightmare ...like the night before...violent, aggressive, destructive and merciless. I saw mad mobs carrying torches hungry for each other’s blood, I saw groups of people on fire, people dying and screaming out for help, I saw men with faces that weren’t human any more...devouring at women’s bodies, I saw children, infants, crying, injured, dying...I saw weapons and hate everywhere and found myself amidst all this...helpless, panicking, running away from everyone who could see me, ‘too glad to be alive at the moment’...lonely...lost... victim...
I woke up last morning to tell myself “thank god it was just a nightmare!” I woke up today to ask myself “was it really just a nightmare?” I have had no personal account of causalities so far... no one I knew has ever been a victim to any of the attacks on peace, so rampant in our world today...but is this reason enough to keep me calm, content and thankful? What I saw while asleep was something I had missed with eyes wide open, it was an essential process of my learning of the changing times around me...an awareness of just how mindless, unpredictable and intolerant has our world become...or an reiteration that I am connected with it organically...that no matter how much I wish it away or distance it from my existence, it is still the world I am a part of, I breathe in it and no matter how many times I am saved...maybe next time is my time. My life can be called short by any blast or firing anytime soon ... and I have to fear not just the loss of my life...being a woman I fear molestation, abduction, rape and if they choose to let me live...lifelong trauma...
I try to go back to the situations of terror, one of which haunted me in my sleep...finding out which one was it was is unnecessary. Mumbai blasts, Godhra, frequent serial blasts in our metro cities, Mumbai terror attack, Northeastern and northern frontiers where blasts, firing, abductions, rapes and killings have become an everyday affair, has taken some little, secluded corner in the middle pages of our national dailies and does not form that occasional blot of tears, helplessness, sympathy and thoughtfulness in our throats anymore. Mindless, ruthless, vain and pompous... Not before I had these nightmares could I feel how would it be to be in the shoes of these people who are maimed, raped, killed in these attacks, only to realise now that there are no ‘those and these’, the fear, the trauma and the panic has come closer home...like the reality of these ugly times itself, crawled out of my TV screen and my newspapers into my bedroom and into my sleep...making me restless, fearful, panicked, sad and disgusted all at the same time.
My chain of thoughts then leads me to the question of seeking comfort and security... Should I go to the state and tell them how I haven’t been able to sleep the last two nights and how I fear for my security and need protection?? But they perhaps know better of it...of numerous sleepless nights, of uncountable losses, of helpless tears, mourning wailings, endless grief and much more. But, will wanting to save myself and my family for today, tomorrow and the day after and the day after that really end my plight...? Will I still not feel the same panic, the same uncertainty that clutches my heart into inaction right at this moment...? Till the time there is war on peace around me will I not fear that the death toll is coming for me...?
I had lost my trust in religion far back in life...I never understood it to be so important as to be requiring to profess one. Today I’d rather not. But will that really make a difference? Are these attacks really directed towards our religious identities? How can they categorically target the Hindus, the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Christians and others in markets of metropolitan cities? Or in train compartments? Or in international hotels?
The goal is not to kill the people belonging to other faiths...but to kill faith itself, to kill humanity, brotherhood and human concern for each other. To make people so individualistic, intolerant and closed that they lose their sense of judgement in the overwhelm of the number of causalities, deaths, rapes and abductions they have suffered and the more of them that can come up if they ‘experimented’ with trusting each other.
But does this really make me take away my trust from people? From humanity? Or from peace? The absence of which I am wailing the most in my life right now? Have not a little hope and a little trust always sufficed to carry the weightless abundance of peace? And yet it today seems too heavy and elusive too even been spoken about without risking being mistaken for the one who has no stakes attached with life! Nonetheless, with all my stakes intact...being an average middle class citizen, who fears to lose her life, her family, her home and her society... I shall go ahead and hope. Hope being the only thing with which I can grant myself and the world one more shot at humanity, tolerance, benevolence and peace ... I shall hope... and hope always...in myself, in you and in justice that’s snoozing for the while hidden somewhere far away and I’d have my peace back...no matter how many times I have to trust, to hope and to have blind faith in u, in people around me...no matter how these forces of unjust anger try to snatch me away from my larger society of humanity and try to make me forget the times we have come to each others’ rescue...in body and in spirit...coz you all are indeed the only ones that I can rely on ... today...more than ever...!

- Benu, 7th January, 2008