When you feel, so powerless.

Pick one. Two kids walking on the road. One hits the other for no apparent reason. They are beginning to start fighting. You are watching all of this. The other kid asks you what he should do now. What do you do? Tell him to forgive him and just move past this small incident. Or, ask him to hit the first kid back, till both of them keep hitting each other, until the time they grow up and still keep fighting, when finally one of them kills the other one’s kids. Hard pick.

Peace. One word we take for granted. One word we make fun of. We have ridiculed and abused. One word we least understand the importance of. One word we’ve hardly ever done anything to achieve it. One word we will never deserve. And why, is because we never strived hard enough to get it. We abused it for our own personal gains. Proof? Divisive politics. The biggest example of this close home is that of the India-Pakistan partition, 1947. The aftermath of that led to a string of unreasonably irrational behavior from those very people who got to the peak of non-violence movement, the practice ground of Satyagraha, they killed each other for their existence. Where in this world did that ever make sense? It is the most painful memory of us as a country. True. But why not take lessons from it rather than picking it up from where our forefathers left us to a future of ruins and some more unreasonable death and devastation. What’s gone is never going to come back. Talk about today. That time back then, at least our so called ‘Indian- ness’ was at stake. Now, I much more than that. I am a non-maharashtrian for a marathi, a mumbaiite for people outside Bombay, a north-walah for my fellow neighbors who I have lived with for years. These very people will kill me one day because I probably don’t belong to some state, district, town, or maybe the religion that they follow. We’re regions fighting against each other! We are fighting for reasons that have never bothered us before. And we are not the ones causing destruction literally, because they might belong to some political party that has vowed to gain power at our cost. We don’t support them, but we won’t stop them either because we’re too scared and too busy. We have become like a child who’s had mother issues and has grown up to be a scavenging monster, who can do anything but what is right. We are not that person. We won’t give into the ‘pep talks’ of our political coaches in between fights, more so for triggering it. We will tell people not as educated as us, to be tolerant towards each other. Religion binds us, they are not chains. There is absolutely no adjective in this world that confines itself to a particular religion. And that is the truth. Doing something in the name of religion is one thing. No. it is the only thing. And that it is wrong!

Two abandoned kids on the road. Abandoned because we religious lot gave religion a little more priority, perhaps. Home? I ask them. On fire. They say. Parents? Lost, dead perhaps. They say. No food to eat, but who is thinking about hunger. Its raining heavily and they are the only people to take care of each other. Feel powerless? Guess this life is too short to live it just for you.