Humra Quraishi*
The war is expanding… targets are on the rise, going well beyond the Palestine borders, towards Lebanon. This week explosions went off in Beirut and several other parts of Lebanon in an apparent second wave of detonations of electronic devices; walkie-talkies and even solar equipment were targeted a day after hundreds of pagers blew up. Many were killed and many more wounded and just too shocked. Compounded by the fact that there’s great anxiety amongst the civilians, the masses, as they view these attacks as the new form of warfare allegedly unleashed by the Israeli forces.
If this level of warfare is not contained now and immediately, it could go well in the Middle East. The political web and the military might, gaining ground, unsettling hundreds of innocents in and around the West Bank and the Middle East and much further… way beyond.
Yet we do not want to discuss the underlying facts of this grave situation. We are worried about the consequences of speaking aloud! Some years back during an international meet on the humanitarian customary law held in New Delhi, I was introduced to a Professor teaching in an international university. Just before meeting him, one heard a series of speeches on what “great legal remedies” are available to the human living in this century for any wrongs inflicted on him or her. With that in the background, I’d asked this professor a series of queries related to the great injustices going on in the world, whereby a mighty nation in terms of its unchecked military might can actually intrude into a smaller country on any given pretext and then kill and destroy and simply terrorize the civilian population. And you should have seen the dazed look on Professor’s face, as though he couldn’t really believe his ears! With an abundance of shock writ large on his face, he muttered, “Surely you don’t expect me to answer these types of questions! You realize they could be dangerous for me and you!”
REUTERS/Hassan Hankir"/>
Today it’s frightful to see the growing anarchy cum violence and killings taking place in the Middle East region. Bound to carry huge tragedies. And bigger offshoots. There is, of course, the refugee crisis which has been spilling over to Europe. This crisis is an extended offshoot of the internal strife and civil war instigated by the vested interests of the bigger nations!
And as bombardments and suicide attacks continue to devastate Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine, and the region around it, we sit all too subdued and meek and mute, wondering: Who is masterminding these killings? Who is behind these organized bombardments? Who are the behind-the-scene destroyers? Why are the governments and world leaders not speaking out? We don’t even scream or shriek in horror to end this mess, even when news reports have been coming in, day after day, of human disasters!
New reports just coming in, this mid-week, state this: India abstained from voting in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Wednesday, as the 193-member body passed a resolution demanding that Israel end its unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territories within 12 months. The resolution received 124 votes in favour, 14 against, and 43 abstentions.
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Even as the civil population sits all too wrapped up in fear, and terrorized, we sit all too shut. State-fed inputs to terrorism continue to hold sway. No, we are not even inclined to go beyond, and question. Only a handful have been focusing on the varying hues and forms of terrorism. Professor V K Tripathi, who was teaching Physics at IIT Delhi, has been doing his utmost to unmask those layers, by holding meetings with students and researchers. Several years back, one late evening as I reached the stretch near the Aravali hostel of IIT New Delhi, I was taken aback to see that on that cold December evening Tripathi, sitting on a faded piece of cloth, discussing with his students and research scholars, the political polarization and terrorism in today’s world! Mind you, one is not talking about terrorism in one of those hyped political or biased terms, but as he’d put across, “For resisting terror we must understand terror in all its forms and take up responsible roles.” In continuation with that, he went on to explain to his students that Imperialism is the deadliest form of terrorism. He also gave the backgrounders to the start of people’s discontent, and build-ups leading to terrorist activity in our country, in the state of Punjab, and also in the North East and Kashmir.
Tripathi is perhaps an exception in today’s India. Few talk openly and responsibly and even bypass its seriousness by overlooking the political complexities to it, as political powers expand their domain on sheer barbaric tactics.
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Whilst focusing on Lebanon, I started to re-read Kahlil Gibran. Do not overlook the fact that he was from Lebanon. Though he had shifted to America when his mother half-brother and two sisters were moving base, his heart was back home, in Lebanon. And though he lived most of the years in New York but couldn’t ever forget his Lebanese roots. So much so that he willed royalties from his books for the people of his hometown, Bsharri… He was born in 1883, in Lebanon’s mountain town of Bsharri.
Leaving you with these quotes from Kahlil Gibran’s book ‘The Prophet’.
On love:
“When love beckons you, follow him/
Though his ways are hard and steep/
And when his wings enfold you yield to him/
Though the sword hidden among the pinions may wound you/
And when he speaks to you believe in him/
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden…”
On children:
“Your children are not your children/
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself/
They come through you but not from you/
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you …”
On joy and sorrow: “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked/
Together they come, and when one sits alone with/
you at your board, remember the other is asleep/
upon your bed…”
On crime and punishment:
“You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked/
For they stand together before the face of the sun/
Even as the black thread and the white are woven together/
And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the whole cloth and he shall examine the loom also…”
Along the same strain of crime and punishment, Gibran brings into focus much more:
“If any of you would bring to judgment/
The unfaithful wife/
Let him also weigh the heart of her husband in/
scales, and measure his soul with measurements/
And let him who would lash the offender look unto/
The spirit of the offended/
And if any of you would punish in the name of/
Righteousness and lay the axe unto the evil tree/
Let him see to its roots.”
On religion:
“Is not religion all deeds and all reflection/
And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but/
A wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul/
Even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom/
…Your daily life is your temple and your religion/
Whenever you enter into it take with you your all/
Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute/
The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight…
“And if you would know God, be not, therefore, a/
Solver of riddles/
Rather look about you and you shall see Him/
Playing with your children/
And look into space; and you shall see Him walking in/
The cloud, stretching His arms in the lightening/
And descending in rain/
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising/
And waving His hands in trees.”
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