A LL the prayers for the end of the war are yet to be answered. Skies are still bearing the brunt of human Afollies flying high. Bombs are destroying cities, eroding life and whatever is good around it. Someone is calling for a ceasefire but the fire is still blazing. Upon the debris of human life,aflag awaits hoisting. Of the many crimes, wars are the least accused of. It is how they unravel the humans living in those times. Calling this unravelling a crime may sound harsh but, in the general perception, whatever does not suit man’s conditioning isacrime.So,to the mighty, this unravelling of the true human face might sound like a crime. It is indeed a crime, to force humans to look at themselves, the way they never did for a very long time. …and war –acumulation, a tipping edge, a boil-over fromapot kept on the burner for long – is an unravelling. After centuries of bloody wars, after major attempts to bring peace, foster brotherhood and building institutions brick-by-brick to prevent wars, here we are - yet another war threatening to become a world war! Our civilisational journey which crossed many barbarous battles, cruel conquests, subjugations and annihilations, to reach a point where our individual tribes began talking at global levels about the globe, now finds itself retreating to old ways.

 

 

 

THE ALL-CONQUERING HUMAN AMNESIA What was the trajectory of theworld just as it came out of COVID? It had seen enough pyres and burials…and fickleness of life. That was a curse on entire humanity and the pain was felt by all communities collectively. The world that emerged out of it should have been together in strength and understanding. It had realised the potential of togetherness. It wanted to grasp more and more of this beautiful world. There was revenge travelling. The technology-aided world could have aspired for anything. Alas! The amnesia – the human bane of ages – caught up just as quickly. It forgot and in no time retreated to old ways – Who’s the most powerful of them all?

THOSE WEDDED TO IDEOLOGIES ARE DIVORCED OF IDEAS Firmly-footed should be your foot, not your brain. In fact, wisemen say, brain should be as supple as the air- free flowing - letting things come in, processing information not just on the ground of advantage but also on ethics (which in fact are collection of long-term advantages), analysing its correctness on various parameters and then acting upon the arrived knowledge. But humans chose the easy ways - commitmenttoonesetofideaseasesthepressuretotrulyanalyse other sets of ideas. It is so easy to let someone else think for you, give you a set ofrules and ask you to follow. It is so hard to always analyse what you have been told, to weigh it, to decode and derive, to assemble and deconstruct… to be right in churning your own course. So easy to be a mob, so hard to be an individual. These weddings of conveniences have produced more dogmas than doctrine, yet humans - those thinking beings - would rather tie their faith to ideologies, then flirt with ideas.

MOST BRILLIANT OF ALL COMMUNITIES FAIL WHEN LED BY FOOLS Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. After two horrific world wars, humanity – in principle – had decided to prevent wars. Institutions were established, formats were readied, methods and methodology were chalked so that problems of the world would be solved through diplomacy. But since trust eluded they also prepared for war. Thanks to this one-foot-in-one-foot-out approach, human leadership forgot to walk straight. Thanks to such hypocritical propositions, words have lost meaning – peace, solidarity, agreements and even ceasefire mean something else now. The human progress of the last couple of decades has belied dreams and dwarfed wildest of imagination. Imagine what all we could have achieved, if only our leaders had allowed words their true meanings? Alas! One-foot-in-one-foot-out – we are peace loving communities at war, waiting to suffer what we have worked hard not to. Under visionary leadership, we are still tribes in a global world.

GREED’s THE RULER The scenes from the war zones have rattled our hearts for a full two minutes. This ‘feeling sorry for those…’ is a true sentiment among a great many people but too weak to extract anything more concrete than ‘sorry’. Humanity’s only hope for ending the war is its age-old greed. The war, if at all it ends soon, will not end seeing the plight of grieving families but looking at the wobble in the oil market and its cascading consequences on the world economy. One war lesson that has come from Iran is – the world may be sorry…but to win a war, you ought to make the world‘very sorry’.That has been Iran’s strategy – attack where it hurts most – not the heart but the pocket.

THE UNRAVELLING An old question surfaces again – are humans essentially good before turned bad by circumstances or essentially bad before covering themselves with a cloak of goodness? The recent wars have laid bare some truths – about global institutions standing by the side as warravages lives, about power and its ability to quickly lose its head, about philosophies of an equitable world and human dignity and integrity. It’s still the rule of the jungle. Mighty is still right. Ifearhistorywillreaduswithconsiderableshame–“These people of the 21st century, despite such wonderful strides, failed to walk on the path they had chalked for themselves. They saw it coming.The weather patterns are changing.The population is growing, unsettling. Chaos reigning. Yet they saw the other way.They saw oil.They saw money.They started a war.”