It’s a day and night journey by car between Dubai and Israel. In Dubai, the Women’s T20 championship is being held, and cricketing countries wait with bated breaths as their women slog balls all over the field. A car’s journey away, women and children lie dead and wounded, maimed, crippled and fatally wounded as bullets and missiles are slogged all over, with ruthless preciseness.
And the rest of the world watches both, with spectator interest.
Have we become so immune to death and suffering? We are so good at flying our flags at half mast, for some political leader we hardly know, but when thousands cry, we just switch channels: ‘Oh look at Smriti Mandhana hitting a six!’ we cheer, even as a missile crashes into a house and a little girl with a doll in her hand lies dead!
Ah, dear readers, just like you would like to imagine your son or daughter to be another, Virat Kohli or Harmanpreet Kaur, and work hard to send them to cricket academies to achieve the same, use that same imagination to see your same child lying dead because the world was watching a cricket match, or was it soccer or tennis?
The world just switched channels.
But should we?
When I drive past a funeral in my country, and watch mourners streaming all over the road, I see grief, but also as they look at me in the car, I see anger, and if perchance my driver were to blow his horn and try to make them move aside, I would have to chastise him for being so insensitive. Because in that callous, thoughtless act, I showed my lack of concern for the intensity of grief they were going through.
But aren’t we doing the same, as we switch channels? Aren’t we saying, “I couldn’t care less!”
We blow our horns, we switch channels, and suddenly a missile crashes into our homes, into our lives. That’s what happened in the second world war when the US allowed the British to fight the Germans, and for years didn’t join in, till Pearl harbour happened.
Suddenly, the missile hit home.
Are we waiting for this to happen? Instead of these artificial gestures of peace that are so meaningless from our political leaders, shouldn’t we movement’ to stop these two wars?
Even as I write this, I can hear you say, ‘Israel is right,’ or ‘Palestine is right,’ ‘Ukraine is right’ or ‘Russia is right’!
Stop it. You don’t show respect to the funeral procession, asking who it is, or how they died. You mourn with the mourners, knowing that grief is terrible. In the same way, let’s stop asking who is right, but only see the homeless, orphaned, maimed and injured, and then stop switching our channels..!
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