Crisis

During various times, whether was it while reading or while seeing the news related to communal or religious riots and violence, I used to pray to God to actually bestow the human kind with a war or a natural disaster wherein the people could break free from their constricted mind-sets and would bond over humanity, empathy and helplessness to realise that there are things superior to us and beyond our control. This prayer wasn’t just a repercussion of angst or frustration that emerged out of the helplessness I bore at those times, the incompetence of not being able to make people understand that we all are different yet same, that there is no religion greater than humanity, rather, the prayer was what I thought – would be the most effective solution to the humanitarian crisis and also environmental crisis that we seem to be in now. I used to literally analyse as much as I can, the factors and reasons behind the thinking that led to such crisis, and I realised all those could be summed up in the fact that millions of years of evolution and yet we couldn’t learn to accept people’s differences. Anything and everything that wasn’t like ours was wrong and to justify it we raced to prove everybody else wrong. And it’s laughable that we only thought of proving others wrong and not ourselves right, had we tried the latter approach, we could have gone in a better direction and have corrected so much of wrong. Well, thinking of having realised what could have been the mistakes, I carefully drafted a prayer, a request to god to do something powerful enough that could show us humans, our insignificance, our powerlessness and send our egos off. I thought a major disaster or war could actually bring in empathy for each other, it would bond us together in times of fear and pain, make us better at understanding people and realizing that the differences we have, are the diversity we must possess as a human species to sustain ourselves and progress further as a complex community consisting of living beings.
Today when indeed we face such a situation I realize, I was right to a great extent, when I see two religious enemies stranded together, help each other, forgetting about their differences and only remembering their human similarity, knowing a man cannot be an island; or when I see nature heal itself; when I see societies level up to some extent when I see capitalists shudder as much as poors in wake of though different reasons but which are linked together in the economic world we have built. It’s times like these when people realise each other’s worth and in the process of recovery rediscover and help each other.
However hard I may have prayed, I now understand I never have myself thought of it ever becoming a reality, since I prayed for it but never wanted it. The past few weeks have manifested in people a weird terror and panic, that the things that they might have prayed for like jobless holidays at home doing nothing, would seem like a bondage for them. The prowess we thought we had of scientific excellence seems to have abandoned us, and the world demanding outward perspective as come to force us to turn inwards. It does make me think, that how low had we fallen that we need to suffer so much to wake up to the grimness we have taken ourselves to and I do wonder would it be enough to make us go home, and if not what can? and worse- how it will be when that comes?!