I was in a boarding school and we were playing something, our tummies rumbling in anticipation of the evening snacks. We smelled of earth, dry grass and sweat and ran to get freshened up before snack time.
We used to have those while watching the evening news on Doordarshan ( the state sponsored news channel of India) .
As I entered, I heard raised voices, some of the fellow boarders were glued to the tv, which showed a building going up in smoke, while others were gesticulating excitedly, even the warden was there, watching it with us.
I can’t recall the faces of most of the people in that room, but the image of the building dissolving into smoke is still clear as a day.
Our hostel had a light’s out rule by 10 pm and most of us complied with it because we used to get so tired by the evenings that we slept like logs anyway dreading the morning alarm bell that the warden rang inches from our beds if we failed to wake up at 5 am. But that night no kid slept at night, we could only talk about the deadly flights that caused so much destruction, I believe a few of us were in tears as well. Days from that incident we learnt new terms like Al Qaeda, Mujahideen, and names that were soon to be equated with terrorism and fundamentalism.
Soon enough, we also learnt to distinguish between peers by their religion, which was a new concept.
“How can someone become so blinded by their faith that they can kill and maim innocents?” is a question that kept me up for a long time and still does everytime there’s a terror act. I took up reading investigative pieces uncovering the motivations behind such heinous acts and quickly learnt that religious extremism is just the tip of the iceberg and that powerful states fumbling to maintain the status quo are the hidden pupeteers running the show.
Fingers in symphony 