Bloodshed and Bruises!

When we come across something that makes us feel uncomfortable, we either stand up to it or we back off. The former doesn’t cause problems, as emotions are shot forth and done and dusted there only. The real danger begins when we repress our emotions without finding a healthy outlet. We might feel safe avoiding sticking up for ourselves, but the emotions buried keep accumulating in the unconscious. They don’t die—they just pile up.

History testifies to the fact that human toxicity knows no limits when explored and acted on. Hitler knew no restraint while butchering human lives. Of late, a woman knew no mercy while murdering her husband and amputating his body parts and cementing them. Serial killers feel no moral scruples while unleashing their dark side on their respective victims. What occurred in Pahalgam remains just another variant of human darkness.

When we are insecure about ourselves, having gone through no personal evaluation, we become easy targets of things that spark our unconscious, where our repressed emotions lie dormant. We become blind. It is now the fight between conscious thinking to not do any wrong and the unconscious urge to do everything wrong just to feel relieved. Now, when we are born in a toxic environment where inaccurate interpretations of Islam are the norm, some turn into ‘religiously motivated’ killers.

All it has to do with on a personal level are psychic insecurities. But when a pack of such monsters that have killed their emotions since they were born join hands, all hell breaks loose. Pahalgam is a case in point. People who benefit from this are those that have the broader sinister agenda in mind. Militants are just the pawns of the huge dark chessboard.

The situation worsens when people with different religious backgrounds fail to understand the nuances of the gruesome attack at Pahalgam and instead blame the whole religion as a prime driver. X is flooded with ‘Islam is terror’ and ‘Islamic terrorism.’ It’s as grave a situation as the strings-tied puppetry subjugation of militants by big shots in Pakistan. Humans’ claimed superior-inferior dichotomy in religious discourses is an evil we need to weed out from our nation.

An equally worrying situation unfolding while expressing anger is the assault on Kashmiri students studying throughout the length and breadth of our nation. Someone did the horrible act at Pahalgam, but projecting anguish onto some other person divorced from the occurrence is not sensible, not even a tad. We are as grieved as the affected families. It hurts and pinches. But chalking it up to us indirectly, as the social media reads, appears to be stark injustice.

I see the visage of a person in crimson red, panting for breath. Struggling to walk with a beloved tourist on his back. Crying thereafter as the whole valley cried in the aftermath of the tragedy. This is Kashmiriyat. We are crushed by these occurrences on many fronts—another tragedy!

A little broadening of the horizons of our perspectives can kill the monster that makes us all suffer. May God save us from bloodshed and bruises!