No reason to celebrate

Another day, another week and in fact another year has gone by in my life and when I look back at 26 years of my existence, I don’t think I have learnt enough about this world to understand the grotesque human nature that drives us to commit crimes that even the Satan would spit at. As I entered the 27th year of my eventless life, I tried to retrospect and summarize my life in this blog. Did I mention “eventless” ? So, I gave up on it, in any case getting older ain’t no fun, and turned to my favourite pass time, that is to read up about wars and battles that has wrecked this beautiful planet. There I stumbled upon the one of the greatest crime this century has seen, next only to the Holocaust in terms of number of people killed or rendered homeless. I won’t even try to rank genocides one after the other, because it just isn’t possible. How can one rate someone’s misery above somebody else’s ? That will be a great disservice to the people who actually suffered to an extent that is beyond our comprehension.

Anyway, I am talking about the Srebrenica massacre that had commenced 15 years back on July 11th. It lasted about 10 days and for that many days I think God was on a vacation out of this world or perhaps He just got sick and tired with the Man and left him to ruin himself. Reading about this incident, I was awe-struck at the sheer cruelty with which young men were butchered, women raped and even children not spared. I am outraged ! What sort of animals are we ? We are not even animals, because even they feel some sort of compassion towards their fellow beings. At least, they will not kill each other only because they belong to a different religion or a race or speak different language or simply don’t agree with each other. We are suppose to be a species with better intellectual capabilities, well, I don’t disagree, we seem to be thinking of creative ways to kill and rape people.

I am just amazed at our ability to not feel sorry for mass murdering an entire population. How can only a handful of people convince an entire nation to do things  nobody could even dream of !? No, I don’t think that is possible unless the majority of the audience is corrupt, now I know you can’t just generalize things in this way but I can’t help but think that there would only be a handful of men in the crowd that feels otherwise. If the collective feeling is one of hostility towards something, the demagogues are just too happy to exploit it and the sad part is people don’t realize that there are being taken for a ride.

You know, Adolf Hitler in his autobiography ‘Mein Kampf’ says something to this effect – Give a man an ideology to fight for and he will fight for it more than he would for his own survival. I guess religion, race, country and all the other things that differentiate us from one another can be turned into an ideology and used to further some personal agendas.

We are blessed with intelligence that has taken us to Moon, perhaps we will colonize some other sorry planet in the future too, but I’d rather trade it for a more understanding, tolerant and accommodating human touch.