Where are we heading to?

I was 7 years old playing hide and seek with my cousins. It was the inauguration of my uncle’s new hotel. Some of the floors of the hotel were not completed. Rooms were without any electrical fittings, doors without any handles and latches. It was in one of these rooms, all of us hid and closed the door. The room became pitch dark. Not even a ray light entered the room. We all, kids of the same age, were scared. We tried to open the door (with no handle or latch) but were not unable to open or pull it. We all dead scared that we will be stuck in this room for long. How will our parents find us? What if they don’t find us? All of us scared to death started crying. It was probably our crying that led our cousin playing the “it” (one who was supposed to find all of us) to this room and he pushed open the door. This happened when I was 7 year old, and to this day when I am 26 years old, I have never played hide and seek again in life.

All this flashed back to me, lately when I saw movie “Parzania”. All I could think of the little girl “Dilshad” who lost her brother and witnessed the mob madness. Will she be ever able to forget that and live normally? Thousands of people who in real life have been a witness to such carnages will be able to put it back forever? I keep imagining the effect of such incidents on the psyche of those who had been a witness to such carnages. Will they ever learn to trust? Do we want to give all this as a legacy to the coming generation? An atmosphere of mutual distrust and fear? Are we as a society not criminally guilty of murdering their spirit of trust, mutual confidence and coma dire?

It is always said whenever a communal riot happens, that, that’s for avenging the injustice done to their men previously. I always believe that one act of injustice cannot be justified by another act of injustice. Public outrage on such incident is natural but that does not mean that people should go on a killing spree. The government and judiciary are there to punish the guilty, not the society. By communal killing, we are only creating room for more backlash. Doing so will not safeguard interests of the party commiting actrocities.

Do we really want our kids to grow in such an atmosphere? If not then what is it that we can do? If nothing else then we can try and increase the tolerance level of the society against such provocations.