Jinhe naaz hai hind pe wo kahan hai???

I started to feel the goose bumps all over my body. I don’t know if that was due to the cold that I was feeling since morning or it was because I just heard about Sabina Sehgal Saikia. She is a consulting editor and a food critic in Times of India. She was in Mumbai and got stuck in the situation inside the Taj Hotel. She was continuously sending messages to her family and friends. She was hiding under her bed and had closed the lights of her room. Her last message was a frightening one saying “They are in my bathroom”. After this SMS to her husband no call or message got her reply.
Seems just like a movie na? But this is not a movie, this is life! And a tough life I must say. There was never a guarantee card of life, but nowadays it’s not the guarantee of life that matters the most, but it’s the scared feeling of ‘how will we die’ that frightens us the most.
We don’t know if we will die in a bus while returning home from the office, or in a train while going to meet our loved ones, or in an aeroplane while going to a hospital to get rid of a severe disease, or in a hotel while resting from a hard day’s work.
The human life is not safe anywhere. We are always at risk. We can die anywhere, anytime. Even at this moment I’m not sure if I will be able to see tomorrow’s sunrise… or should I say I’m not even sure to see today’s sunset.
These things make us helpless. We feel disgusted by such acts, but we are not able to completely stop them. Even if we raise our voice it doesn’t matter to anyone. Either we will get killed or something so heinous will happen to us or our family members that we will stop raising our voice forever.
And even if we do raise our voice, our own people will protest against us. People of our own country even of our own community. Yes, even where we live… that place is also not safe for us. You never know when you’ll be tagged as a Hindu/Muslim, black/white, Bihari/Marathi, and the list will be endless.
Let me tell you guys my own example. Today when we were discussing about the chaos of the Taj and Oberoi, one of the employee of the company casually said, “Ma’am don’t go to Karachi.” I didn’t know why he said that to me, but then I realised that he was perhaps discriminating me because of my religion. Again this same day I gave a thousand rupee note to someone for some reason and that same employee (who I mentioned about just now) took my note and began to joke that the note was not a genuine one because, “Here it is not written India, it’s written Pak…” and he smiled at me. I wanted to hit him hard where it hurts the most but I controlled myself.
This humiliation is not only suffered by me, but by many others in this country, in this world, even in their separate localities.
We always talk about fighting against a similar cause, but it can’t be done unless and until we drop all differences and put on a garb of unity.
How thick skinned can you be that you’ll cry on your own loss but will like to see other people suffering? Is this the world we want our next generation to breathe in? Is this the world where we ourselves want to live?
No doubt it is a bit difficult to change the mentality of a whole community or a country, but we can try to at least change the mind sets of the few people we come across in our day-to-day life.
I don’t know if I will change anybody’s mind set through my writing but I just wanted to express my helplessness.