Last week, I encountered a question I wish no child would ever feel the need to ask. "Has there ever been a time when there was peace in the world?" my daughter asked me. And then, after some thinking, she answered the question herself: "Probably not."
I would have liked nothing more than to tell her she was wrong in thinking so. But the unfortunate reality is that every age and generation has had to deal with conflict, even if it witnessed it from a distance. As a child, I remember those times when the daily newspaper and the 9 O'clock news brought in stories of terror from Punjab that began with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and outlasted him by more than a decade. Stark black and white images of the carnage that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the stories of mass murder on the roads haunted me for days.
Before us, my parents' generation too experienced the violent world as children, in the form of Partition. Like many whose roots lie in Punjab, I have heard stories from my father about the lunacy he escaped through in 1947. He was six when he made his way from Pakistan to India with his parents and siblings, often hiding in the fields to evade the marauding mobs.
I know where my daughter's question came from and why it came now than at any other time. We are still suffering the aftermath of Uri and the retaliatory surgical strikes. Every day, there are reports of "Us" hitting "Them" and "Them" hitting "Us" and of body bags coming home to distraught families. The high-decibel TV news anchors, many of whom have clearly lost the sense of balance on which journalism is pivoted, are no doubt affecting the way children today view the world.
The last one year, in particular, has again and again thrown at us images of children or places associated with children directly taking the impact of the turbulence.
A year and two months have already passed since the body of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy trying to escape the violence back home with his family on a boat, was found washed up on a Turkish beach, lying face down, hands stretched close to the sides - like a baby in deep sleep. That heart-wrenching picture had shaken the world and overnight increased calls for peace. Several European countries promised to change their policies towards refugees.
During the recent demolition of a refugee camp in Calais, France, that picture of little Kurdi appeared forgotten. The camp had hundreds of unaccompanied children, separated from their families during the violence back home or whose parents were consumed by it. Many of them have since wandered away into oblivion The fate of hundreds of others hangs in the balance. Desperate for help, some of them have put up posters with messages such as this one: "We are not toys to play with. We are kids. We need lives."
If all this is happening too far away from us to care, then let us turn out attention to our home. Kashmir. And the people of Kashmir, who we have let down so badly with our myopic policies that rely less on engagement and more on forcing a military solution. A population governed by the gun. How can it ever trust that man holding the gun, no matter how convincingly he tells them that he is on their side? It can never be a normal life and we, who have never had to live it, cannot claim to even remotely understand what it must be like.
Here too, we now see children more than ever before caught in conflict. A child opens the door of his house to let in a guest and takes a bullet. A child watches his school being burnt, and then others, one after the other, until 25 of them have been gutted. Why?
As guns from across the border target civilians, a baby is hit. The next morning, we see pictures of the helpless infant, all bandaged up, being carried to hospital. In another frame, a boy sits, his eyes wide and teeth clenched, at the funeral of his sister who too was killed in the shelling.
These images don't escape our children. They see them, they think about them and they worry. An anxious world is what we are creating today. What we do not realise is that if we go on this way, we are going to self-destruct sooner than we were meant to.
veenu.sandhu@bsmail.in
