It was going to be a long Thanksgiving weekend here as I was wrapping up my work on Wednesday. Two things happened right during that time that left me disturbed. A last minute work just before the holidays is always frustrating, But a terror attack on Mumbai simply silenced me. I did not know how to react when I saw a flurry of twitter messages tagged #Mumbai. Multiple things were going on in my mind. I closed the day by writing one simple twitter message:
I Pray for Love and Peace.
As Humans, we have the power to think, a brain and the mind to help us with that. We call it our sixth sense. When we are able to separate the good from the evil, we are using our power to think. But we have a choice. We can choose to be evil or we can choose to be good. A normal person chooses to be good most of the times, but we do fall trap to the evil once a while. Because, Evil is so evil that it can delude you and make you feel good temporarily. You will know what I mean if you had watched Spider Man 3.
Mumbai was attacked. Attacked by Humans who chose to be Evil, who thought that killing innocent people will bring them whatever justice they were looking for, who thought it will make them feel good for whatever they were thinking about.
As I was driving to the library on Friday, when it was not yet over, I had several things going on in my sub conscious mind. I was in a constant search for an answer to what was happening in Mumbai – Terrorism.
1. A few men entered the city by a rubber boat and went on their attacking spree. India as a country needs to have better National security, Intelligence and infrastructure to support it. When a fellow tweep (@imtipedia) messaged about Commandos arriving in BEST bus, my reaction was WTF. But here is the reality, Security will keep us safe from the terrorists temporarily. Beefing up security will not kill terrorism entirely though. Terrorism will be there and they will always try to penetrate the security.
2. The idea of attacking the terrorists camps and smoking them out and killing the last known terrorist will also only work temporarily. May be this temporariness will be longer than point 1. But when fresh individuals, whoever they may be, begin to take over from where it was left off, we are back to square one. So this means that killing a 100 terrorists is not going to kill terrorism until you identify and fix the root cause.
3. So Can we kill terrorism by fixing the root cause? What is it? Is terrorism caused due to oppression of one community over the other? Is it politics? Is it the envious neighboring countries? Whatever it may be, can we identify the root cause and fix that? Terrorists are not born, they are humans who are converted into being so. So can we fix the problem by looking at their motive? This will be very tedious and it is probably something that can only be done alongside 1 and 2. But even if we fix the root cause, as soon as a new motive/reason begins to happen, terrorism would be born again with a new set of individuals willing to take up the evil side for new reasons.
My solutions were all temporary, but they have to be done.
I reached the library and I dropped what I had borrowed. But I had a choice, I could have been evil and stolen the borrowed materials and hacked into the library system, update it as though I have returned it. But I didn’t, I simply dropped the borrowed materials and left. Why? I chose to be good and Why? I didn’t know why I did that, But I did find the answer I was looking for. It was already said long back by a Tamil Poet named Pattukottai Kalyanasundaram:
திருடனாய் பார்த்து திருந்தாவிட்டால் திருட்டை ஒழிக்க முடியாது.
It means “Only if a thief becomes good and stops stealing, Theft would be eradicated”. Only when a terrorist chooses to be a good person and lets go of the intentions to be on the evil side, Terrorism will be completely eradicated from the face of our planet. This is it, this was the only perfect solution that I could think of and it is completely in one’s own hands, which is every single person on this planet including the Terrorists.
Every single person in this world can think of 2 kinds of possibilities for everything – Good Ones and Bad Ones. If every single person chooses only the Good possibility every single time, Good will win over the Evil, not by a War, not with blood shed, but by simply not choosing the Evil.
When Evil is not chosen, Good need not fight Evil. There will be Love and Peace forever.
Update: I think I didn’t convey my intended meaning properly. From this post, I say that the first 3 points – Security, Attacking the camps, Fixing root cause will all have to be done, in order to save ourselves from the current set of terrorists. But if we want to prevent terrorism from happening in future, we have to choose the last solution that i have shown. Choose good over evil every time. It is hard to explain that, but I am sure you will be able to judge what I really mean by that. I apologize if my point didn’t come out the way I wanted.