How do you compose yourself amid the warmongering? Especially because I am currently located remotely, the celebratory rallying of India’s current military advances trigger in me a sense of disbelief. Imagine you had a fight with your neighbour and decided to poison their water supply. Do you really think the soil sitting on your plot of land won’t ingest the toxicity? What makes you think your garden is immune? It sounds simplistic to reduce historical tensions between two post-colonial nations to gardening metaphors, but the reality is so much more stupid, tinged with hyperbolic reactions that only serve to further stimulate an ongoing cycle of violence. The need of the hour is not war but repair; not counter-attack but redressal mechanisms that can help assess the size of our existing wounds so that we do not need to cause further injuries.

Before the events of yesterday, I had been planning to write about attention. I wanted to explore its contours, what it means to incorporate it as a virtue within one’s every day, especially given how our lives seem to unravel against the theatre of continuous distraction. War, too, is a manufactured distraction meant to deflect our attention from the realities that need our attention: climate change, pollution, growing inequalities and declining birth rates. Instead of focussing our energies on finding remedies, we are being called upon to beat battle drums and to cheer over the mindless slaughter of innocent people in the quest for gunning down terrorists. Israel’s cruel occupation of Gaza and decimation of civilian lives and infrastructure in the name of revenge opened the gateway for all occupying forces to perpetuate further atrocities and to get away with impunity.