Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.
-George W. Bush
Gulzar Sahab, in one of his interviews, was asked this once: “Do you think we have made enough films or written enough literature about the horrors of the India-Pakistan Partition?” He, being a victim of it himself, said, “No. We haven’t. And there won’t be enough ever.”
Films made, books written, art created around any horrifying historical incident never feel enough. Because one can never get over something that in one way or the other, changed the course of humanity, the course of history, and sometimes even the course of geography.
How many films? and I say honest, genuine, deeply felt films have we made on the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai? How many films on the 2006 local train blasts? & How many on the heinous terror attack of 26/11? Less than a dozen I guess!
There are so many attacks, massacres, killings, genocides that we as a nation have faced, have suffered. But do we talk about them enough? No, we don’t. We feel as if just talking about terror is a threat to peace and humanity. You know what? It’s not. For Peace to Prevail, The Terror Must Die. And for the terror to die, it must be talked about fearlessly.
Think about the amount of literature and cinema that’s been made on and around Nazi cruelty. Think about what Americans have made continuously on the attacks of 9/11 and about Operation Neptune Spear. They talk about it almost every single year through their films, their writings, their shows - because they don’t want to forget what is considered to be the greatest tragedy they went through in modern history.
Netflix's Documentary American Manhunt: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden is the latest & exact example of the fact, I am talking about. A perfectly made documentary with detailed explanations on how American agencies, after a long wait of 15 years, found and killed Al-Qaeda’s supremo, wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden.
There is a scene from a Shahrukh Khan starrer film Ra-One, where the character played by actor Arjun Rampal says this dialogue, and I quote: “Tum log Raavan ko har saal kyun jalate ho? Kyonki tumhein yakeen nahin hota ki vo mar chuka hai.”
It’s hard to gulp it down. But it is a fact that - “Till the time there is humanity, there will be terrorism.” But so will be the counters. The defense. The fightbacks. The attacks, the violence, the wounds, the scars, the pain they inflicted must not be forgotten, because if you do so you will start taking peace for granted. I recall a famous African proverb that says - "The axe forgets, but the tree remembers."
Peace, just like freedom, isn’t a one-time goal. It’s not eternal. It has to be achieved again and again and again. Its pursuit is perpetual. “Let everything happen to you. Beauty or terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final,” said the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. And I agree with him.
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