War

 Unfortunately, "war" has become the 'open sesame' clue of our world recently. Just when we thought we had managed the war against Covid, erupted the Russia-Ukraine war. As it lingers on (does anyone know whatever is happening on that front currently?), the Palestine-Israel war is re-creating the gory scenes by the hour!

There is a war against peace currently. That is why people blithely talk of a war to end wars! Actually, war is truly vicious these days, what with the technological advances available. At times, I think that Einstein was so spot on when he said that "I would not know the weaponry of the Third World War, but the Fourth World War would surely be fought with stones and sticks!". 

Yet at times I do feel that often the war could be nothing but an attempt to create a market place for the outdated war technology so that the new lot could be invented, and marketed! Just like the way Indian women, (next African, later Latin-American women) became beauty queens, Miss Universe, Miss World, Miss Galli to Miss Dilli so that beauty products could sell, right?

No, I am not being cynical. Consumerism is key word of the world today, not to forget the cartel practices for business  booms! Yet the real enemy leading to the innumerable massacres is not really the economy or the post-LPG financial structures. 

Rather the fiend lies in the human heart! It can be the aggressive feel of ethnicity mixed with the militant religious intolerance, a dangerous cocktail which breeds the terrorists who have changed the very face of the world after the Twin Tower terror. Till that fatal fall, there was mostly a mutual tolerance which is now replaced by a bitter, vicious suspicion which leads to wars galore, in Afghanistan, in Gaza,

The Russian invasion is a by-product of the NATO border skirmishes which America  using to downsize the Putin-Xi alliance is Interesting unions creating a multi-polar world! Here economic sanctions to crypto-currency, subtle but vicious were the post-modern weapons.

In all this political-religious frenzy and economic hustle-bustle is forgotten the fact that those who die are the innocents! No longer are soldiers the only martyrs. Even children are not spared now! No songs of innocence any longer, only the pathos that Tennyson so sensitively captured in "Home they brought her warrior dead!"

Pratima@ "Never think that war, however necessary, however justified, is not a crime," maintains Hemingway.