Sands Of A Foreign Land And Some Of My Own Sorrow

Today was another usual lazy Sunday in New York. There wasn't really anything to speak about. I lay most of the day in my bed trying to work a little but just mostly surfed the Internet, something that I do not get to do for the rest of the week. Then around two in the afternoon, I turned on the TV. After shuffling through few channels, I started watching this documentary on HBO about the current state of Darfur, Sudan. I do not write unless I feel compelled to do so. And, in all honesty, this documentary shook me to the extent that on an absolutely normal and event-free Sunday, I sat down and questioned so many things inside and around me. I would really want everyone who visits my blog to watch this documentary even if at this point, this issue seems cliched and overstressed to you.

Sand and Sorrow

I do not want to sound charitable and certainly do not want to preach. But when you watch something like this, nothing seems to make sense in your perfectly cozy city apartment life. Suddenly I was staring at a reality that was light years beyond all my sensible and rational understanding of the ways of the world and human existence. It is utterly shameful (to put it mildly) that all of us who do not have the excuse of ignorance continue to go on with our lives like nothing wrong is going on in this world and even if it is then it's worth as much of our precious attention as a bad movie that we just happened to have watched.

And then when I was done feeling insignificant and irrelevant and ineffective; I sat down and wondered to myself - beyond political and economic agendas, whether such horrific inhuman activities go unpunished, even unnoticed(have been historically) because the world, at heart, is racist (said, Rukun); or because we, as human beings ( and there is no end to the ramblings about how advanced, intelligent and accomplished a species we are), have just failed to emotionally evolve enough to be able to empathize, get affected by and act upon incidents that happen beyond five blocks of our neighborhood!! The worst - may be both are true.