“Lost..!”

People often say that the only time of peace in Pakistan is between one “Breaking News” and the other. Bombs, killings, accidents, calamities – since 2007 I can hardly recall a day that passed without we suffering from a constant barrage of breaking news bringing in the number after number of people who have died.

“3 people killed in target killing “10 die in a road side blast” “Numerous killed and injured in a suicide blast” – slowly, and I would admit my own guilt on that, we all have become numbed to the notion of death in our country.

It is a strange general behaviour of ours. If anyone tells us of a bomb blast or we read a story on a laptop/TV screen, the first thing we look for is the “number” of people who died in that blast. There is that urge to see “how many?” and strangely enough if we do not see a double-digit number then there is that sense of relief, oh “chalo yaar 5 log hi maray hain” (Oh well only five have died!).

Probably our breaking news-eager media has successfully shaped our national psyche to ignore any deaths that do not stack up to more than 30-50 at a time.

I remember the tale I read in a book somewhere about “Attila”. The Hun ruler who was quiet simply the person for Venice and Rome as Genghis Khan was for Baghdad. A mountain of skulls, plumes of fires seen from miles away was his favourite sight. Ferocious, cruel and clever, Attila is often remarked in the European history around the “speed” at which he attacked his targets. Using a breed of wild Hungarian/Nordic horses, Attila’s main feature of attack was his speed at which he covered at times huge distances and meet his enemy unprepared.

It is said that once Attila entered a suburban village of Northern Tuscany (Present day Italy) and razed everything to ground with flaming horse-archers force. He ordered all the villagers to gather in the ground outside the town area. Somehow, it transpired that the news of their attack was leaked beforehand and most of the villagers were able to flee before he reached the area. When Attila only saw a handful of men, he ordered all the prisoners to be tied to the horses and dragged to the next village. He continued to tie and drag people across 3-5 different villages until he had a massive number of people as prisoners.

He then ordered to cut everyone’s head off and stack them up in a single minaret of skulls. When asked why didn’t he killed everyone earlier he replied “I don’t enjoy killing, I just love counting, the higher the pile the more to count”

For us as a nation we have remarkably lost our sense of empathy. For us the number of killings have taken a far more important place in our consciousness than the value of life.

Today we celebrate “Youm e Shuhda” - when I look around myself and see the beautiful faces I’ve lost to this war and terrorism, I realise what a bunch of wretched humans we are.

We all live everyday engulfed in our little circles of pleasures and procrastinations. For us the breaking news is nothing more than a new number. We do not see the heart breaking stories behind these numbers. We do not think how one man killed on the mountains of Waziristan or the streets of Karachi can mean the whole world to someone. Shahnam, Umair, Jehangir, Sir Imran, Captain TJ, Major Zaka – they all are just names for us. What care do we do who they were? What have they left behind? There’ll be a new blast tomorrow to check the “score” of death. A new calamity to see the “number”, plenty do we have on our minds to think of these people.

Lost…we are lost, in the endless mire of social, moral and conscious bankruptcy..! 

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