The siege of the beautiful commissariat. Turn every possible direction, the scene is the same - lush green mountains, peaks and valleys. When the day progressed into the night, the beauty of the place drastically increased as moonlight glimmered on the lawns. There were oak trees everywhere, fallen acorns lying around scattered and squirrels sweetly squeaking as they grab those oak nuts. But the beauty, one dreadful day, was desecrated by a tyrant named Hazael who was King over Syria. The siege was deadly. Everything was destroyed. The provisions looted. Trees cut. Fires lit. Women raped. The heads of children smashed with stones. Men mutilated and most of them killed in torture. King Joash gathered his armies and battled hard to reconquer the place, not once, but thrice and finally, after much struggle, regained it. But the regained Bashan was no more a beautiful city. It was a destroyed dunghill filled with blood and loud bitter cries. Pitifully, the place vanished from history after this final recorded event.
Well, my intention is not to tell you a story from forgotten middle-east history. But to draw your attention to the congruence it generates with our present day living. Here I go! There is distress everywhere. This is added to our lives in no comprehensible proportion as days roll by and the Sun goes up and down. These could be nullified by the good things that happen in our lives. But there is a greater distress that can take hold of our lives if we allow our minds to be incarcerated by the domineering complexes of the tyrants we see everyday.
These complexes have the power to jinx us into the vile spell of deceptions. There are no incentives for being good, but showers of praise for people who are successful cheats. Bharat Mata Ki Jai and the Common Minimum Programme were blatant deceptions, polarization behind the scenes was the ugly truth. Misuse is the way to prosper. Impose things on others, stifle their words, let them not voice their opinions, kill their spirits, molest the rationale, mutilate their minds, backbite, sex it up, be judgmental just the wrong way, be wayward, fake it, do not analyse why people act the way they act, create confusions, shatter peace, gamble with lives, make divisions, denigrate enviously, create fables and float it in the media, yearn for people to admire you even if you knew they were false, be a narcissist, be sadistic, compromise quick, have no stance, change colors, never accept your mistake, feel you're always right, mock others, abuse, help people only if you get something in return, feed on other's pie, stump from behind, swell, gloat, think you are bigger than the universe, take a lot of pictures and upload them on facebook - these are steps that you can take to become the smartest kid every girl and the larger janata would go mad about. Wake up to the era of post-modern siege!
You might wonder what they would siege! Dear, it is your mind, the Bashan of your life, they siege. Your inner peace would go to the tatters - robbed and violated. Because it doesn't matter what you actually are, what matters is what they think who you are. If you're thought as a scum, you would forever be treated as a downcast Manu Smriti style. If you're thought as an assertive violator - (oh, how could it get easier than this!) - they would frame you in a false case and send you to jail. After years of mercy petitions, you know what you deserve is no less than capital punishment and you would be hung till your intestines gush out Afzal Guru style.
Scientists say that planet Earth has gone through 23 Ice Ages. Oh rightly yes - I am a big fan of the Ice Age movie series. In every part, you would see Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel, with an acorn(oak nut), the fruit of Bashan. Whatever happened in the movie, the acorn would be shown with the squirrel chasing it - in the beginning or in the end of the movie. Nothing would happen to the fruit - though it passed through all those dreadful Ice Ages. That is the spirit one needs to breed in one's inner self. 'You can kill a man, not his spirit!' - is how our tombstones should read. Let us pass through ice ages in our lives every now and then, let worse things happen, let the whole world conspire against us - but no, let us not give up on our upright behavior and principled living - at any cost.
