Peace NOT p i e c e s!

"We make war that we may live in peace!" This famous quote of Aristotle comes to my mind daily as I read in news of the blasts and killings. Anger, skirmish, battle and war, all these have just two reasons to show their face on earth, difference in language or religion!

What makes a language, a language? The phonetics or the script? Take for instance the sound "Aa", can u distinguish whether it is a Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi or a Bengali "Aa"? The distinguishing factor has always been this script and we humans have always fought over this for god alone knows what! Take the case of our own India, where the states were originally divided on the basis of language for better administrative and communicative purposes. But now they have probably forgotten that they belong to a larger group called India and a even larger group "Humans"! Classic cases of the rifts are the Cauvery water row between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the Belgaum issue between Karnataka and Maharashtra, the internal rifts in Andra Pradesh and the list is in-exhaustive.

The next thing what we humans clash over is religion. The only religion that existed in prehistoric times was humanity. It was a binary value. Good or Bad, and nothing in between. But somewhere in between things took a turn for the worse. But the irony is that since all the religions in the world ultimately say the same thing, just as in the case of the phonetics we cant say which religion said what in the broader perspective. The paths may be different but the all reach the same place!

The problem in my opinion lies in the fact that we humans sometimes as educated fools are not able to distinguish between the feelings of fondness and fanaticism! Loving a thing is good, fanaticism is fatal. Had Aristotle been alive today he would have written "We make war and we lie in PIECES!"

Here is an anecdote:-

There was once a man reading a book and his child was asking him lot of questions and irritating him. To make his child quiet he took a paper and tore it into pieces. On the paper was the world map. He asked the child to join the pieces of the map and then ask him questions. The child came back in a matter of 5mins and showed him a perfectly joined map. The man was puzzled and asked how he managed to get it right as the child was very young to know the placement of the countries on the map. The child showed his father that on the reverse of the map was a human face, the child has just joined the human face and the world was perfectly assembled!