Peace Midst the Chaos The Internal Journey

a media office is attacked

a beautiful soul hides under the table

she faces the wall she would not give

her attackers the satisfaction of seeing

her in tears

she texts her parents telling them

they’ll she loves them

she survives the attack but she walks

out a different person

some of us face major moments of trauma

that they can trace

others have minor moments of trauma

happening around them

every day so close that we stop seeing

it eventually

as for when i saw the first dead bodies

of the civil war

i was six when a missile missed our

house and killed six of our neighbors

i was 11 when a gun was pulled out on my

father and he was taken away

when i try to trace back my trauma all i

see is a haze

and i’ve just realized that a few years

back

and i wonder how many of us face the

same dilemma

and we fail to see it and even when we

do

our pride stops us from talking about it

as much as i want to be a motivational

speaker here and give you something to

be happy about cheering about walk out

of here with your fists pumping

i am but only an academic and a poet at

heart

so i’m going to try and work with your

perspective today

do you know what the highest turnout in

recent history in the past two decades

in elections were and where they

happened

surprisingly it was iraq 2004 after the

fall of the saddam regime

now you would think that a country that

hadn’t had elections for more than two

decades

would not know how important elections

were

on the other hand the lowest turnout in

recent history was the u.s presidential

elections where 50

art percent people showed up

what’s interesting is that both these

elections share the same

element that drives people showing up

and not showing up

that’s called othering right it’s very

difficult to know yourself to identify

yourself to really put pen to paper and

say who you are

but it’s really easy to look down in

your social structure

and find the weakest link find the

smallest group the emancipated group

and really point towards them and say

i am not them right so you define

yourself in opposition to things

that is why in both elections though

one party in iraq thought that if the

others came into power it would be an

existential question for them

it was primal to their existence

that they stay in power on the other

hand in the united states the

others the emancipated groups thought

that voting voting wouldn’t make a

difference

because their fates were decided

it’s talking about labels it’s just

about politics

it’s about something beyond that

think about the racial jokes you crack

everywhere around the world

think of any country you’ve been to and

think about their racial jokes

mostly and very often they would target

the weaker in the group

you go to iraq the jokes are about the

kurds you go to pakistan they used to

joke about the bengalis

in afghanistan at one point we had the

indians coming in and working as cheap

labor

most of our jokes were about them

so that’s the power of words and how

they change our perspective

and it goes beyond that it goes beyond

that to our own identity

as people of this country and it has

been happening throughout our

lives ask your elders and they would

tell you that

aristotle the great brought the biggest

army in the world

and yet he was amazed at the fighting

skill of the people of this land

you think about the mongol hordes and

how they

faced tough battles through our region

the british empire was

expelled from this country the soviet

union and so on and so forth

but there’s something behind the scenes

that we do not realize

did we actually decide that this was our

image

that this was who we were because i’ll

tell you

it wasn’t us so the british empire

actually invested a lot of

energy and political will into creating

this image of the afghans savage

warriors

rudyard kim kipling in his poem about

his days in afghanistan

writes about how if you were wounded and

left on the plains of afghanistan

and before the woman come out and cut

what remains

roll towards your rifle and blow your

brains

and go to your god like a soldier just

to show you the savage nature

of even the woman of afghanistan that

helped the british empire

that narrative was very important to

them it was important to them for two

reasons

one was international law

rules of warfare they only apply to

humans

that qualify and can be treated as

equals

whereas savages really counter

insurgency strategies can be whatever

they are

and they’re justified because they don’t

follow the rules it’s smart not to

follow the rules with them

we justified punishments like communal

punishments like community punishments

that were happening in our region

do you understand that the british would

demolish a whole marketplace

if there was one security incident in

that region

against the primary basis of justice

and on the second end why they did it

was they needed local fighters

so they would go up to tribesmen recruit

them give them money and get them to

fight against anyone who revolted

that’s where the important narrative of

savage’s

fighting barbarians came into being

because

when you’re sitting out there and you

have

people fighting amongst themselves you

really have nothing to lose

and i wish it ended there even the

recent u.s intervention in afghanistan

we see the term warlord being thrown

around a lot

so those who allied by by the us troops

were considered

tribal leaders supporters of the cause

and anyone who opposed

the united states nato and its allies

were considered warlords

and i heard a talk about how the taliban

were using

terms better they were using our own

rhetoric and discourse against us

there’s an interesting thought there

because

if you pick up their literature if you

look at the insurgency’s material

one of the primary reasons they tell us

to fight

is because the pride of the afran has

been injured

this land known as the graveyard of

civilization a stupid compliment that we

wear as a badge on ourselves

keeps driving people from the villages

to retake the honor of this country

do we really want to have that image

imposed on us

and then the idea is i think it’s human

nature so we can’t really blame the

advance or blame anyone else for how we

think

we in human nature are conformists we’re

so scared of standing out we just want

to merge into the crowd

and it comes from very very primal

instincts

like animals have you guys ever seen an

elephant

at a circus i don’t think we have

circuses here but

if you do go to a circus by any chance

you’d see this huge elephant

with a rope in its neck and it’s tied to

a peck on the ground

a peg that the elephant could literally

remove with a sneeze but the elephant

never runs away

why because the elephant when it was a

baby it tried to resist the rope

eventually gave up now even as a

grown-up elephant it thinks that the

rope is unbreakable so it never

challenges it

and even in human psyche there have been

tests where

people are brought into a room with

seven other candidates

who are all in on the act and they’re

asked a question

and they all give the wrong answer and

the test subject is very often inclined

to give the wrong answer

they know it’s the wrong answer to give

but they don’t want to stand out they

don’t want to appear

weird by giving the different answer

right so conformity is within our nature

but then it

creates problems right it creates

problems where we stop questioning

things around us

but we’re lucky because the past

century or two we’ve had scholars that

have come up to question

structures the money you

all have in your pocket or whoever does

have money here today

what does it mean why can you buy things

with this currency

what happened to all the currencies

before that what if the

government suddenly decides that we

should start trading peanuts for our

food or our clothes

what about the national anthem what

about the flag that we’ve changed so

often in this country

what do they mean why do they have any

meaning whatsoever

what if we all got up one day and

decided that this money meant nothing

that’s the power we have because all

these constructs around us

only feed off whatever legitimacy we

give it

and we have the power of stripping it

away that’s where the very important

quote by barths comes in

it’s not just about what things are it’s

about words

and he said the time had arrived for the

death

of the writer and the birth of the

reader

texts were not dictated by those who

wrote them

it was dictated by those who read them

and how they perceived them

and that’s the power we hold and it’s

not just words it’s our perspective as a

whole

it’s about how we look at our suffering

within this country

there’s a very interesting book for

those of us who are looking for some

meaning in life man’s searched for

meaning it was written by a

nazi holocaust camp survivor he was a

psychiatrist

and he writes about one of his patients

a husband who had recently lost his wife

the love of his life

he says he’s lost all hope he says that

he’s probably going to kill himself so

the doctor asked something really

important he asks him two questions

he says is this pain unbearable

the answer obviously is yes the second

question he asks is

would you wish this unbearable pain of

parting on your wife instead

would you have had her had her bury you

instead

it’s when the man realizes that there

was some blessing

in the suffering that he suffered i

don’t know why i keep holding the paper

upside down

okay and beyond that something

an idea to wrap up things with

we’ve talked about our words we’ve

talked about our identities and how

there’s some incentive for an outsider

to exploit it

one last thing that divides this country

very often is

the idea of what religion we believe in

do you know that in zero rastism which

was a religion propagated by zarustra

which was the original religion of this

land in persia it had one concept

the concept was to avoid

a word that still exists in our daily

language

dhruv in both pashto and

beyond that every religion you look at

the concepts are there still

in our day-to-day languages buddha

talked about

avoiding dukkha which ends up being the

hindi term for

which means suffering so if we

peeled religions to their core

we’d realize that at the end of it

there’s just one message

it’s to do good and not to do bad to be

better human beings

if there’s one thing that we can take

from religion

it’s that at the core of it it tries to

unite us

so if you’re going to walk out of here

and unless you decide that our

words are important and how we use them

both in our jokes and in our thinking

unless you decide that you’re going to

accept the trauma and hurt that you have

unless you look at your neighbor and

realize that they too

are suffering a battle of their own

unless we

find peace within this country would

never know peace

thank you very much

you