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