To Those Who Hate- An Open Letter

When I see your comments on online threads, when I read and hear about the atrocities you commit in the name of your faith, in the name of the God you say you love, when I see the images of the aftermath, my mouth fills with bile and my heart with disgust. I feel anger. I feel outrage. But increasingly nowadays, I also feel weariness. Where does this end? And above all, I feel an utter incomprehensibility. How do you kill a little boy? How do you rape little girls? How do you destroy millions of lives without thinking that they are people, just like you? If you cannot love the human beings that you claim your God created, how can you possibly love God? People are real, they are born, they suffer, smile, love, feel anger, pain and joy- just like you. God, if S/He exists, is intangible. If your heart can’t comprehend the tangible, how can it hold love for the One who is Limitless and beyond definitions? And I wonder how utterly empty inside you need to be to have so much hatred inside you. You kill, because you don’t see yourself in those you kill because deep inside, you don’t know who you are, and therefore you can’t find God within yourself. And afraid to confront yourself, you drown your inner voice further in the security that community provides. “The desire to be superior is embedded in individuals, and communities. We want to be alpha, and those who cannot do it individually, do so by joining a pack or a herd or a hive.”[i] And of course, the more rigid a community, the more secure you feel, for it saves you from thinking. Nothing unites like hate after all. And once you’re a part of it, everyone else who doesn’t belong becomes part of the ‘other’. They’re no longer people but a repository of everything you hated in yourself, all your fears and all your lacks, and thus you feel no qualms in hating and maiming and killing. And every time you hate, you hate yourself. Every time you kill, you’re killing your own soul. Hatred consumes everything in its path and begets only itself. It is a one-way ride.
I realize this sounds preachy, but we all know how easy it is to hate once you label someone as 'other'. I know it as well as you do. It's what allows us to turn our faces away and get on with our lives everyday as we see and hear about others' pains. We move on, because they're not us. It's what drives us during our petty quarrels with others on a crowded train or bus on the way to work. They are not us, you are not us, and we hate each other.

But suppose you tried? Have you looked at this world with its deserts and meadows and rivers and mountains and oceans and colours and sounds- the myriad manifestations of the God you worship? Why would the God who created such diversities in nature be happy with human beings created in the same exact mould? Look up at the sky, observe the many patterns that stars make, trace the different cloud shapes. Why would S/He who made the world and the sky care to be called by only one name, in only one way of prayer? And then ask yourself, why does hate make you happy? Are you truly, truly happy? “Wisdom lies not in winning in argument, but in understanding and outgrowing the desire to win.”[ii] 
Suppose we all tried to understand? Suppose we all tried to love?

Unending Miles

(To the pigeons that died in the fire during the terrorist attack on the Taj Hotel, Mumbai on November 2008.)

Soaring past cannibal tongues of fire

You made ‘Breaking News’ for a brief footage-

Your brave white wings defiantly stretched

Had angel glory that sulphurous night.

Could there be light beyond those flames?

At dawn you rested amongst your kin

Broken. Upon bullet shells and shards of glass.

You fell before you reached the sand.

(Published in First Edition, 2009)
©RuchiraMandal

Meera[iii] kahe bina prem se nahi mile Nandlala[iv]

If you liked this post, you might like these:

            What if the universe was Godless?
A Sky Full of Sun and Stars
Once Upon A Nowhere

---

[i] http://devdutt.com/articles/applied-mythology/society/has-kalki-arrived.html

[ii] http://devdutt.com/articles/applied-mythology/society/has-kalki-arrived.html

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meera

[iv] https://www.lyricsbogie.com/movies/yatrik-1952/meera-kahe-bina-prem.html (“And Meera says, without love you can never find Krishna” – translation mine)