WELCOME
TO
OUR POETRY ARCHIVE
FROM THE EDITOR
Hypocrisy
All Around The Hue And Cry
316,703 this is the number of
people who have died in pandemic 2020. No, obviously this is not even the final
number. This is the current number at the moment of writing this editorial.
Most of these people were still living when I wrote the last editorial. And
many of them thought they had taken enough precautions to save themselves from
Covid 19. Just as we are thinking at this time. Even so, we don’t know who will
survive till the next month. Such is the case with this pandemic. We don’t know
how many of these dead souls used to read the monthly web journal Our Poetry
Archive. We don’t even know how many readers of OPA will not be alive to flip
through the pages of our upcoming editions. Yes, this is really frightening for
an editor as well as for any sensible human being. We don’t even know whether we’ll survive to
continue with our monthly and other publications of OPA. We never know who will
survive, who will not. We never know how long this pandemic will continue to
wreak havoc on human civilization. We only know in life there is no second
innings to play once again like it is in the cricket field.
Yes, it is really the time of
colossal calamity. We don’t know whether it is a man-made pandemic for ulterior
sinister motives of few powerful men with immense wealth to control the entire
world for their business interests. We
are not even sure if it is really a natural phenomenon. In either case we must
say we remain really vulnerable without authentic and proper defence system
against such calamity. Then what were we doing during last hundred years of
technological evolution? We can send our men to the Moon. We can send our
spacecrafts to the other planets. We can drop atomic bombs anytime anywhere to
kill millions of people. Yet we cannot save our citizens from a tiny virus.
Such are our achievements. I think it is (the) high time to ponder over
the number of blunders that we have made during the so-called technological
evolutions or revolutions, of which we are still so proud.
We don’t know the feelings of a
dying patient breathing through a ventilator. Who, even a fortnight before was
roaming healthy around his or her everyday life. Perhaps planning for future
after the end of the pandemic. Yet fearing that the end of life is looming
large lying inside the ventilator. Can a poet catch up with those dying moments
of a person full of life and planning for the upcoming times? When actually
those times will never come at all, when even the ventilator will fail to save
a precious life. Yes, as a human being we should consider that every life is
precious. However insignificant it can be according to the parameters of success in material life.
Yet we have failed to save thousands of such precious lives. And did we think
how many peoples around the world have lost their dear ones? How painful it is
to lose someone suddenly. This pandemic has brought us face to face with some
fundamental questions about life in general.
We all know that death is the
final answer of life. Time will put its signature on death any time, yet we
remain hopeful that we can keep our death at bay for a much longer time. During
this time, it is our dream to enjoy life in full. Now suddenly when death is
knocking at our door, pushing us towards those ventilators, wreaking havoc on
our souls and mind, we can suddenly realise life is much more precious than our
usual conceptions. In our daily life we have become much more complacent about
our views and opinions of the world in general. When people were dying every day
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria facing those missiles and bombs of the
American military and its allies, we never pondered over those uncalled-for
inhuman deaths. We have never shown our solidarity with those unfortunate
peoples of Middle East. We never recognised their dignity as human souls. We
never recognised their fundamental human rights to carry on with their everyday
life. We never recognised our fundamental sin, that we never considered their
lives as valuable as ours. We have forgotten that each and every life is as
precious as others, not much less or much more. We have even forgotten that in
order to kill a human being you need to be inhuman yourself. But to save a
human being you have to be human first. We have forgotten that it is much easier
to kill a person than to save a life. Yet we led a normal life during all those
period of mass killings.
With 316,703 deaths, we are
shedding bitter tears, considering the world is facing an abnormal situation.
But with all those countless dead bodies of unfortunate unarmed defenceless
common peoples of the Middle East during the last two decades, we never
considered those deaths as war crimes. As most abnormal, inhuman and deadly
sins. We didn’t count the dead bodies of those most unfortunate people every
day, as we are doing now. We should consider the vital fact that we could have
easily avoided those deaths, which we cannot do now against the virus. Let’s
accept the hypocrisy of our mindset. When we remain safe from wars, we never
bother about the millions of dying people elsewhere facing the deadliest
missiles every day. But now when we are facing this dreadful virus right at our
own doorsteps, we are crying for human solidarity to save mankind. Such a
hypocrite species we are. Unfortunately, our literature germinates from our own
hypocrisy… not even our poetry is immune from this sin, hypocrisy.
Let’s consider this vital fact
that it is now high time to go through the most important phase of our life,
self-criticism. Without self-criticism we can never undo the blunders that this
civilisation of material world is repeating on and on throughout the ages.
Let’s also hope that post covid 19 era of human civilisation will come out of
its devastating blunders. Let’s assume that poets and writers, thinkers and
artists all around the world will also come out of their personal lock-ups of
hypocrisy only to be more sensitive, compassionate and humbly human. Without
achieving humanity, I don’t think our literature will achieve anything
substantial. Let’s now pray for us. Not only for our own survival, but also for
our human substance, which unfortunately we have lost since long.
From The
Editorial Desk
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