For All The Children

    This cold foggy morning, my daughters also left for school like million others around the world. I dropped them off at the bus stop in the dark. The tail lights of the school bus melted into the hazy darkness. They were warm with hopes in their hearts and the joy of meeting their friends, looking forward to their many activities. So did those kids in Peshawar. So did their mothers send them off that morning. And then got busy getting the lunch ready keeping in mind what the children prefer.

  But the lunch never got cooked. The hearth remained cold. For the mothers ran towards the school only to bring back the bodies after what seemed an eternity of nightmare. The cold little bodies. Cold bodies that had hugged them warm just a little while ago.

   How did they pull the first trigger? How did they hunt down the innocent ruffled heads? How did they shoot down the pair of pleading young eyes? How did they bore down on those tender limbs? Are they so stoned with fanaticism and brain washed that they failed to see what lay before them? Why come as fidayeens?  Is it because they knew they could never ever live with the cries of the hundreds, the red spraying all around? And those who thump their chest proudly to say it was a revenge well taken? A revenge  taken on children who were taking exams, first aid sessions and career counselling? A revenge taken on children who were preparing for a life ahead?
 
    This is the second December that tears have rolled down my cheeks as I opened the morning newspaper. The first time was when Nirbhaya was brutally violated on one such cold dark day. And today Peshawar.

    If  ever there was a convention of all the animals in the world, I would be ashamed to call myself a human being. For we belong right down there in the ladder of all the species. Charles Darwin, did you say we were the most evolved? The most evolved when I, like many other, wait for my children to return safe each day?