War is a horrible joke

It’s 2016 and there are more than enough warmongers amongst us. The worst revelation being the otherwise calm folks who vent their deepest angst on social media. To them, war is a solution, not a problem. It’s sad how people can jump to a fatal conclusion like that. Slow down a bit. What’s the most barbaric thing you can think of? Whatever your guess, war comprises almost every fucked-up thing imaginable. Just that we don’t get to experience any of it from the sideline. Glory, honour, patriotism, etc. are some of the words decorated with war, conveniently overlooking the fact that war is nothing but our collective failure at employing our greatest asset: words. Sometimes, even kids grow up thinking that there is an enemy out there, all thanks to the conversations shining on the W-word. If only somebody told the kid what the ground reality is like; how overzealous young men tend to lose their bellicose thrill within a few days of entering the war zone. There’s no fun in smelling blood and shit. It doesn’t take long to realize that they are basically going through crap to entertain the ego of the powers-to-be. Regardless, they are expected to shoot at people they’ve never met before; people they have nothing against personally. No wonder WW1 witnessed soldiers—on both sides—shooting over their so-called enemies’ helmets. If there can be a miracle on the battlefield—no, Hitler surviving WW1 wasn’t a miracle, that was pure fate—this phenomenon was it. Excessive exposure to bullets makes one weary and brings out the kindest as well as wildest out of you. Soldiers are known to act out of character in their blood-stained uniforms. Speaking of which, it’s often ignored how war becomes synonymous with rape. There isn’t a war in human history which didn’t record soldiers violating the womenfolk from the other side. We don’t have to go to WW2 to check how it ended with the Russian soldiers raping German women; it happened in Afghanistan, Iraq and most recently in Syria. The price of conflict is often borne by those who have the least to do with it. Unfortunately, we neither talk about it nor acknowledge we don’t have the capacity to make our children see how things are. How words like ransacked, seized, defeated, captured, annexed in their history books have broader implications. And there is nothing glorious about them.