Troubled mountains of the Yezidis, Gazans, Tibetans and Kashmiri Pandits

It was the year 1984 and the sleepy school town of Tangasseri woke up to a murmur, that Mother Theresa had arrived in the Missionaries of Charity home in Tangasseri. It was ten minutes before the morning assembly bell to go from the flat metal disc hung next to the principle’s office, at Infant Jesus Anglo Indian High School; yet hundreds of children ran out of their class rooms, crossed the road that choked mostly of cycle rickshaws, fewer cars and bicycles loaded with students and school bags. 

They rushed into a small furniture-less room of the charity home known to distribute milk powder, wheat and medicines to the needy (generally argued as incentives for conversion). There she stood in the middle of the room wrinkled as ever, her hands busy being kissed by children of different faiths – all of them who chorused ‘Our Father in Heaven’ and ‘Hail Mary’ at the end of the school assembly, something which might be blasphemous now.

Today is World Humanitarian Day and Mother Theresa still remains the most recognisable icon of6 humanity, a virtue that is no longer taken for granted in a world of misplaced priorities and blinded greed for land, religious hegemony and power.  For some time now the mountains around the globe have been wailing.

The world is anguished at the gruesome accounts of murder in Gaza and at the ruthless genocide of the Yezidis.  The sheer violence and the pace of wiping out of a heritage in the arid mountains of northern Iraq has outshone the plight of the Tibetans and the Kashmiri Pandits who have been for long subjected to a gradual extinction of a rich cultural heritage over decades and with no signs of  rescue from a hegemonistic china or an apathetic India to its indigenous Pandits respectively. 

For now Dalai Lama stares helplessly beyond the Himalayan ranges for the dragon to let go and the Pandits look up, from their relief tents and borrowed homes across the country, to a Modi who wears a saffron turban at heart.

Fighting insurgencies and racial-religious intolerance seems deadly and tedious than rescuing poor and the bedridden from the sickness haunted streets of then Calcutta. Humanity is being celebrated as another ‘World Day’ in a long list of days earmarked to represent a cause and not an innate human gesture; as a reminder, as its no longer part of the gated communities and free markets we aspire for.