Celestial light

The New Year dawned shell-pink, the profiles of the world below seeping through its penumbra of grey, soft as the smile of a million babies in sleep 8212; some of them were those whose bodies had been abused and life snuffed out in demented perversion. They peered from a horizon that was above reproach; their world below, howled in pain and indignation looking for a nail on which this horror could be hung, looking for the head that should roll, overlooking that the issue is not a incident; the issue is incident after incident, one worse than the other, that have etched the skyline of recent years. Blame is always someone else8217;s and society itself is above par. Never mind the convenient tolerance of sliding moral and ethical standards by its members.

Why have we become a society that breeds degeneration of the moral stamina? Can such crimes really be laid at the doorstep of individual perversion or of individuals and homes that foster, often participate in, a formidable build-up towards perversion, validating the loss of every value that would have sanctified human existence in saner times? We have been warned, though, by Zafar: aadmi usko na jaaniyega /Ho voh kaisa bhi sahib-e-fahm-o-zaka/ Jise aish mein yaade Khuda na rahee / Jise taish mein khauf-e-khuda na rahaa However sophisticated an intellect he may have, do not consider him human in the real sense, him who would not remember God8217;s beneficence in his luxuries, nor fear Him in his agitations.

And the Light of God, along with other sources of a force that illumines norms, is banished to the nether regions as a figment of uneducated imagination, while we educated ones ruin every institution in sight in a blind stampede towards progress that smells of the death of all that is refined and worth living for: 8220;Darkness upon darkness/And he for whom Allah giveth not light, shall find no light at all8221; Surah 24:40 of the Qur8217;an Sharif. Could we not resolve this New Year to bring back the easy simplicity of existence called dharma, of living in harmony, upheld at once by the Bible and the Padma Puran, that one will desist from doing to another that which one would not like to be done to oneself?