“I used have dreams about 15 years ago, inundated with them too…. gang warfare… I was always hiding in bushes and running from people in the streets with guns, trying to kill any person with a heartbeat. Men and women with guns…I think this is what is going to happen to humankind…. and nature will speed up the process of elimination” – Sam

Sometimes I believe that is all that is happening here is creation and destruction. It’s the cycle of life. When I watch historical documentaries, I think of how we will be seen a few hundred years from now. I am so detached. I am interested in the academic content but I do not and cannot really feel for those who lost so much in tragedies of the past. Now, many years on, it seems clinical; a technicality of life. Things need to end, to be destroyed, in order for creation to continue. It’s that straightforward. Hinduism will teach you that. Buddhism will teach you that. And come way may, life will teach you that at some point or another, in some way or another.

There is no good, no bad – just facts; just life. Life doing what it has always done. Life going on. And we too are going on because we cannot live with the same things forever. If things do not break down and are not destroyed, we cannot move on because if we do not, we will never evolve and our kind will perish.

It is heartbreaking now because I am in the midst of something that dynamic but I know that, years on, my life will mean nothing. Those who died will not be remembered. Not the martyrs, not the victims, not the terrorists, not the innocent, not the bystanders – no one. All that was lost there will become a statistic or trivia for tourists visiting the site of the massacres years from today; just like they do Tianmen Square, or Jallianwala Baghor the death camps at Auschwitz. Curious, but able to walk away and leave it behind. And well done, because that is the only way to do it. We must move on.

The world is full of statistics and we are one of them. Mere numbers in the making. Not people. Or names. None of this means anything. Nothing. It’s just a process, that’s all. Atrocities in the name of humanity, religion are excuses for life being itself. Creating us, destroying us. We cannot be in the way of that Great Change. When that change comes, we will have to go.

Am I being too clinical? Too detached? Too unfeeling? Those who know me know that I possess not an iota of any of these. Maybe I am numb after these days of battery. Maybe I am tired of being ashamed, enraged, disgusted and terrorised. I know I am not willing to go to war or kill more people. I know I am not willing to support any faction or individual that promotes violence. I know that I am probably just a dreamer. But I also know I am not the only one.