Meet him.
Not Black, not Muslim, not Latino.
Not trans, not immigrant, not gay.
Not a card-carrying revolutionary,
not the frothing caricature you wanted.
Just a typical, homegrown lad,
straight as a plumb line,
a son, a brother, a suitor, a mate, refined by a conservative hearth—
and such hands are pulling the trigger.

So what now?
Do you stitch another fence from your fears?
Raise another shibboleth?
Wave another flag, red or blue,
as though stitched cloth could cauterise the wound?
You think radicalisation redeems?
You think polarisation purifies?
Antiquity laughs in the physiognomy of your illusions.
From Belfast to Bosnia,
from Rwanda to Westminster’s own whispering antechambers,
blood has always flowed
when men mistook categories for causes.

It is easy to mourn the dead,
to canonise them in marble prose,
to cry martyr, saint, beloved.
But brave you admit
that their words, their deeds, their ideology
cut others to ribbons while they yet breathed?
Valiant you hold paradox in your palm—
to love the slain and still
recognise the lesions they left behind?
Or must you always polish the past
until it gleams in a single colour?

Why does compassion crumble
the moment it meets conflict?
Why do we, clever apes,
demand a world painted in absolutes—
black or white, villain or angel—
when the truth is muddier,
a swamp of motives,
a cesspit of contradictions?

Unconditional love—
is it sermon or substance?
Does it mean to embrace
the murderer and the mourners alike,
to carry both insult and affection,
venom and antidote,
as though they were salt crystals upon the tongue?
And yet—
a pinch of salt, we say,
British understatement camouflaging despair:
It’s all good, baby, baby.
But is it?
Tell that to Gaza’s children.
Tell that to the mother of Stephen Lawrence.
Tell that to the father who buried his boy
after Columbine, after Sandy Hook,
after Uvalde, after London Bridge.
Is it all good?
Or is that phrase a nostrum,
smoothing over jagged veracity?

I ask you—
what if the problem is not extremism
but our refusal to sit in dissonance,
to experience its bitterness,
to accept that love must live with critique,
that empathy must coexist with resentment?
What if accord will never be built
from symmetry or certainty,
but from the messy work of holding opposites
without breaking?

So take your slogans, your scapegoats,
your shrill chants of “them” and “us,”
and taste them—
with a pinch of salt.
Swallow, if you dare.
It will burn on the lingua and glossa.
It will make you question
whether you have ever truly thought,
or only borrowed thought from louder voices.
It will make you squirm,
because exactitude is no banquet—
it is gristle, sinew, bone.
And it is yours to chew.

Once, the patterns were legible.
The habitual offender.
The ideologue nursing his factional frenzy.
The broken soul, warped by trauma or twisted chemistry.
We could explain them away—
file them neatly under pathology or politics.

But now?
Now the face is familiar.
The figure is camouflaged as a friend,
a neighbour who mows the lawn,
the colleague who shares your tea break,
the classmate who once copied your notes.

And when such a countenance turns,
when such a hand clenches around the firearm,
what excuse remains?
What comfort in the old categories?
What shield against the statistic
that the monstrous now wears
the pretence of the prototypical?

So I ask—
If the neighbour becomes the threat, who remains neighbour?
If the scholar becomes the killer, who remains wise?
If the ordinary becomes the executioner, what remains of the ordinary?
And if the veneer of normality can hide anything—
how long before it hides you?

Which brings us to the final, most unforgiving inquest.
People act as they do because people are pushed—
pushed against walls, pushed into corners,
pushed until the mind itself buckles under the strain.

Violence, we are told, erupts only when there is no other way out.
Yet irony mocks us:
it is often the free, the strong, the educated—
those with choices—that lift the weapon.
For you cannot expect the man, the woman, the child in Gaza,
starved of agency and shackled by rubble,
to redraw the law with their bare hands.

So why, then, are those who might have chosen amity
driven to the brink of madness?
Why do those with liberty squander it on bullets?
Should those who push not have learnt from history?
For history speaks, again and again:
whatever you sow—courtesy or cruelty,
mercy or malice— ricochets to you a hundredfold.
And if today resistance rises like smoke,
it is only because tirades of turbulence
were thundered from pulpits and podiums.

So the query stands, unresolved, unavoidable:
How do we bring kindness into a world
so fluent in fury?
How do we restrain the hand
before it clenches into a fist?
How do we calm the earth, unsettled and quaking,
when our very values tremble like sand?
What is ethics, what is morality,
if not the courage to refuse the cycle of return?
And if we cannot answer—
what hope remains of peace at all?

Less than ten minutes before the wheels left tarmac,
two hundred and forty-two lives
sat fastened in foetal seats,
tea cooling in plastic cups,
thumbs twitching over glowing screens,
minds rehearsing office slides, forgotten birthdays,
lovers’ texts left on “read.”
No one knew. Not a single soul.
Their names were already trembling
on the lip of silence,
already being whispered
by that most impartial registrar—Death.

Below, on solid ground,
the humdrum went on unbothered—
medical students scribbling dosages
in sterile halls; a nurse munching chips by the stairwell;
a professor grumbling over unpaid grants.
The kind of banal day that never earns poetry—
until it ends in pulverised concrete
and bones like chalk beneath metal.

And all it took—was a glitch perhaps.
A burnt wire. A bolt forgotten.
A breath’s-worth of mechanical betrayal,
and entire galaxies—
entire futures—collapsed into dust.
Just like that.
Without preface. Without justice.

And we? The voyeurs,
the obituary-scrollers and newsfeed-mourners?
We return to our cockfights—
scrapping over flags and fictions,
over castes that claim heaven,
creeds that damn,
borders drawn by drunks on old colonial maps.
We raise walls, chant slogans,
lynch in the name of gods
who have long stopped listening.

We forget that gravity is godless.
That fire has no ideology.
That death does not check your documents—
it cannot pronounce your surname.
You could be rich as the richest man,
or a lad unlawfully dragged by uniformed boots.
It ends the same:
flesh surrenders, eyes stare blankly,
history books close.

What does one say to the mother in Kerala
whose son studying in Kyiv
came home zipped in foreign silence?
Or to the boy in Raqqa
who lost all four limbs,
but not his stammering faith
in the idea of peace?
What does one say to the girl in Gaza
drawing flowers in the rubble
while drones carve thunder in the sky?

We keep saying “never again”
while building higher fences.
We light candles and call it healing.
We post flags in our bios—
a Palestinian one,
then a Ukrainian,
then whatever’s trending next.

But let’s speak plainly:
We are a species drunk on division.
We are magicians of forgetting.
We weep for strangers
only when they burn on camera.
We feel compassion
only when corpses come in clusters.

And yet, every now and then,
death, in all its calm arithmetic,
pulls the rug from beneath us.
It reminds us
that we are not kings of permanence—
we are tenants on borrowed time.

We will all die.
The bigots and the bridge-builders.
The tyrants and the poets.
Those with blue passports
and those without country.
The ones who plant bombs,
and the ones who plant tomatoes.

And when we die,
our bodies will not request
a caste certificate.
They will not need Aadhaar.
They will not demand veneration.
They will rot. Gloriously. Democratically.
They will join the honest loam.

So what, then, is the point
of all this tribal madness?
Why do we lace our short, stupid lives
with so much hatred and hubris?

Isn’t it time we bowed
before our shared frailty?
Isn’t it time we asked—
what if kindness is the only thing
that survives the wreckage?

For in the end,
when the smoke has cleared,
and all that’s left is bone,
you will not know
whether the hand you held in death
believed in your god,
or spoke your language,
or cheered for your side.

You will only know
that it, too, was trying
to hold on.
Just like you.

Some among you may not find your way to poetry with ease or instinct, and so, in the spirit of clarity and fellowship, I have endeavoured to render in prose what I sought to express in verse.

Less than ten minutes before take-off, 242 souls sat strapped into their seats—some sipping tea, others scrolling through their phones, a few perhaps fretting over unfinished work or mundane family squabbles. Not one of them knew they were living their last ordinary moments. Not one had an inkling that their names were already being whispered by death.

And down below, on solid ground, medical students and staff were caught in the most routine of routines—classrooms, corridors, coffee breaks—utterly oblivious to the fact that their lives were about to be obliterated in seconds, without warning, without reason.

All it takes is one unfeeling mechanical failure, and just like that—entire worlds collapse.

Yet we, the rest of us, continue to live under the grand illusion of permanence. We cling to flags, fight over imaginary lines on maps, draw blood over caste, creed, class, skin, and surname—knowing full well that the grave swallows us all the same. Muslim or Christian, rich or poor, Brahmin or Dalit, soldier or civilian—it doesn’t matter to fire or steel or gravity. Death doesn’t check your documents.

We go to war for power, kill for pride, alienate in the name of tradition—and for what? So our names can outlive us in history books written by men just as doomed? All our bigotries, posturing, and tribal loyalties are flattened in the face of a single crash—an indifferent plume of smoke rising from the earth as if to say: None of it mattered.

And when such a tragedy does occur, we weep. We call them “innocent lives lost.” We share posts. We light candles. And then, like clockwork, we go right back to hating, hoarding, dividing—forgetting that the same death waits at our doorstep.

Is this the best of what we are? Must it always take unspeakable grief to remind us of our shared fragility? Must we always need a body count to feel compassion for strangers?

The cruel irony is this: we spend our lives trying to be separate—by borders, beliefs, birthrights—but in death, we are finally, and completely, the same.