Collateral Damage

September 18, 2024

            I woke to news of Hezbollah pagers exploding simultaneously. I don’t know why it shocked me so much—I don’t have any sympathy for them. But perhaps because it felt like a scene from a future with never ending violence, what with all the new technology being developed on ways to spy on and to kill.

            I read a Washington Post article about it that made a coherent argument about the IDF being behind it—though IDF had not confirmed this. It made me think of Pegasus and how Israel never confirmed or denied selling the spying system to the Indian government. It made me think of how the story has died down in India and nobody knows what if anything the probe into it is doing. 

            So, my mind split. 

Part of it thinking of the scary cyberespionage-ware being developed. Thinking of this attack that seems to me to violate some basic ethics. The entire war on Hamas where ‘collateral damage’, non-combatant casualty, has crossed every boundary of humanity should be uniquivocally condemned. I read recently—“Israel has dropped almost 80,000 tons of explosives - this means that Israel has dropped ~36 kilograms of explosives on Gaza for every man, woman, and child.”
            This is astounding. Unthinkable.

            What does it mean for humanity, the human race’s future as an ethical one, that such things can happen. That groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, that don’t care that private citizens are ‘collateral damage’ in their war for power, can flourish. And a state like Israel, that does the same, thrive. I also wonder what it means for humanity to not realise yet, that violence can never lead to peace and co-existence, that it fosters cycles of revenge not just amongst those that believe in the ideology of exterminating the other, but also amongst groups who have suffered from the ‘collateral damage’. It is rare to see forgiveness bloom in such circumstances, though not completely unseen. 

            As I keep saying and feel deeply—what if the world spent as much on peace technology that it spends on war? What would our world look like? Maybe it is age, living so much life and not seeing things change—but I don’t feel much hope. 

            The other part of my mind went to all the things, huge unforgivable things, that have been glossed over in India. Pegasus, electoral bonds, crony capitalism, rising inequality in wealth distribution, bias and corrupt regulators—and the list goes on. Though despite all this it warms my heart when I think that the people of India did were not won over by religious sloganeering and voted from on basis of their needs, in the last election. Hope they do the same in the next, though which party/government actually cares about us/them is a mystery. 

            Just observing the weird ways in which the mind moves—starts somewhere and other things get thrown up. 

            I am still here at the cat’s home. Will be back at my home for a week and then have to make a trip to Bombay to see my mother who is unwell. The time here is tiring—possibly because sleep is reduced, and I am missing being around my things, and missing my life as it was finally beginning to emerge. I feel isolated here and stressed by even the thought of trying to keep my activities going while juggling cat meals and things. 

            The stress did exacerbate my gastric issues which anyway had flared up recently. This though had an interesting insight—that when I have gastric flareups not only does my brain fog up, but I become self-absorbed and would like to be in an almost comatose state. I did a chakra meditation and felt a relief or clearing in the abdomen area the first time I did it, similar to what I had felt after my first acupuncture session last year. 

My mind is still rebelling against the knowledge that eating anything I have allergies to causes massive flareups and sometimes I reach for that bottle of chill sauce or the dairy product—read ice-cream—that I know makes life miserable. I’d like to work on this body symptom and this dysfunctional behaviour but haven’t had time yet.

            The meditation also left me with a feeling that what would help me heal is being in one place for long enough that I could focus on developing structures and diets that promote the healing. But this year has constantly thrown up movement and scattered attention and I’m not yet sure how it will end. 

            Still, I hope I can end the year in stillness and maybe even some solitude and healing.