Amidst all the madness of these times, the world is grooving to the gangam gag. The Twilight Saga is merely a digitalisation of the contemporary fantasy about love, and vampires, and above all absurdity. The tragedy in arts is on her deathbed; not alive, nor yet dead. And she sobs.

We live, they tell us, in peacetimes. Go by the numbers, and they tell us right. Go by the sanctity of human blood, and all hell will break loose. Strange peacetimes, these are, under the shadows of perpetual wars. Strange times; when the silence of ours is gorier than the blood soaked spears of them. Where are the friends, and protagonists, and propagandists, and showstoppers? Where are the saviors are when they are needed the most?

Does anyone remember Szmul Zygielbojm, a Jewish-Polish socialist who committed suicide, in the summer of 1943, to protest the indifference and silence of Allied governments in the face of the Holocaust?

Thus wrote Zygielbojm in his suicide letter:

By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.

Stranger are these times than the harrowing days of wars, when people are getting killed en masse and the silence is just spectacular.

Aside from tragedy and farce, it has happened before and is happening again. There come these strange times when grownups are too intimidated to stand up to their nemesis. Who was he, if not young David, to call out grand Goliath near the Valley of Elah when the king Saul and Israelites had lost all hope? Who was she, if not young Jeanne D’Arc, to reverse the tide of war against the English to defend France?

Who was she, if not young Malalai, to come forward and lift the Pashtun national flag when the Afghan army was near defeat from exhaustion and thirst during the second Anglo-Afghan war, the battle of Maiwand? The jendei (poem) she shouted in battlefield, inscribed today on the Minar-e-Maiwand in Kabul, goes like this:

With a drop of my sweetheart’s blood Shed in defense of the Motherland Will I put a beauty spot on my face Such as would put to shame the roses in the garden

And the child of our times? Malalai of Swat?

They are the children of songs, and poems, and folklores, and resistance and strange times. They are the people.

Ideas perhaps have failed the test of time. Ideologies are worn out. Such are the cruel and stern standards of our times. The age of information sans perspective lies ahead of us transforming clarity into a scarce commodity. Aside from the judgmental good and bad dichotomy, the break from the traditional means of knowledge and understanding seems to be getting clearer. Gray areas are spreading out across the white and black plains of the past.

Revolutionaries from the past are new darlings of neo-reactionaries. Saints of yesteryears are the most salable commodities of our times. Che wears a Nike cap and appears on T-shirts, just in a bad mood. Neruda gets fitted anyplace where he can fit the least. Rumi and spirituality are touching new heights of commercialism. Faiz is the new poet of Philistines. Middle classes are taking to the streets and revolutions are being uploaded on facebook. The Bastille of our age is yet to be stormed though and that too when Robespierre is nowhere in sight, let alone the sans-culottes.

Love, however, has managed to make it unvaried, and pure. It’s a little less violent though, and a little more personal – a little less tragic. In these times, love does not mix well with pain and politics. Not anymore is love associated with the cry emanating from the very heart of humanity but with the whimpers and whispers of humans. In strange times, as are these, people tend not to slaughter animals out of love and butcher fellow beings out of lost love.

Pain, unlike love, has become more impersonal – a little more objective. Cutting across the divides between things animate or inanimate, tangible or intangible; pain feels to be straining everything under the sun. In times like these, rocks feel to be agonizing of headaches and butterflies are sick from toothaches. Pain is the only thing that has brought nations together since the times when histories started merging. More than trains and planes, in times like these, it is pain that connects us all.

Strange times, these are, when it is imperative to tell untellable tales, to say all hitherto unsaid things, and to recite poems which have never been heard before.