Imagine

Imagine yourself living in a land where every day you wake up and thank your luck that you were not one of those 170, or 450, or 1200 - or for that matter any number of people - who were bombed to death overnight.

Imagine a land where you just keep your fingers crossed that your children, brothers, sisters or parents will not be among those any number of people who will perish today in shrapnel or building collapse.

Imagine you are hunkering down during the dark nights in the basement of your building, wishing that it is not your building that will sandwich-collapse tonight. Imagine yourself without electricity or gas for four months, and you don't know if these very basic things will ever return. Imagine you don't know where to find some drinking water for your child. Imagine you do not know how your next meal will arrive, because a monster of an army is blocking the road.

Imagine you were a family of ten today, and tomorrow you alone are standing. The rest are under the rubble of your house. Imagine for four months you walk past the same rubble under which your child's body is now buried and rotting. 

Imagine you had a distant past but no foreseeable future. Imagine your city has lost one percent of its people in just four months from bombs raining down the sky. This is like Dhaka city losing two lakh of its habitants to sudden and gruesome deaths. Imagine you have been reduced to a pest.

Now imagine a land just some miles across you where a people live, who had not been here even a few decades ago. They were transported here to create a new country on the land that belonged to you. Imagine these people were transported after they faced genocide in countries far away. But these countries instead of assimilating the persecuted people, just shipped them to your land - snatched away from you forcefully.

Now imagine again that these new people in the new land are having a full course dinner, watching Netflix slouching on the sofa, kissing their child goodnight before turning to bed.  Imagine a people who wake up in the morning, go to an office room, draw crosses on a chart to decide where their next bombs will fall today - and you and your family may come under the cross. 

Imagine they have not blinked an eye or said one single sorry, although their actions have killed over 25,000 people, mostly civilians, like you and me. Imagine a land being incessantly poured with sophisticated F15s, F16s and F35s from the world's most powerful country.

Now imagine you can kill, choke, starve and dehumanise a people, and still you will not be charged with genocide. And yet at the very onset of another war on the Russia-Ukraine border - the president of the most powerful country in the world called it a genocide.

John Lennon asked us to imagine. Can we?