I just have to say thank you for all your best wishes and prayers for our nation. This is the darkest hour in our history. We are in a state of mourning, once its over, the enemy will pay in blood till there is none left. Entire Pakistani nation wants nothing but blood, it stands decided. Death to ALL terrorists!
Thank you one and all international PDF members, your responses are appreciated.
It's good to see this amongst the pure anger and sorrow.
There is no need to thank us for our support, because frankly, most Indians took this atrocity very personally. Somehow, it was not viewed as a crime that was perpetrated in our neighbours' house, but in our own. We felt like it was our own children who were so fiendishly murdered. It was not sympathy we felt, but empathy. On that day, the LoC or IB did not exist, as far as we were concerned.
It is still the same sentiment, in regard to this particular brutality. In my memory, this is the first time that every single school across the country observed two minutes of silence together. Most of them have erected artistic depictions of solidarity, made by the children. (Paintings, drawings etc.) During the silent remembrance, many of the teachers and some of the older students were weeping. The speaker of the Lok Sabha of the Indian parliament also reportedly teared up as she read out the message of condemnation. Even MPs from the virulently anti-Pakistani Shiv Sena party expressed their shock and outrage in no uncertain terms.
I think (and I say this non judgementally) the reason for this reaction from Indians has something to do with our human nature, our tribal instincts. (Again, I'm not using that term as a pejorative.) Even worse atrocities have happened in the recent past across the world - the Beslan school siege, the repeated attacks on school and college students in Nigeria by Boko haram, the kidnapping and sexual enslaving of hundreds of school girls by the same group, etc. But none of those incidents shocked and pained us so deeply. I'm sure the reason is that when we saw this massacre unfold on TV, and saw children and parents who looked so similar to our people, and who were all speaking in languages that many in India understand, and we knew lived only a few hundred miles away from our country, this felt like an attack on our own people, our own tribe. International boundaries do not matter as much as physical, ethnic, cultural and linguistic similarity, in our brains. In the early days of our social evolution, these feelings must have helped in forging tribal solidarities and societies. While people from all over the world condoled you, we wept with you.
The above para is just my speculation. Anyway, whatever the reasons, the indisputable fact is that we Indians were as shocked and outraged as you were on that day. The feeling was not "Oh my god, Pakistani children are being shot dead!", it was simply "Oh my god, terrorists are shooting children in a school." Some of my own relatives were traumatized by the images and videos, although I don't think any of them could pinpoint Peshawar on a map.
So, you came across one a-hole on the internet? My, my!
