"The end of violence ought to be the simplest good news in the world. That it so rarely functions as such is a phenomenon worth pausing over. Something about the structure of collective life makes enemies necessary. Understanding what that something is, requires looking not at the conflict but at the one watching it."

"The real war is the one the ego wages against honest seeing, the war between what it is and what it insists on being taken for. It is the hunger the ego carries meeting a reality that will not satisfy it; the persistent feeling that something is missing whose name cannot be found because finding it would require looking at the one who feels it."

"The inner condition that produces belligerent foreign policy is the same one that produces the epidemic of depression, anxiety, addiction, and inner purposelessness that's become the defining psychological signature of the most militarily powerful societies on earth. You cannot burn your neighbour’s house and rest in peace, not because of some mystical law, but because the act of burning changes the one who burns."

"Nations often behave remarkably like insecure individuals. They nurse historical wounds for centuries. They demand recognition. They measure themselves against rivals and mistake expansion for strength."

“Revolutions always promise change, and they usually deliver something that merely looks like change. Regimes collapse, flags are replaced, slogans change, but something remains untouched. The question we refuse to ask is simple: when the wheel turns again, what will have changed?”

“But what was the human being doing during this so-called peace? Per capita consumption, carbon emissions, and animal kills kept rising continuously, even through the decades we remember as stable. The superficial learning from World War II remained: do not collide with each other, pile more on your own plate, but buy it from the market rather than snatching it from the neighbour. The hunger never diminished. Only the hunting strategy changed.”

"Violence never arrives announcing itself as violence. It arrives wrapped in reasons and slogans, in duty, in faith, in law, in nation, and demands that you honour it as necessary. It extracts your moral consent first, and only then does it spill blood."

"Crowds may fill avenues and squares, but a society as a whole rarely revolts; only individuals do"

"When the skies grow dark with smoke and the earth quakes beneath exploding shells, the world once again asks: Why does this never end? Why is war still so close, so constant, despite all our advancements? These questions are not only for politicians or diplomats. "

"Amid echoes of wartime hysteria, the daughter of an Indian diplomat became the target of collective vulgarity - not amid gunfire, but amid hashtags and headlines."

"Recently, amid the hysteria usually associated with wars, the daughter of an Indian diplomat became the object of collective vulgarity — not in a war zone, but in public discourse."

The divide between India and Pakistan is far more profound than politics. It represents a spiritual poverty, identity, and understanding crisis.

"After the terror attack in Pahalgam and the retaliatory action by India, the region is now standing at the precipice of war. Public opinion is getting more jingoistic, and the brute spectre of war stares us in the face."

"In a tragic event at Pahalgam, more than twenty innocent tourists were brutally murdered in a terror attack. Reports state that the terrorists specifically chose their victims along religious lines before killing them."