I was on my way to the park, studying en route, the tense flustered faces of people going about their daily chores in an unnatural hurry. I guessed the hurry was because of the expected call for curfew in that U.P. township. On that day, I wondered if the long-suffering common man had reached his saturation point finally, and if so, was his cathartic lashing out, a culmination of years of accumulated frustration, directed at the right targets? Are we capable of thinking objectively and identifying sources responsible for the present state of affairs?

Can we rationally try to identify manipulative vested interest? Will we by our cathartic vent of feelings play straight in the hands, of those very vested interests? in the process causing death and destruction by lashing out in wrong directions — and, hence, complete the vicious circle that will boomerang on us and, ultimately, set us collectively rolling downhill, regardless of who or what we are..

I was just contemplating turning back when a little girl in a woolly something, carrying a furry bundle (a small puppy) in her arms, appeared out of nowhere and running smack on to my left foot, remained standing for one suspended moment on to my left shoe. The next moment she had brushed the shoe clean with a little hand and the tail of her puppy! Before I could protest, she was off with a kiss blown in my direction! The heart-tugging smile, full of a thousand apologies but minus one tooth, stayed etched on my mind. It was so incongruent with my earlier thoughts that I did not know whether to smile or weep.

"Earthbird!" flashed through my mind, as I remembered an uncharacteristically cheerful sculpture I had made a long time ago. She looked like that sculpture — with all its native hopes and dreams that can only be embodied by an innocent little child.. That smile spurred me on to complete my walk.

Sitting on the grass, watching the children at play, I tried to brush away the cobwebs of confusion from my mind. We were all like this once — innocent and full of love. What could have gone so drastically wrong on our journey to adulthood that we should actually instigate ourselves to take lives of innocent people? Ultimately, it was not always the innocent who became unwitting victims of attacks emanating from confused wrath? People who have done us no harm.

Thought about the gory stories I had heard from my mother about the "Partition days. I thought of the crying states of present-day India.. and on my way back home, I thought of the little girl with the guileless heart. Was I or anybody else capable of being monster enough to ask, "Earthbird, what religion are you?" and strike her down if she was not mine? Was that what religion — any religion — preached in the name of God, was capable of allowing?

I wonder if God ever shudders and weeps..