দেড় হাজার মৃত।
দেড় লক্ষ বাস্তুচ্যুত।
কোথায়, সেটা আর বলবো না...
কমেন্ট আসবে - পলিটিক্যালি মোটিভেটেড পোস্ট।
কিসের জন্য, সেটা বলতে পারি...
এক টুকরো মাটি, মহা পবিত্র সেই মাটি।
বছরের পর বছর ওই মাটির জন্য মানুষ মানুষের রক্ত মেখেছে।
আর বছরের পর বছর, এই মাটিকে অবলীলায় ফিরিয়ে দিয়ে
মা চলে গেছে তার ক্ষ্যাপা বরের কাছে।
শেখো কিছু।
শুভ বিজয়া দশমী।
Kimeli Naiyomah was studying medicine in New York, when 9/11 happened. A few months later, back home in Kenya, he told his tribespeople about this great tragedy. Stunned and saddened, the Masai decided to extend their help to the United States. On 1st June 2002, in the village of Enoosaen, tribe elders dressed in their traditional red robes presented William Brancick, deputy head of the American embassy in Kenya, with 14 cows, an animal they hold sacred.
I came across this story recently, and it hit me that a lot of people across the globe, myself included, will probably never be able to truly comprehend how beautiful and selfless this gift was, because we focus on the cows. But it's not about the cows. It's about wrapping your arm around someone who's hurting, and giving them a piece of you.
And in this respect, what the Masai gave was priceless. What the Masai gave to the Americans, and to the world, was hope. Hope, that for every group of people trying to cause harm, there will always be another group of people trying to help. With cows.
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PS: The cows were never actually transported to the United States. Instead, they remained in Enoosaen, and were used to set up an education trust fund for the Masai children.
American neurosurgeon Dr. Paul Sudhir Arul Kalanithi was 38, when he passed away with stage IV metastatic lung cancer. His daughter was only eight months old. During his battle, he wrote a memoir, which was published posthumously as "When Breath Becomes Air". Here are a few lines from the end of that book.
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Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.
Yet one thing cannot be robbed of her futurity: our daughter, Cady. I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters—but what would they say? I don’t know what this girl will be like when she is fifteen; I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her. There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.
That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.