Trying to understand humanity at a source code level is something I have committed to.
Towards this, whenever I immerse myself into a new place, culture or feeling, I try and track back to see where else did I feel this, or where does this connect.
I stood at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial today, and time bent. Not backward, not forward. Just inward.
I've felt this before, at the Anne Frank House, outside the Taj post 26/11, and at the 9/11 memorial and museum.
It's not sadness, not exactly. It's a realization: that human beings are capable of unthinkable cruelty. And that we keep finding new ways to forget it.
Not just spontaneous or emotional cruelty, but calculated, industrial-scale violence.
The kind that's planned, defended, justified, the kind that is anchored in some manufactured 'higher purpose' & ideology.
Civilization, as we define it — writing, laws, cities — gave us structure. But it also gave us systems to organize that cruelty.
We wrote poetry and built prisons. We created religion and waged war in its name. For every breakthrough, there was a breakdown. And over time, that emotional damage wasn't healed. It was inherited.
Empires, countries and cultures passed down not just language or architecture, but fear, rage, and the idea that power must always come at someone else's cost.
The strange thing is, we've evolved materially — technology, infrastructure, GDP — but emotionally, we're still children acting out old hurts.
Nations behave like people: proud, insecure, reactive, stupid, petty. At times. Toxic. And because we never processed the original trauma, we keep repeating it, dressed up in different flags.
You don't have to look far to see that this pattern is still alive.
India and Pakistan were born out of trauma. Partition wasn't just a political event, it was a psychological fracture. And we've been managing that grief ever since, mostly by ignoring it.
Kashmir, in this light, isn't just a land dispute. It's a symptom. A place where the past keeps playing out in the present, over and over again.
In some ways the world today looks like it's moving forward. In others, backwards. Under the surface tho, I feel we're still running on emotional defaults: fear of the other, obsession with control, trauma disguised as nationalism.
We're adult nations with childhood wounds, acting powerful but behaving petty.
And unless we learn to see the pattern, we'll stay trapped in it.
Because peace isn't the absence of conflict. It's the presence of awareness.
And the courage to break the loop.
The Atomic Bomb Dome, Hiroshima. The skeleton of what was once the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, preserved exactly as it stood after August 6, 1945.
A melted Buddha from Jizo-in Temple, thrown from its pedestal by the blast. The front melted in the fire. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
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