Page 158 - Age of Peace Goodword.indd

A Personal Experience

so disconcerted that I immediately left the place and travelled
back alone to the Allahabad city by bus.

The culture of violence is apparently directed against
someone else. But in fact it is against reality. When a violent
person tries to kill another, he is not aware of the grave reality,
that is, of the Angel of Death standing behind him. When he
has killed others, he too, will, sooner or later, come into the
grip of the Angel of Death, who will take him to the Lord of
the Worlds to be held accountable for his deeds. If a person
holding a gun were to remember this reality, he would never
– for any reason whatsoever – aim it at anyone or press the
trigger. He would only engage in peaceful struggle to achieve
the purpose of his life.
Whenever I hear news of terrorism, I always remember the
above experience I had at Allahabad. I think that terrorists are
also human beings just as I am. They have the same conscience
as I have, so why does not their inner voice ask them why
they are killing their fellow men? What right do they have to
kill a person whom they did not create in the first place? They
would not like anybody to kill them, then why perpetrate this
crime against others? Are the terrorists made of stone? If the
gun I was given to kill the bird fell from my hand, why do the
guns not similarly fall from the hands of these terrorists when
they are about to kill other people?
This thought troubles me time and again. I find that terrorists
have become negative because they base their actions on a
one-sided study of events. For example, a news report lists the
books that are read by terrorists, most of which are on war.
This is evident from the collection of documents recovered
from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. These
included the books which Bin Laden and his people had been
reading. Some of them are America’s “War on Terrorism”
by Michel Chossudovsky, Guerilla Air Defense: Antiaircraft
Weapons and Techniques for Guerilla Forces by James Crabtree,

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