As the planet turns and the despicable world leaders turn it into their own little horrific war game to satiate their lust for power, conquest and greed, it is really difficult to find any ray of hope of humanity redeeming itself. What is most painful is to witness how deliberately innocent children, youth, women and civilians are being targeted.

The radius of the circle of known people directly affected by war is also getting smaller. We believe war is elsewhere, it won’t affect us and this too shall pass as history tells us tyrants are often defeated. But somehow chaos reigns and the tiniest ripples of any war or destruction reach out far in amplified form. There are intangible numerous multiple socio-economic and cultural implications. We dwell on one earth and are facing the worst brunt of it, though we choose to be denial.

Last week my son saw his usual metro line closed. He initially thought it was for regular repairs but only later learnt that it was closed due to a shoot out. A mentally unstable woman had raised a religious slogan and made some verbal bomb threats to fellow passengers and was consequently shot as she couldn’t be tackled otherwise, so metro line was closed. Both the woman and the cops are being investigated.

My son’s friend is touring Europe and their rented car was broken into by probably a desperate homeless woman – hurting herself before disappearing and turning their leisure trip into a short nightmare.

His classmates with families in various troubled zones are extremely worried as they are not sure when they will be able to see their families again.

In our friend circles too stories are trickling in about PhDs getting disrupted due to ongoing conflicts or foreign diplomacy fiascos.

I can only tell my son and his friends to be brave and kind as much as possible to each other. I don’t think we can even comprehend or imagine how tough it has become for our youths as the planet faces this unprecedented multiple crises.

Our leaders are absolutely disconnected with aspirations of future generations though they wage wars and build corporate offices in their names to use them as weapons, shields, soldiers, cheap labour force, mob etc – who can be easily exploited and oppressed.

Nowadays my conversations with my son are more about season change, day time saving switch which has made us one more hour apart on time scale, grocery shopping, daily chores, physics, his classes, exams and beautiful autumn sky.

And then I asked him today what he misses the most and his one word answer was – ‘You’.

Here is a click shared by him of autumn sky from his campus and another by his friend who visited the famous forgotten caves to see the extraordinary oldest surviving art made by our ancestors.

While war and hatred isn’t worthy of inheritance, art certainly is.