“Mankind’s One True Home”

I am fortunate to have the company of my friend, whom I call The Teacher, for discussing various scholarly and intellectual matters that often bother me. I can proudly say that his insight has never disappointed me in finding the answers to those issues.

On one such occasion, I shared with him one of my experiences that I was trying to make sense of. I said to him: “Dear teacher, when I was little and confined to my immediate neighborhood, I had a sense of belonging to that specific neighborhood only. All other neighborhoods of the village were foreign to me, and potential enemies.

When I grew up a bit and made friends from all over the village, I developed a love for my village Center Yasin, and believed myself to be not only member of my own neighborhood, but of the village as well. Still, all other villages of Yasin Valley were more or less foreign.

Then a beautiful event occured: I shifted to Gilgit City for higher education. There, I began perceiving the whole Yasin Valley as home, and developed a certain affection and pride of being form there. I was fast learning about the diversity of GB, yet the only place I could truly call home at that time was Yasin.

When my tenure of staying in the provincial capital came to an end, I had fully accustomed to the diversity of GB, and had begun to cherish all the nooks and crannies of my beloved land. Thus form provincial capital, now I have migrated to the nation’s capital in pursuit of further studies, and now I feel an immense amount of love and passion for the whole of GB. The sense of belonging that I felt for my native neighborhood in childhood, has now shifted and encompasses all of GB, which is amazing considering the fact that GB is an incredibly diverse place in all aspects; be it linguistically, ethnically, or in terms of religious belief.

In my younger days, it was a different kind of happiness I felt when I entered Yasin Valley form Gupis bridge, when travelling from the south. Now I have that same feeling while descending form Babusar Top, into the mountains of our beloved North. Back then, only Yasin was my home, but now I proudly call every valley of GB as home.”

After hearing my story, the teacher smiled and said: ” What you have experienced has been experienced by thousands of people across the ages. A human being is born into a society, and every society on the face of this earth has an attitude of Us-and-Them. Each society is unconsciously afraid of being dominated by its neighbor, and that’s why it teaches its members to be fearful of the other society. Because of this underlying process, a person tends to forget that humans from all places are more similar, and very minutely different. It’s just that we focus on the differences alot more. Because of your travels , you have unconsciously realized this phenomenon by migrating to different places. Perhaps that’s why migration is a constant theme in all major religions. It makes us see the whole picture.

Yet again, this experience of yours won’t stop here, one day when you travel abroad, you will have the same feeling for every corner of this country, and even after that, when you have known people from all corners of the world, you will reach the ultimate realization: that every corner of this planet is home. It is just a matter of knowing this fact.”

And in the end, The Teacher said something that I will never ever forget:
” It is high time we realize this; our history is not the history of tribes in GB, our history is not the history of Muslims in India, rather, our history is the history of mankind on this planet earth.”