Letter to a Terrorist

Mr. Terrorist

I was compelled to write this letter because you were compelled to express your dissent by murdering innocent people. If you saw me out on the street, you would fill hand grenades with hatred and without a second thought pull the pin and throw it at me, so that your disillusionment with the world may shatter my body and leave it lifeless in a pool of my own blood. But I would like you to know that when I usually meet people on the streets, I smile at them.
But now that you have declared war on the sanctity of life, I am going to throw a grenade of ideas at you, that I hope will encourage you to indulge in some self-reflection, if that is not too much to ask for. And ideas, Mr. Terrorist like a great man once said, is immune to bullets, your bullets.
I have been trying to make some sense of the tragedy that has been unfolding in Mumbai over the past few days and I must confess that I am so distressed that I have been sleepless. But today, I had a sudden realization that I must stop trying to make sense of what happened, because there IS NO sense in it.
You see, this has been the problem in the first place. The world failed to talk some sense into you.
Instead, someone else got to you first and you readily accepted the nonsense they fed to you and accepted your bags full of ammunition and dried fruit and fake credentials and crossed the seas to murder and to perish in a faraway land. I assure you that your pilgrimage was a vain one, because I have not heard of anyone having a spiritual revelation either while pulling the trigger or while being shot at. Last time I checked, God was all for peace.
It really amazes me that instead of joining an organization to build schools, shelter, and orphanages, you chose to sign up for "Pointless death and destruction 101".
I don't care about your motives, I do not sympathise with your ideas and I do not accept your protestations. You are no martyr, you are no savior, you are no victim, you are no freedom fighter, you are no soldier, you are not a revolutionary. YOU ARE A MURDERER!
You were human before you went to the camps, to crawl in the dirt, under barbed wire fences, and stabbed dolls filled with hay and learned to shoot, to murder, to maim. If only you had used your brain to think; if only you had used those fingers which were trained to put together explosives, to write and express your ideas; if only you had walked out of rooms that preached hate and practiced non-violence, we would have not witnessed these heart wrenching sights of death and destruction.
You might call this letter an oversimplified and emotional response to the complex issues underlying incidents such as the Mumbai massacre. But considering the lack of intelligence you have displayed with your actions over the last 72 hours, I am obliged to oversimplify, so that you may understand. So that you may stop. Now!
-- Nikesh Murali