Arun Kumar
2 min readNov 25, 2023

News Flash — Pause in fighting to save some (but then kill more later)

On the absurdity of human mind

Arun Kumar

24 November 2023 morning. As is part of my perfunctory morning routine, I have a warm cup of earl gray in my hand and settle down to look through the headlines.

The top news this morning is “Pause in fighting, paving way for release of captives.”

The headline is about war going in Gaza and death and destruction it has caused since 7 October 2023.

The headline is telling us that there will be a mediated pause in fighting. A semblance of a civilized world will be restored for a couple of days.

Perhaps for a few days the dust will settle down and the noise of explosions will give way to silence, amongst which cries of humanity resulting from its loss can be heard.

There will be a pause in which children and their families will not be on the run from one shelter to another and for a few nights will have the blessing of uninterrupted sleep.

The mention of pause also conjures up an image that a couple days an invisible hand will press a button and the paused brutalities of war will resume.

The thought conjures up the image of a movie where in the middle of an action sequence everything gets frozen in midair and after a few seconds when time resumes, and broken pieces of bones fall on the ground.

The pause is like the freeze time effect in movies.

And so, in a few days the pause in the war would be over. During that time, a few prisoners and hostages will be released or exchanged. After that the fighting would resume and inevitably more would die.

The absurdity of it all — exchange few human souls, but later extinguish souls of many more — should be apparent.

Guess that is how the human mind works.

Ciao.