Come September!

The fall of Osama on International Labor day brings to mind my musings on the gruesome event of 9/11 recorded in my Editorial in Re-Markings (www.re-markings.com):

“Come September!” The epithet easily helps one to joyfully recall from down the memory lane that lilting tune from Billy Vauhn and His Orchestra which set the hearts and feet of  the young and the old alike dancing with happiness and cheer. All that seems long ago. 11 September, 2001 changed all that. The catastrophe that reduced the mighty twin towers of the World Trade Centre to mere fragments of etherised memory in the twinkling of an eye showed the seamy side of inhuman ingenuity to which even the sky seems no limit. April is no longer ‘the cruellest month’. September has forged ahead with its dead weight of ‘broken images’ spilled the world over. In an age of globalization nothing can remain neutral. Even terrorism has turned global.

In a world already beleaguered with fanaticism and violence where the emphasis is on the adage: ‘good fences make good neighbours’ and where instant justifications are rendered in the name of either justice or counter-revolutionary retaliation, there must be those countless mortals who would like to rise and proclaim: ’Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / that wants it down’. Such mortals, however, prefer to remain inert and waiting like the ‘winged seeds’ in Shelley’s ode for the clarion call of the West Wind to awaken them from their slumber.

-- Nibir K. Ghosh,  “Editorial,” Re-Markings Vol. 2 No.2, September 2003