People die. A select few make billions. And the world calls it geopolitics.
I can’t write about that. Not because I don’t have opinions — and not because I can pretend to be neutral, I live in Pakistan, I am not outside this — but because the moment you name a country or a conflict you become a camp. And I’ve written before about the ease of not belonging to a camp.
What I can write about is something smaller and somehow more dangerous.
Take two babies. Raise them together. They will behave as siblings unless someone trains them otherwise. The conflict is never original. It is always inherited.
What gets inherited is not just belief but the shape of meaning. How a word lands. What a phrase implies. The gap between what is said and what is received.
A long time ago I was walking back to university with a friend. His major had nothing to do with language or literature but he read voraciously and wrote anonymously. To test him — or maybe to test myself — I gave him a phrase.
In love, god, girls and myself.
He laughed first. Called it profane. Then paused and said something I haven’t forgotten — that sex is also profane, but marriage is not, even if the papers are unsigned.
What I meant was simple. Almost innocent. At that point in life things arranged themselves in this order — the love of God, the mystery of girls, the slow and unfinished business of understanding myself.
But meaning doesn’t travel the way you send it.
Take that same phrase and hand it to someone carrying years of a different inheritance and the output is unrecognizable. Not wrong exactly. Just entirely their own.
That is what this is about. Not the wars on maps. But the war inside language. The nuance of meaning that divides everyone — quietly, completely, and sometimes beyond repair.
Note: AI helped me find the right words and structure.