Strangers In The Backyard

In a shrinking world of unclear and disputed borders, the human species is surely at a threshold of change. Change is always a welcome inconvenience, but how much of it can we take? Age old dogmas are being contested, and established moral principles are thrown out the window. While some fight to preserve a cultural tradition in the grips of extinction, some try to bring radical change in just about everything in the world today. The disputes are no longer restricted to faith and territories, but has graduated in to beliefs. Belief that one holds about what, in their individual opinon, is right or wrong, is moral or not. Nothing to do with what religion one follows, what race one is or what gender one is. We are redfining the world with the limits of our understanding and wisdom. It is no longer us who have to adjust, but the world according to our beliefs. Loyalties are drowned and altered in a glass of cold beer on weekday happy hours.

In this self-centered pursuit for changing the world, even as contact lists burgeon and approachability increases, many have become increasingly strangers - not only to those whom they have not met, but even to those that are part of the family structure and possibly even to themselves. The mirror is no longer a reliable medium to recognize themselves, but one to introduce them to a stranger whom they have grown with from the day they were born till now. A stranger whom they have shared an entire life with, but do not know if they can trust. A stranger they identify with and relate to. Everyone else must be but an extension of that unknown, of that stranger they know, and those who are not lives on in the world shackled down with archaic principles, those whom they need to fight and change.

Till such time either they change themselves or they change the world, or possibly forever considering the insatiable thirst of humans for change, they - and among them everyone else - will continue to live with strangers in the backyard.