A confession. And a request.

I confess that I am as shallow as they come. I don’t pretend to be profound or have any depth whatsoever. I know very little about very little. My education & reading, my lived life & experiences, and my social conditioning & moral compass belies my biases and prejudices more than any expertise or knowledge, as does my obvious privilege that flows from my gender, sexuality, and caste. I can’t claim to be anything but the most superficial of beings. In fact, the more I know, the more I realise that I don’t know anything.

That said, since you are already here, drawn by my obvious shallowness, privilege, and inadequacy, please spare a thought for the 2.3 million people, of which a whopping 47% are children and 50,000 are pregnant women, who are cramped up in 363sq km, cut off from all sides, hemmed in by hostile (and heavily armed) powers, and jailed in the world’s largest open-air prison called Gaza, being bombed out of existence openly and brazenly in front of the world, without shame or fear of consequences, rather ironically by the very people who have suffered throughout history from the exact same treatment, and never cease to remind everyone never to forget it.

If I, the openly shallow one with nary a deep thought, as someone obsessed with my image, a vain man posting selfies at an age well past his sell-by date, can see this so clearly, I cannot see a reason why you, better educated than me, better-travelled than me, better-read than me, indeed better than me in every respect, cannot see something that is so obvious in plain sight. I am sure you can. And I would like to appeal to your intellect to see it for what it is: a stain on humanity, a blot on all our collective progress over thousands of years, a big question mark on our claim of being civilised, evolved beings that have achieved consciousness. Please. I beg you.

Note: The keffiyeh (or kufiyya) scarf I am wearing has a long history with the struggle for Palestinian freedom and the aspirations of the common Palestinian. I stand, unequivocally today, on the side of the oppressed. I hope you join me too. Free Palestine.