No one deserves to die.
Yet death—brutal, certain.
We spend our days
wrestling with this cruel paradox.
A train torn apart by fire.
Planes slicing into glass and steel.
Tourists gunned down on holiday streets.
Headlines that leave us gasping.
They didn’t deserve it—
not the firemen swallowed by flame,
not the soldier in the cold foothills.
Does a uniform mean you’ve shaken hands with death?
And the babies?
Some not even born.
Children clinging to life in bombed-out hospitals.
Little girls—innocence stolen, discarded.
If no one deserves it,
should death arrive by invitation?
And even then—
could we ever greet it with grace?
Death.
The full stop at the end of our sentence.
A final breath,
with or without farewell.
Random. Unstoppable. Inevitable.
And grief—
a shadow that stretches across lifetimes.
It doesn’t measure.
The pain of a martyr’s end
hurts no less than an infant’s silence.
Unjust.
Uncalled for.
Unbearably early.
We burn with rage.
We cry out.
Nirbhaya’s name scorched into memory.
Godhra. Ahmedabad. Hathras.
Pahalgam.
Too many to count.
And every time we scream—
every tear, every clenched fist—
it’s proof.
We are still human.
Still capable of heartbreak.
Still alive enough to care.