As a young student, I used to wonder how people must live in Iraq and the Palestinian occupied territories. In my mind, Iraqis and Palestinians got shot and arrested and bombarded so often they were used to such atrocities. “Of course not,” said a friend who had lived in those areas, “they have their jobs and their routines, their boredoms and their dreams. Each new disaster shocks and breaks them all over again, even if it is the hundred thousandth.” How true now i realize as the same things were happening in my homeland. Children were chanting lessons in roofless classrooms. Young women were cycling to work past the army barracks. And the tired laborers were often forced off to ‘jansarkar’ gatherings on their way home. Anything can happen anytime. But when it does, they are the ones to lose their lives and their limbs and their loved ones. They can’t chatter about ‘the situation’ because their only choice is to live it. Distance, how it divides us and distorts other peoples’ tragedies. If we are to ever understand their suffering, we must first of all cross the distance in mind, if not in miles. But as we dramatise their condition and dehumanise their losses, we only grow further and further apart. As said by Sharda Ghale on nepalitimes.com( with additions from me)