The muted screams

An image of a man in an orange suit, kneeling on the ground with a masked man behind him, dressed in black, was the first thing that caught my attention as I opened 'The Hindu' today. I was completely shaken as I read the news report in detail, online. 

It was not very long ago that I read an article written by a cameraman - Mohamed Badr - of Al Jazeera, who covered the Egyptian war in length. The article was about how his intention to capture a photograph as a tear-gas shell was thrown by the Egyptian military on a group of protestants had gone completely wrong and he had been captured by the Egyptian military and had been imprisoned for seven months. It was a very moving article in which he had mentioned how depressing it was to be left to suffer in an Egyptian prison while his wife gave birth to his son.

Journalists/Photojournalists all over the world have faced/face/will keep facing very similar threats and to a greater probability, very tragic deaths. 

Any person who admires journalism would not easily forget how Marie Colvin lost the sight in her left eye covering the Sri Lankan war or worse - how she lost her life covering the Syrian war. And having remembered Colvin, how could one miss Rémi Ochlik who was killed in the same tragic bombing?

What about the Libyan war that robbed the world of two great photojournalists in Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington?

If we pause for a moment and think as to why these people agreed/agree to continue in a profession that endangered/endangers their lives every moment, we would be dumbfounded by the reason. 

These people had laid down/continue to lay down their lives so that we could be informed of the atrocities and inhumanities being carried out at the distant corners of the world.

These people had laid down/continue to lay down their lives to tell us the truest of stories about the human race and its potential to annihilate itself.

And what do we do? 

We never even care to give a glance to such reports written by the journalists, amidst the everyday-occurring-war, living with the fear of where the next bomb would land and pictures captured by the photojournalists, amidst the blood splattered bodies and brick shattered buildings, standing with the fear of whom the next bullet would target.

And why would we?

Our own petty problems in colleges and homes and organizations seem more important to us than hundreds of people dying in a middle-east nation and I would not blame anybody.

It is the way we are brought up and it is the way we are encouraged to exist in our society. 

Indifference and ignorance have become two of our most defining characteristics.

And it is a pity that the journalists/photojournalists living in the war zones believe that their accounts and reports are acting as a voice of the innocent people being killed everyday in the name of freedom. 

It is time that we send them an article for a change and call them back to come and lead a life as monotonous as ours instead of living every day as if it were the last one.

At least, they would be spared the cost that they are forced to pay for being the voice of every unheard common man caught in the middle of a war no way meaningful to him.