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I realized with a shock, that in spite of routinely reading through newspapers about Afghanistan for years together, I had never really come to empathize with the country and its suffering until I read Hosseini.

And there lies the power of words, the work of arts, poetry, films and music that gets banned, burnt, destroyed mercilessly by totalitarian regimes everywhere. From the famous libraries of yore that were the first to be targeted by marauding troops to the banning of certain writings that persist till today, brute power has historically been afraid of thought power. For thought enables us to rise beyond the superficial differences amongst us and realize the essential oneness of it all. And that certainly won't do, would it?

Ah, and hence, the genocides, the brutalities, the oppressions, the violence. From Darfur to Kinshasa. From Baghdad to Kenya. From Kabul to Haiti. The millions murdered during the 'total agricultural paradise drive' of Pol Pot regimen in Cambodia bled the same colour as the blood that is flowing in Sudan today as the Jangaweed strikes with impunity to clear villages for usurping the precious oil underneath.

Maybe it is serendipity (a small magic that keeps buoying me up most days) but I also chanced to read Kevin Sites' book, 'In the Hot Zone' - one man, one year, twenty wars. (Sites is incidentally Yahoo!'s first news correspondent who undertook the project of travelling across the war-ravaged world for one whole year and covered the most brutal wars that bedevil it across borders. Refer: www.kevinsitesreports.com)

As I read this one-man-crusade of a book, as unputdownable as Hosseini, it told me amongst other facts, all about the Khat chewed by the Somalian fighters even during the battle of Mogadishu (which gave the voyeuristic world the film Black Hawk Down). It also revealed to me the agony of the victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam who were denied compensation by multinational companies that paid liberally to the American war veterans who used it on them. It introduced me to the children in Joseph Kony's Lord's Liberation Army of Uganda who kill their own family first. I realized the universal truth yet again. That seven colours go in to make a white light. The human race cries with the same voice of pain and joy everywhere.

Serendipity serenaded me again in the dentist's office. The Time magazine's 2007 person-of-the-year issue was lying on the side desk. Not that I wanted to admire Putin's handsome face when the molars were troubling me. I was more interested in the interview with one of the runner-ups by the name of J. K. Rowling. (Yours truly stood in a Slytherin' serpentine queue at mid-night in July for the last Harry Potter book, so forgive the bias!)

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Ministhy Dileep is PG (PM&IR) from XLRI-Jamshedpur, and currently, an IAS officer working in the UP cadre. She has written three books - 'Unequal Equations', 'Learning with Tippy Tortoise: Tales for Kids', and 'Happy Birthday: Poems for Kids', and hopes to publish her first novel in the year 2008.