13/04/2026

MONDAY | APR 13, 2026

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ON TELEGRAM m RAM

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What do humans really want? T HE old adage whispers across generations: “Don’t trouble trouble unless trouble troubles you.” Wise,

What does anyone gain? The dead do not collect territory and the displaced do not celebrate strategic victories. Then, there is Israel’s clarification – if one can call it that – that the ceasefire applies only to Iran. Lebanon remains a target. Bombing continues. So, the word “ceasefire” becomes a language trap, a pause in one alley while fire is poured into the next. This is not peace; this is scheduling or rescheduling. Reading old literature, one is reminded of a grim, constant

concise and almost comically irrelevant to the spectacle unfolding in West Asia. Here, trouble has not only been troubled; it has been summoned – dressed in uniform, given a dozen conflicting justifications and left to wander in the rubble without a map. And so, we are left with

questions, not answers. Perhaps that is the only honest place to begin. Take the orange

that humans are a warring community by nature. From the first sharpened stone to the drone strike, the pattern holds. Territorial supremacy is the old answer – the one we teach in schools and the one that fits neatly into textbooks. But territory is just a visible excuse. Beneath it lies something older and less nameable. It can be a fear of emptiness, a terror of stillness, a need to measure existence through opposition or simply when there is a madness beyond human or AI comprehension. What do humans really want? The question is not new but it feels newly urgent when you watch a region burn and hear leaders speak

man, the architect of this latest chapter, whose name we need not repeat because his silhouette is plastered in every headline. When the first bombs fell, the reason was survival. Then it became preemption. Then it was about hostages, about dignity and about red lines drawn in the desert sand. Now, with a two-week ceasefire dangling like a tattered rope, he declares victory – objective achieved. Which objective? No one knows. Perhaps not even him.

“You win a border, you want the next. You secure a ceasefire, you want the terms rewritten. You defeat an enemy, you invent a new one just to keep the machinery of purpose turning.

Israeli left-wing activists demonstrate in HaBima Square against the ongoing war with Iran in Tel Aviv on Saturday. Since the ceasefire came into effect, a relative calm has prevailed, with no bombings reported in Iran or the Gulf. – AFPPIC

So, we are left, as always, with the living moment. A two-week ceasefire that is not quite a ceasefire. A victory whose object is a secret. A region on fire and the rest of the world watching while finding means to cope with the scarcities and relieved it is not yet their turn. Don’t trouble trouble, the adage says. But trouble has a way of finding you anyway. And when it does, it does not ask what you want; it only asks what you are willing to sacrifice. Dr Bhavani Krishna Iyer holds a doctorate in English literature. Her professional background encompasses teaching, journalism and public relations. She is currently pursuing a second master’s degree in counselling. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com

questions because we keep giving the same wrong answers. So, forgive the repetition. It is not a failure of imagination; it is a symptom of the disease. The questions posed here are rhetorical, of course. No historian will answer it because historians do not settle arguments, they inherit them. They will write this moment as they have written all others from a distance, with the luxury of cause and effect, selecting what is music and what is noise, according to their impulses. The orange man will be a paragraph, the Yemeni fighter will be a footnote and the Lebanese family sleeping through bombings will be a statistic. History is not truth; it is the imagination of the last surviving scribe.

Is this how human evolution is supposed to take place? Through killing? Through bloodshed? Through suffering administered and endured, generation after generation, until suffering becomes not a tragedy but a tradition? And here I must stop myself because I am beginning to sound like a broken record, repeating the same laments, the same weary observations about war and want and the foolishness of our species. Same words, different war – that is cognitive looping, the mind’s cruel habit of circling the same wound without ever licking it clean. I told myself no more such rattles. No more reciting the horror as if novelty might rescue it. But the loop exists because the loop is true. We keep asking the same

in riddles. There are needs like food, shelter, safety and belonging. There are wants such as recognition, revenge, legacy and the scream of “I was here”. When needs are met – and in West Asia, they rarely are – wants expand like fume to fill every available space. They are, by design, inexhaustible. You win a border, you want the next. You secure a ceasefire, you want the terms rewritten. You defeat an enemy, you invent a new one just to keep the machinery of purpose turning.

When reasons shift faster than frontlines, they cease to be reasons; they become excuses. And excuses, unlike reasons, do not need to be true; they only need to be repeated. Meanwhile, the fire spreads, not as a single blaze but as a contagion of allegiances. One by one, the nations of West Asia have joined the fray, not out of conviction, but out of the strange reckoning of regional honour. Yemen, the latest entrant, arrives late to a war already exhausted of meaning. What does Yemen gain?

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