"I remember that day, it was 12th September 2001 and I was at my college as usual. None of students who were sitting in the front row talked with me for the first three hours of the day. At about 12:45, during the lunch break, I was questioned by a second-bench guy ‘are you a Muslim?’ I replied to him ‘yes’ politely. The guy who sat next to me, questioned, ‘do you know those terrorists?’ I asked him, ‘which terrorists?’ He and few others went on abuse Muslims, while the rest supported him. I wish I had punched him on his face, breaking his front teeth but I couldn’t. I was the lone Muslim in the class (Section JI-1, Gowtham Junior College, Ameerpet, Hyderabad) and I had no support in my favor whatsoever.
When I went back home, I was told by my mother that there has been a massive terrorist attack in New York and over 4000 people are believed to be dead. Soon, I realized why those guys were abusing me and my religion. For the next few days, I was constantly provoked by abuses and nick-names. Eventually I decided to vacate the first bench. Generally, in India, the most intelligent students of the class sit in first bench while the dull students sit at last rows. There was never a time in my life where I had sat at last bench until that day. Sitting alone in the last bench was not just psychologically damaging but had a worse impact on my studies. While, the rest of my classmates scored over 96% marks in intermediate first year, I obtained merely 90% marks. And the worst was yet to come, after intermediate second year, I failed in IIT Junior entrance exam.
8 years have passed by since 9/11 Twin tower attacks and even today people find still some way or the other to abuse Muslims in general as perpetrators of those attacks. And in all these 8 years, whenever I thought of 9/11 attacks, I always asked a question at myself, does Al-Qaeda have enough intelligence to carry out the most sophisticated attack that ever happened on this planet? Whenever, I saw about Al-Qaeda on news channels, the images of illiterate fanatic people were shown, who only knew of street fighting with guns. They never appeared in any sense to be capable of designing such a sophisticated attack. The answer that I always got, Al-Qaeda was only physically involved in the attacks, the brain behind the attacks is someone else because Al-Qaeda simply doesn’t have the intellectual talent to design such sophisticated attacks.
Until, yesterday, I believed that Americans were convinced that Al-Qaeda is intellectually and physically involved attacks but that changed after I came across Charlie Sheen’s video message to President Obama. There are Americans who think, there is more to 9/11 Twin tower attacks than we know. My life might not have as affected by 9/11 Twin tower attacks as those who have directly suffered the pain of losing their loved ones but as a Muslim, whose life is not same as it was prior to September 11th 2001, I demand the United States Government to do a honest reinvestigation of 9/11 Twin Tower attacks. And when I say this, I have no hope. "
No comments:
Post a Comment