New Delhi, April 16 -- The blood-stained school bags reached Islamabad. The 'flight of dreams' boarded the 'flight of death' for that elusive peace in the boiling cauldron of West Asia. The world has seldom seen such a juxtaposition of bitter existential truths in a single breath as it did in the past 45 days. The West Asia war has tired out humanity. The ceasefire is hanging by a thin thread of sanity, left in the drying drip of political veins. Perhaps, these bloody times need literary radicals. Maybe as extreme as Aristophanes' 'Lysistrata', in which Greek women withhold sex from their husbands until the Peloponnesian War ends. A satire so incisive in its premise that it has never lost its bite. Today, world leaders are so busy mining the embedded 'laurels' of conflict that they have forgotten what literature has warned us through the ages - war is the ultimate expression of human failure. Let them revisit the library and reread that wisdom.
Literature, in the age of morphed utilitarianism, is often branded as a luxury of the privileged or a hobby of the sensitive. The Russia-Ukraine and US-Iran wars have proved otherwise. In 2026, it is a survival necessity - perhaps the last resort of empathy in a world which has mastered the art of destruction; perhaps the only force that can sensitise a generation into understanding the horrific failures of its ancestors. In Western literature, Homer's 'Iliad' is recognised as the first work of significance. It is invariably part of university syllabi across continents. It is a devastating war poem on the face and a deliberative anti-war poem in its soul. It is less about the victory of the Greeks and more about the weeping father kneeling before Achilles, begging for the return of Hector's desecrated body. It is about the overpowering realisation that the war's deepest wound is the one it inflicts on human dignity.
If we travel from Homer to the Bard, the words dig deeper, and the echo grows stronger. Shakespeare's plays were not overt manifestoes against war; they are even more enduring. The aftermath lies exposed so starkly that the illusion of glory cannot survive its truth. Let us appropriate 'Macbeth' for broader understanding. The decorated warrior of Scotland evolves into a monster with decaying morality, where ambition legitimises blood. In the struggle of ethics, the victor turns vanquished in the end. Even 'Henry V' appears to celebrate martial heroism. The St. Crispin's Day speech is often read as a rousing call to arms, as we often encounter in Trump's press conferences, though a horribly watered-down version of it. But beneath it lies the unease of its rhetoric. The soldiers are laden with fear and uncertainty, not with glory and grandeur. Shakespeare's thesis is also evident in 'Troilus and Cressida'. The Trojan War becomes a hollow currency, reduced to a theatre of ego, absurdity and futility. The war is stripped of its drummed-up dignity, leaving behind only emptiness.
Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' is an epic meditation on war, where Napoleon's invasion of Russia fragments lives and ravages history. Andrei, who finds a way out of boredom in the adrenaline rush of war, realises its uselessness in the face of death. Pierre and Natasha, who emerge as dishevelled remnants of war, realise how collective stupidity and vanity destroy lives. Delusion often leads to catastrophe, and it becomes too late when the meaning of simple family life eventually dawns on humanity. As the US and Iran retrace from the brink of the Stone Age, hope lingers on them emerging as prison-breakers and not as prisoners of war.
The century we left behind has given humankind searing anti-war literature. Wilfred Owen's words in the 'Preface to Poems' still echo in the corridors of tragedy: 'My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.' It was written from the trenches of the First World War. It is a telling statement of purpose - or rather, purposelessness. The glory of dying in war stands demolished. Even Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' unnerved many when a nineteen-year-old soldier realised that the glory of conflict is propagated by men who will never set foot in a war zone. The immediate analogy lies in Trump's mindless pressers from the cocoon of the White House, while its military is egged on to fight to Make America Great Again (MAGA). The ego unsettles the world and undoes its order. Remarque's impact has been so loud and clear that even a century later, its Netflix adaptation won four Academy Awards. The scene Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, should introduce to Trump is where Paul Baumer stares at an enemy soldier he has killed and understands they were never enemies. Paul fumbles through the man's pockets and finds letters, photographs and all the postcards of life that are painfully similar to his own. Yet, we are where we are. Schools are bombed. Children die. Militaries are drugged with ideals of expansive colonialism. Politicians find new microphones for their old lies.
No less is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which writer and lyricist Varun Grover recently recommended on a film podcast. There is hardly a more psychologically honest portrait of how war treats a soldier who wages it. It denudes every civilising pretension until the whispered conclusion arrives - 'the horror, the horror'. Literature, with cinema in its fold, has been an unwavering loyalist of peace and non-violence. But the audience is debriefed in the long run by a mercilessly selfish world.
Salman Rushdie rightly put forth: 'Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.' But the larger question remains - who is listening to those voices? Literature is not the alchemist that can resolve frictions and unite factions overnight. Yet, it can raise its head of conscience and consciousness amidst the greedy murmurs of war and the economics around it. The global defence industry was worth 2.7 trillion USD in 2024, as per certain estimates. Weapon-selling lobbies exist across the globe; they are powerful and well-oiled. Literature does not have lobbies that can inject the futility of bayonets and bombs. But it can present the balance sheet of human cost over worldly profits.
War is always justified in the language of the future. It is sold as a solution to injustice and threat. The Americans did it in Iraq. They are doing it again in Iran. Literature had warned of similar blatant profiteering through wars in an interesting play written by German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht, titled 'Mother Courage and Her Children'. In the 17th century, Anna Fierling sold food and liquor to Swedish soldiers. She made profits from conflict and travelled across Europe with the army. But fate had a tale to tell. All three of her children fell victim to the same war she relied on for commercial gain. The question before our generation is whether we let this civilisational catastrophe run unbridled or walk into a library to read literature - not to pass an examination, not for the badge of honours, but to be better human beings. To identify with a character who is not us, to understand a war that is not ours, and to realise the disaster that can one day be ours. Let us not be nuclear giants and moral infants.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is a communication professional and former journalist
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.