One man, seated in a high -ceilinged room with maps scrawled across a desk, draws a line. A single stroke of ink that slices through villages he has never seen, rivers he has never crossed and history that he isn’t aware of. He doesn’t hear the cries that follow, see friends turn into foes, families divided and people fleeing their homes leaving behind everything they owned to start life afresh in strange, unknown territory. To him it was cartography, while for millions it was trauma. This is the Radcliffe line that divided one nation into two. It is a scar that still throbs.

Several decades apart, another man in another part of the world, wounded by a slight, bruised in pride, decides on tariffs- not through reason but retaliation. Like a peeved, petulant child withholding toys, he stamps policies onto people’s lives. This impulsive move hasmarkets crash, leave people live in danger of losing livelihoods and dampens sectors that were once vibrant and growing. Palmed off as economic policy, this despair dressed as diplomacy has repercussions on people in different landscapes across the world. Elsewhere there are leaders rising each day with the taste of blood, war and gory strategy that makes human life dispensable andhas people perish like flies. Drones (not the insects but war machines) replace lullabies, pictures of grieving mothers and babies are splashed across television screens and legacies are being built on wreckage for months on end, making people immune to the horrors of war over a period of time. We have, in the process, become insensitive to leaders who are warring like amused children playing the famous Play station games and their advanced versions for real. Human history with its notorious leaders over the ages doesn’t always move forward. It moves around in circles looping through the vanity of leaders, the whims of the powerful, and the stubborn refusal to learn from what is already burned.

But power isn’t just wielded at the helm of nations. It wears a nameplate on a gated community wall, a chair at the civic body’s monthly meeting ora title at the top of a trade board. There too, egos thrive- masked in minutes and meetings, in quiet discrimination, delayed approvals and arbitrary decisions that suffocate lives in many invisible ways. People entrusted with responsibility often forget its source. They forget that their power is not inherent but borrowed from the trust of others. This story of egos and shameless vanity unfortunately, can end only when there is a shift in our thinking and a thinning of stunned silence which most of us retreat into. Across streets and courtrooms, class rooms and civic meetings, people need to reclaim ownership, refuse to be ruled by personal whims and insist on being heard. Apathy that is thick and stifling needs to give way to awareness becausepower comes only from shared awareness. This is the power that does not divide but heals, does not conquer but connects, does not stuff out life but ignites it. It is only when we speak up against injustice, that we venture to change situations. This is isn’t about governments or borders. It is about the way we treat one another in our homes, communities, neighbourhoods and wherever trust is given and decisions are made. Awareness is the beginning of change- when it rises, so do we.