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When we grow up surrounded with stockpiles of information at our finger tips, and an infinite supply of preserved words, sounds, images loaded on our gadgets, we are on the verge of losing the capacity to obsess about memory. Especially memories of wars. With all of West Asia on fire, the images being streamed live on the media looks like a freak show. Several people say they have stopped watching news about the war. What would they do with more stories of death and thuggery knowing much of it may be fake news. 

The first verse in Rigveda is an ode to or powerful Agni or fire known as also a perennially hungry consumer of all matter: Hutbhuk. The poet describes Agni as the priest, the Lord of all fire sacrifices, the one who feeds the holy fire on behalf of mankind. Wars are fire : perpetually in motion, licking off all that is in their path, extinguished only to flare up again and again when fed by the Hota at the behest of humans hoping that the sacrifice will fill their homes with precious stones and riches of all kinds. Come, come to us as our Father Agni, be ever available to us like a Father, as our protector, the ninth verse says.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Very subtly the verses seem to be answering some perennial questions of historians. Why have nations fed wars that destroy all in their path ? Why did the Pandavas, not really sired by their father Pandu, and the equally undeserving Kauravas, whose blind father became a king by default in denial of the laws of kingship, fight a bloody fratricidal war over a ‘paternal’ legacy ? 

Why did that cradle of Western civilisation Greece, wage wars with Persia ? What about the historic battles to reclaim the Holy land from infidels by Christians, the Crusades that lasted for centuries , followed by push back battles to oust Muslims from Spain, and........

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