Shared by Syed Naqvi.

(Bloomberg View) — The world seems full of crises and
disasters: from political stasis and racial standoffs in Europe and the U.S., to the classic conflicts of capitalism in “emerging” economies (inequality, weakening states, authoritarianism), to tribal conflicts and sectarian uprisings in the Middle East and Africa. But the small coffins of Peshawar’s students are the heaviest burden on our conscience.
The murder of children crushes our soul. It destroys the already frail hope, without which life becomes unbearable, that there is justice in our world. Adults commit unspeakable atrocities against each other in the name of religion, race, nation and profit. But none of our many competing gods has yet explained why the innocent young should suffer for the sins of adults.
The killing of 132 children in Peshawar violates the shared assumptions that have regulated the conduct of humanity for millennia. Some unshakeable tenets, which the fiercest partisans on the left and the right both cherished, have been trampled into the earth. It is why our grief is not assuaged by the ritual condemnation of international statesmen and editorialists, the cool analysis of terrorism experts, or the retaliatory measures of politicians and generals.
Nor is it alleviated by jeremiads against allegedly anti- modern Islam, or the unique depravity of the Pakistani Taliban.
The group’s apparent enemy, Pakistan’s security establishment, has itself created and sponsored some of the most vicious militant organizations in South Asia. Demagogues in Sri Lanka and India demonstrate that civilian rule is no insurance against extremism. The massacre of children has occurred in the same fortnight that a former vice-president of the world’s biggest democracy claimed that he would authorize torture again if need be.
We cannot precisely diagnose a crisis that seems so all- encompassing — the life-denying nihilism that hangs over the world like smog. It does hint at insidious decay in the very institutions and processes — families, education, media and inherited patterns of culture — through which basic values such as individual self-restraint are transmitted.
This is true not only of brutalized contestants in an endless war. There seems to be a pervasive uncertainty in even the world’s relatively peaceful zones about what one generation should pass on to the next, or how it should define the duties and responsibilities of being human.
Formal education, reduced to vocational training by anxious parents and teachers, no longer effectively insulates against the mental confusion and hideously distorted urge for transcendence that makes a corporate executive in Bangalore turn into a fervent tweeter on behalf of Islamic State. Many of the young today are nurtured by and mature intellectually in new communities of meaning on the Internet, where everything seems permitted. In the resulting moral vacuum, deracinated and estranged young men succumb to a grandiose will to power, and an infatuation with charismatic figures and utopian movements.
Something more than just economic and political distress must explain the worldwide proliferation of men who espouse spine-chilling convictions and fantasies of mass murder. We cannot afford to renounce the possibility of achieving a more democratic, free and just society through political change. Yet we can no longer believe that the enabling conditions of nihilistic violence or the apocalyptic mind-set can be removed by reform or modification of public policy alone, let alone by military retaliation.
The blood of innocent children rouses us to drastic action.
But it is not cowardly to acknowledge problems to which there are no stock sociopolitical remedies, and to grasp the unprecedented nature of the threats in our time to human life, freedom and dignity. Certainly, however deep our revulsion to atrocities perpetrated by all sides — sectarian or secular, governments or terrorists — it won’t help to blame religion for a phenomenon that is so clearly rooted in a catastrophic loss of the religious sense.

To contact the author on this story:
Pankaj Mishra at pmishra24@bloomberg.net To contact the editor on this story:
Nisid Hajari at nhajari@bloomberg.net

Unfortunately terrorist attacks have become a routine in Pakistan, but today is especially a heartbreaking and sad day in Pakistan. Killing of innocent children is an evil act and we condemn such acts of terrorism in all forms. Our heartfelt sympathies to the families of the victims and citizens of Pakistan, who have to endure such terrorist acts on daily basis. Below is a worth reading article by Rafia Zakaria in Dawn (Editors)

Pakistan’s Schools of Sorrows

They began the day in their school uniforms, they ended it in burial shrouds.

On the morning of December 16, 2014, it was exam time at the Army Public School in Peshawar and most of the students were inside the examination hall where they would take their tests.

The night before, there must have been much cramming, much last minute memorisation, much anxiety about how they would fare.

Their minds would have been focused on doing the best they could, scoring the highest marks. They did not expect to die.

Also read: ‘I saw death so close’: student recalls Peshawar school carnage

The assailants who came to kill them scaled a wall adjoining a graveyard. Once inside, they fired in the schoolyard dispersing the students that remained there.

Then, they came to the examination hall.

To save themselves, the students hit the ground, their young bodies aligning with the earth to evade the bullets that sought their bodies. But the killers had come to kill; according to eyewitnesses, there was no hurried or haphazard showering of bullets.

The killers killed one by one, pointing their guns at one child and then another, watching their bodies flinch and fail. Later, when the corpses would be counted, they would number over a hundred.

Also read: Militant siege of Peshawar school over, at least 141 killed

In the aftermath, the children are gone, silenced and buried. The country is in mourning, stunned again, shaken again, angered again at the barbarity that lives within and spawns such death.

Outrage is an easy emotion in Pakistan and after a decade of terrorist attacks almost a habit; when the tears dry up as tears do, little changes.

Were we not locked into this cycle of act, outrage and forgetfulness, the imminence of an attack such as this one would have long been acknowledged, its probability seen as high, its likelihood necessitating preparation and security.

There were numbers that told of the possibility; a report issued by the Global Coalition for the Protection of Education earlier this year noted that in the years between 2009 and 2012 there were 800 attacks on schools in Pakistan.

Not one or two, but 800 warnings of the carnage to come, boxed away, set aside, pushed away to the back pages of newspapers, the recesses of consciousness.

In pictures: Tears, loss and despair for our children

In the years after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese created a memorial to the victims. Painstakingly, they collected the bits and pieces of the belongings left behind by the dead so they would be a reminder to the living of the near limitless depths of human depravity.

The most touching, the most poignant and the most heartbreaking of the collection are the belongings of the many dead children; schoolbooks with work half done, lunchboxes with food half eaten, last uniforms worn in final moments.

Those children are dead too, but at least they are remembered and memorialised; theirs is an immortal innocence that speaks decades later and chastises humanity for its criminal apathy.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1151230/pakistans-schools-of-sorrow

FIFTY years ago this month, the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell submitted a short, quirky article to a fly-by-night journal titled Physics, Physique, Fizika. He had been too shy to ask his American hosts, whom he was visiting during a sabbatical, to cover the steep page charges at a mainstream journal, the Physical Review. Though the journal he selected folded a few years later, his paper became a blockbuster. Today it is among the most frequently cited physics articles of all time.

Bell’s paper made important claims about quantum entanglement, one of those captivating features of quantum theory that depart strongly from our common sense. Entanglement concerns the behavior of tiny particles, such as electrons, that have interacted in the past and then moved apart. Tickle one particle here, by measuring one of its properties — its position, momentum or “spin” — and its partner should dance, instantaneously, no matter how far away the second particle has traveled.

The key word is “instantaneously.” The entangled particles could be separated across the galaxy, and somehow, according to quantum theory, measurements on one particle should affect the behavior of the far-off twin faster than light could have traveled between them.

Entanglement insults our intuitions about how the world could possibly work. Albert Einstein sneered that if the equations of quantum theory predicted such nonsense, so much the worse for quantum theory. “Spooky actions at a distance,” he huffed to a colleague in 1948.

In his article, Bell demonstrated that quantum theory requires entanglement; the strange connectedness is an inescapable feature of the equations. But Bell’s proof didn’t show that nature behaved that way, only that physicists’ equations did. The question remained: Does quantum entanglement occur in the world?

Starting in the early 1970s, a few intrepid physicists — in the face of critics who felt such “philosophical” research was fit only for crackpots — found that the answer appeared to be yes.

John F. Clauser, then a young postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was the first. Using duct tape and spare parts, he fashioned a contraption to measure quantum entanglement. Together with a graduate student named Stuart Freedman, he fired thousands of pairs of little particles of light known as photons in opposite directions, from the middle of the device, toward each of its two ends. At each end was a detector that measured a property of the photon known as polarization.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/opinion/sunday/is-quantum-entanglement-real.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

Posted By F. Sheikh