Yesterday when I was coming back from office, I saw a little girl, (barely 6 or 7 years old) and her father were crossing a bridge near Kupwara with Indian security forces all around .The father was kind of scared so he asked his little daughter: “Sweetheart, please hold my hand so that you don’t slip and hurt yourself.
The little girl said: No daddy, I won’t slip, but let’s walk little quickly.
“Why would we walk quickly?” Asked father.
“They (Indian security forces) are looking at us,” replied the little girl.
The father smiled at her and started walking quickly.
I saw this and I am narrating it the way I saw it and I can’t believe what I saw. The little girl grabbed the father’s legs and then suddenly loosened them off and in the next movement she turned around. While her father was walking away, the little girl opened her arms and started walking backwards and in the meantime was trying to cover her father and move in the same motion as was her father.
At first I didn’t understand why she was doing that, but after she reached some distance and could no more see the Indian security forces, she again turned around, now towards her father, hold his hand and went away, and
I realized that she was probably doing this because of the fear of security forces might shoot her father and she will lose him.
She was probably doing this because she was daddy’s little girl and daddy has always sheltered and protected her from all the storms.
Now the thing that baffles me most is the fear in the 7 year old girls mind and the way she thinks to stand against it.
Obviously, she is by no means the only one reacting this way to fear. You might have seen countless instances of this same pattern repeating itself. I see it even in myself. But I am not able understand what type of fear is it and what type of survival is in our hands.