Last autumn, while serving on a UN assignment in Afghanistan, a Tanzanian colleague said something at floats up in my mind ever so often. He was telling us about a jihadist terrorist organisation in Central Africa that has killed thousands and displaced about 2.3 million people from their homes. "Boko Haram", he told us, "simply means 'books are bad'" - all books, except, of course, the Holy Koran.
Come to think of it, this is a recurring theme across the world - Khymer Rouge, The Great Leap Forward, the power of a radical ideology, encapsulated in a seemingly innocuous slogan, packaging an ideology that divides neighbours, drives ethnic cleansing, forced migrations, and wars.
Why do neighbours make the worst enemies? Is it the old adage 'familiarity breeds contempt' driven to extremes?
Just as it is difficult for non-South Asians to differentiate between Indians and Pakistanis, it is not easy for us to figure out why the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis are at each others throats now. The news channels tells us that these two former Soviet states are fighting for an enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh or "Mountainous Black Garden" - itself a Russian-Turkic term, representing an amalgamation of cultures covering an undulating, fertile patch that lies at the tri-junction of three old empires - Russian, Ottoman and Persian.
When you look at the map it seems like a puzzle at many levels: How did so many Christian Armenians end up in an enclave surrounded by Shia Muslims? How on earth did other large chunk of Azerbaijan - the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic - end up on the other side of Armenia, next to Iran and Turkey?
Then there is this ongoing spectacle of a real war being played out like video games. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have put up slick twitter handles that update the world on how efficiently they are now slaughtering each other. Images from kamikaze drones closing in on their targets - a tank, a truck, or a group of soldiers huddled in a corner - before obliterating them; images of a peaceful, tree-lined avenue disappearing in a haze of cluster bombs; long shots of artillery shells landing in cities, decorating it with plumes of smoke. Each side puts up daily scorecards of soldiers killed and military hardware destroyed or captured.
People are getting killed in hundreds and yet it all seems like a video game being played by kids sitting sitting in front of computer consoles in Turkey or Russia. They are just following an example set by USA in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Wonder what point these gamers and their puppeteers conclude that have shifted one way or the other...
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