A Line in the Sand - Original Writing

A Line in the Sand - Original Writing

A line. A simple, one-dimensional mark. It may be the edge of a

square, the shortest distance between two points, or markings on the

road. Lines, gentlemen, are boring yet useful tools in life. Right?

Wrong! There is one line I would like to tell you about. If you were

seen stepping over this line, it would result in your death on the

spot, no questions asked. This is a line drawn in the sand. This line

has caused the largest population movement ever witnessed by

humankind. Upon construction of this line, 3.5 million people had to

move from one side and 5 million from the other. There are estimates

that more that 20 million people were left homeless after the

construction of this line. Who said lines were boring, not me!

However, it runs deeper than that. Not only did people have to move,

more than one million people were butchered on the construction of

this line. The positioning of this line has been the cause of three

wars: three bloody brutal wars. Now can I ask you, who in the right

mind would make such a line as this? They would have to be mighty

inhuman to draw a line that would kill a million people. But in the

end, all they had done, was to draw a line in the sand, just a line in

sand…nothing more, nothing less

So where do you think this line is? Between Israel and Palestine…no

Between North and South Korea…no. Between the former north and South

Vietnam,…wrong again. The line, gentlemen was drawn in the state of

Punjab, in 1947, in what was then undivided British India. The line

created and separated Pakistan from India. Ancient India, which gave

us modern numbering system, which gave us steel, which gave us

surgery, was destroyed by a line in the sand. Culture and

civilisations spanning thousands of years were split apart by a line

in the sand. A country was shattered….shattered by a line in the sand.

Fifty-five years on and the trade of insults from leader to leader