आज अंतरराष्ट्रीय प्रवासी दिवस है, माने International Migrants Day. तो क्या हुआ,? आप कह सकते हैं. सही कहूं तो हम में से हरेक शख़्स किसी न किसी मानो में #मुहाजिर है. यकीन न आये तो ज़रा सोच कर देखिएगा. इसीलिए इस मौके पर मुझे लेखक Mohsin Hamid (हाँ, वही The Reluctant Fundamentalist वाले) की चंद बातें याद आ रही हैं. ग़ौर फ़रमायें: The scale of migration we will see in the coming centuries is likely to dwarf what has come before. Climate change, disease, state failure, wars: all these will push hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, to leave one country for another. If we do not recognise their right to move, we will be attempting to build an apartheid planet where our passports will be our castes, and where obedience will be enforceable only through ever-increasing uses of force. We (all) are migrants historically: our ancestors came from somewhere else, and originated, long ago, in the same spot in Africa. And we are migrants personally: life is the experience of moving through time, of abandoning each present moment for the next, of temporal migration. It is we, those who stop migration, who are the criminals, not those who are migrants.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 11:36:04 +0000