Wars

From the beginning of recorded history, human beings have fought each other for supremacy and for power: the power to rule, to control, to bend other lives to our will. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the thinking species, and we do have remarkable minds. We build civilizations, tame nature, and shape the world around us. Yet across thousands of years on this earth, it’s hard to find a single era untouched by conflict, as if war has been the shadow that follows our intelligence.

Whether it was Alexander the Great, Ashoka, or the Mughal emperors, the pattern repeats. Ambition rises, armies follow, and war becomes the tool of choice. Too often we have treated war like an inevitable occupation, almost a rite of passage for rulers and nations. Instead of resisting it, we have stepped toward it, using wars as proof of strength, skill, and authority.

But wars have given humanity very little, especially when measured against what they destroy. Every continent, every country, every island and ordinary people everywhere have lived with the aftereffects. The world after war is rarely brighter or simpler. Grief lingers, economies stagger, trust collapses, and survivors learn a new kind of normal. Families break. Friends disappear. Lives are reduced to absence. So many wars have been tragedies that did not have to happen tragedies that might have been avoided if we had been more sensitive, more thoughtful, more humane.

We have seen wars in every age, from Waterloo to Iraq. On paper there is always a winner and a loser. But in a deeper sense, humanity loses each time. The winner gains a trophy and a story; the loser loses homes, futures, and sometimes entire generations. Often these conflicts erupt when nations are steadily climbing the path of development, only for war to pull them backward, turning progress into rubble. And the setback does not stop at borders: the shockwaves travel outward, disturbing the world beyond the battlefield.