Royal BC Museum, Victoria - Incomplete Draft

I never understood why people went to look at historical monuments or art and architecture. Usually, this lack of appreciation would surface when ami would drag us to see "masterpieces" on family trips. "Ami aap bhee naa..!!" i'd think to myself.

Khair. At the beginning of last term i found myself praying for God to show me the Reality that the colors He/She made cloaked. Hands raised, and with Zubair at my side, We'd pray: "Ay Allah Mian, humein cheezon ki haqeeqat ki pehchaan dila".

Shaayad iss liye hi i've started looking at everything differently. My indifference to art is still there, but something in my perspective has shifted. I try constantly to search for a bigger picture and if ever there were one, i found a huge chunk of it at the Royal BC museum in Victoria. Such beautiful Native art, but it didn't really move me. What stirred my thoughts more was the capacity of human beings to destroy. How methodically the colonials had destroyed a living mosaic thousands of years in the making. But even the thoroughness of the destruction wasn't what stuck in my mind. For once it wasn't human beings' capacity to destroy that took the spotlight in my mind's eye. Rather it was our capacity to survive.

Despite the annihilation of peoples, despite the terror, despite the pain, despite the savagery, despite the injustice, despite the oppression, despite the suppression, and despite of the enslavement of mind and body, somewhere a soul roamed free.

And even though a raging forest fire had been extinguished, the rising smoke filled the woods with a smell of what used to be and so, in some sense, still is.

They might have no been the fittest according to Darwin, but they survived.