The first lot of people who are murdered when a country is headed in the wrong direction, are thinkers and writers! Because, the powers that be, don’t want thoughts except those expressed by them, and no communication except what they want to tell. So, bullets, or the strong arm of government machinery are used to still those voices.India has just seen this in the dastardly killing of Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken woman journalist.

And yet the pen is mightier than the sword. How’s that?

“Hey you two killers who shot the Indian journalist dead, hey!”

“We’ve got guns! Don’t shout at us, we’ll shoot you!”

“But your guns have no bullets! You’ve emptied them into a defenseless woman!”

“You should have seen her fall!” laugh the gunmen brandishing pistols, “We knew she was dead, the moment she fell!”

“But she lives on!”

“We saw her dead!”

“But look, everything she wrote is now being read! People are saying she spoke the truth, and in her death, she’s proved she was correct! She’s alive!”

“We heard her fall! We saw her die! We’ll shoot you, for saying she’s not dead!”

“Your bullets are dead! Her words live on!”

The two assassins get off their getaway bike, they walk to where they’d shot Gauri, they see no body, “Where’s she?” they whisper, “We saw her fall!”

 A passerby, comes over, “Who do you look for?”

“The journalist who was shot dead here! Where is she now?”

“There!” says the passerby, and points to hundreds and thousands of Gauris, all over India. She fell and rose again, throughout the land!”They hear the rustling of papers as all that the journalist had written is reread. They see people nodding their heads in agreement. They hear the murmur of voices, whispering in unison, they hear whispers becoming louder, and yet louder. Suddenly the noise is deafening.

“My head hurts!” shouts one assassin.

“Like a million bullets!” shouts the other, “She’s shooting at us!Firing salvo after salvo, and look…”

They both look as they see their leader, “Why did you kill her?” shouts their bearded leader.

“We thought you wanted her dead sir!” they shout back over the din.

“But look what’s happening to me. Look at my country! I’m being hit by a million bullets!”

“Sir!“ shouts the first assassin, “They are strange looking bullets, and yet they hurt deeper than the ones we used!”

“Run!” shouts their leader, “Run,” these are not ordinary missiles and bullets, they are words, wielded by her pen, and now used by a thousand others, all aimed at us!”

“Run!” they shout, and they stumble and fall, pick themselves up and run, ruined politically forever, by the deadliness of paper missiles ignited by penned words!”

The pen is mightier than the sword, oh yes it is, because bullets do just a writer kill, but their words live on, deadly and dangerous, after the sword is blunt and bent, and gun’s bullets spent..!

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