I don’t remember when I started working for the Ministry of Vivification (MoVi).
It might have been yesterday. It might have been a few hundred years ago.
You don’t really remember such things. What you do remember is the transformation – or the transmogrification, as the ministry likes to call it. And in this process of transmogrification you remember meeting people who have disappeared, and going to the strangest of places to uncover their secrets. You witness their process of awakening. See them metamorphose into things that you may not have noticed earlier.
It all starts with a term much discussed in the last few decades – Terrorism.
On February 5, 1794, Maximillian Robespierre chillingly defined what he meant by “terror.”
Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice. . . . It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most pressing needs.
When the word “Terror” (from which terrorism was to be derived later) first appeared during the French Revolution as a vessel for change in the political sphere, it was less of a political ideology and more of an aberration (not a practice).
Over the years of my working with MoVi, I have seen that term take many forms and paint itself in various colors while it went dancing on the streets. In fact, I met terrorists even before Robespierre was to use that term for the first time. Terrorism existed before terrorism came into being.
In this place, I’ll share with you my many travels through the innards and the courtyards of terrorism through past, present and future. These journeys span over centuries and millenniums, and over countries and continents (and sometimes, even universes). There’s only two things common between them – me, myself and the Ministry of Vivification.
In through these journeys, I’ll tell you about my interactions with some people you’ve heard about, and others you were never told, existed.
But this, above all, will be a voyage of awakening to the innocence and one continuous energy – all too powerful – that is meant to connect you to your real selves. To the parallel existence that is really you.
You are more than a human being. Trust me. You’ll see.
Abhishek Sengupta 