I am a Citizen of the World

I am a citizen of the world

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”

― Jiddu Krishnamurti

When I was in college I was often asked this question, “Where are you from?” I have often answered, the world, as this question has been irrelevant to me since a really long time. How does it matter where I come from and what religion or race I am from? I am a human being, and humanity is the best way to look at me collectively. I am a small part of a swelling humanity that has always found ways to fight with each other, religion, region and race have slowed down our mental development to such an extent that the term racist was born in a world of men who bleed the same red blood and breathe the same air.

We discriminate at will everyday and almost everywhere. The rich and the poor, the black and the white, the haves and the have not’s, we have discriminatory policies deep routed in education, employment and we often give it the name of competition. The greater collective called humanity has ceased to exist and we live in isolated pockets of our own ignorance blinded by inhumanity.

The development of the human race has been immense over the last hundred years, and so has the degradation. We have managed to divide up every piece of land in the name of race, region and religion. We constantly give consent to violence and support it in our own ways. There is no terrorism in this world, there is only confusion, everyone speaks of the same thing in their own different ways and yet we have closed our minds to this and we dedicate ourselves to find a difference. In search of collective identity, we have lost out on the one true collective that binds us all, Humanity!

It’s time for every person to wake up to the fact that we are all human beings. It’s time for us to accept that there is no greater cause than the cause of humanity, only then will we truly prosper as one, only then will there be not a single person left behind. Only then will we truly realize the true potential of this unique species of animal that we call human. Think about it, we all bleed the same red blood, cry the same tears and feel the same pain. It’s time for each one of us to say, I am a Citizen of the World, I am a human being.