I once saw a Hollywood movie in which a producer cum director of horror films is asked a question by a reporter: “Why do you think your films are so successful?” The director replies: “Because they are about a world that resides deep inside of us, a world of impulses and instincts that we have been taught to suppress so that we do not even know we have them. Those instincts consist of animal cruelty, brutal violence and blood lust which prowl around in the mental cages we have built for them. Sometimes during our sleeping or waking hours they whisper to us that they want to be set free. I set them free in people’s imagination through my films.”
The films are not the only means to set those impulses free. There are other ways to do so in real life when you can motivate people through a mixture of greed and ideological indoctrination to give vent to such horrible instincts. And that is how the current wave of terrorism is being carried on in our country.
ATIQ AHMAD,
Muzaffargarh, August 26.