At the stroke of midnight the pages of our diaries changed, but for some they didn’t. They remained the same. They read the same: struggle, tears and empty promises. They continued to burn their blood as some of us burst crackers to usher in the New Year. They are migrants. Walls of hatred or walls of disgust greet them wherever they land. And that’s if they don’t get drowned.

It is very true that the last few days were spent praying for peace and harmony in the world. But action has to follow prayers. In fact, a concerted effort has to be made in that direction.

The world had been gleefully talking about events that would ring in the New Year as thousands of people were battling choppy seas to reach shores they thought were safe. But in most places they were confronted with “walls of indifference.”

We will never understand what it means to run away from one’s own uniformed countrymen and be kicked around because we aren’t migrants.  

We will never understand what it feels to pay for the safety of one’s family and then see them drown and see their lifeless pictures on television screens because we aren’t migrants. For the world of news the tragedy will become highly saleable, for the migrants inconsolable sorrow. The pain will become a huge motif for creative people, but for the migrants it will be a different tale.

We will never understand, if we aren’t migrants, what it feels to be told by friends that we could stay in their country and the very next day fences come up on the border.

We will never understand, if we aren’t migrants, the emotional impact of being told that we could be a security threat and, therefore, should be kept away. The bases of suspicion will be faith, colour.

We will never understand how some migrants feel after being publicly humiliated because we aren’t migrants.  

At a meeting in Castelgomberto, Italy, a man shouted, “My grandfather built that place for priests, not for Muslims.”

A migrant responded, “I eat bread, like him, when I feel hungry; I drink water, like him, when I am thirsty; I bleed, like him, when nails pierce my flesh and I find, like him, shrouds to be the heaviest of coverings and corteges to be the ugliest of processions.”

We will never understand, because we aren’t migrants, how it feels when the land we are born into, the land we till with all our love chases us away. And when we seek shelter in some other place we are told that our numbers could lead to crimes because that’s what the jobless do to run their lives. It will become worse because we will not be given a chance to explain that every jobless person is not a thief. Poverty may be a crime. But deprivation doesn’t necessarily create rogues.

Well, on behalf of the migrants I would like to ask some leaders in the West why did they lie to people that a leader was hiding banned weaponry? And then decide to destabilise his country in the name of flushing out those arms, which created millions of refugees. I would like to ask leaders elsewhere why in the name of fighting terrorism they created millions of refugees?

Well, the least they can do now is not raise fences of hatred because nights are freezing and ill-fitting charities’ woollens will not be enough.

And it will not be fair at all on their part to play with their pets on the hearthrug and watch on their TV frames people struggling to beat border guards in search of a bottle of water or a piece of loaf or a clean sheet or a roof.

Also the fuss over the inflow of migrants is exaggerated because it amounts to only one per cent of Europe’s population. Twenty million roamed Europe at the end of World War II.

As we begin our year, let’s have one resolve: pray for harmony, pray that fewer people become homeless and, most important, share what we have.