null On a hot night last week, when I went to town with my assistants to see the first hoarding of my next film come up, I saw something I’d never seen before in Mumbai. Army vehicles were bringing huge tanks onto Marine Drive in a row one after another. It was the kind of visual I had gotten used to seeing from a safe distance on my television screen on the broken streets of a West Bank city. Of course, I knew that the tanks were rolling in for some sort of friendly exhibition of the Indian Army’s muscle but I let myself entertain the ominous thought that since the world was at war, someday soon Mumbai would be too.

And it wasn’t just the tanks or the horrifying mass murders in Gujarat that made me think this way. It was a heartbreaking conversation I had had with a 65-year-old man Dilip who had gently told me one afternoon at work that if there was a Muslim and a snake standing in front of him he wouldn’t know who he would attack first! How could a minority threaten a majority in such a serious way, I argued with him, but he wouldn’t hear a thing. He was convinced that Hindus wouldn’t be able to live in their own country if it wasn’t for the fundamentalists protecting them from ‘‘these people’’.

Fundemantalists need to protect Us from These People, says 65-year-old Dilip. What about the Muslim woman who supported him since he came as a ten-year-old to Mumbai from Karachi? ‘‘I love her,’’ he says, ‘‘but I can’t forget how my parents were killed, how I hid for days before fleeing” What was more shocking was that Dilip had been supported by a Muslim woman since the age of ten when he had been put on a ship from Karachi after the partition and brought to a camp in Mumbai. She had given him the love of a mother and her Hindu husband had given him employment. ‘‘So what about that woman?’’ I fought with him, ‘‘You don’t remember what she did for you?’’

‘‘I remember and love her,’’ he replied, ‘‘but I can’t forget that my parents were killed by Muslims and I was hiding in my school for days before I was sent here — all alone, without any family or a friend in the whole world.’’ Such historical hatred, such angry memories. ‘‘You know Muslims went through the same hell,’’ I said, ‘‘and are suffering in India even today?’’ But he felt no sympathy, only a sense of justice fill his heart.

The world is abounding with hate stories like this and emotions like ‘secularism’, ‘rationalism’, ‘liberalism’ and above all ‘peace’ just don’t stand a chance. Religion divides, faith makes enemies.

All over, the need to come closer to their God is taking people aggressively and violently away from other people. Everywhere, passions are flaring up. We simply aren’t able to live together.

Secularists must address the fears, and anxieties of fundamentalists and hope against hope that the war slows down The genocidal horror tales that are now coming out of Gujarat leave Mumbai’s 1992-93 communal riots far behind in cruelty and ugliness. Is this not terrorism? What right have we to speak against terror that is unleashed upon us from across the border when we do the same from within?

I was angry with Dilip but when I went back to work the next day I decided not to fight with him. If I wanted him to understand what I was saying I needed to also understand his anger. I spoke to him about his life, and discovered he had a lot to say. In an avalanche of words he detailed a life in which his own community had treated him with far more indignity than Muslims. Thus, for him, my appeal was nothing but dry words, a modern rejection of a real experience drenched in anguish.

And although I say unflinchingly that we have let the Muslims down, I must also admit that the strength of my feelings pales in front of the trauma Dilip has lived through. His extremism comes from pain, mine from affection. Pain, as we know, always cuts sharper.

Which is why the time to truly understand fundamentalism has come. Religion has become more militant than ever and represents a widespread disappointment, alienation, anxiety and rage that no government can ignore.

Modernisation has always been a painful process and people feel alienated and lost when fundamental changes in their society make the world strange and unrecognisable, like Dilip felt when he was harshly uprooted from his home. Fundamentalism is not simply a throw-back to the past but an essential part of modernity and a type of religiosity that suffers under the aggressive assault of fundamentalist liberals. Religious fundamentalists feel that they are battling against forces that threaten their most sacred values.

And although I find it difficult to comprehend how values like freedom and equality can cause distress to them, and as reprehensible as their violent acts may seem to me, I must try and understand the pain and perceptions of ‘‘these people’’. Because although what has happened in Gujarat is a shattering defeat for the Hindu religion, Dilip simply doesn’t comprehend why what happened to him doesn’t cause me more distress!