Beyond the News Cycle: Remembering the Human Cost of War

A hundred dead. Seventy injured. Five hospitals were bombed. Four airstrikes overnight.
We scroll. We nod. We sigh. We move on.

The language of war has become a spreadsheet. Our screens are crowded with updates—strategic gains, territorial losses, diplomatic statements. The human body count is squeezed into bullet points, often buried under graphics of advancing armies and expert analysis. We don’t see the father pulling his daughter’s hand from under rubble. We don’t hear the mother screaming into the night for a child who will never come back. We don’t feel the silence of a destroyed home.

In 2021, an online campaign invited people across the world to write letters to the children of Gaza—a small gesture of solidarity, a call for peace, a reminder to the world that innocence was under siege. It urged us to look beyond politics and remember the human cost of conflict. Since then, thousands of those children have died. Thousands more have lost their homes, their families, or any sense of safety. The ones who should’ve been learning lullabies and playing with colour pencils have instead learned the sound of sirens and the shape of bullet casings.

History has always left its scars behind—etched in gravestones and broken homes. Across the world, war cemeteries from World War II stand in solemn silence. Even in Guwahati, one can walk among rows of graves bearing the names of boys barely seventeen or eighteen—from every religion, every background. WWII may have begun as a war of ideology and persecution, but when the fire spread across continents, the bullets no longer cared for the religion, language, or dreams of the ones they tore through. Flesh is flesh—no matter the flag it bleeds under.

In a world saturated with conflict, we've mastered the art of watching without feeling. Our screens flicker with images of burning buildings, displaced families, and the staggering arithmetic of death—but we scroll past them, numbed by repetition and protected by distance. The more war becomes a constant, the more abstract it feels. Our grief now has a short attention span.

We speak in numbers because numbers are easier: 2,000 dead. 600 children. 1 million displaced.
Statistics offer a way to process the unthinkable—but also a way to avoid it. A child buried under rubble becomes a data point, not a face, not a story.

This is the age of real-time war, where devastation unfolds live on social media. And yet, our empathy hasn’t scaled with our access. We've begun to observe suffering like spectators at a game—picking sides, analyzing strategies, sharing hashtags, but rarely asking the fundamental question: What if that were me?

It’s easier to discuss the strategic depth of a military move than to imagine the mother who just lost her third child. Easier to talk about ceasefires and sanctions than to picture a father cradling the body of his son. We’ve adopted the language of analysts and diplomats, not of human beings. Somewhere along the way, war stopped being a human tragedy and became just another trending topic.

But for the people living it, there is no such luxury of abstraction. For them, war is not foreign policy. It's the empty chair at dinner. The silence in a classroom. The smell of gunpowder replacing that of fresh earth.

We’ve developed a terrible habit of turning human agony into news cycles—timed, packaged, and posted. Every explosion is breaking news. Every massacre is a graphic with body counts. Every grieving mother is a thumbnail image. And when the algorithm decides it’s no longer trending, the story disappears. But the pain doesn’t.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing the people behind the headlines. We don't hear the names anymore—just death tolls. We don’t feel the grief anymore—just fatigue. Every tragedy becomes a flash of content in an endless scroll, and we move on to the next headline before the blood has even dried.

This is not awareness. This is consumption.

We are not just informed spectators—we are desensitized participants in a world that commodifies suffering for attention. When a child's final breath becomes a footnote in someone’s evening news rundown, something is deeply broken—not just in the systems that wage war, but in the societies that watch in silence.

War is not a headline. It is a wound. And unless we start treating it as such, we will keep mistaking information for empathy—and spectacle for truth.