If words could kill. A sentence thats so mainstream in its existence that everyone from poets to rappers have had a shot at it. Kinda meta. Well surely meta. Only if words could kill, I did the killing by writing these words. And who would be tried for such a murder. The writer or the words themselves. Are they the weapon or the culprit. And what about copyrights. And the thoughts in head that have yet to metamorphose into words.

Well regretfully I do not need to ponder over such questions. Because words do kill. They have been doing so for ages. In fact the worst of massacres can be attributed to mere words. Some say words are winds. Once they leave your lips its impossible to put them back in the bottle. I say they are more akin to fire. The can be contained with proper caution, but whittle away at the embers and it soon engulfs the jungle.

History is privy to this fact. It was the words that led crusaders to the steps of Constantinople. It was the words that led to the incarceration of Jews. And it was the words that led to the partition of my country. Scores lost their lives, limbs and dignity on both sides of the draw. In each instance we were provided with extreme eloquence of speech. A voice untethered to rationale but seeped with emotion and pride and fire. Humans are easy to manipulate. All you need are mere words to drive them to do the bidding of individual in possession of the said words. For Crusades read Pope Urban II, For Nazi Germany read Hitler, For Pakistan read Jinnah.

Now tell me if words can kill.

Yet somehow the words have seen their power diminish over the years. With the advent of information age we are surrounded by words which should, in theory, render them more effective. Au contraire, while the words themselves have never experienced such largesse in numbers, their use has actually diminished. We talk before we think. We tweet before we talk. And then we stab, we wound, we pierce, we pinch, we dissect those tweets. The words have never been less controlled and more dangerous. You know the proverbial shit hits the fan when people look to Urban Dictionary for meaning rather than Oxford. Its the reason why an innocuous invite for a nightcap is construed as a thinly veiled euphemism for sex. If you are wondering, I was the inviter. Granted that in some tiny recess of my mind that idea may have cosseted itself but I would never be so blatant as to propose it outright. Killed at seduction by an online repository of colloquialism.

Reading brings me immense delight. I linger over beautiful sentences and soak in their meaning. Both literal and figurative and even some that cannot be construed but merely hypothesized. I am befuddled by the aromas, tones and textures of fine wines but composed while discussing finer points of a prose or poetry. Lately though, I have come to feel that it's not necessarily a trait worth having much less celebrating. You know that the same proverbial shit has hit an industrial-grade cooler and splattered all across your wall when you are rejected by a statuesque beauty on the grounds of being too polite and gentlemanly. And when she posits the framing of your thoughtfully composed texts to be quite unsettling. This time you shouldn't be wondering but, just in case, I was the rejectee. Killed at seduction by short-form. Shakespeare wouldn’t survive here, I tell you.

You see, we are barraged with words and visuals so hard and fast that we become immune to their affect. Gone are the days when you would sit for hours stringing together a few lines to convey. Now it's all about the hashtags.

It's not even so much about the locution but who said it. More about presentation than content. It's the reason why extroversion has come to be looked as a favorable quality rather than a characteristic. We forego validity of an argument in favor of how it's put across. It's pitch. It's roll. It's sexiness. It's the reason why Netanyahu can roll forward rhetoric after divisive rhetoric and and win an election. It's why India is enthralled with a tea-seller turned Prime Minister that is Modi. And more dangerously, it's why someone can declare himself a Caliph and lead a religious war all over again. Imagine what Hitler would do in the present times when the reach of his words would be far greater. But then again he wasn't much of looker. You see, words are powerful. Words from a beautiful, charming, pouting face even more so. It's the paradigm of living in today's visual society. We see so many names and faces. We take selfies and consume selfies. We wish for lives we don't have and we show off lives we cannot have. And along the way we try to sway the opinion of others in whatever way we can. Whether it be 140 characters or longer.

Much like what ISIS does. Much like what every individual tries to do. The politicians, the God men, the celebrities and to an extent me by writing this.