The relevance of Persepolis' today

Every page of Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran, written 20 years ago, still wrenches a reaction

- Somak Ghoshal

Three thousand, three hundred and twenty-four, and counting. That's the number of children who have been killed so far in the war in Gaza since 7 October.

No life deserves to be reduced to cold statistics. But nonetheless, here's a devastating data point for perspective. According to the NGO Save The Children, the death toll for children in Gaza and the West Bank already exceeds the total number of annual deaths for minors living in war zones across the world over the last three years. And the current spate of violence in West Asia, from all indications, is far from over.

Be it Homer's Iliad, the Mahabharat, or Herodotus' Histories, epics and histories have mourned the hapless casualties of war with pathos and elegy since millennia, even as some of these texts have extolled heroism. The business of fighting wars has remained, in a time-honoured tradition, a plaything in the hands of a few men drunk on power, as ordinary people have become its collateral damage. The English poet, Wilfred Owen, who was killed days before the end of World War I at the age of 19, coined the phrase "the pity of war" in his poem Strange Meeting to refer to this universal tragedy of the human condition.

Adults may seek whatever comfort they can find by philosophising the costs of violence but for children living in conflict zones, war is, first and always, an everyday reality, not the result of political sparring. It is a brute force that destroys their homes, leaves them orphaned, forces them to live in camps, deprives them of food and clean water, disrupts their education and relationship with the world they are born in. Documentary evidence of this truth is spread all over the internet, especially in testimonies by the young victims of the ongoing war in Gaza.