Preface to the second edition

Preface to the second edition

I have received some excellent feedback for this book, and, along with those pats on the back, I received a lot of questions as well. It soon became clear to me that there are a lot of clarifications that are required at various points in the story. Moreover, in trying to keep it as close to the original as possible, I had to sacrifice certain aspects that could have explained a lot of stuff. Therefore, I decided to rewrite certain parts using the notes that I had prepared from my interviews and to provide certain clarifications at some very important junctures in the story.

I would like to highlight here that a lot of people have commented that they could not believe that all the narration in the book is actually from a terrorist and had doubts about the authenticity of the story. I would like to share with all of them a very famous adage:

“Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction”

What we need to understand here is the fact that most of the terrorists in the world are misled youth whose minds have been played with and for whom all the fiction fed is the most important truth of their life. But, even though most of them have hardened to a point of no return, there are a few who have realized their folly and have returned back to normal human life after giving up the path of death and destruction. This story is of one such youth. One also needs to understand here that it is not possible, or at least highly improbable, for such people to come out in open about that phase of their life. The fear of rebuke by the society as well as of lifelong haunting by authorities is enough to deter them from coming out with their stories openly. In the past, only those ex-terrorists have come out with their stories that have been provided protection and support by some government or another in lieu of their utility as a valuable information tool. For others, it is simply too difficult to avoid being ostracized or persecuted.

Further, I would like to make it clear that this story is almost in the words of that person and I have acted merely as a translator, compiler and editor while providing necessary structure to the language. The expressions, emotions, thoughts and everything else in the story is from the horse’s mouth in his words. I could have changed things at a lot of places but, then, it would have lost the authenticity. I want the people to read his story in his simple words. We need to understand that this story is from a school drop-out and is not written by a properly educated person.

I hope people find themselves much closer to the pain of a lost soul after reading this emotional account though one would need to rid oneself of any predispositions based on various fictional accounts and the ghost-written ‘authentic’ accounts of famous ex-terrorists that are more for the purposes of propaganda rather than reality.

“Al – Qaeda is fake”

“9/11 was a conspiracy hatched by the US government”

“Jihad is just a recruitment strategy for the politically – motivated ‘pseudo – war’ propagating organizations created by various governments”

“Post – Godhra Gujarat riots of 2002 were political, not communal”

These and other such statements were something that I never could have believed to be true till I came to know about the truth from this ex–terrorist’s life story. Till that time, I was living blindly, without paying any heed to the fact that we cannot take all the things on their face value. The things that we read in newspapers or see on the news may not be the truth; they may be politically – controlled and manipulated to hide the reality. It is not uncommon for politicians to create a false – truth and feed it to the people in such a manner that the masses close their eyes and their minds to the reality and build false perceptions about issues like Religious Extremism, Cross – border hatred, and the necessity of War. His story made me sit up and try to form my own opinion and views on such issues based on facts and logic rather than hearsay and official releases.

I was never religious and used to consider myself an Atheist. However, this story made me realize that it isn’t God that I do not believe in; it is the way ‘God’ is manipulated everyday behind the veil of ‘Religion’, the biggest lie of all. I am quite sure that by the end of this story, you would agree with me on the fact that all of us are manipulated on a daily basis in the name of religion or ethnicity or colour or race.