The Qanat and the Tunnel

It is striking how differently people use the same earth. Both cut through the heart of a mountain. Both move forward underground, in darkness. Both spend years sweating over the work, pouring in their lives and fortunes. One dug a qanat. With picks and oil lamps, our ancestors worked their way from shaft to shaft through the earth, searching for a vein of water. Quietly, they carried it beneath the mountain to a thirsty plain. They dug qanats so that, in a land of little rain, villages could turn green, wheat could grow, and a child could drink from a stream. For thousands of years, they worked below ground so that life could flow above it. The other digs tunnels. In the same soil, beneath the same mountains. Not for water, but for missiles. Underground cities are built to conceal weapons, and terrorist groups in other lands are helped to dig beneath people's homes. A nation's wealth is poured into stone to stockpile death. Meanwhile, the qanats dry up one by one. The plains sink, the rivers run to dust, and a people sitting on a treasure of water, soil and history are left thirsty. The soil is the same. The mountain is the same. The country is the same. What separates the two is neither their tools nor their skill, but the intention they carry within them. One opened the earth so that life could spring from it. The other opens it so that death can lie within. Perhaps that is the secret of human beings—and of every government: no one is measured by what they hold in their hands, but perhaps by what flows from them. #JavidShah