Bhagat Singh: Between revolution and wisdom
Bhagat Singh: Between revolution and wisdom I closed the pages of Why I Am An Atheist and Other Works on a quiet day in Chandigarh (29/10/2025). The book sat before me like an incomplete conversation; one I felt compelled to continue in the stillness of my own thoughts. As a man born in Baghdad in 1995, as someone whose childhood was painted in the ash-grey of conflict and whose adolescence was marked by losses both personal and national, I found myself drawn to this collection precisely because I needed to understand how a young man could question everything, even the divine. Bhagat Singh was twenty-three when they hanged. I was twenty-three when I left Iraq, carrying nothing but documents and the weight of things I had witnessed. Perhaps this is why his words struck me with such force and such ambivalence. The essay "Why I Am An Atheist" is brilliant in its audacity. There is no denying this. A young revolutionary, imprisoned, facing execution, takes his pen and wri...