Sri Lanka, July 7 -- Those mothers and these mothers. That would be a caption for a two-part visual of two sets of mothers, Tamil and Sinhala, grieving over the deaths of their sons. Those and these are words that are predicated on location in terms of place, ideological preference, political stand and of course identity. It's about 'ours' and 'theirs,' relatedness and un-relatedness, proximity and distance.

Step back. Imagine you are neither here nor there, that you don't belong to either and neither belongs to you. Just two mothers, say, grieving over their children who died/disappeared in battle or in crossfire or were simply abducted/arrested and summarily executed. Take away what lends to political manipulation, pernicious or otherw...