Fireworks suddenly began on October 3 at around 9 p.m. It was really beautiful. IT was so beautiful that you almost didn’t have to think about the occasion or reason. The fireworks show was so clear from my office window that I almost thought it was for me. All of a sudden, I heard an Armenian advertisement slogan run through my mind: “We’ll turn your life into a celebration.” They’re selling shoes and promise to turn your life into a celebration. They sell candies and promise to turn your life into a celebration and the same goes for selling flowers.
The fireworks show ended. Sitting in my office, I didn’t quite understand why the fireworks began and who they were for. Armenia’s independence anniversary celebration is over, French President Jacques Chirac and Charles Aznavour came and left. The next occasion is New Year’s Eve, but for that you first of all need a Christmas tree and then fireworks. After a while, there was some thunder, a little lightning, which enlightened the tall buildings of the city and this went on for a couple of times. “It’ was probably the repetition of lightning and thunder,” I thought and I started to panic.
I started to feel pity for the Americans. “They’re so naive,” I thought. A couple of days ago, while a military parade was going on at the Republic Square, on the same day in one of the tall government buildings of the republic square, the American “Millennium Challenges” document was being signed and the journalists were saying that this is being done to help people living in the third-world countries. Should we go ahead and consider the fireworks on that day as an occasion and call it a clever fireworks display, or simply a fireworks show in honor of the oligarch’s son, wife’s or mother-in-law’s birthday? Then I started to feel pity for the Armenians living abroad. “They’re naive,” I thought. On the day of the independence celebration, while the heavy tanks were making their way to the Republic Square, a couple of kilometers away from the square they were complaining about solving the problems concering the needy people of Armenia’s regions. After watching the military parade with enthusiasm, they were going to go back to their countries of residence and say: “The Armenian army has advanced, the problem is that the villagers are still in poverty.” Should we consider the fireworks display on October 3 as something clever, or consider it the second, third or fifth anniversary of an elite club with the slogan “We only speak about the rich life”?
Then, for some reason, I started thinking about the Mets Tagher village of the Hadrut region of Karabakh. I started visualizing what I had seen a month and a half ago-the people were taking water home from the only fountain in the village. They tie buckets of water to their horses and go home. The young girl carries buckets of water with her. But a couple of kilometers away from tohe village, one of the deputy ministers, who is also from the same village, is building a Water World park. Who can say that the Water World isn’t built for the nation, the people and the individual?-nobody. The person won’t say it not because it’s insecure to criticize the work done by a deputy minister and a deputy Defense Minister at that, but rather because any smart Armenian knows that when the Armenian state official builds a Water World for the villagers without any water instead of buying himself a new, elegant car, he is known as a benefactor. After all, he could have played that money in many casinos worldwide and throw away some of the money belonging to the state. Perhaps this is the fireworks for cleverness of the villagers, who don’t criticize anyone and look, they get to have a Water World built for them. Then I thought about the Americans again. “They’re so naive,” I thought. They’re spending so much money for a third-world country and don’t realize that Armenians are asphalting the roads again for welcoming the French President Jacques Chirac. Americans are so behind that they don’t even notice the “poor” asphalting-the job was incomplete. This is how we accept the challenges for the millennium.