Plato...

I'm reading Sophie's world these days, on the recommendation of my good friend Ooty, and it's every bit an amazing book as he claims it is.

I wanted to talk a bit about platonic ideas, as I find them fascinating. In a nutshell, Plato claimed that there are two types of worlds - the ideal world, where perfect "moulds" for everything exist, and the sensory world, which is everything around us. Basically, the sensory world is based on models from the ideal world, but everything in the sensory world has imperfections.

In the book, the author gives an example of why a child might knock over a sandcastle as soon as she's done building it. The author claims this is so because the real sandcastle that she built is so vastly inferior to the ideal sandcastle in her head.

And that brings me to the beauty of writing and books. When you're curled up in bed with a good book, and the book creates an atmosphere, that ambience is being created in the ideal world in your head, and because of that, the images your mind conjures are as close to perfection as possible. The moods and emotions your imagination weaves have connotations and subtleties that are...well, yours and yours alone. Somebody else reading the same paragraph might have a totally different set of images. Ever see a movie based on a book? Why is it almost always a disappointment? It just never lives up to the ideals in your head. No sir, TV just spoonfeeds you, bite by bite.

The writer kept on mentioning Midsummer Eve, which is a holiday festival in parts of Europe. That reminded of Shakespeare's play...a midsummer's night dream. Just the title itself brought a rush of images, sounds and feelings. I suddenly saw a forest, with fairies tinkling about in the warm air, leaving dazzling sparks in their wake. And then there was this feeling of midsummer...this light, almost festive feeling. Indeed, the world that good writing creates is just so vivid.

I'm trying to get a love of books back. I think I'm succeeding :).

Infinite Omnipotence?

There are a few things that stand out clearly from my teenage years. They're fresh in my mind, as if they happened yesterday. One of them is a dialogue between my aunt and my uncle. I was the silent observer...the camera, so to speak. My aunt wished out loud that Allah would help Pakistan win a cricket match. My uncle, playing the role of the wise, open-minded male of the house, laughed and said, "You can't expect Allah to have the time to attend to such small matters."

We often tend to paint the unseen in the light of man and what surrounds him. It's a natural and often inadvertent response...we relate better to what we've already experienced and observed. If we'd seen angels, jinnaat, and other supernatural beings, they would hardly been "the unseen" anymore, would they? That's why man has resorted again and again to idolatory. Hinduism claim that their statues are actually just agents - proxies, if you will - between believers and a single God. It's just easier to relate to something tangible. A few years ago, when I prayed, I unconsciously thought I was prostrating before a tall, kindly-looking man who glowed blue and wore a robe. Then I realized I was doing this, and stopped. Again, all human nature. That's what my uncle was thinking when he said Allah would not have the time to deal with small things. After all, He is running the universe and all the worlds beyond!

But now, I disagree with my uncle. As time has passed, I've tried to decouple the inadvertent biases in my own thinking from my perception of Allah. Allah is perfect. If I believe in that, then I cannot say anything that bounds Allah in anyway. To some extent, I cannot even say He is unbounded, for even in making that statement, I am binding Him. And of course, I cannot state that he doesn't have time for "small" things, because I am implying that his ability to multitask is finite. It's finite only if He wills it to be!

Again, it's interesting how human nature categorizes everything in terms of size. A colony of ants is less important than a herd of elephants. The celestial bodies have enchanted mankind for so long. They've been made into gods, and so on. Even within humans, height is considered a positive attribute, especially for leadership roles. But the honest truth is that I cannot impose those innate biases on Allah. I should not think that Allah deems things important based on size, or whatever ideals I have. How do I know what the relative importance of an amoeba is to Allah, compared to, say, a giraffe?

After all, in the grand scheme of things, we're all just specks of dust, floating in the vastness of the cosmos.

The man and the see-saw

His gnarled hands beckoned me towards him. "Come my child," he said. His voice was gruff, like stones being ground, and yet barely above a whisper. I suddenly had this image of a lion meowing.

"Come...do not be afraid. Come sit by me," he said, and I came. And as I sat down cross-legged, I got a closer look at him and noticed how beautiful he was despite the ravages of time. Long, white hair flowed from his head and beard in a waterfall...white silky hair, that seemed as gossamer as a spider's web.

"Look at this," he whispered, laying his hand on a child's see-saw in front of us. "Look at it long and hard, my child. I want you to balance it at its center." I nodded and did so, adjusting the wooden plank until I thought it was balanced.

"Now let it go...."

I took away my hand. The plank remained still in mid-air for a second, unsure of what to do, and then gently thudded down on one side.

"Again!" He said, and I jumped, for his voice was much louder this time. For a second, I glimpsed in his tone the true energy that flowed through him, hidden deep inside his aging body.

I quickly balanced it again, and in my hurry, the plank did not even hover this time.

"That see-saw is us, my son," he said. He lay a hand on my shoulder. Despite its scrawniness, it felt heavier than lead. "That see-saw is you...your mind. You cannot balance your emotions, your thoughts just one time and then let them go. No, you must continuously keep balancing them, making sure they stay afloat in mid-air. If you don't, they'll fall to one side, and you will have stumbled off the path of miyana ravi."

He sighed. It sounded like mountains rumbling. "And that, my child, is the ultimate failure."

social pressures...

I was discussing this with a few people one or two weeks ago, and the more I think about it, the more I realize how much it rings with truth.

Ready? Well then, here it comes. A very large percentage of pressures, worries and anxieties can be traced back to social causes, either directly and indirectly. If you think about what's worrying you in your life, you'll see how true this is.

Some of these pressures are obvious. Maintaining a relationship, or rather, all relationships...learning to deal with people...trying to come out the better in a confrontation. But there are some links that are not as obvious...you have to tease them out strand by strand from the whole ball of yarn. Today, I'm working in Boston for an engineering company. I have no clue what tomorrow will bring. For all I know, I might get laid off. When I think about all the fears that frantically whirl around that thought, there's one I can grab immediately from mid-air and slam it on the table in front of you: what will people think? What will my family think? What will my friends think? Social pressures, my comrades...social pressures.

And of course, temperatures rise with time. Tomorrow, I'll be married...I'll have to think about supporting my wife, making sure my kids get a good education, and the list goes on. Directly or indirectly, I can link all those worries to people.

That said, I don't intend for this article to be dark and pessimistic. I'm merely expounding on an observation. If anything, I think that this knowledge helps you when you get worried. On the flip-side, I can easily argue that without people, you lose the lows, yes, but you also lose the highs. The joy of being with those you care about. Small, miniscule things in life that eventually affect you in profound ways. Without people, your emotions will eventually flatline...an emotional death, so to speak. And I can stand up and vouch for this because I've lived in imposed isolation before.

After all, man is a social animal, and both the good and the bad come with the package. :)

Funny bones jiggling about...

When a good friend ribs you about something, and you resent the remark, you're probably taking yourself a little too seriously.

And that, my dear chaps, is a definite no-no! :)

I hate thinking

Okay, so maybe that's putting it a bit strongly. But as year after year has crept by, as page after page from my calendar has fallen away, I've begun to realize how useless too much thinking can be. And ooty my love, if you're reading this, you know that both you and I ponder stuff way too much.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, who lives in Harvard square. He's been in Boston for the past many years now. He's in his late thirties but still a bachelor...no roommates either. I asked him why he lived in such isolation, although I already knew the answer. He said, "you get the chance to think about life and religion." I knew that's what he would say, because I'm going through the same thing.

Last November, Ooty and Murzi, one old and one new buddy, came to visit. Before that, I was living in intense isolation, meeting friends only on weekends, and spending most of the week rarely talking to anybody. I'd begun to love that loneliness, because it was giving me an insight into things I never could have attained around people. I won't go into details, because they're irrelevant and not terribly exciting, but to sum it up, things were beginning to tie together. I would see something and hear this 'click' in my mind and be able to relate it to something else philosophically. Sounds confusing, I know, but you have to go through it to understand it. With each passing day, I sank further and further into myself.

But here's the thing though. When ooty and Murzi came, and right after that, when I went to Pakistan, none of these things had any practical application. None whatsoever. Yes, they were beautiful on paper, but when I was plunged from isolation into a swarm of people, that "reasoning" part of my brain just switched off, and instinct took over. It's rather like being thrown head first into a swimming pool when you don't know how to swim. All thoughts are suspended. I'm guessing that's why thinkers isolate themselves from people in the first place.

To get to a point, I think that thought, or excess of it, tends to cripple you . It gives you insight into the truth, into the bigger picture, and that starts dragging you down like a rock chained to your legs. It makes you sober and older...kills the child within you. In the survival of the fittest, in the materialistic race that 90% of people are in, you will have no place whatsoever if you think too much. You need instinct to be able to survive in the animal world, and if you ponder into the wee hours of the night, you start marring that instinct. You start dulling drives that you need for "success" like ambition.

Right now, I feel I have no ambition at all.... I've stopped measuring success in terms of money or your job or personality. To me, everybody is successful in their own right. Everybody's a genius in their own special way. You just have to have the right eye, but you also need to be able to think. You need to hold the reins on your first feeling when you meet somebody you don't deem "successful." If you look hard enough, you'll see that he is in his own way.

But the point is that all corollaries stemming from such intense thought are just not practical. They're not the way of the world. All those thoughts will fly around in your mind and tie themselves in knots, but you'll get nowhere. Nowhere at all.

It's the air...

I came back from Pakistan about three days ago. It'd been a long time since I'd gone to Pakistan - one year and three months to be exact. Okay, so that's not exactly eons, but if you know me, you'll also know that I used to go back at the end of every semester in college. That's twice a year.

I left the US for Pakistan right before Christmas. At the time I was leaving, I was as americanized as can be. I'm not talking about bar-hopping or dating or stuff like that. I'm talking about subtler things, such as how I viewed the world...my perspectives...my point of views. I can imagine that Americans must take their mindset for granted. People think a lot over here. They analyze things. They have a culture, of course, but they're not bound by it.

Well, as soon as I stepped onto Pakistan soil, I knew I was a fish out of water. These were my people, this was my land, and yet they all felt so alien. The way they kept staring at you...the way they always had this chakri attitude, for lack of a better word. I loved my soil so dearly, and yet, when I was climbing down the steps of PIA flight 757, I'd probably never felt more alienated. It reminded me of a stanza in a ghazal that the great Nusrat Fateh had sung once:

Nasir is dayyar mein
Kitna ajnabi hai tu

But as I spent the days and met my friends and visited all these different places that I hadn't gone to in ages, this feeling of being disjointed began to slip away. Like a dhoti in high wind. (Sorry...been watching too many punjabi stage plays). And hence the title of this blog; as I breathed in the air around me, I felt everything rushing back. Old memories, old ways of thinking. Very very subtle things...I once found myself remembering what I had once thought when I looked out of my bedroom window. I found myself remembering her...long forgotten corner of my heart that she is. And very soon, I didn't feel alien anymore. I still had my own viewpoints, but I understood how the people around me thought. Why they did what they did.

To wrap up, I'm tired of living in America. It's a great big river. It carries you at blinding speed through life, and when you're washed ashore, you find that you've gained nothing important, but you've missed all the things that count. Relationships. Love. Watching your siblings grow. Spending time with your family. Making friends that you actually bond with like brothers...not acquaintances that you use to pass the time.

For now, I sit in pitch black, straining my eyes for the sweet glow of twilight.