A Father's Wise Words

"Ami, that was so amazing! You're the best cook ever!" Iftikhar sighed, deeply satisfied. He kicked back his legs and buried himself in the sofa. Ami smiled, satisfied in her own way. She began clearing the dishes.

It was a long weekend. Iftikhar had finally found some time to drive down to Washington DC to pay his parents a visit. After the crazed scurrying of the past few weeks, this was a blissful change - a mini-vacation. Whenever he was with his parents, he always felt like he'd stepped into a cocoon. He loved that feeling. It was warm and snug, like a tightly wrapped comforter on a frosty morning.

Abu came into the room and sat down, carrying a steaming cup of green tea. He always had a cup every night; he claimed it helped him digest. Iftikhar had tried it once and it had helped, although he hadn't been able to sleep all night because of the caffeine.

"So what's new, young man?" He asked. He blew into the cup and jasmine-tinged steam seemed to billow out from it. He tentatively took a sip, and satisfied that it didn't burn his upper lip, finally turned to face Iftikhar.

"Life is good, Alhamdulillah," Iftikhar said. He hesitated. "I had a question to ask you."

"Yes!" Abu's face lit up. He set the cup down and turned his full attention to his son.

"Well...." Iftikhar was trying to think of words. He always felt a hint of unease asking his father for advice. He felt he should know enough by now to manage on his own.

"I feel like I've stopped learning," he finally said. "Every time I go out on a limb, every time I try to learn something new, I stop myself."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, for example, the other day, I heard that Arabic lessons were being offered at Cambridge mosque. I wanted to attend - I really really did. You know how much I've always wanted to learn Arabic. But I wound up not going. Or taking another example, I've been psyching myself for the past two months to get up at six in the morning and do some writing before work. But I haven't been able to."

"There's a word for what you're going through." Abu smiled. "It's called laziness!"

"No, no...that's the thing. It's not laziness. Well, maybe a part of it is, but not all." Hassan leaned forward, gesturing with his hands, trying to get the words right. When he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. "It's almost like I'm afraid, you know."

"Afraid of failure?"

"No...." He sighed. "Yes. I'm scared of losing. It's like...I've been down that path so many times, all the way from childhood. Can't it stop now? Can't I just do something without the chance or the indignity of having to fail?"

"But everybody's been down that path," Abu said gently.

"Yes, but I'm sick of it!" Iftikhar's voice rose suddenly. He tried to check himself, but he couldn't. Now that he'd started speaking, all his bottled-up frustration was finally coming out. "I'm so tired of it, Abu! Why is everything a struggle? Why can't something just fall into our laps? And I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about everybody. Why does man have to struggle for everything? At least when I don't try something new, there's no chance of sucking at it!" Iftikhar sat back, crossing his arms. Abu tried to keep from smiling. For a second, he saw a boy in the man. He saw a five-year old Iftikhar, sulking and waiting to be consoled.

Abu was quiet for a few moments. He suddenly said, "You know I finally learnt how to ride a bike the other day?"

Iftikhar looked surprised. "You did?"

Abu nodded. "Your uncle Tariq taught me. Right outside this house, on the street. Despite all your mother's sarcastic remarks, I learnt it in a day." He took a cigarette from a pack of Benson and Hedges and lit it up. He took a thoughtful puff.

"Will wonders never cease!" Iftikhar said. He smiled at the thought of Abu riding around the block, ringing his bell.

"Not that it came easily, though," Abu said. "Look at this." He rolled up the legs of his shalwar. Just below his knee, there was an ugly scab. "There's a similar one on my elbow. Actually, don't even bring up the topic with your mother. She's convinced I made a complete fool out of myself in front of the neighbors."

He rolled it back down. "Now tell me, if I had gotten onto that bike thinking I already knew how to ride it, and didn't even accomodate the possibility of failure, would I have been able to learn it? Or if I had let pride get to my head - or for that matter, your mother's wit - would I have succeeded?" Abu shook his head. "I don't think so."

"That's true," Iftikhar admitted.

"Remember, the wisest man is he who realizes that he knows nothing. He'll soak up knowledge like a sponge. The moment you become too proud to crash and burn, you'll stop growing."

"That's also true," Iftikhar said. He hated how his father always took the force of his conviction away in discussions like these. It seemed to slip out from beneath Iftikhar like a rug on polished wood.

"Now I have a question for you," Abu said. His eyes were twinkling with mischief. "If a fifty year old man can get on a bike, fall three times, have children laugh at him, and be hen-pecked for an hour, why can't you?" He took a final puff of his cigarette and put it out. "What are you, seventy years old, nana jee?"

Crime and Punishment

Absolute sin. Know what it is? It's a reprehensible act that would be equally immoral for everybody. A lot of people say that absolute sin does not exist. If it did, why would something be considered a crime in one culture and not another? And when I say crime, I do not necessarily mean an act punishable by law, but rather, an act punishable by conscience. Why is it not sinful to marry a cousin in Islam, but looked on as incest in other cultures? Dozens of such examples exist.

I think absolute sin does exist. Absolute sin has been defined in all religions, and it's uncanny how similar moral tenets are across religions. Personally, I believe that this moral framework was perfected in Islam, but that's just my opinion. Not to stray from the point, absolute sin exists, but I claim that man is not born with a sense of it. Man is born with a conscience, a clean slate ready to be written on, a machine ready to be programmed. As man grows, his conscience is shaped by the way he is nurtured, by what he sees and deduces from his environment, and so on.

In a "macro" sense...in the sense of society or religion as a whole, crime is defined by laws. When you break those laws, you've overstepped your bounds and committed a crime. Whether you get caught or not is a totally different matter. However, in a "micro" sense, at the individual's level, I think crime is defined purely by your conscience. Crime is anything that goes against your conscience. And what defines your conscience? Again, your upbringing, your nurturing, and so on.

That's why it's so important for the conscience to be programmed properly during one's formative years. If I've seen the people around me take bribes, if I am brought up to think that society cannot function without bribes, I will not feel even a prick of conscience taking or receiving one. If, on the other hand, I was raised and programmed with Islamic values, there is no way I'll reconcile myself to bribery without guilt. Guilt...the ultimate punishment! You need no court of law nor a prison cell to be punished by guilt.

Taking things up a notch, do you think a cannibal feels guilty murdering and eating another human being? I honestly don't think so. Do you feel guilty when you sit down to a meal of roasted chicken? I don't...I can say that for sure. And yet I know people who won't touch meat because they feel sorry for the animal. It's all a function of conscience. Conscience is relative, not absolute. That's why one's conscience has to be raised on good values.

I think conscience is the main reason why atheists and agnostics do not morally fall apart. I've discussed this once with a good friend of mine. He doesn't believe in God. I asked him what stops him from going out and, say, robbing a store or something. He claimed it would be bad for society. I think that at the most primitive level, the force keeping both of us in check is the same: the conscience. I don't commit sin for fear of Allah, but at the most basic level, I don't commit sin because of my conscience. For there are many things I do that Allah probably dislikes, and yet I continue doing them...because my conscience does not prick me. It's not a crime for me anymore.

Quite amazingly, the punishment administered by consience is a strange one indeed. As everybody knows, the guilt of committing a crime (and when I say crime, it can be anything that goes against your conscience...even something very paltry) dies down as the crime is committed over and over. But here's the thing: it's only when one stops committing the crime that one realizes the hell one was living in. So it's not that conscience stops punishing you....it's more like you grow used to the punishment, just like you might grow used to living in a 10x10 prison cell. But it's only when you get out that you realize the shit-hole you were in.

I'd like to sum up by recommending a movie and a book (yeah yeah, I can't do without my recommendations, can I?). The movie is The Machinist starring Christian Bale. The book is Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Both explore similar themes, but leave you mind-blown.

The brothers karamazov...

...by Fyodor Dostoevsky. What an amazing novel! I still haven't finished it yet - I still have a hundred or so more pages to go. At over 700 pages, it's more of a tome than a book. But I tell you, it's worth every line to read. Dostoevsky's insight into human psychology and minute details of emotions is simply mindblowing. And one chapter in the book called Rebellion actually made me give up reading the novel for a while because it was so powerful. I felt like my head was going to explode. Moreover, even if one glosses over the philosophies and moral dilemmas woven into each page, the story makes a fine drama, laden with suspense and intrigue.

I wish I knew Russian and understood the prevalent analogies and connotations of 19th century Russia. I would have loved to read Russian greats like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekov in their original glory.

Anyhow...highly recommended!

Rebellion

There once lived a boy in Lahore, a boy some eight summers old. Hassan was his name, and he was a fine lad, the only child of his mother and father. It was near dusk one frosty winter when Hassan was outside, playing with his father. The sun's rays grew more and more feeble and were on the verge of winking out into twilight. Hassan had climbed onto the lowest branch of an old, bent tree that grew in their verandah. Below, his father was looking up at him, smiling.

"Come down now Hassan," he said. "Before your mother calls for us."

"Will you catch me, baba?" Hassan asked. He was laughing. "Baba, please say yes!"

Baba shook his head playfully. Then he smiled. He held up his arms and beckoned him with his hands. Still laughing, Hassan slid off the branch.

At the last instant, Baba drew his arms away.

Hassan fell on to the brick-covered ground. The skin over his knee split open in a gush of blood. As he lay in agony, he looked up at his father in astonishment.

His father sat down on his haunches beside him. He was no longer smiling and his eyes were grim. When he spoke, his voice was stangely quiet. "Never trust anyone in this world," he said. "Never forget this."

Hassan never did.

As the boy matured into a man, his mistrust of people grew with him, developing into a strange, quiet frenzy. He became cynical without experience, always looking on somebody's kindness with resentment, and the world's evil with a sad nod of his head. He made few friends, and those he did make often shied away from him, spooked by his paranoia. And thus, lost upon him were his father's kind intentions. His father had wanted merely to give him a slap on the wrist - something to open his eyes. As time went on, however, Hassan's eyes became more and more tightly shut.

When he started college, things finally started to change. He started to see things, see people differently. It first began when he was on the verge of failing a course in his first semester, and some of his classmates helped him out, for no apparent reason. No apparent reason at all. They weren't even his friends. When he got his result card and saw how barely he had made it, he thought, "What have I been doing? All this time, how could I have been mistrusting these very people?"

He used to lie awake many a night, rattled by terrible guilt. He would think of the times when he'd turned others away, refusing to play with some, refusing help from others. In his heart started to grow a deep love for his fellow people. On other nights, he would curse the day he had jumped off the tree - the day that had robbed him of so many years.

Time went on. He got married and had a child. One morning, as his boy lay sleeping in his lap, Hassan stroked his hair, and whispered in his ear, "Always trust those around you, bachay. The world is your friend."

And so parental wisdom passes on generation after generation - wisdom that zig zags pendulously between extremes like a see-saw.

Wisdom that is shaped less by evolution and more by rebellion.

Comfort zone atrophy

A good friend of mine in college used to lift regularly, five times a week. Taking all those weights upon himself had really carved out his physique and given him some nice biceps. He used to be a pipsqueak in freshman year, and maybe that's one of the reasons he wanted to put on some mass. But then, after graduation, he gave up lifting for two months. Didn't have time. Guess what...he lost his muscles. He didn't lose them completely, of course. He wasn't back to his thin self or anything. He still had a nice physique. But he definitely did lose...what's the word...the edge.

I realized yesterday that this picture could be very much analogous to that strange perimeter around you called your comfort zone. What it does, how it grows, how it shrinks. How it expands when you work on it and contracts when you become lazy.

I think an example is called for. Take a person who is shy and feels self-conscious when he is in the midst of a throng of people. By exposing himself to social situations over and over again, he will gradually begin expanding his comfort zone. He'll feel more and more comfortable being around people. However, let's say he gives this up for 2-3 weeks or so. After this hiatus, he returns to the social scene. He'll find that the break has shrunk his comfort zone a bit. He doesn't have the same ease with people that he did before. Of course, it's not as bad as it was, say, two years ago, but he's lost the edge, and will have to work at it a bit to get it back. Just like my friend who lost a bit of his muscles, and needed to lift regularly to get them back.

The whole situation reminds me of a cord of elastic rubber. You pull at it, and it lengthens. You let it go, and it does shrinks, but not to its original length. In the same way, it seems the quiescent state of your comfort zone always lags a bit behind...what shall we call it...the active state? The stimulated state? The state in which you are expanding your comfort zone?

Anyway, this is just a theory borne out of hours of pondering useless crap. What do you think? Does it hold true?

Logic and mood...mind and heart

I've been reading one of Bertrand Russell's books lately. It's titled, "the conquest of happiness," and all I can say is that it's a great book. Russell was a great philosopher...using simple logic and common sense to get his points across. Moreover, he was a happy philosopher. You don't see many of those around.

Russell mentions something which strikes a chord with what I've been mulling over recently. He says something to the tune of, "you can't argue with mood." Ever been blue and tried to reason yourself out of it? Tried to show yourself the bigger picture? Tried to wriggle your way into happiness using sheer logic alone? I think it's as hard as hell. I'd say it's impossible to do, but then of course, I'd be biased since I'm sure there are some lucky ones who can do it. Especially those with immense amounts of faith in Allah.

I've been observing this link between mind and heart (or reasoning and emotions...call it whatever you will) for a long time. It's a slippery rope...slithering and squirming....just always out of reach. So far, I've reached the following conclusions:

1) The heart is the dominant of the two. Your mood depends on a lot of factors, one of the important ones being the environment around you. e.g., you feel good with family around, bad if somebody cheats you, and so on.

2) The mind is heavily influenced by the state of the heart. I guess another way of putting this is that your reasoning is, by default, biased by how you are feeling at the time. More prissily, your emotions will weight the input variables to any argument, giving more importance to some of these variables more others. If my brother were on the stand for murder, and I were to reason whether he was guilty or innocent, my love for him would naturally try and skew my logical thinking. It would water down variables such as the evidence against him, and bring out his good side. On the other hand, if officials thought somebody had killed my brother, I would probably want to see him hanged. My biases would stamp his guilt.

I think point 2 is what makes logical thinking so prone to bias. If a Muslim wants to drink alcohol, he'll make the case for it. He'll interpret the Quraan and Hadeeth his own way. His reasoning is a slave to his emotions in this case...not the other way around. I want things to be the other way around...I don't want to be a slave to my emotions. I want my emotions to be there, but I want reasoning to be in control. To tell you the truth, it sometimes makes me feel very uneasy to realize how much of my life is dependent on mood. It almost makes me feel like I'm wasting this precious life Allah has given me.

Anyway, sorry if I was just stating the obvious. It's just that I find it helpful sometimes to give words to thoughts. That way, they become tangible, instead of remaining evasive ghosts inside one's head.

Nawab Bugti is dead...

...but what a way to go :).

Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti - the tiger of Balochistan. What a strange character he was! As well-educated as anybody (Oxford Univerity grad), well-read to a fault (he used to read tonnes of books), and yet had the temper of an animal (he first murdered at the age of twelve. Apparently, his victim was annoying him).

I've heard that he was a very difficult person. Very arrogant. Steeped in his tribal values. I can see how education must have made things worse rather than better, since it gave reasoning to his violence...logic to his values. Whatever his character, one thing is for sure now - Mush bhai has, with a flair of the artillery at his behest, given him instant martyrdom in the eyes of the public. Nawab Bugti is a hero. Go to any newspaper editorial on him...most mention his controversial aspects, but almost all of them end by christening him a hero. Why? Because the public and the media are tired of Mush bhai and the rule of the army. To them, the killing of a politician like Nawab Bugti (whether it be for right or wrong...that's irrelevant) chalks another line against army rule.

Say whatever you want about Nawab Bugti though...one thing is for certain. He sure went with a performer's bow. The last few days were his final performance on the stage, and I think he knew it. No, I'm certain he knew that his days were numbered. And here's the interesting thing...something that newspapers have not picked up on yet, and that somebody close to me pointed out recently. Nawab Bugti was in a cave in Bhamboor Hills in Balochistan when the military attack occurred on him. Wanna know who else was from Bhamboor?

Sassi - one of the most revered fictional characters of Baloch literature.

Conservation of Energy...or more?

Ever heard of the principle of conservation of energy? It's pretty much the backbone of modern physics, stating that mass-energy cannot be created nor destroyed. And it's remarkable in its simplicity too...if I light a fire, the subsequent energy released comes from the wood. If I slow down while driving, kinetic energy morphs into heat and radiates away.

I was thinking this over. Doesn't this principle apply to a whole lot more than just energy? A musician composes a tune...but has he created it? I don't think so. I think he's just channelled different musical ideas in his head into one composition. Similarly, a writer might come up with a story, but he hasn't technically created it. For the most part, he's twined different strands in his mind into a ball of yarn. Of course, he's added his own flair to it.

Look at it in Islam. You do bad to another person. Someday, in some way, it will boomerang back to you. The total "goodness" or "badness" is being conserved. It is neither being created not destroyed. Everywhere I look, I see undertones of conservation masquerading as creation.

Actually, I believe true creation lies only with Allah. True creation was the moment when He sparked the universe with his Will, and His "KUN" created pure majesty out of nothing.