Tread Softly

What Makes a Great Leader

2011-10-06T19:11:00.001-07:00

A great leader does not need to assert his leadership. Others follow him of their own volition. Such a leader is not perpetually high-status. Leadership should not primarily be about always winning an argument and imposing one’s will. If that’s the goal, the leader might gain authority, but never respect. The ultimate goal should be bigger. A better product. The world’s best company. Deeper knowledge. Aesthetics. And so on.

A great leader can come down in status to talk to the lowest person in the pecking order (keeping his status just a little bit higher, of course). While a leader can create a sense of awe and authority by being perpetually high-status, I think this is damaging in the long run. Steve Jobs (RIP) sent out company-wide emails and signed his name off like he was everybody’s best bud. He wasn't – but can you imagine an insecure person doing that?

Ultimately, the leader’s merit is the quality of his leadership, not how high-brow he is. It’s in how logically persuasive he is and how much he believes in himself. A leader must have a vision that’s 20/20 clear about how to go about thing. If the leader believes in himself, others will follow suit. People love to be led, after all, by someone who knows what he’s doing.

Therefore leaders have the over-logic. They can think beyond the curve. They do not fall prey to herd mentality and have that feeling in their gut that tells them they’re right. They’re willing to put everything on the line for that feeling, including reputation, self-respect and money.

And Steve Jobs, you were all the above and so much more. May you rest in peace.

Cause and Effect

2009-03-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

The more I think about it, the more I realize that playing mental chess of cause and effect can potentially be very destructive. We're hard-wired to do it, that much is for sure. Our minds silently chug away, attributing causes to the events that ripple through our lives. The process is instinctive, but it can be very irrational also - sometimes, it might be outright idiotic if you sit down to think about it.

A form of the irrationality of cause and effect is superstition. I walk under a ladder and I think I'm going to have bad luck. Then something bad does wind up happening - even if it's a week later, I immediately attribute it to the damn ladder. In my mind, that connection works, it's perfect, it fits. Except that it's completely irrational and makes no sense whatsoever.

Superstition is just one example - in our everyday lives, there are much more mundane examples of the cause and effect illusion in play. Everyone is under their own unique spell under this illusion. I think there's nothing 'wrong' with this - it's as normal as anything else. The only point at which one should force rationalization to take over is when the effect gives one either an extreme high or an extreme low. If a hot girl winks at me, I could attribute this to a cause: that she's madly in love with me. I could be in ecstacy for days on end, planning our future together. Before things get this out of hand, I have to enforce the rationality that a) I've never even met the girl before and b) it was mighty windy that day and she probably had something in her eye.

If I weren't feeling lazy right now, I could make a similar example for the low. But hopefully, you get my drift. The example I gave is pretty silly, but I think if you look closely, you might see examples in your life where the cause and effect reflex is not so silly. Hell, it might even be a bit dire. Maybe you'll decide it's time you've gotten tired of playing by it's irrational rules, and that it's time for some plain, clean rationality.

Good for you if you do.

Fades Away...

2009-02-11T19:19:00.000-08:00

After much thought, Aadil and I've decided to unleash a song we once made to the world.

So here it is. Listen to it, do, and leave your comments.

[Edit: Aadil proposed an easier link. Here it is.]

http://www.yourfilehost.com/media.php?cat=audio&file=Fades_Away.mp3

Alternate mirror:

http://w19.easy-share.com/1903113998.html

Song Name: Fades Away
Artists: Aadil Farook,Hasnain Akram,Salman Yasin,Sarmad Ghafoor
Composition: Aadil & Hasnain
Poetry:Aadil
Vocals:Salman Yasin
Lead Guitars:Sarmad Ghafoor
Production,Mixing,Mastering:Sarmad Ghafoor
Ideas (Musical&Production):Aadil

LYRICS

seen a warrior’s burst of rage
seen a martyr’s life outgrow his age
seen vile in great men
seen beauty in false women
seen rivals of a genius
seen tyrants hailed among us
seen the envy of a friend
seen love draw its own end

Seen a rainbow fade when it should stay
seen a summer wait for the next may
seen a leave wither from its youth
seen weathers play with our moods

seen a victim plead for his right
seen a culprit with his last lie
seen guilty hands turn to pray
seen aggression overwhelmed by grace

But the world just doesn’t run on grace
In the crowd, you’re just another face
when you’re gone, you dont ever leave a trace

seen faith take hold of our reason
seen wisdom go out of season
seen hatred for a chosen prophet
seen sacrifices with regret

seen ironies turn to the truth
seen lies bearing the fruits
seen impact of just a thought
seen actions ending with naught

But the world just doesn’t run on grace
In the crowd, you’re just another face
when you’re gone, you dont ever leave a trace

seen voices live longer than singers
seen a maestro play with bleeding fingers
seen life in a dead man’s painting
seen victors go down fainting

But the world just doesn’t run on grace
In the crowd, you’re just another face
when you’re gone, you dont ever leave a trace

Like a whistle it fades away (Chorus repeat)

History Repeats in Mysterious Ways

2008-02-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

The following excerpt is from an article written by Ardeshir Cowasjee in the Dawn newspaper. Cowasjee held Government posts in the Bhutto-era, which brought him in contact with Bhutto. And Zia, after the latter shoved Bhutto aside.

Anyway, I think the following applies pretty damn perfectly to the never-ending Mush situation our country faces.

THE date, Aug 25, 1977; the place, General Headquarters, Rawalpindi; the man in the high chair, President Gen Ziaul Haq, jet black hair heavily pomaded, mascara surrounding his eyes, moustache bristling, confidence oozing from every pore.

Sitting on the opposite side of the table, next to me, was the soft-spoken mild-mannered and ever faithful Gen K.M. Arif, taking notes, gathering up each pearl of wisdom as it gently dropped from the all-powerful lips.

“Mr Kovasji,” as was his interpretation of my name, “what can you do for the ports of Pakistan and its shipping in 70 days?” he asked. “General,” I replied, “what is so sacrosanct about the figure 70? After all, it took Phineas Fogg 80 days to circumnavigate the earth in a balloon. Why only 70?”

Came the answer, pat, convincing, “I have promised the people that I will march back to my barracks in 90 days, 20 days have since passed, so that leaves 70.” I countered, “No, General, you will do nothing of the sort. You will stay on, and on, for as long as you can.” Far from being annoyed, he laughed, “And on what do you base this premise of yours?” History, was my answer and I asked him if he had ever read Captain Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart’s brief but exceedingly wise book Why Don’t We Learn from History? (first published in 1944). One chapter that I particularly recommended to him is entitled ‘Pattern of Dictatorship’. Zia made a note of the book’s title, I subsequently sent him a copy, and he had it reprinted by the Services Book Club (later, in 1986, his editors chopped and chipped — but it did not change history).

Now, a quote from the relevant chapter: “We learn from history that self-made despotic rulers follow a standard pattern… They claim they want absolute power for only a short time (but ‘find’ subsequently that the time to relinquish it never comes)…

“On gaining power: They soon begin to rid themselves of their chief helpers, ‘discovering’ that those who brought about the new order have suddenly become traitors to it. They suppress criticism on one pretext or another and punish anyone who mentions facts which, however true, are unfavourable to their policy. They enlist religion on their side, if possible, or, if its leaders are not compliant, foster a new kind of religion subservient to their ends. They spend public money lavishly on material works... They manipulate the currency to make the economic position of the state appear better than it is in reality...” and so it goes, to the perfect pattern.

Sounds familiar?

'nuff said.

(Source: http://dawn.com/weekly/cowas/20080127.htm)

The Assassination of a Country's Dreams

2008-01-17T05:34:00.000-08:00

They say that a country begins its descent into annihilation once immorality starts spreading like rot from the inside out. Pakistan has been walking this tightrope for decades now, running around in circles like a dog chasing its own tail. I have no intention of recapping history here - all the facts are already well known. I'm only thinking of my own future and the future of my family - what sort of a Pakistan will we see going forward? How much longer will I have to spend justifying whatever is happening in Pakistan to people abroad? My country is a plane crash that should have happened a long long time ago. The fact that it hasn't is a sign of sheer benevolence from the One above. He keeps giving us one more pass, one more chance to checkmate, one more opportunity towards redemption, and we keep throwing it away, chucking it into the fireplace. Sooner or later, He's going to stop giving…

We can't blame it all on our leaders though, can we? Sure, we can make the argument that no leader Pakistan has seen has had enough integrity and vision to carry this country forward. Zia assassinated Bhutto, crippled our chances for democracy through his never-ending martial law, fanned Islamic extremism and took the country literally nowhere. He had no intentions of a new direction either - it was only a bomb in his plane (God bless his soul) that gave the country a different direction.

Not that democracy was much of a new direction - the country's decade of elected leaders didn't give us much either did it? Apart from allegations of corruption, villas in Spain, Swiss bank accounts with the country's laundered money, the country pretty much stood stagnant during those years, rotting like water in a swamp. It took Musharraf's military coup to change the country's direction again.

Isn't it ironic that Pakistan's only hope of progress has been through coups and assassinations?

The fact is that I'm tired of my country's volatility. I'm tired of defending all messed up things our leaders do. And I'm dead tired of the looks I see on the faces of some people after they've read news of us messing up yet again. I hide my country's shortcomings like a father might stow away an illegal child, and yet the more I hide them, the more they seem to assert their presence.

But the fact is that I'm as bad as the rest of the Pakistani population, aren't I? I'm part of the clique of people that are all talk and no action - who love rhetoric but are too lazy to get off their asses. The truth is that nobody can blame it all on leaders - a country's leaders are only as good as its people, after all. This country's problems begin in the psyche of its people. Corruption always spreads from the inside out, whether it be a rotting carcass or a country in the process of decay. And I think symptoms of this are most visible to somebody who comes to this country from abroad - who has seen a different mindset and therefore has a more uninfluenced perspective.

One clear symptom is the Pakistani preclivity for outsmarting each other. While its prevalence differs among social strata, it's nonetheless engrained deep into the common man's psyche. The better man is always one who can outsmart the other, pull a fast one without the other even realizing what happened. That's what happens at the grassroot level, and if you think about it, that's pretty much what's happened with our leaders. If all the rumors of corruption and embezzling funds are even remotely true, our leaders have always put themselves before country, and they've done it in such a way that even to this day, they have a massive following. People came out in flocks to welcome Nawaz Sharif and Benazir, didn't they?

How much better can you get at outsmarting somebody?

Ishq

2007-11-29T19:32:00.000-08:00

I'm sick of the type of conformity that results in helplessness. It kills original thought. Worse, it seizes you by the nape of your neck and drags you through thorns. Popular culture is a myth, a massive entity spun by the psyche's desire for change. So to hell with the chasm between romeo and juliet, heer and ranjha, sassi and pannoo - the chasm created centuries ago that has long since been morphed into a symbol of popular culture.

The biggest realization that I've been coming to terms with is that love is not ishq and ishq is not love. Ishq is not a blazing fire, a rising thread of mercury, nor a seminal spurt of emotion. For if it were, Ishq would be ephemeral, here one second and gone the next.

No, I think Ishq is slow, Ishq takes its time. Ishq has constancy, like land or baked sands...or maybe a song that never gets old. Ishq is massive. That mass makes it slow to start, but once it is moving, it is impossible to stop.

Love is a turbulent foam, enwrought with anxiety and ecstacy. Love is the ever-swinging pendulum, the screaming ride of extremes. Love is a high, its sorrow an addiction. But Ishq is not like that. Ishq is not like that at all. No sir, Ishq is no quick fix.

You can fall out of love. You cannot fall out of Ishq. It can be created, but not destroyed. And if it is destroyed, I don't think it ever existed to begin with.

And all this makes Ishq very rare. One place to find it would be in the hearts of mothers. But from what I've seen, lovers are usually just that - two people in love.

'Tis what I believe now anyway.

Remembrance

2007-11-29T19:20:00.000-08:00

You want logic? I'll give you some - I'll step you through its snares and fend you from the snarling beasts of irrationality. Just lend me an ear.

Anxiety, depression, feeling gloomy, feeling old, feeling hollow - we've all been there, done that. In fact, it's been done to death. Sadness is one of the easiest states of mind to slip into and carries its own special kind of solace - an escape of sorts. Like a hug from somebody long estranged. In the end, mood is governed by state of mind. Similarly, how the world is perceived is also governed by state of mind. A joke you find har-de-har-har hilarious when you're happy is dismally irritating when you're pissed off.

Take any state of mind, and call it your baseline state. Your baseline state will be where you find yourself the most. A chirpy person will be pretty happy. A pessimist will have a more negative state of mind. I think most people I know have a negative baseline state. Myself included. Yep, I'm there, shoveling shit with the rest of them.

What makes a baseline state a baseline state? Why does the mind keep returning to it? A simply principle called negative feedback. A change in state is negated by the way you think, the way you've trained your thought habits. If you're a pessimist, even if you're happy for a brief amount of time, your paranoia or insistence in seeing things in a negative way is going to get you down again mighty quickly. Back to your baseline state you go, love. Negative feedback, right there.

So now coming to the crux of this post and tying everything together. How can one achieve a peaceful state of mind, where you are one with yourself and everything, where you aren't in a constant struggle with the demon called self...where, simply put, your heart is at peace? To do this, I think you need to know that there is a constant, immutable presence for which no problem of yours is too big or too small. A presence that is always there, no matter where you are. A presence that allows you to unburden your aching shoulders of all your troubles. A presence you can escape into, instead of trying to escape into sorrow, pessimism, love, self or the bottle.

When you were a kid, that presence was likely one of your parents. Things were just peachy then, weren't they? But grown-ups need something more. Maybe because of the realization that parents are, after all, as helpless as their children. As human anyway.

And there is something more, that ultimate force of negative feedback.

An Ayat in the Quran says, Verily in the Remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest.

It says it right there. And verily, every word of the Quran rings true.

I quoted that Ayat almost a year ago on this blog. I was reminded of it by a friend's poem. And I was appalled at how my remembrance keeps failing me over and over.

New Blog In Town

2007-11-29T14:02:00.000-08:00

Presenting the blog of Aadil Farook...one of Usman's and my oldest friends.

http://aadilfar.blogspot.com/

Go on, visit his world - methinks you might not want to come back...

The Shanghai Chronicles

2007-11-09T04:55:00.000-08:00

I don't have anything Shanghai-specific to write about today. Actually, I just wanna comment on one trait that's been perfected to an art among desis - story-spinning. Chorna, as it's called.

Tonight, I found my Indian chef friend again (from the last post). The first thing he said was, "Akram, what a cricket match last night! Congratulations on Pakistan winning!"

I thanked him, thinking that this guy really followed his cricket. "Afridi really came through for Pakistan, didn't he?"

He laughed and came clean. "Well, to be honest, I didn't actually watch the match. I only know what I read in the headlines this morning."

I laughed back. The truth was that I hadn't seen the match either - I only knew tidbits from a gmail conversation with friends from the morning. Afridi's name had popped up, so I'd decided to throw it out.

So at night, I was telling my mother all this. She started laughing and said, "Afridi kahaan se aa gaya hai? Kamaal kartay ho Hasnain. Younis ne match jitwaya tha!" I laughed back sheepishly, thinking that my chorna skills obviously couldn't face up to somebody who'd actually watched the match.

Well, it turns out she hadn't seen the game either - only overhead a conversation about it at lunch at some restaurant. A conversation at a neighboring table, no less.

This, my friends is classic chorna in action!

Nothin' Like a Good Meal...

2007-11-08T17:41:00.000-08:00

I'm in Shanghai for a few days on a business trip. It's an amazing city - the new york of Asia, you could say. But for somebody who's on halal only, it's a pretty tough place to be in from a gourmet perspective.

As an illustration of this, I was discussing my food situation with a co-worker yesterday. He asked, "Can you eat beef or pork?" I shook my head. "Lamb?" Shook my head. "Chicken?" Shook the ol' noodle. "Eggs?" He asked, but he was smiling. I nodded happily, and he started laughing. "It seems your choices are a bit limited!"

So imagine my wonder when I walked into my hotel lobby, and by the entrance of the restaurant, saw what appeared to be an Indian wearing a chef's hat.

Just so I wasn't clear, he was a) Indian and b) wearing a chef's hat.

Well, that was it then. I literally ran up to this guy like a desert-blinded fool chasing an oasis. Felt around his face to make sure he was real. Felt his hat to make sure it really was a chef's hat and not some sick halloween costume. (And all this while he looked on patiently with a Colonel Sanders' smile).

He was real all right. And an awesome guy too. We chatted for a bit, shooting up the ol' desi breeze. He called me Wasim Akram.

And I had amazing Shrimp masala, dal makhani, vegetable curry, naan and rice for dinner.

Needless to say...BOOYA!

Weird Happenings

2007-11-07T18:30:00.000-08:00

Last night, I fell asleep with the TV on, watching national geographic. My sleep was intensely deep, the type that's a surreal vat of blackness.

Until about the middle of the night, when I began having this awful nightmare that just went on and on.

I vaguely remember the details now, but do recall it was about a supernatural "presence" in my house. In one scene, one of my best friends in the dream (she was an african american girl, for some reason) was standing with me outside my front door. She told me my house was possessed after I'd been living there for months. I glanced into the window of the house, and actually saw a hazy shape moving in there, gliding slowly between rooms.

Anything that's mildly scary during the day is outrightly terrifying in the darkness of night. When I woke up, I was literally shivering.

...And I immediately discovered the cause of the whole thing.

National geographic was running a special on haunted houses.

As stewie would say...BLAST!

In the Name of Art...

2007-10-16T16:33:00.001-07:00

By now, I'm sure everybody has heard of the cartoon drawn by one Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist. This cartoon depicted a very very insulting image of Islam's Prophet (SAW), and was published in a Swedish newspaper in mid-August. That makes the controversy a couple of months old, but I still keep seeing it crop up on CNN from time to time, so I decided it merits a bit of introspection.

I'm glad that, on the whole, Muslims have had a much more balanced reaction this time around, although there is still the matter of the fatwah issued by Iraq for the death Lars Vilks, as well as numerous threats by individuals on the life of the artist. I hope, to some extent, that Muslims have realized that violence does not solve anything. Not only does it fail to make a point (why the hell would the offending artist care about a McDonald's being burnt to the ground on the other side of the globe?) it's also plain wrong from an Islamic point of view.

Lars Vilks (and even the artist who drew the Danish cartoon) got this published in his home country. In accordance with Islam, the proper way to counter this would be to ask the Government of the country to take action against the offense, which several countries (including Pakistan) have done. If the Government does something about it, well and good. If it can't or won't, then that's it...this particular round is over. The bell's been rung. It's time to move on and think about what could be done so this doesn't happen again. Educating people about Islam might be a good start. Islam is a peace-loving religion. People still don't believe this - the other day, I saw Bill Maher commenting on how much mention there was of killing the infidel in the Quran. I bet he hasn't even read a page of the Prophet's (SAW) life.

But what you DON'T do is take the law in your own hands and think that murder and violence are going to solve everything. Even a five-year old can see that this will just fuel the fire and perpetuate the stereotype. The same principle would apply even if the controversy had happened in an Islamic country; the offender should be tried justly in a court of law, not slaughtered one fine night in his sleep.

Don't think I'm playing the Devil's advocate here though. Now that I've done with one aspect of the issue, let's tear apart the other one, shall we? In reaction to the publication of the cartoon, Lars Vilks said, "That's a way of expressing things. If you don't like it, don't look at it. And if you look at it, don't take it too seriously. No harm done, really." Of course! How the hell could anyone have been so dumb as to take offense, when the artist himself has provided the perfect solution! Just...don't...look...at...it! Turn the other way! After all, it's all about freedom of art, eh? The world's advanced by leaps and bounds anyway!

So tomorrow, if somebody draws a flagrant cartoon depicting Lars' mother as a seedy whore, I wonder what his reaction will be. After all, if he doesn't like it, he doesn't need to look at it, right? And if he is man enough to look at it, the last thing he should do is take offense, in his own opinion. In the end, there's "no harm done, really." Isn't that right?

But no, I don't think it's right. I don't think he'd turn the other way - he'd better not, if he has even an ounce of self-respect. Hell, I bet he'd drag the artist to court on slander and defamation charges. I bet he'd fume inside at the unnecessary indignity his loved one has been subjected to - indignity that doesn't contain even an ounce of truth. And I bet he'd win the case too.

I think that's exactly what should happen to Lars and all such people who offend huge masses of people in the name of art. Their rear ends should be dragged to court, and these cases should be legally realistic enough to be tried and won. What Lars has done is nothing short of defamation and slander.

Lars has claimed he's an "equal-opportunity" offender and has depicted Jesus as a pedophile before. Others also argue that such satire on Islam is justified because Christianity has been subject to it for ages now. I've never been able to understand this argument. By this train of logic, all the atrocities that African-Americans were subjected to prior to their liberation were "justified" because they'd been going on "for ages." Does that make any sense at all? How does one wrong justify another?

Freedom of art is a great thing - part of me is an artist, and I love our modern times for allowing it. But I guess our times are still not modern enough to recognize the borders of this freedom. After all, there's no clearly demarcated line, nor any checkposts with sentries standing guard. In the bigger picture, Lars Vilks is a nobody - just another artist who happened to get himself caught in crosshairs. The problem is way bigger than him. The problem is being able to identify and respect those borders.

After all, what fricking good is freedom of the artist if it winds up caging its audience?

Hospitality in Foreign Lands

2007-10-07T19:58:00.000-07:00

Recently, for a few days, I was in Canada to get my visa stamped. I was staying in Quebec City, which is a few hours north of Toronto. I'm not entirely sure why, but I was bored out of my skull most of the time there. Maybe it was because Quebec City is a tourist attraction mostly for those who've just retired. At the risk of being cheeky, suffice it to say that I felt like a young gun in a cupboard full of vintage muskets. The ones that needed gunpowder to fire and oft blew up right in your face.

By the way, on a complete tangent from my main topic, can somebody please expound on the beauty of Picasso's art? Specifically, where exactly in his works can it be found? On my second last day in Canada, I went to a museum of fine arts, which had a Picasso exhibition, and I gotta say, it seemed that the dude wasn't even trying anymore. You remember those "portraits" you used to draw in kindergarten? Of people with huge smiles and round eyes? Well, expand them to wall size, and I think you'll be able to pass it off for a Picasso painting. I mean, I think I know why people devote so much time to studying Picasso's works in college, because I gotta tell ya, you really do need devoted study time to come up with something worthwhile in his works.

Anyway, back to my main topic. So, one evening before iftaari, I set out to find a halaal restaurant with the help of everybody's online friend, google. I found a nice middle-eastern one that was only a kilometer or so away from my hotel. Well, I'd no sooner reached it that I found out that it had been shut down - the only thing open there was a grocery store (the owner of which was middle-eastern, but that doesn't really help. I actually spent a good five minutes standing in front of the butcher's kiosk inside the store, looking at the raw meat and wondering where exactly it was converted into shawerma, before realizing that there was no shawerma for me here.)

In dismay, with my mouth-watering visions dissolving away, I asked one of the people in the checkout line if there was another halal restaurant nearby. The guy gave me some vague directions which I knew I had no hope of following, so I stepped out of the store, chagrined to the core, and started walking. Well, I realized after a few minutes that the guy I'd asked actually was following me (I always have been good at sleuthing....ahem). He caught up to me, and insisted that I come with him to his house for iftaari, instead of wandering around like a schmuck and eventually eating alone (okay, he didn't say that.) He said he'd just talked to his mother, and she really really wanted me to come.

So I followed my gut (literally) and went with him. My newly-found friend was Moroccan, and his apartment was only a couple of blocks away. What followed was an awesome conversation with him, along with great halal food (beef and lentil soup, burgers, moroccan sweets and this kickass curry made from calf's liver). We prayed maghrib together in jamaat. We talked about him, we talked about me, we talked about Islam in Quebec. All of a sudden, all intimations of boredom had vanished.

My point is this - it has become so rare nowadays for somebody to show such hospitality to a fellow Muslim that I was honestly taken aback. Of course, there are reasons that you don't see it much anymore. People get taken advantage of, they get hurt, and that's enough to make goodwill take a back seat. But it's a shame, honestly it is, because I feel that this is what a large part of Islam was about - taking care of others in your society, and that's exactly what this angel of a man did. He took a total stranger into his home and fed him in the way of Allah.

People often say that it is impractical to show goodwill to strangers. You can't trust anyone these days - that's a motto everyone lives and breathes by these days. But I think the scope of the problem is bigger. If people were good Muslims, they would know their limits. They wouldn't take advantage of those who offer such hospitality. That would ensure that the goodwill of such people would not fade away in bitterness and cynicism.

Wisdom

2007-09-15T05:27:00.000-07:00

There is never a more humbling realization than the fact that one does not know anything, despite all one's touts of knowledge and experience. In one of his books, Paulo Coelho said, human wisdom is madness in the eyes of God, and he's right. Wisdom is a slippery eel - after a particularly harsh experience, you'll find it's jumped right out from between your palms. You were as good as never having it in the first place.

What of the people of the Quraysh at the time of Islam? Do you think they were so different from you and I? Evil wasn't separated from good as black from white, no sir. After all, this is not a superhero comic book we're talking about - this is real life. Despite all the abominations that some people of the Quraysh did on Muslims, most of them probably thought they were doing the right thing. (I won't say all, because that's probably not realistic). Most of them had their reasons - reasons we can identify with even today - preserving family honor, culture and stead in society, as well as, of course, peer pressure. The fact that these familiar, innocent-sounding factors led to such a gaping chasm between good and evil scares the hell out of me. It scares me even more because these reasons are present today and always have been since time's little heart first started beating.

How many of us have taken or given bribes because, well..."because that's the way things are done around here?" How many of us have lied because there seemed no other way to save our skins? How many of us have talked down to people because that's what we saw our father and his father doing? How many of us have been suspicious of people of other Islamic sects because of hearsay in our own family? The list is as long as an inter-state highway, but you get the point.

The only true knowledge, I think, is the willingness to concede that everything you know may be wrong. That's the only way knowledge won't turn into pride, and pride won't become a spiralling downfall.

Islam...how misunderstood are thou!

2007-06-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was chilling with a very good friend of mine. I won't mention his religion, because it's not important. Suffice it to say that he wasn't Muslim, and he wanted me to clear up his misconceptions regarding Islamic beliefs. Somewhere in our discussion, he said he was concerned that the Quran does not respect women. He alluded to two examples, the first that there is a verse that allows husbands to beat their wives, and the second that there is a verse that requires four witnesses to prove that a woman had been raped.

While he was talking, I remember rubbing my brow and feeling...tired. Yeah, that's the emotion. I felt tired of being on the backfoot all the time, of having to explain to people that Islam has acquired a bad name but is widely misunderstood, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. I was frustrated, barely fighting the urge to climb a rooftop and shout out to the world that Islam is a peace-loving, flexible religion, and that if you have any doubt, invest your time researching it yourself instead of thinking such ill about it!

Later on that night, I realized I'd merely been through a dose of self-pity and, well, stupidity. After all, if I claim that Islam is my ideology, I have to be the one backing it up. I have to be the one doin' the explaining. If I (and other members of this ideology) don't, who else will??

First of all, though, I want to give a disclaimer and make one thing perfectly clear. I'm only defending Islam here. I'm only defending the religion revealed to Prophet Muhammad (SAW). I'm not in any way extending that to saying that everything Muslims do today is right. So if there are no women's rights in Saudi Arabia, or if there are honor killings in villages in Pakistan, that's not a fault of Islam - that's the fault of those particular Muslims, because they aren't following their religion, or are interpreting it to suit their own needs. There will always be a conflict between the teachings and the pupils, and it's our misfortune today that this rift yawns wide, like hell's maw. Unfortunately, these lost pupils are giving the teachings a bad name...a really really bad name, because in the end, it's only these pupils that the world sees.

Now that that clarification is out of the way, we can move on, and I'd like to examine both of the issues that my friend raised, starting with his concern that women can be beaten in Islam. So without further ado, I present an excerpt from Yusuf Ali's translation of 4:34, the Quranic verse that contains this teaching.

As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all)

Without delving into the axioms on which Islam is based, can you honestly read that and tell me that Islam is a religion that encourages beating your wife? I mean, just look at the construction of the verse: If you suspect that your wife is disloyal, talk to her first. The next step is refusing to share her bed, which is allegorical for negative incentives. The last step is the beating part and that doesn't mean a WWE cage death match. The words in parantheses explain context, and that context is to admonish lightly. The word beating is an english translation of the associated Arabic word, and unfortunately has really harsh connotations. These bring up images of a black-eye or a brawl in the street, which are a bit extreme, to say the very least.

Of course, this verse has been misused a heck of a lot by some Muslims, a lot of whom have probably not even read it or tried to understand its meaning. In reality, you can't take any one verse in the Quran on its own, which goes back to what I was mentioning about axioms earlier on. Islam has certain fundamental values. One should be aware of one's intentions when doing anything, to ensure they don't defeat these fundamental values. So the truth is that a true practicing Muslim would probably never even reach the third step (i.e., the beating part) because he would be questioning his own intentions and motives.

So, to put things in perspective with an example. Suppose you find out your wife is sleeping with somebody behind your back...a passionate love affair of sorts. You'd talk to her first about it. If that doesn't do anything, you would use negative incentives, maybe ignoring her for a bit. You do that and find she's still sleeping around. Now you have permission, at least from Islam's point of view, to admonish her lightly. What if you decide to let her have it, and (oh Lord) give her a good sock on the face? Well, you've probably overstepped the line by a couple of miles then. If anything, you committed the action in anger and retaliation, and that violates the fundamental axioms of having sound intentions for everything you do. But if I can't hit her when I'm angry, you say, when will I ever hit her? Why on earth would I hit her when I've cooled off? Exactly...that's what I meant when I said that daring to lift your hand to your spouse (to somebody you're supposed to protect) is not that easy to do without violating basic axioms and values of Islam, hence the point that a true believer would probably never even do it.

Oh but wait...what if there's a law against it in the country you're in? Then you can't do it...plain and simple. As per Islamic tenets, you can't violate the laws of the land you're in.

How about a divorce, then? Well, that's the thing...Islam actually discourages divorce, meaning you can't just go out and hire a divorce lawyer. First of all, both of you need to try and resolve your differences with the help of arbitrators from your familes. If that doesn't work, you should separate for 4 months and then try to reconcile again. If that doesn't work...you're home-free. You can file for divorce. But that doesn't make sense, you might say. What about that notion that the husband can just divorce the wife by saying so three times? Well, buddy boy, as you can see from my description, things just ain't like that.

Surprised yet? Maybe you are, maybe you're not. Maybe you're just shrugging your shoulders, thinking that you don't really give a damn. That's all fine with me, coz it's all off my chest now. I'm going to move on to the next issue, which is that Islam apparently requires a raped woman to present four witnesses to prove the crime.

The following quote is from the Quran (24:4-5)

And those who accuse chaste women [of adultery] and then do not produce four witnesses — lash them with eighty lashes and do not accept from them testimony ever after. And those are the defiantly disobedient. Except for those who repent thereafter and reform, for indeed Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.

Again, I ask the same question. How on earth does one go from reading the above verse (on its own, by the way, and not even without any supporting historical context) to claiming that a raped woman needs four witnesses to prove her crime? If anything, this verse is defending women's rights, not suffocating them. All it's saying is if you have the nerve to slander a reputable woman of committing adultery, you'd better be able to prove it beyond doubt. The four witnesses act as proof beyond doubt, but the Quran accepts a proof of crime if the proof can provide full confidence. So in today's modern world, for example, a DNA sample would be the equivalent (and hence, Islam is flexible...yet another misconception touched upon today.)

Finally, I'd like to wrap up by citing an account of the Holy Prophet (SAW), taken from Sunan Abu Dawud, Book 38, #4366, which essentially shows that only the testimony of a raped woman is required to prove the crime. With that, I'd like to sign off, and leave things as they are to your own judgement.

"Narrated Wa’il ibn Hujr: "When a woman went out in the time of the Prophet (P) for prayer, a man attacked her and overpowered [raped] her. She shouted and he went off, and when a man came by, she said: That [man] did such and such to me. And when a company of the Emigrants came by, she said: That man did such and such to me. They went and seized the man whom they thought had had intercourse with her and brought him to her.

She said: Yes, this is he. Then they brought him to the Apostle of Allah (P).

When he [the Prophet] was about to pass sentence, the man who [actually] had assaulted her stood up and said: Apostle of Allah, I am the man who did it to her.

He [the Prophet] said to her: Go away, for Allah has forgiven you. But he told the man some good words [Abu Dawud said: "meaning the man who was seized"], and of the man who had had intercourse with her, he said: "Stone him to death."

References:

The Quran
http://www.bismikaallahuma.org/

Wizard and Glass

2007-05-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading Wizard and Glass...the fourth book in Stephen King's dark tower series, following the adventures of Roland of Gilead, the world's last gunslinger. What can I say, except that I'm helplessly blown away, a leaf in a King-maelstrom. I think King has outdone himself this time. The first three books were good - heck the first book was amazing - but this one...it's ascended above and beyond.

A more-than-sizeable chunk (I think 600 pages out of 700) of the book is a flashback. Near the beginning, when I realized that I'd been rudely yanked out of the present (Roland's present, at any rate) and nudged into his past, I admit I groaned, and I had the right to, I think. Flashbacks are tough for the reader. You have to find your groove all over again, and I'd say it's almost as bad as starting a new book. But my groans died down mighty quickly...oh yes, The King saw to that!

More than anything, it's the world that King wove that just drew me in, until I could almost smell the characters...until the characters were not characters anymore, but real people from a different world, a different time. Even right now, as I sit typing this in the afterglow of the book, I feel groggy and zoned out, like I've woken up from being hypnotized (aye, mayhap by the coin rolling on the gunslinger's knuckles, I wot!) The town of Hambry sits in the back of my mind as if it really were a place I once visited, and the people there are folk I'm sure I once knew. Some I admire in awe (Roland, Alain, Cuthbert, and the lovely Sue Delgado), some I sneer at (Jonas is at the top of the list), and some I hate with numbing coldness. Rhea of Coos, black ashes on thy face, and death to thee by the bleeding eye of the Demon moon! By bird and hare and bear and fish!

I'm kind of afraid to go on to the next book now. I'm not entirely sure how The King can top this one.

Writing and Dilemmas

2007-04-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

I love writing, and I've loved it for so long.

Wait. I should correct that. Let's be a little more precise, shall we?

I love the idea of writing, of fingers swirling in their own peck-dance on a keyboard, of eyes distant and bleary, and pulse racing in the throes of composition. That's a dream and fantasy I keep quietly locked away, and at times like these, when I wonder what the big picture is, what the future is, I look back at that fantasy. And marvel at how real life and fantasy are so different.

It's the damn routine, I tell myself. And it is, make no mistake about it. There's just no time for writing in my life right now, except the occasional scribble. Even now, I have a monster of a report due tomorrow for my final class project. I've spent both days of the last couple of weekends at work, scrambling to get things done. After you come home wiped out after a long day, the last thing your caffeine-addled brain wants is for you to flip open that laptop and make it work even more.

And so time passes. Seconds turn into days, which turn into months. You start counting your moments in summers, lost in a frenzy of trying to dig through the mountain that is your to-do list.

And then after a long time, you say, man, I'm actually free for a bit after such a long haul! Y'know what? I'm gonna write now. And so out comes that laptop, and as the cursor starts blinking and you reach into the cookie jar for an idea, an inspiration, anything fergodssakes, you realize there's nothing there...not even crumbs. Somebody's wiped it clean, and the culprit is time itself.

At moments like those, a voice cackles inside my head. I think it's my muse. "What did you think, that you'd be able to write for life, sonny? That you come back to me after days and months and years, and I'd be waiting like a mongrel on a leash? Nothing's for free!" I listen quietly, and I know what he's saying. It reminds me of the doting father who spends all his time working, who spends each moment thinking ahead to the day when he'll actually be free enough to give attention to his family, and when that day finally comes, the kids have grown and y'know what, having a good ol' tete-a-tete with their till-now-absent father is the last fricking thing on their agenda. No sir, pater can go piss in Lake Ontario now for all they care...where the hell was he the first twenty years of their life?

With each day I spend doing something else, the dream tucked away in a lock-box is fading like a polaroid. Pretty much soon enough, I suspect there'll be nothing left of it if things continue the way they have been. Nothing but a shitload of rust.

If you feel the same way, there is one hope. An organized effort. A deadline, say one month. Lots of friends writing in the same period of time, trying to meet the same deadline, trying to meet the word count, working on their own stuff, but with the knowledge that they aren't alone, that there are others also crusading against the endless non-idealities of practical life.

Whatdoyasay?

Ooty, playmate of my childhood years, you for one had better say yes before you leave Pakistan!

Black

2007-04-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

Well, a friend of mine has done it again. This time, he's got me hooked on Pearl Jam. I heard One, their first album, in his car and got so hooked on it that I went out and bought their greatest hits album. Now I'm a believer.

Black is an amazing song. It start off on an acoustic, almost bluesy, and then the discordance kicks in...and before you know it, the tempo is somewhere else all together. Take this excerpt:

Now my bitter hands
cradle broken glass
Of what was everything...

Grunge definitely was something, wasn't it? There was a raw power to it that felt like being socked in the gut. Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam...all of them were grunge gurus, creating masterpiece upon masterpiece. The pinnacle of grunge came in the 90's, and then pretty much just died out, eerily similar to the way some of grunge's main frontmen did (Kurt Cobain shot himself...I believe the lead singer of Alice in Chains also decided it was better to burn than to fade away).

But enough of that...lemme tell you from a musical standpoint why grunge is so awesome.

Grunge is awesome because it has discordance. In the chords and notes of the song themselves.

Most traditional rock songs might have blazing guitar riffs and screaming vocals, but from a musical standpoint, they mostly play it safe, staying within a key, or shifting keys in sometimes almost textbook ways. Things harmonize together in traditional rock. With grunge, things are different. Grunge is rebellion...rebellion against tradition, and against the technical brilliance but at times emotional barrenness of rock shredding. Nothing about grunge is proper, and yet everything is. It defies existence, but continues to exist.

That's what I mean when I say that grunge has discordance within it. Different parts of the song push at each other, and are strung together only by the tight cord of emotion that runs through the song, so tight it almost thrums. That's what gives grunge such power...emotion begets the song and keeps its heart beating, cradling it from falling apart. Of course, this means that the composer had better know what in hell he's doing, or the song won't instill any emotion apart from the urge to roll down the window, throw the cd out, and watch in the rearview with satisfaction as the cd get shattered beneath the tyres of the car behind.

If you fold your arms and say no to grunge, it might be because you find it depressing. I won't try and argue with your there. All that discordance, that emotion is definitely going to take its toll if one becomes a grunge junkie, so listening to such music should definitely be a once-in-a-while thing. Like at the gym, where you can use the aggression instead of letting it build up.

But if it's because you've never given it a chance, don't be so hard on it. Give a listen to some mainstream hits. Black or Jeremy by Pearl Jam. Rooster by Alice in Chains. Plush by Stone Temple Pilots. No matter what you think of it, methinks you won't deem it empty....

Real Time with Bill Maher

2007-03-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

I've been watching Real Time with Bill Maher a lot lately. I think it's a great show if you wanna watch something both interesting and intellectual. Bill Maher basically invites a new panel of three guests each week, and engages them in debates about various current events.

Bill's a pretty smart dude, and his arguments are usually always quite logical...he doesn't resort to dirty rhetoric just to get in the last word, and most of the time, really does have oomph behind whatever he says. However, the problem, which to some extent I think was unavoidable, is that the show is not completely unbiased. Bill is quite anti-republican (particularly anti-bush, but then again who isn't) and he's also to a very large extent anti-religion. He believes that religion and state should not be combined, and touts this as being one of America's greatest achievements. I guess it is, although I think Bush relies more on faith than logic to run the country. But sometimes I get the feeling that Bill Maher crosses a line, from freeing oppressed minds to oppressing free minds. And the worst thing is that he bases this on what he tries to vanquish - prejudice.

Consider what he said on one of his recent shows, and I quote, "it (Islam) was extremist to being with...Mohammad was a warrior."

Let me get one thing clear before we delve any further. There is a distinction between Islam and Muslims. Islam is a religion revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, and as such covers the era in which the Prophet was alive. I say Islam, and I mean Islam as revealed in the Prophet's time. I don't mean Muslims today. But they're one and the same thing, you might say? Well they're not necessarily, and there are a multitude of reasons why, but the biggest one is that, over time, religion gets mixed with culture.

Everything in the Quran has to be studied in the light of the Prophet's life and teachings. That's the ground rule! It's not enough to glance at the life of a Muslim today and declare that whatever he does is Islamic. You wanna learn about Islam? Get Muhammad by Martin Lings, a biography of the Prophet. It's a beautiful book, and it's very unbiased, mainly because its author was a professor at a US university. Read about the Prophet's life, read Quran in the context of that era.

Muhammad was a warrior? Islam was extremist to begin with? Is that why the Prophet used to try his utmost to avoid war until there was no other way out? Is that why he had strict ground rules for engaging in combat, such that the elderly, women and children were to be protected? Is that why in the conquest of Makkah, not one life was lost? Not one!

There are so many misconceptions about Islam that it's not even funny. One thing that's gotten a lot of bad press is the Islamic law to cut off a person's hand if he steals. How is that not extremist, people argue? Isn't that barbaric? Prehistoric? By cause and effect, isn't Islam a religion of the dark ages, of the sword, of bloodshed? If you're fervently nodding your head, then you're a moron. lol...sorry, but it's true...and you'll know its true if you read the biography of the Prophet and find out how peaceful the Muslim society was. Because of a mixture of faith, conscience, respect, and obviously a fear of punishment, people very seldom committed crimes. If a) I have faith in God, b) I respect the sanctity of the society I live in and c) I know my hands going to get cut off if I steal something, chances are I'm not going to steal. It's as simple as that.

So I say this to you Bill. Read the Prophet's life...then if you say that Islam is "extremist" I'll bow my head and respect your opinion. But damn it, for crying out loud, don't declare your opinions based on pure prejudice! On hearsay! On your discussions over a drink at the bar! You're watched by who knows how many viewers all over the world...do you know how much power you have? Do you realize how many people probably absorb your words as if on a plate, without even bothering to analyze them? Your words become their knowledge. Don't prejudice people any more than they already are man. You have a fricking responsibility.

I chose this comment of Bill's to pick on because a) I'm a Muslim...if I don't clear misconceptions up, who will? and b) I'm a fan of Bill Maher! (if nothing else, he's a fellow Cornellian...boo ya!). But the same argument applies to every other medium, whether satirical or not. People of the press, you're our eyes and ears to whatever goes on in the world. Make the walls between races, religions and people fall...don't stack them up even higher. Don't blind us...educate us. Teach us.

After all, it's your moral obligation

The Hurdy-Gurdy Man

2007-03-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

Just saw Zodiac yesterday. It's a movie based on an actual killer by the name of Zodiac, who haunted San Fransisco in the 70's. The movie was good...very watchable, although I'm sure some, if not most, might disagree. It's directed by the same guy who made fight club and seven...both awesome movies. Frequently in the movie (starting from about ten minutes into the damn thing), I had no idea what was going on. As it turned out, I wasn't alone...my friends didn't get a lot of parts either. Outside the theatre, I tentatively asked them a question about the movie, not wanting to look like the guy who's the slowest in getting the film. I needn't have worried. My question sparked a whole melee of questions. Basically, to summarize, all of us loved the movie, but nobody understood much of what had happened between the beginning and the end.

But that doesn't matter. It's a good movie - the kind you'd want to get on dvd and go over a few times just to nail down the sometimes scene-to-scene epiphanies that the main characters have. I think it deserves being watched over and over. Like Memento. Or fight club. Or Mulholland Drive. Or the few dozen other classics that make you feel like you have the IQ of a cabbage the first time you sit down to them with a huge bag of popcorn in your lap.

Anyway, coming to the title of the post, and the main reason for this blog, the hurdy-gurdy man is one of the songs in the movie's soundtrack, and I fell in love with it the first time I heard it in the movie. It's a 60's song, and it's got such a fantasy-world, trance-like feel to it.

'Twas then when the hurdy gurdy man
Came singing songs of love
Then when the hurdy gurdy man
Came singing songs of love

It must be fun being the hurdy-gurdy man - the one oasis of sanity, love, and all other values we platonically hold dear to us. I really want to be there when he finally comes walking down the road like the pied piper, making heads turn in wonder. I want to be in the crowd that gathers behind him, letting him lead the way down whichever paths he divines. And I want to learn his songs - the hurdy-gurdy songs of love.

Intimations of Power

2007-02-26T22:22:00.000-08:00

Everything's natural, in my opinion, but not everything's right. Not everything is a good path, nor a path to success. The only golden-bricked road lies in realizing one's limitations. It lies in staring at your ego in the face and declaring that you are not its monkey, ready to jump through hoops at its behest. For the biggest slave is he who is not free of himself. You can be standing at the gallows, your neck being chaffed in a thick noose, and yet you can be free if you're not a captor of your own being. You can taste from the goblet of freedom...if you can wrestle it away from yourself.

The biggest wars are not fought between countries, nations or people. The fiercest wars rage within oneself, bloodless and yet as vicious as swirling tornados. He who can come out the better in a fight against himself can rule the world. The ironic thing is that he will have no desire to.

Power lies not in worshipping one's strength, but in looking at one's weaknesses in the eye, in grimly accepting their existence, and in either vanquishing them or going around them. When somebody stands on the edge of a field laden with landmines, it does him precious little good to scamper across it with his eyes tightly shut. If he's lucky, he won't even hear the explosion that blows his face in. If he's really unlucky, he'll lie writhing in agony, staring at a bloody stump where a leg used to be. But if he's wise, he'll know that he's in bloody deep shit even as he stands on the edge of the minefield, rubbing his clammy palms against his dusty khakhi pants. And with that knowledge comes power. Great power. With that power comes hope. Hope and eventually freedom.

Did you hear of the ostrich that buried its head in a landmine? It was the first recorded flight of an ostrich, all zillion pieces of it. Pity it only lasted a second, before the parts of the bird that weren't vaporized came splattering back down.

The best teacher that one can find actually hides within oneself. It's hard as frying the meat of an old camel to get him to come out and do his job, but it can be done. Slowly yet surely, it can be done, the same way a bag o' bones can buff up at the gym. When the time is right, your teacher will come out, his old british hat cocked to one side and his monocle hanging from a chain. He always does, when he decides it's time to crack the old knuckles and give a merry heave-ho.

And when he does come out, the war in my mind will start dying down. The sounds of swords rattling will fade, and both armies will fall down to the ground, exhausted, each a victor and each the defeated. He'll be the only one standing in the middle of the battlefield, surveying the sight of fallen soldiers around him with one hand on his hip and the other holding a cigar, and he'll say in a perfect british accent, "I say, what was all the fuss about? I can't seem to understand." And I know when he says that, I'll be at a loss for words. I won't have any answer for him, because no answer will exist.

I hear a knock on my door.

Shit, I think he's here. Put your toys away, boys!

The Weather In Boston

2007-02-17T07:25:00.000-08:00

I think the weather in pretty much the whole of New England has been Father Winter's idea of a joke...except it ain't that funny. I bet he's sitting up there, rubbing his palms and ho-ho-hoing like santa claus at his own handiwork. Well, laugh it up, jackass...you'll get yours someday.

For those of you aren't in the know, here are the sequence of events that happened a few days ago. Look at them, and I think you'll agree that they can't be anything other than an evil, malicious and highly irritating plan.

First...: it snows all damn day...and I'm talking like 6-8 inches here. I see snowplows running around the city like crazed banshees trying to get the damn stuff off the road. Of course, in doing so, they turn all sidewalks into mini-replicas of Mount Washington

Then...: the snow turns into rain. A good thing? The temperature's going up you say? Well yeah, except you're forgetting that there's six inches of snow on the ground already. Result? Rain and snow have a little rendezvous together, getting all nicely mixed up and turning into...slush.

Finally...: and this one's a riot, folks...when the snow and rain combo could not be any messier, the temperature suddenly plummets like a plane out of fuel, dropping into sub-sub-zero regions. The whole city freezes over! All that slush turns into ice! You see? You see??? How can that not be a plan??

Anyway, the whole of New England is a huge ice pond. Hell, you could skate to work if you were crazy enough to. Maybe it'll stay this way a little longer and we can host the next ice olympics in boston...in the middle of the frocking street.

Hehe...I'm not as mad as I make it sound...it's not that bad actually. Honestly.

Except it is. *Shakes fist at Father Winter, making a silent wish that his beard gets caught in a lawnmower*

Dreams Never Lie

2007-02-14T16:05:00.000-08:00

This is just a doodle, but now that I think about it, it could probably serve as the start to a fantasy story...
---------------------------------

It was one of those days. A day where lights were supposed to guide you home, and yet all you could see was crouching darkness. Ashley fumbled in her bag pack for a torch, groping around blindly past the loose sheets crowding around in there. No torch. She groaned.

"Shit," she whispered under her breath, pulling her hand out sharply and putting her finger into her mouth. She sucked on it. Of all the moments in the world to get a damn paper cut! She shifted her weight, and suddenly, the floor creaked and swayed. She froze, her heart suddenly thumping like a rabbit's foot. The creaking slowed down, and eventually, the floor stopped rocking.

"Gently now," she said. She allowed herself to exhale, and her breath shuddered softly as she let it out. "No sudden movements." She felt around again for her bag, slowly extending her fingers in front of her until they closed around the soft canvas. She pulled it towards her. "Please Uncle Tom, if you love me and you can hear me, let me find the flashlight before the whole treehouse falls to the ground!"

As if hearing her, the wind sighed outside, almost teasingly, reminding her quietly that it could topple the tree house with one lungful of air. She began searching the compartments of the bag again, caressing her fingers against its nooks and crannies. The leaves of the tree rustled, softly whispering against the bark of the tree. Ashley looked at the starlight outside the window of the treehouse as her hands did their work. She wished to high heaven she were in open air right now, instead of sitting three stories high in pitch darkness. She tried to imagine what Aunt Emily had simmering merrily on the stove. It was probably pot roast. Thursdays were always pot roast, except last Thursday, when the butcher was having a meat shortage, and Aunt Emily had wound up cooking beans and mashed potatoes. Ashley had wondered how on earth the butcher could have run out of beef. Had all the nearby cows gone on vacation or something?

"Got it!" She whispered excitedly, her fingers closing in around the cold plastic shaft. She turned it on with a click, and suddenly the whole hut erupted into a dull halogen glow.

The wind was getting stronger now, and Ashley heard the soft patter of raindrops falling against the roof of the treehouse. The roof wouldn't last very long...it was made of thatches of hay that hadn't been replaced in ages. Ashley knew she should get her rear end out of there before the wood started getting soggy. But she also knew she wouldn't leave...couldn't leave...until she had found what she was looking for.

She and Sam had built the treehouse years ago with Uncle Tom, but both of them had stopped playing in it after Uncle Tom died. The treehouse reminded her of Uncle Tom too much, and besides, Sam started telling her stories of how Uncle Tom's ghost had moved into the treehouse after he'd died. He claimed he had heard Uncle Tom humming his favorite tune in there, and one day, he'd even smelt tobacco, the same kind Uncle Tom used to smoke in his pipe. She knew Sam was lying, and even if Uncle Tom's ghost had come back, well, it wouldn't hurt her now would it? She was Uncle Tom's little girl, after all. Even so, she came to the treehouse less and less frequently after that. It was no fun without Uncle Tom. One day, she stopped coming all together.

Until now.

Ashley swivelled the beam of her flashlight around. Outside, a fresh peal of thunder boomed, and the rain started falling faster, smacking against the hut in sheets. She got up, knowing the treehouse was going to fall any minute now. "A little longer," she whispered. "It's got to be here! I know it does! Dreams never lie! It's got to be here!"

And suddenly, as she moved the light past a corner of the treehouse, something glittered there. Barely able to contain herself, she moved slowly, almost cat-like towards it. The treehouse started groaning again, but she pressed on, her lips whispering a verse from the Bible that Aunt Emily had taught her as a child. Finally, she reached the corner, and lifted the object to her eyes. At first, she was unable to believe what she was seeing. And then, a tear rolled down her face. A happy, joyous tear.

"Dreams never lie, do they, Uncle Tom?" She said, and her voice was soft with love and remembrance. "You can hear me, can't you? I found your lost ring! After all these years, I found your lost ring! And you showed me where it was!"

She got up and slowly walked to the door of the house, carefully climbing onto the rope ladder. On her way down, she paused, and looked into the black mouth of the treehouse. "I'm going to go home now Uncle Tom," she said firmly. "I'm going to go home and sleep, and you'd better come back to me in a dream!" Her face was drenched in a mixture of rain and tears, and her voice broke as she said, "You'd better come back, because I miss you so much!"

She looked down and started descending the ladder. The treehouse groaned and creaked again, and then fell into a hushed silence.

The Lens of Perception

2007-02-03T09:37:00.000-08:00

Have you ever realized that we don't really live in a real world? Actually, let me qualify that - the world around us is as real as reality. The image of the world in our minds, however, is generated after we perceive it through our five (and for some lucky folk, six) senses, and interpret what we perceive. Everything we soak in from around us - colors, odors, the touch of a loved one - goes through the lens of our minds before it becomes available to us as "the world" we live in. I think it's no understatement to say that we really do live in a virtual world. That's why everybody looks at things differently, has their own viewpoints, and so on.

Now let's talk a bit about that lens, shall we? The way our mind interprets what it perceives is based on, literally, a chaotic number of things. Our lens is shaped as we grow by childhood events, thoughts, reactions to thoughts, new thoughts spawned by old thoughts, bad memories, good memories...quite literally everything under the towering roof of the solar system. I personally think that this is why every person is different from the other. We've all gotten our lens shaped differently, because we've all lived different lives. and our perception of reality - the shadow of the world in our minds - differs from each other. Think about it this way - if our perception of the world were somehow absolute, the psyche of every human being would essentially be exactly the same!

So this lens is what plays the lead role in the old cliche of a glass being half-full or half-empty. My main point here - and this does not come from me but from many close people I've had endless discussions with - that it is possible to change this perception if you really want to. It is possible to change yourself, to change the way you respond to things. I've seen people do it, believe me, and it is not the easiest thing in the world, by far. I'm not fool enough to come out and say, oh don't worry, just will it and things will change overnight. There's no miracle here - no parting of the seas in your mind. It takes time, patience and hard work, but it can be done. I've seen it being done, damn it. I've seen people change right in front of me, with nothing but their determination and free will.

Now you may ask, why is it so hard? Have you ever tried to kick a habit? It's impossible as hell, isn't it? Chewing nails, blinking your eyes too hard, cracking your joints...all of these are nightmares to give up, because they happen unconsciously. Now imagine a thought you are trying to give up - a mental habit if you will. Sounds daunting? It is. At least with habits of the body, it takes a second or two to bring your nails to your mouth. With mental habits, there's no motion, no click, no poof of smoke. It just happens. Thoughts just morph.

And that's why it is so hard. And that's why, when armed with this knowledge, a person can give up a bad thinking habit - can correct his lens of perception like a self-appointed optometrist. They say, after all, that you should keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

I've always thought all my life that I am just the way I am. I can't change myself or the dependence on my emotions. At one point - and here's a crazy thought - I used to think that nobody is a sinner. Everybody has a reason for committing a sin. Imagine somebody who's neck-deep in poverty's mire, who hasn't eaten in three days, and is standing outside the window of a bakery. The only thing that separates him from a loaf of bread is a sheet of glass. Don't you think his fantasies would revolve around the sweet sound of that window shattering? Why should he be a sinner if he steals food to feed himself? Where is his fault in the grand scheme of things? This is something I couldn't reconcile in Islam either. Why does Islam have punishments and "absolute" sins for everything?

But then I realized two things. The first thing is that Allah has given us all free will, albeit to an extent qualified by him. The second is that if everybody were dependent on their whims and emotions, society would plummet into chaos and anarchy. Looking at it another way, if I turn my above argument about sins around, if Allah had not given us free will over our emotions, we would not be to blame for sinning, and He, Magnanimous that He is, would not have been cruel enough to have such harsh punishments. It's only because we do have free will that we also have the ability to control our emotions and our lens of perception.

Refreshing thought? Not as much as I'd think, actually. Because now, I can't keep blaming everything I do wrong on my emotions.

A game of chess, anyone?

2007-01-05T00:58:00.000-08:00

I've begun to realize the truth in the age-old cliche, that life is not all that different from a game of chess. Every possible move in chess can be mapped out the moment the game begins. While it's not possible to map out our lives the same way, it is possible to envision repercussions...to imagine the ways in which rows upon rows of dominoes will fall.

It is not possible to predict the future, but it is possible to predict possibilities. No harm there...is there?

Just like life, most people go all their lives without learning chess. Just like life, people who finally sit down to learn the game almost always get check-mated the first time. The difference is that chess, for all its seriousness, is only a game...life, sadly or otherwise, is not. The other difference is that chess is alternating patches of black and white, and yet life has those pesky shades of grey in between, doesn't it? Those surreal shades of non-deterministic grey, that we all have an intuition for, and yet very few can actually quantify.

We're all players out on a giant chess board of mottled black and white and grey. Don't we owe it to ourselves to learn the game?

The Secrets of Success

2006-12-29T19:01:00.000-08:00

I've noted that people who are "successful" at anything (getting good grades in an exam, rising in the ranks at work, spreading Islam to every corner of their neighborhood, finding themselves...however u wanna interpet success) usually possess two dominant attributes. One is intelligence, and I don't necessarily mean the E=mc2, IQ-measured intelligence. Indeed, I've met people who can't read or write and are sharper than nails when it comes to being smart. I've met others who've flunked exams despite all their study efforts, and yet they possess deep, logically-driven insights to life. In fact, I contend that everybody in this world has this intelligence, despite what our shallow perception tells us.

The other attribute is drive. Ambition. Determination. Want more synonyms? How about motivation? To some extent, I'd say that motivation is more important than intelligence, because without a sense of drive, without ambition to keep your pistons firing and gears turning, well, intelligence is just about as useful as a ferrari with an empty gas tank.

And these two attributes do cover everything else don't they? With intelligence, you'll know your strengths and weaknesses, your friends and enemies. You'll be able to ascend over the potentially destructive forces of emotion. You'll know what's in your power to achieve, and where you'll have to seek help - the same way somebody with a broken leg overcomes his handicap by compensating with his other muscles and using a crutch. And I don't count vision as a third attribute because I think it comes under determination...you have to be determined for something, don't you? Otherwise you'll be like a car revving in neutral.

I know people around me, people who are close to me who have tonnes of drive, and I really really admire them for it. I look up to all the great leaders in history (dubya, anyone?), who've used their intelligence and drive to carve out new maps. I look up to the ill who've stayed positive during unimagineable suffering. I look up to children born without homes, some of whom are never hesitant to smile despite all their hardship.

Yup, there are a lot of people I derive inspiration from. The list is probably as long as Massachussett's I-93.

One thing I realized the other day while reading a book by Stephen Covey, which shows the power of determination (coupled with intelligence, of course). People who are emotionally driven often blame their environment for whatever happens to them. Such people become gloomy when the weather is bleak, are happy when people are nice to them and things are going well, and become depressed otherwise. What Covey contends is that your response to all such external stimuli is, to a large extent, under your control. Every person walks the lands between stimulus and response, and well, it's up to him what he wants to do with them. People who revoke this free will become emotionally driven. And well, of course it's not fully possible to logically channelize a stimulus to a certain response...but there are degrees to which you can do it, and I know people who don't do it at all. Period. Zeroeth degree.

When I read the chapter, I remember feeling a certain sense of disbelief. What was Covey saying? That I was irresponsible? That I was selfish? And then, when I flipped back a few pages in my memory, I realized I could have acted differently in a lot of situations. I chose not to do because...well...a multitude of reasons, which mostly all boiled down to emotions. With this realization came the spark of possibility. Allah has given me control. I know a lot of people disagree with this notion...hell, I strongly did until a week ago, but I've been toying with this thought over and over in the context of all logic I'd employed in the past, and I've begun to realize that it's true.

As somebody wise I know once said, "With your mind, you can conquer the world, and with your heart, you can let it all slip away."

The Sage

2006-12-21T06:30:00.000-08:00

The world is much bigger than you and I, spoke the sage into the looking-glass.

We've tread these waters before, my sage, replied his likeness.

We tread them for the last time, old friend, the sage whispered, and with a blow of his staff, shattered the glass into pieces.

The Ice Princess

2006-12-11T09:02:00.000-08:00

You know, there was a time when I used to hate cold weather. Ithaca used to get numbingly frigid in winter, and this season of polar gloom would last for the better part of the year, starting in October and ending somewhere in April. I despised it like the oppressed. At times, when I was leaning into freezing, skin-numbing winds, I'd marvel like a damn fool at how anything could be so cruel and callous.

You see, my imagination personified the cold into a monster, one that I used to battle every day. I'd battle it stepping out of the house in the morning, feeling like I'd plummetted from my cosy bed into the lung-freezing arctic. Hell, I'd battle it touching a cold doorknob, swearing under my breath at how a single second of jiggling the metal made my fingers feel as if they would fall off in protest and run away.

However, for some reason, things have started to change now. Somehow, I don't dread the cold in the same way. This morning, for example, I didn't turn the heater on when I was driving to work. My hands got really cold, but I didn't mind. And yesterday, I actually opened the windows while driving. The cold air rushed into the car as if it were a vacuum, and settled everywhere...and it felt exhilarating.

I think the reason for the change is, again, my overactive imagination. Call me an idiot, but I've actually begun to feel a bit sorry for the cold. After all, I've been cursing it and telling it to go to hell for the past six years. What if I've been misunderstanding it the whole time? What if it's not a monster with stalactites hanging off its chin, but a beautiful ice princess? A sensitive, delicate ice princess, whom fate has handed the Midas curse - that of harming whoever she touches.

She's been shoved away all her life by scum like myself, hasn't she? And now, I can imagine her sitting on her iceberg, with her legs hugging her chest, weeping freezing tears into pale hands. How lonely must she be? How much in love must she be? After all, she welcomes me in her embrace every time I step outside. She snuggles up to me like a lost child. She tries desperately, with a lover's passion, to seep into my every pore. And her presence lingers even after I've entered the warm snugness of the indoors. I can feel it somewhere in my bones - a chill that just sits there, refusing to go away no matter how warm my surroundings are.

Every right now, that chill reminds me of her, you know...my ice princess. Like a tinge of guilt, it reminds me that she waits patiently outside, harkening for my footfall. I think of the way her caress will make my cheeks burn with icy fire, and the thought is too welcoming to resist. I reach for my jacket.

After all, how can I let love so intense go unrequited?

Ehh...frostbite's a small price to pay...mah icy lovah!

Shadows

2006-12-08T13:50:00.000-08:00

Strange are those times when dreams become demons.

And these are strange times. Even on this bitterly cold morning, dry flakes of snow swirl around constantly outside my window, like quiet uneasy ghosts.

Highs

2006-12-04T17:56:00.000-08:00

Y'know, it's amazing, but the other day, the shit really hit the fan. And hard. I had a mega project due for class that I hadn't even started yet, and another mega-project due for work. So what's the stunning thing here? Well, when the burners turned on, and the pressure mounted, I found myself performing...and really performing, you know. I felt good, despite all the anxiety, and coasted through the whole pressure on sheer adrenaline alone.

Well, it's not really that amazing. I'm sure this has happened to virtually everybody at one time or another in their lives. Basically, you're thrust into an unfamiliar situation, way out of your comfort zone, and you find that the bad things in your personality suddenly disappear, whisked away in a magic trick. You're motivated, you rise to the challenge, you let go and find the beat. You feel good about yourself. And most importantly, you suddenly find yourself with tonnes of faith in Allah. Maybe you even wonder how you could ever have doubted Him.

Sounds familiar? Deja vu? Ring any bells, dear reader?

I've been thinking a bit about such fairy-tale transformations. Especially the part about the renewed faith in Allah. That's happened to me a lot, you know. The first time I was coming to America to start a job, I was really scared. In the days that led up to my flight to the US, fear of the unknown used to haunt me at night, singing terrifying lullabies that made me cringe in my sheets. The day before the flight, I was so anxious about what the future held that my mind felt it had shut down from sheer stress alone. And suddenly, when I stepped into the plane, it all drained away. All the fear. All the anxiety. What was left was still calm - the kind you find on a country-side lake - and an overjoyed faith in Allah that everything would turn out to be okay. And for the next week or so, whenever I thought about Allah, I could literally feel all the tension sitting on my shoulders ease off and slip away.

But it was only for the next week or so. It was short-lived. It was adrenaline-driven...or whatever hormones drive such extreme emotions. After that, when things settled down, my usual worries came back. With a bang. POW!

The same goes for the intial stages of love, doesn't it? When you're head-over-heels about the other person, and all you can think about is when you'll see them next. That stage of puppy-love is the ultimate high, I think. But it wears away. It always does. (Just for the record, I firmly believe that this emotion is not love, but just a fascination with the other person. Infatuation, if you will. Love comes much later if it comes at all...long after the high has gone through a few lows).

Almost anybody can rise above themselves when thrust into a sudden challenge. It's in human nature. Why do you think war brings people closer? Why do you think people of a common cause unite and forget their differences when faced with a common tormenter? What of the man who lifted a whole fricking car by himself and rent it asunder to rescue his child? What of Hindus and Muslims, who became closer than brothers despite their differences when they rose to fight the British? I could go on and on with examples all night long, but I won't, because you and I have both heard them so many times before.

I guess my overall point is that these transient stages are always the most misleading. They can make you a better person, a better believer in Allah. They can unite hearts and minds. They can make you feel good about yourself. They can feel like a drug eddying in your bloodstream. But at the end of the day, it's all ephemeral. It doesn't last. No sir, the real test of love, faith, everything is when you fall back into a state of equilibrium. When all the foam has settled back down. Because that's when your demons start coming back out and making themselves at home once again.

I think it's how we react at that point that really determines what we're made of. Because that's when you can't go with the flow of your emotions any more. You have to hit the brakes and swim upstream. You have to zip out your saber and keep your demons at bay. And that's hard. Isn't it? Most of the time, I don't even know they're there, even while they snicker at me with rotting, crooked teeth.

So I guess my point is that the initial "ascension" that may occur when you're thurst out of your comfort zone - whether it be due to love, war, meeting new people, finding a job or anything else in the world - is never real. Before you know it, it'll slip away like the silken veil it is.

And that's when a whole new trial will begin.

Remembrance

2006-11-28T08:13:00.000-08:00

Verily, in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest. (From the Holy Quran)

Oh me of little faith, how could you have forgotten what your heart already knew?

Emotion

2006-11-25T12:24:00.000-08:00

Tell me something...isn't emotion something metaphysical? I mean, can you see it? Can you hear it? Can any of your five senses perceive it? No they can't. You can only see signs of emotion...furrows in your brow when you're angry...or your lips curling upwards inadvertently when you're elated.

If each of us reflects Allah in part, which is a fundamental Muslim belief, then isn't it also true that these emotions that twist and turn our lives also reflect Allah in part?

Allah's anger is mentioned in the Quran, but isn't it also plausible to assume that Allah might also get jealous, feel flattered, be happy, and so on?

A wise elder in my family once said that when you pray (make dua) you should praise Allah in your dua. Allah likes khushamad, he said playfully to us.

Other wise men of the past have said that Allah's love can only fill that heart which houses no other love within its walls. Isn't that another way of describing jealousy?

These are interesting questions and ones that I would really, really like to ask more people of traditional religious thought. Uzer and Niqabi, if you're reading this, I'd love to know your opinions.

Ooty yaar, tu rehnay hi dayeen. :P

Chaos

2006-11-23T20:19:00.000-08:00

Some time in the 80's, a mathematician came up with an equation to predict the results of a mass-scale rubella vaccination in the US. Before I delve into that, here's a question for you. What would you predict as the outcome of a mass-scale vaccination?

If you're like me, you'd probably expect the incidence of rubella to fall. No rocket science there. It's the obvious, intuitive thing to expect.

Well, it turns out that things didn't quite happen that way in real life. According to the mathematician's equations, a perturbation to the "system" such as a mass-scale vaccination would actually cause large-scale swings in the incidence of the disease. That's exactly what happened. The incidence of the disease rose in the short-term.

Usually, when weird anomalies like this happen, the relevant authorities dismiss it, attributing it to factors out of their control. In this case, doctors probably would have said that a bad batch of vaccines was to blame. However, just the fact that mathematics predicted that the swings would happen shows that life is not as intuitive as we expect(big surprise). The fact of the matter is that there were no unknown factors...no bad batches of vaccine or medical negligence, or other vague theories. The end line is that the rise in the incidence happened because that's the way nature works.

By the way, the branch of mathematics that proved this is...you guessed it...chaos theory.

So to get to where I'm going...the fact (and somewhat of a tragedy) of life is that our minds think in a simple, intuitive, linear way, and the world around us is extremely non-linear and chaotic. That's why there's always a clash between what we expect and what happens. That's why love never works out the way we expect, why relationships bloom and suffer, why moods rise and fall. Because our thinking is too linear and simplified for this world.

Plato had proposed something similar with his notion of the platonic world. According to plato, our minds are still "stuck" in a platonic world...a place we lived in before we were born and where everything was "perfect." That's why there's always such a clash between our ideals and the world. Between the simplified linearity of our minds and the chaos around us.

My question is...why? Why make our brains misfits for this world? Why the disparity between the fuzzy lands of our minds and the even fuzzier vat we are floating around in?

Rhythm

2006-11-20T13:28:00.000-08:00

Everything in life has a peculiar rhythm.

And yet nothing in life fully repeats itself.

And nothing in life is fully deterministic.

For example, seasons come and go in a vaguely predictable way. You know that winter is going to come some time late in the year. But do you know the exact date and time on which winter will arrive? No, you don't. It's not deterministic. And moreoever, has any one season that you've experienced in your life ever been exactly the same, down to the last day, last hour, last puff of wind? Nopes...life is not periodic. It doesn't fully repeat itself.

Such is the beauty of chaos.

Order within disorder.

Jam, and not the apple variety

2006-11-11T16:19:00.000-08:00

Nothing like jamming with friends, eh? Except that we meet after so long, months at a time. And usually we only have a few hours to jam. That gap and the meagre amount of jamming time is nowhere near long enough to find the beat. You know what I mean? Every time you start playing together, you always have to spend some time getting ready. Re-learning chords, solos, getting the timing right, and what not. So it's very rare that we get a song down perfectly, just as it should be. Mostly, we just wind up jumping from song to song. At the end, we usually fall asleep or something.

Isn't it amazing, then, how perfect professional bands are in their harmony? How many brows must have sweated, how many fingers bled, and voices cracked by the sheer amount of practice? I don't think i can ever get there...I simply don't have that much of patience.

But whatever...it's fun to do! Yagshimas! WA WA WEE WA! Okay, that was random, but we were going crazy with borat today.

Children

2006-11-08T19:51:00.000-08:00

If you ask me right now what I miss most about home, I'll probably throw out a lot of random stuff like Mohammadi nihaari, my old friends, and going with my old friends to eat Mohammadi nihaari, and so on. But truth be told - one of the things I get really nostalgic for is the time I spent with my baby cousins!

Children are awesome, aren't they? Masha Allah, they're Allah's bow-tied gifts - little fairies and cherubs they are. They curl their palms around your finger and lead you into their own little worlds, and you wonder why in the name of hell on earth you ever got down or depressed. I've spent so many hours playing games with my cousins, and not as somebody older, but literally as one of them. lol...people who swore on my being a sober guy would glance in and wonder if I had completely lost my mind. One day, my chacha actually got mad at me, saying, "Duffer, ab tumhari umar hai is tarah bachon ke saath khelnay ki?"

But I couldn't help it. It's an addiction. If you've spent time with kids, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about, and if you haven't...well buddy, you've missed out on a lot. Kids have healing in them - that's just the way it is. They take away worries, misery, and dark brooding thoughts. I look at them and their innocence, and I feel cleansed. I also wonder why the heck I always wanted to grow up when I was a kid.

Of course, for all this exciting stuff to happen, the kids have to be good, well-mannered ones. If you're stuck with a couple of spoiled brats who slap your face just to see how you react...well, being cleansed and reborn is probably going to be the last thing on your mind.

The Real You

2006-11-08T13:58:00.000-08:00

It's always happened that whenever I met somebody for the first time, or in a "professional" context such as in a business meeting, I'd always think to myself, "this is not what this person is actually like in real life. This is just a facade. A cover. Everybody's laughing and joking and we're all just best pals, aren't we! It's all so fake!" You ever had that feeling?

But I guess the more I think about it, the more I realize that this point of view is just not true. In most cases, people aren't consciously putting up a facade. They aren't trying to act the way they act. They just wind up acting like that, that's all. It's their natural reaction to that particular situation.

Another way of thinking about this is that there's no such thing as the real you, which is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot. I don't think we're like a stage, hidden behind curtains that you have to pull apart with the help of time and trust to the actual person inside. Nopes, I think we're more like multi-faceted crystal, and depending on the social context, we show a particular side. If we're new to the person we're meeting, the crystal shows "the new person" side - we're all proper and formal. However, with time and familiarity, the crystal rotates. The person's personality changes. A new side is exposed. A new epoch begins.

In this case, I guess, the real you would just be the most coveted facet - the one most fun to hang out with, the one most romantic, and so on. This way of looking at things also explains quite well how dynamic our personalities are. Everybody's heard the story of how the relationship between married couples changes with time. But that's just it - I don't think it's changing. I don't think that a person was "good" before and then turned "bad" a few years later. I think all that happens is that marriage explores all the facets, each one different, with its own textures. People don't "change"....they just expose personality traits that happened to be latent before.

In fact, even with people very close to you, I bet you've only touched the tip of their personality's iceberg. There's a whole continent underneath that's just not tangible to you. The world is in a grain of sand, and every person is a universe in himself or herself. This comparison of the universe and a person is so analogous to how a number growing from 1 to infinity can be as massive with respect to the number of decades as a number shrinking from 1 to 0, even though the physical "sizes" of the numbers are so different. Such duality in the universe just blows my mind.

Of course, I could be wrong, or it could be more complex that this - but on five hours of sleep, it all just makes so much of sense!

Snow (again)

2006-11-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

So I just finished reading Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (who allegedly sounds like a dalmation). The book was actually originally written in Turkish, and the version I read was, obviously, a translation, and a pretty damn good one at that. Snow got Pamuk the nobel prize in literture recently. The story itself is about Ka, a liberal Turk who's lived in Germany for years, and who returns to the small, desolate town of Kars in Turkey. The book centers around the two or three days Ka spent in Kars, and his ventures into love, religion, politics, and his own soul.

I have mixed feelings about the book. There were moments when I simply couldn't put it down, and had to see what happened next. There were other sections of the book that, unfortunately, dwelt too much into politics, and to be honest, that bores the hell out of me. I've never had a good appreciation for politics, and mostly find it too dry. Nopes, human emotion and psychology are what get my gears turning, and I'll tell ya, snow has oodles and oodles of them.

But it's beyond that. Ka, the main character, is a poet, and driven by his emotion, not his mind. In a lot of ways, I'm like Ka, and because of Pamuk's amazing powers of description, I seemed to feel everything that Ka felt. Pamuk, the writer, was holding up a mirror and shouting, "Over here, fucker! This is what you look like! This is what you do! Pretty? Not!" And it's not pretty, no sir...those enslaved by their own emotions are often self-destructive, like giant, flaming stars that wind up imploding into themselves.

And that's the scary thing. There's a logical part of me who scoffs at Ka, calling him a self-lacerating, pessimistic fool. But there's also that writer inside me who smiles with a sad understanding at the way Ka's mental states twist and turn, and secretly knows that his fate could have been no different.

There is heavy snowfall in Kars throughout the novel. In the comfort of my blanket, Pamuk's description of the cold and the snowflakes seems so poetic. Ka mentions once in the novel how strangely silent everything is when snow begins to fall (provided, of course, that a blizzard isn't blowing up your ass). Ka describes it as the 'silence of God.' How beautiful!

Even though the landscape Pamuk sketched of the snow made me want to catch the next flight to Turkey, I've never gotten along well with US winters. I like the snowfall, and even the cold to some extent. What I can't stand though, what freezes my marrow, are the gusts of wind. Icy puffs from the maw of a snow troll they are, and a terrible troll at that. On windy winter days, even seconds spent outside are unbearable. Hell, I'm sure if I took a piss outside on one of these days, it would freeze in mid-air.

The other thing I can't stand is the trees in winter. All their leaves have fallen off by this point, and they look like black, charred death. The winter landscape here in New England is so bleak and...desolate. Like an arctic wasteland. There's nothing romantic or poetic about it, and believe me, I've tried looking. I've been peering my eyes for the last six years.

Anonymity

2006-11-05T20:38:00.000-08:00

Even though this blog is public, so many people out there in the world are never going to read it. It's a weird, deliciously ticklish thought. What I'm writing right now is readily available for anyone with an internet connection (and a computer, of course) to see. And yet, blogistan (hell, the net) is so huge that it's very much likely that only the people I've told about this blog will see it. Maybe not even them. I'm a small tadpole in a huge, foaming river and ironically, that gives me anonymity.

So if I write "choohiya khala, your cooking SUCKS! And do something about that hairstyle of yours...it went out of style after Lord Mounbatten's wife hit the fashion scene" there's virtually no chance in hell she's ever going to read it! Or if I say, "Haji Sahib, if you slouch anymore, hunchbacks are going to be consoling themselves saying, 'man, we could've wound up like him, y'know'" Haji Sahib will have to find and read it first to kill me :P.

Ahhh, it's such a nice, snug feeling! Catch me if you can!

Feedback

2006-11-04T13:51:00.000-08:00

This is all on hearsay, but there was recently a singing competition on some Pakistani channel, and Mekaal Hasan was one of the judges. One of the girls sang terribly, and yet she had no idea how badly she sounded (probably something like a cat being neutered). Well, Mekaal sahib wasn't exactly one to pull punches. He told her that one of the aspects of being a good singer was to be able to "hear" onself sing. Apparently, if the girl had been able to do this, she would have stopped singing a long time ago. But again...I didn't see the show.

Essentially, Mekaal was talking about feedback...the ability to return an output of a system back to its input. At lower, subconscious levels, we use feedback all the time. Our eyes use it to adjust their focus. Our ears use it to change the tensions of our eardrum. Our nervous system uses feedback to know exactly where our muscles are in space, relative to the rest of the body. When you're steering your car, you're using feedback to adjust where you're going. The list can fill the damn yellow pages and more.

However, at a conscious level, the use of feedback is comparatively much less, probably because it requires conscious thought to train oneself in the beginning. The girl with the voice of a thousand nails on a chalkboard is one example (lol...I have no idea why I'm dissing the poor girl. I mean, I haven't even heard her sing fergodsakes). But I think, to some extent, such feedback is essential for becoming a better person. Essentially, if you're aware that what you're doing is bad, you have a chance to stop doing it. If, at some level, your thoughts are being fed back into your brain, you have an opportunity not to think sin. But for all this, you need to be aware of these things...you need to have some level of feedback, whether conscious or sub-conscious, real-time or post-processed.

Otherwise, if everything is "open-loop" as it's called in engineering, i.e., if there's no higher-level feedback, I'll remain stuck in my habits, spiralling in a vicious cycle that continues forever.

Snow

2006-11-03T08:49:00.001-08:00

A few lines from Snow, by Orhan Pamuk. I don't have the book in front of me, so this is from memory...

Happiness and good poetry can exist together only for fleeting moments. After this, happiness will either make writing coarse, or the weight of one's own words will make happiness disappear.

Pamuk...you da man.

Tagged!

2006-11-02T02:04:00.000-08:00

I've been tagged by Niqabi, so here goes....

Height: 5'8
Color: dunno....light brown? Whatever the desi color is called
Piercing: none
Tattoos: none

Right now time: 4:57am (yep...can't sleep :))
Mood: Pensive...about why the hell I can't sleep
Taste: Bad...morning breath
Weather: cool, and yet not freezing my keister off
Bad habit: Procrastinating
Current crush: Quite a few
Biggest regret: Giving up writing for almost four years is the first thing that comes to mind
Perfume(s): Brut aftershave? Just anything I can get my hands on, really
Thing I want to do: Get a book published in the US

Favourite
TV show: Don't have cable :) But probably a comedy like Seinfeld...or family guy! What the deuce!
Book: crime and punishment, and the harry potter series
Non alcoholic drink: diet coke
Milk drink: How about just plain milk?
Brand: none
Color: red
Emblem: Chand and Taara
Perfume: None.
Designer: None
Chocolate: Twix and snickers!

Have I Ever
Broken the law: Didn't turn my A Levels teacher over to the Singaporean police when he spat in public over there. Booyah!
Misused credit card: Nopes
Skipped school: tonnes of times
Fell asleep in the shower/bath: No...don't have a bath, and well, is it even possible in a shower?
Had children: No
Been in love: Yes
Been hurt: Plenty of times.

Random
Have a job: Yes...electrical engineer, at your service.
My CD player has what in it right now: A cd filled with weird african instrumentals
If I were a crayon, the color: red
What makes me happy: A nice, home-cooked meal.

When/What Was the Last
I got a real letter: Two years ago, from my baby cousin
Got an email: From Sunil, who's convinced Dev looks like Nick Lachey
Thing I purchased: Pancakes!
TV program I watched: Family guy, I think
Movie I saw in the theaters: It's been ages...Inside Man, I think.
Hugged: Ages and ages ago
Place I was an hour ago: In my sheets, trying to fall asleep
Song heard: Peera Ho...Khalid Anum
Phone call: Aditya
Was depressed: Two days

What Comes to Mind When I Hear
Car: Honda Civic...my trusty steed
Murder: a 12" saber
Cape: Cape cod, definitely.
Cell: cell phone
Fun: Gup-shup and general chillaxing with friends
Shoe: hush puppies
Crush: Jennifer Aniston (yeah yeah, she's old, but what the heck)
Music: Joe Satriani
Love: Ishq
Chalk: school

5:22am...time for Fajr.

Inspirations

2006-10-29T19:50:00.000-08:00

I've had two inspirations today. Not huge ones...nothing can really be a big inspiration at this age. But relatively quite big ones. Mini-supernovas at least. And on the same day.
That's quite an achievement.
The first one was a book I finished today: the fifth mountain, by Coelho. It reminded me something that I had forgotten for quite some time now. It reminded me that not everything is written in stone...that man has free will. That we can fight our destiny. That Allah likes it when we pick up our arms, and as my friend ooty put it, say "never more." I don't know how on earth I could have lost sight of this - I'd reasoned out an explanation for the apparent paradox between destiny and free will over a year ago.
The second inspiration is my good friend Chinmay Joshi. This is one guy who changed his destiny over a span of a few months. He had a dream - of just wanting to chill with friends, go out, meet more people and basically, live the life, as they say. Well, he's achieved it, ladies and gentlemen. As I said, within months.
So, Coelho and Joshi, I salute both of you.

Seinfeld moment

2006-10-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

As usual, the happy bubble of a world I'm living in just has to get popped, doesn't it?

hasnain says:
btw, I happen to have an awesome eye for earrings...I gave somebody two sets as a gift last december
hasnain says:
and she doesn't wanna part with them
maryam says:
oh good boy
maryam says:
i LOVE earrings
hasnain says:
and she also doesn't know they were only 10 bucks each
hasnain says:
BOOYAH !
maryam says:
thats dhs.35
maryam says:
thats expensive
hasnain says:
eh?
hasnain says:
really?
hasnain says:
shit

Random

2006-10-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

Through the blinding darkness, I see a faint glow yawning in the horizon.
Twilight.
Oh, sweet twilight.

The Future

2006-10-14T03:33:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting thought: you ever notice that things seldom occur the way you envision them? In fact, twisting words a little, mapping out a future event in your imagination seems to greatly reduce the chances that it will happen in that way, doesn't it? It's happened to me so many times. If there's a future event coming up that gets me tossing and turning at night in dread, conjuring up the worst things that could happen, things seldom go that bad. Unfortunately, it works the other way too; whenever I daydream about just the perfect way I'd like something to happen, the damn thing will never happen that way.

Of course, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for it that lies hidden in dusty tomes of probability, perception and our own expectations. But a) what's the fun in explaining it away? and b) that doesn't change the fact that it still works. I've given some of my best exams and reviews when I'm dreading them, kneading out different things that could go wrong. In fact, maybe this is the reason that unrequited love often remains unrequited, and even if one gets whom one pines for, there is much frustration in life. If you've already spent a lifetime of beautiful moments with your beloved in the fertile lands of your mind, you've eliminated the possibility of ever living that life in the real world.

All this is a play on words, of course, but the great writer Jorge Luis Borges takes it to an extreme in one of his stories. The main character is due to be shot in a few days. In his desperation, he imagines the worst emotions and suffering he could possibly have, thinking that by doing so, he's eliminating the chances of them ever happening! Unfortunately, by doing so, Borges' character falls victim to another demon of the human psyche: paranoia.

Strange Places, Strange Times

2006-10-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

I'm at a peculiar place in life right now. Alhamdulillah, everything is good, but it seems I've been in this place for an eternity now. I feel like a traveller who's stayed over at an inn too long...I'm beginning to think it's home. I'm beginning to like spending evenings in the tavern, talking to other wanderers and telling stories over the clinking of mugs. In doing so, I'm starting to forget that there ever was a place called home, where people still wait for me and memories still frolick. Maybe this is something all travellers feel...the sense of being uprooted and tossed about in the wind, not belonging to any one place.

As dusk falls and cloaks everything in darkness, this wanderer sits in a quiet corner and contemplates. Maybe the sun is telling me something. Maybe it's time to pick up my knapsack, throw in a loaf of bread and pound of tea, and start out for home. After a long, long time.

If I can ever find it again.

The Miracle of Islam

2006-10-10T16:54:00.000-07:00

It just never ceases to stun me how amazingly tuned Islam is to human nature. Little things in life constantly keep reminding me. The best moments are when by Allah's grace, I observe something and I can correlate it back to the wisdom of His last religion. Those moments leave me filled with happiness and a sense of sublime wonder.

Like the other day, I was discussing religion with a very good Hindu friend of mine. We were talking about the importance of religion in every day life. He was of the opinion that religion has a very limited practical role when it comes to taking your mind off mundane worries. He said something to the tune of: "what's the point, man...even if I do pooja in the morning and I feel at peace then, I wind up forgetting it in the busy routine of the day." And afterwards, when I was mulling over his words, this one question suddenly lit up in my mind like a bulb....

Why does Islam insist upon five prayers a day?

In fact, insist is the wrong word...five prayers a day are part of the fundamental pillars of Islam. They're the barebones you need...other stuff is extra credit - whipped cream on top of your imaan cake, if you like. In a moment of frustration and despair, my friend had given me a morsel that ironically fed my faith and made it stronger. And now I can appreciate one solid reason out of a myriad why praying is so necessary, and why it is interspersed throughout the day.

It's necessary because we keep forgetting.

It's as simple as that. We get dragged down into banal details of every day life. Praying gives us a chance to see the bigger picture, the end goal, the sky for the trees baby. In fact, Allah in his wisdom probably knew that even five prayers throughout the day wouldn't be enough, and that we'd still forget in between prayers (we do though, don't we?) Maybe that's why He had originally prescribed more...much much more. Ultimately, Allah, our Creator, knows what makes our gears tick. Islam as a way of life channels our instincts as opposed to oppressing them.

Of course, only Allah knows his Wisdom. We can only stare in awe at what we'll never even hope to understand.

Stream of Consciousness

2006-10-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

Writing styles - there's never a shortage of them, is there? There are dozens of little tricks that writers have up their sleeves, and writers use them with glee, pulling rabbits out of hats and (or so they hope) leaving their readers stunned. But there's one writing style in particular called stream of consciousness that's probably the hardest to read (and must be mighty tough to write too. I know I can't do it for shit).

And it is exactly what it sounds like - it's supposed to be a written account of the stream of your thoughts, images, flashes...basically every little volcano that erupts and bursts in that little brain of yours. So I figured, why not give it a try?

Somebody laughed haha Keep typing keep going somebody's coming I have to go and read lord of the rings at noon and I'm still waiting for the day to get over. space a man standing on a canyon looks at me directly but I'm trying to work right now and work I shall I'm going to the lab to work no write. I'm writing but working and head hurts feels full what's that smell? A tall man in a white t-shirt winks and walks away fists screwed up and I'm thankful I slipped away.

Makes no sense at all, does it? lol. Well, thoughts hardly do though, if you think about it. And these were my thoughts at the time, as weird and random as they may be.

Believe it or not, there are actually whole books written in this style. James Joyce loved stream of consciousness, and one of his books called Finnegan's Wake is virtually unreadable. Seasoned English professors have thrown up their hands in frustration at that book, saying it's an impossible task to decipher.

It is an interesting style though, at least for writing if not for reading. Give it a try sometime. Bring that nib to a piece of paper and let it fly with your thoughts. Bruce Willis said in the sixth sense that if you do this for long enough in one sitting, you'll soon be writing things you never imagined you had within you. Creepy things, I expect...things that flutter in the night...things that awaken from slumber when u're tossing and moaning in the shadows of a nightmare. Muahahaha!

state of mind

2006-10-07T03:41:00.000-07:00

Boy, am I in a dreary mood today. I feel as cold as rain (it literally is that cold too...Fall is already on its way out the door). Why is it that whenever you feel low, your blackest memories start peeking out at you from dark corners within your mind? Why do your till-now forgotten insecurities rise like pricking grains of sand and suddenly start blowing around you in a maelstrom? What tails do I tread on, what switch do I accidentally flick to start this chain reaction? Is it just me? Is it just an overactive imagination and a mind speeding on the verge of a crash? Or is this entwined in human nature?

Sorry boys...comes as part of the parcel. Take it or leave it. In fact, take it. Go on, don't be shy...

There are times (such as right here, right now) when I loathe human nature. It disgusts me like a cockroach might. No matter how hard I squint, it still looks as dark and dank to me as the guts of a forgotten cave. The same old cycle, ladies and gentlemen. The same ol' mistakes repeated over and over. The wise learn from their mistakes. Those even wiser learn from others' mistakes. Most people, communities, countries, cultures do neither. Nope, they keep on doing what they're doing, and history keeps on repeating itself like an accursed sine wave. I just wish somebody would pull the plug on the oscillator.

Anyhow, I didn't mean for this to be such a forlorn post (or maybe I did), but it became so of its own volition. And I actually feel lighter now, having gotten this off my chest. I'll IA come out of the dumps in a day or two (that damn sine wave again!) . After all, it's foliage day in New Hampshire! Today, Fall is in its throes over there, and all the trees are blazing with fiery colors. I think I'll call a few friends and head up there, just for the heck of it....

A Father's Wise Words

2006-09-29T02:50:00.000-07:00

"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

2006-09-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

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...

2006-09-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

...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

2006-09-14T06:53:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

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...

2006-09-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

...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?

2006-09-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Inertia....ohhhh, woe to inertia!

2006-08-31T12:02:00.000-07:00

Howdy people. I'm back, in case you were wondering where on earth I'd disappeared to. The last couple of months have been mad hectic. I was taking a part-time engineering masters course, and suffice it to say, I didn't even have time (or the thought) to run a comb through my hair. A lot of people at work thought I was going for a 'fro. Others started calling me Kramer (from Seinfeld). With all that work, writing has just been a synonym for wishful thinking.

Alhamdolillah, though, the course is over. I've been on a three-week vacation from my part-time masters. My parents are visiting, and I've been showing them around New England. Things have slowed down a little from the blinding clip they were at recently. In this more relaxed environment, I've gotten a little more time to think...and I don't mean chin-on-knuckles pondering. I mean the relaxed, backburner type of thinking. I have ideas simmering in the back of my mind, and from time-to-time, I check on them to see how they're doing, adding a dash of spice or a stir of the ladle if I fancy.

So what are those ideas saying? It's simple - the more I think, the more I'm convinced that I simply want to write. I want to write stories, novellas, blogs...you name it. Eventually, if I'm good enough, I want to try my hand at getting published in the US. I know I want to do this, just as simply as a child knows it wants milk (or you know when you want to take a leak...whichever analogy makes you happy). Not that I want to quit engineering. Quite the opposite - I want to earn from engineering, and have writing be my hobby...my money-on-the-side occupation. Engineering is my daily toil...I want writing to be my escape. I want to plunge into the ravines flowing in my mind...explore them...see what worlds I come out into.

There is, however, one tiny thing getting in my way...

Inertia.

Man, how I despise the damn thing. Sure, I convince myself that the only reason for not writing is lack of time. I spend nine hours a day working. My mind feels like mush when I get home. And on top of that, I have to take masters classes - do you have any idea how hard they are? If I told you my weekly routine, I could easily lead you to believe that I'm a burnt-out, overworked sap. Of course he wouldn't have time for writing, you would say. But somewhere inside me, in the no-man's land that theologians call "conscience," a sage shakes his head at me and clucks his tongue in disapproval. You see, I can't hide from him. I can convince the world I don't have time, but I can't convince myself, because he's always there to remind me otherwise with his head-shaking, tongue-clucking, annoyingly self-righteous attitude.

As you can see, I'm slightly frustrated.

Anyhoo, Insha Allah enough is enough. Enough of inertia. Enough of the sagging guilt that accompanies it. Enough of being shackled to the ball-and-chain of my own whims. Classes start next week. Let's see if I can get through this next semester without giving up my dreams.

May Allah grant me will...

Driving forces

2006-06-11T00:54:00.000-07:00

What drives people to be the way they are? I am sitting in a room right now, as I type these very words. There are five people in front of me. They don't know I'm typing this. Indeed, for all purposes, I'm the ideal observer, placed in the corner of the room. For the past hour, all these people have been dancing the well-loved waltz of social contact...groups of friends interacting with each other. When I say groups of friends, that's exactly what I mean - closely-knit friends meeting other closely-knit friends. It's so interesting how they have a tendency to stick to their groups. These groups sit opposite each other, interacting with each other like two teams facing off. I'm guessing that a sense of security plays a strong role here - people feel confident with people they already know well.

How are people so different from each other? I find this amazing. What drives people to be the way they are? Why do some girls hang out like boys with you, and why are some girls typical girls? You know what I'm talking about, right? If you've watched kuch kuch hota hai, then you definitely know what I'm talking about, where Kajol doesn't act like a girl at all, and rani mukherjee is the "perfect" woman. See that dichotomy?

I don't even know what I'm saying right now, or what my point is. It's 4am rite now, and my brain is too muddled to make a point. Make of this post what you will. Tomorrow, I'll hopefully feel fresh enough to piece this all together. Until then...

Whirling mystics

2006-05-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

They whirled in the midst of dazzling colors, their robes rising in harmony to their own ascension into esoteric realms. They whirled on and on like tops, spinning joyfully in a dance of ishq. They whirled, and the stars whirled with them in the skies above, like fireflies around a lamp.

The tune played in mind over and over as I looked on, and moist drops of envy rolled down my face. Someone inside me insisted that he too had tasted what they were going through....that he too had risen into surreal planes. But I knew better.

I had never danced. I had never whirled. God only knew if I ever would.

The blog bans in Pakistan

2006-03-08T08:02:00.000-08:00

Most people have heard of the bans on blogspot and blogger.com imposed by the Government, after some of the blogs reproduced the caricatures of Prophet Mohammad (SAW). I won't go into the brainlessness of this act - those who are in Pakistan are much aware of this already. I can only imagine their frustration at our Government's lack of understanding.

Unfortunately, there's really no way to circumvent the ban, other than using a bypass proxy server that sits outside the banned network. I'm sure most people are doing this already. I'm also sure that some won't have access to these.

My point? This is a time for action. A lot of people on the blog network have already posted groups that frustrated Pakistani bloggers can join. If we all speak in one voice, we have a better chance of catching the Government's ears. DrPak (http://drpak.blogspot.com) has created a group on google where people can speak out in one voice. There's also another website dedicated to this cause:

The Government's not going to understand unless we explain it to them. I suggest we get cracking.

The alchemist

2006-02-14T06:37:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading The Alchemist. It's a nice book...a very quick read, with words as simple as its message. I don't know if you've read it, but it basically says to believe in your dreams and struggle for them to the end. If you reach the end of the rainbow, the journey will have made you a better person, no matter what your pot of gold looks like. This is something I've sort of known all along...I guess it's innate to us...but Coelho summarized it neatly in the life of Santiago the Shephard.

There have been so many times when I really wanted to do something, but held back for some reason or the other. The universe lies in a grain of sand, so I'll give you the most mundane example ever, and this has happened to me a number of times. I'd be sitting in a classroom listening to a professor's lecture, and suddenly, I'd have this irresistible urge to ask a question. But then, this second voice would crop up, telling me that the question is stupid...something a freshman would know. So I'd fold my arms on my chest and sit tight, but I'd always be left with this nasty unease in my chest. The same unease you get when you're about to sneeze, but it never comes. And lo and behold, somebody in the class would often ask a similar question to mine. :)

I guess that unease multiplies as more and more wishes go unfulfilled. The worst realization is that they went unfulfilled simply because one let them.

That's why Coelho says that increasing knowledge requires not just reasoning, but action also. To give a mundane example again, there's an empty can of coke by my side. I can spend the whole day thinking about how I want it to be in the trash can. By the time the sun is bowing its head, I'll be exhausted, my thinking capacity drained, but the can won't have moved an inch. It'll only move when I pick it up and toss it into the garbage. The scenario may be comical in its stupidity, but I think the underlying principle is quite applicable to our daily lives.

The all-seeing eye

2006-02-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I've developed - as I'm sure many others do - the habit of observing my surroundings. The original idea was to have this portion of my mind that would only observe and analyze things that happened around me in an unbiased way. I wanted this unbiased insight to ultimately correct my own flaws and make myself a better person. Alas, I was trying to decouple emotion from reason...one of the hardest things that can be done.

And essential too. Because, as the great thinkers have said over and over, we do not act on something unless we're convinced it's okay to do. That applies to everything. To us a robber is a person without scruples who cannot see the distinction between right and wrong. That's because we're judging that distinction from the comfort of our armchairs. To a person who's tottering on the brink of that distinction, who's in the trenches, who's on the field playing, things always look different. Scales always balance differently. Thus at the moment a robber is slipping into a house, he will be logically convinced that what's he's doing is absolutely justified.

And therein lies the fundamental flaw with logical reasoning - no matter how hard we try, our brains aren't just purely thinking machines. Humans have emotions, and those emotions always tend to bias our thinking. That's why some people justify that alcohol is allowed in Islam, and others go out of their way to prove that it isn't. Really, if you put your heart into it, you can justify anything. In the right emotional state, our minds will conveniently belittle the parameters that tend to swing the logical equation against our favor.

In the end, I think I did succeed a little bit. There is this little corner of my mind that just observes, like the motion camera in movies. It just takes in all that's happening around it. But just like a camera, it is ultimately powerless, possessing only the ability to sit and watch as event after event unfolds.

Creaking!

2006-02-03T03:34:00.000-08:00

I think I'm officially going nuts. The guy who lives above me has a creaky floor. A really creeky floor. Know what that means for me? Every time he walks across the room, I feel like biting leather.

Actually, during the day it's not bad. But I think he has this habit of waking up around 6am to go to the washroom or something. Which means I'm also promptly awake at 6am because of all the racket he makes. Take a leak man, but don't wake up my farishtas in the process!

And so, for the past week, I've been on 5-6 hours of sleep, every day. I feel like the guy in "the machinist" who hasn't slept in a year. Except my reason for not sleeping is a creaky floor and an early-morning pisser.

Even now it's 6:45 am...I've been tossing and turning for the past hour. No luck. Because, you see, now my body is tuned to this guy firing off the ol' creak alarm in the morn.

Feeling highly unamused at the moment.

Plato...

2006-01-29T18:55:00.000-08:00

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?

2006-01-28T21:16:00.000-08:00

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

2006-01-24T10:25:00.000-08:00

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...

2006-01-23T09:21:00.000-08:00

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...

2006-01-22T14:16:00.000-08:00

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

2006-01-20T14:25:00.000-08:00

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...

2006-01-19T04:37:00.000-08:00

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.