The Crimson Storm

And beyond...

2011-08-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

Im lazy when it comes to posting. More like inconsistent. More like I fall off the radar, the edge. And sometimes, forget to float.

However, I'm beyond now. In a place where I must write and chant. The names of a thousand forgotten things. I must remember to catch the sundrops. I must write before I'm written out. Life is in the now. Time is always now. That is the law. The final law. All religions have convergent validity here at this subtlety. We are all in the now. And that is perhaps the greatest truth of all.

What to do now? What to do? Shall I work and make money and play with the blind boys? Or will I take up a pursuit and chase it to the end? Can I ever finish that task? May I ever run time down? Or will I be run down?

All a matter of staying in the now. And remembering.

Studying for the boards sucks

2010-07-23T18:01:00.001-07:00

I can't seem to study for the Boards that well. With a little baby in the house, taking care of chores and a new job seems more important than mindlessly reading endocrinopathies. Yuck! What keeps me going is this angel as beheld below.

Muaah. Love him.
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Location:Starlight Rd,Lady Lake,United States

Pakistan-related books

2010-07-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

I have Tariq Ali's The Duel, Salman Ahmad's Rock and Roll Jihad, Daniyal Muhayyudin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, as well as Ali Sethi's The Wishmaker as ebooks. I would be happy to lend them from my collection to any readers, if anyone's interested.

Usman

Ahad

2010-06-22T15:08:00.001-07:00

My son was born on the winter solstice in the year 2009. He was 21 inches long, and he cried for five minutes before the nurse cleaned him up and handed him to his mother. He fell quiet the moment he touched his mother. It was perhaps one of the most surreal moments of my life.

I had loved my son from the moment I had heard his heart beat via the obstetric probe. The wusha wusha wusha of life scared me. It was fear of the unknown, but I was also stunned. Now I realize I had also fallen in love.

Ahad is funny, smart, beautiful, charming, irksome, moody, and a person. Never realized babies had such strong personalities. Well, now I know. In a moment he is irritating, silly, funy, and gorgeous.

He is a facet of God. And I love him.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Grandview Ave W,Roseville,United States

Moving house

2010-06-22T13:05:00.001-07:00

I came to the US three years ago alone and Muslim. I am moving from Minneapolis to Leesburg in three days with a little baby and my wife.

It is an odd feeling. I feel like I did when I left the Male Hostel. The capital letters are important. They reflect what I feel about the hostel.

Once again I am a nomad.

The Ancient World is Stirring Again

2009-05-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

A thousand years ago, when I was a kid of eight or nine, I discovered the wondrous world of high fantasy in Urdu.

I still remember I had a birthday party. I was in class two (I refuse to say 'grade'!). A friend brought me a 5 rupee children's book about a boy who had magical powers bestowed by one 'Bandar baba', the Monkey Man, a dervish living in a tiny hut deep inside a mysterious jungle. Subsequent to that bestowal, the boy, ten years old himself, could fly in the air, walk on water, fight off evil creatures and dark magicians, and was accompanied by a girl witch. The boy of course was Chan Changloo, so called because when he walked he would produce the sound of tinkling bells from his toes, a reminder on each step that these powers be used for the goodness of mankind. And the girl's name was Shamli. This was a series of children's books written by one Mazhar Kaleem, MA. The same man who was (and probably still is) the most popular torch-bearer of Ibn-e-Safi, the legendary Urdu Spy fiction writer. Imran Series lives on through the pen of Mazhar Kaleem, as millions of Pakistanis know quite well.

That little book was the beginning of my life as a writer, because each night I would enact magical plays and moves in my head and direct and screenwright multiple adventures. Chan Changloo, Tarzan, Chalosak Malosak, Umar (oo!) Ayar, and multiple characters either created or propogated by the hands of multiple writers and publishers, most notably Mazhar Kaleem MA via Yusuf Brothers Publications in Multan were (and sometimes in the dark moments of the night still are) more real to me than anything else happening in my nerdy little life. There would be book exchanges with cousins and friends, piles and sackfuls carried to and from Ravi Road and Allama Iqbal Town, Lahore, and I still remember the excitement in my heart as I would sit in the backseat of my dad's car, looking forward to readig those adventures. Such was the beautiful, innocent reality of my childhood friends and assets.

One of the greatest high fantasy dastans though that captured me for years to come was that of Amir Hamza and Talism Hoshruba. These tales are the Urdu equivalent and, if I may, superior of the Alif Laila (A Thousand and One Nights). They are perhaps the longest epic tales ever written in the history of mankind, passed on orally, oratorially, told and retold in courts of Moguls, the streets of IndoPakistan, to beggars and to emperors, in a day when days were long and the world was vast, mysterious, cruel, but beautiful.

All my life, I have defined myself as a writer. Medicine is my work and my humbling. Writing is my spirit and my fumbling effort to be taller than my five and a half feet. I have lamented all this while the disappearance of Urdu as a medium of magic in childhood. I have wept at the religiopolitical terrorism going on in my country, inflicted at my people, but I have also sighed at the praise showered upon Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, while Hamza and Amar Ayyar sit in a corner, pale and silent like ghosts of dreams past.

Then something happened.

Someone got tired of his own tears and lamentation, someone stronger and more wilful than I will ever be, and penned the translation of the original Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. He sat down, and scribbled line after line, till his electronic quills were drenched with the sweat and blood of his toils, and thus was born The Adventures Of Amir Hamza IN ENGLISH.

Finally, the manuscript that was dying away, that dust was laying a pale film of claim upon, that the monopolising tyrants of English had strangled and almost choked, rises back into the limelight, fresh and gleaming, like a baby pheonix, like Zeus from the cobbled lava of the sun, like Lazarus himself called back from the dead.

It is to Musharraf Ali Farooqi's credit that he spent years on this labor of love. Who can imagine the long stretches of time, the days and works of hands that rustled on paper, determined in their love for a lover that must have seemed so completely out of reach in this world of iPods, iPhones, ebooks, Eragon ( a wretchedly ill-writ novel by the way in my humble opinion), Potter and LOTR? Who can imagine the self-doubt, the exhaustion of trying to bring a dying world back to life?

I can...and so can millions of others who must be out there, lovers of Urdu and Urdu literature.

But I can't do what Mr Farooqi did. He did it! Dastan-e-Amir Hamza and Talism Hoshruba gleam on the bookshelf in your nearest bookstore, the former actually published by Random House.

Musharraf actually gives a fascinating history of the dastans in the beginning of each series. The Adventures of Amir Hamza is a single volume of almost a thousand pages,a feat of marvel and love and beauty. The Hoshruba series, so I hear, will be a 24 volume series, the longest epic, the most comprehensive saga of magic and mystery in any language in the world.

To anyone who is lucky enough to be able to buy and read both epics, please pass this on. The ancient world is stirring again, the lights in Hogwarts dim, while the torches in Parestan and Mount Kaf whoosh into existence.

Amir Hamza and Amar, undying friends, stand now, smiling upon millions and millions of Urdu-reading souls that ever lived in the last 200 years. They look tired and a little old, but Hamza's mighty steed and Amar's lightning speed whiz by us. The Invisible Cloak and the Neverending Satchel lie in old, skeleton hands, gleaming like Aladdin's lamp.

Welcome to two hundred years ago!

Out of the void...

2009-03-23T19:55:00.001-07:00

I have lost words to write.

1 yr and 3 months. That's the time period after which I'm writing anything. Much has happened in between. I once listened to someone say that youth goes fleeting by, but old age lasts forever. It is true. So much has happened in the interim since I last wrote anything on this blog.

I am married now...happily. Much much happily alhamdulillah. Junaid and I are almost at the end of the second yr of internal medicine residency. Moiz will finish his intern year in medicine soon. Murtaza and Uzer are well set in their surgery residencies. Fawad, Mujtaba and Hussain while the time away happily and busily in theri respective medicine programs. Bubloo sahib matched in Family practice, something he wanted to do. Mak, so I hear, matched into medicine as well -- I am yet unaware into which program. Kashif works away hard at his neurosciences PhD. It seems all my AKU friends are finally well set and on solid ground as far as their career is concerned.

Oh btw, in case no one's heard, Moiz and Hasnain got engaged. TRUMPETS!!

I sit comfortably in bed. My wife's studying in the living room. She has a quiz tomorrow. The night is atremble with the sound of heated pipes. My pager sits blackly next to me. I'm on backfloat. Just today, I wrote an email to a very nice physician recruiter from a hospital in Bradford, Pennsylvania, declining their offer to join their hospital as a traditional internist; Unfortunately, my wife's intended school is quite a aways from the hospital. However, I do have a couple of nice J1 visa waiver job offers.

Yet, my heart is silent and a little cold.

Could it be the bomb blast that killed a constable in Islamabad today? Could it be that the very smells of a Pakistani market with its dust and chickens and old festering fruits is slowly fading from my nostrils and my memory?

I can't feel Lahore anymore. It once used to live under my skin, in the cage of my bones.

I can't write anymore. Medicine residency and a new marriage can take their toll on your time and priorities. I haven't written much of anything, let alone thought about publications or creative fountains.

I need to study more too.

As you can see, my mind is a labyrinth, meandering and hazy. I did both renal dayfloat, a rehumatology consult, and saw six patients in my own clinic. That is enough to distract any man from his aforeset task in life, bestowed upon him by the great and blind god Cthulho. Now, come on, that's funny!

This post is a mirror of the maze in my mind.

I think I will be okay though in the long run.

The Boogeyman aka Islam

2007-12-09T17:31:00.000-08:00

In the heart of darkness, there throbs the life of hope...and no, no sexual innuendos are being made here.

There is a current current running through the crevices of Islam. The word, Islam, is taboo. And, as we all know, taboo is anything feared and least likely understood. If one wishes to examine the roots of that fear, one must trace its steps back to the World of Islam, a religiously bound geographical entity that stretched its wings from the sands of Arabia to the Rock of Gibraltar a thousand years ago. This is the time even before Baghdad University (Al-Nizammia-al-Baghdad), which was the Harvard of the medieval world, one of whose professors was Ghazali himself.

Medieval Christianity feared and hence hated Islam, mislabeling and misinterpreting a religion that derives its roots from the very word ‘peace’. Mohammad thus became ‘Mahound’ and in some versions ‘man-hound’, and Islam became something that was spread at the point of sword. History is written by he who writes, and is written in a certain language. Our history was miswritten by the West, and indeed in the great classic, La Divina Comedia, ‘The Divine Comedy’ by Dante, Mohammad (PBUH) is to be found in the last circle of hell, his body being cut in two halves, because he allegedly separated brother from brother. How ironic, misinformed and Middle-Agedly prejudiced, since Mohammad’s last speech declares each human being brother to another, with nothing but piety elevating any rank whatsoever.

So our history was written by either the West or highly qualified Muslim historians, but in Arabic, Persian and much later in Urdu. All three of these languages have been lost over the last hundred years, a deliberate effort by Lord Macaulay in his Minute on Indian Eduction, where he tries to prove that ""The languages of Western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar ... We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."

As a direct consequence of the implementation of this classic British cultural imperialism in 1835, educational Madrassahs where mathematics, poetry, science, astronomy, numerology, Sufi treatises and other eastern sciences were taught were shut down, leaving in their wake English as the primary language of imparting education. No doubt that has helped round up the globe even tighter into a village, where cultural terrorism goes ignored and suicide bombing becomes the clamor of the day, notwithstanding the fact that those very Madrassahs, that allegedly produce these terrorists, were encouraged by the British to strictly follow curriculums devoid of any objectivity, science, art, or culture, leaving religious teaching stripped of its holisticity, barren of aspiration and change, immersed eternally in fixed stangnant ideas taught by mullahs who have never opened Ghazali’s Mishkat-ul-Anwar (The Niche for Lights) or Ibn al-Arabi’s Fatoohat-e-Mekki (The Meccan Revelations).

We all die when we are born. It is all just a matter of time. Sometimes though, we have a chance at eternity, a shot at glory. Our glory is and will be the end of religious insanity. Religion is passion liberated: it is pain silenced and internalised till it begins to open hidden doors. We must begin once again by reaching for Ahad, Unity. Unity in thought, action, and knowledge. A fusion of western and eastern sciences must take place, where we learn the arts and science of not only medicine, but of politics, culture, literature, music, and social infrastructure. We must take all this training, if we do go back, which should or at least could be an idealistic aspiration, and use that to improvise unto a local colour the art of living. If knowledge is power, there must be no greater war than for knowledge and that too should be fought with our own selves first. There must be no blood spilt but ink in this fight. If freedom of expression means the Mohammaden cartoons can be published, we must also agree that London-based historian David Irving and Australian scholar Dr. Frederik Toben, two men who state that much of what is said about the Holocaust is exaggeration, must also be allowed to express their views in the interest of ‘freedom of expression’. There must be no prejudice then in the expression of truth. We must remember that if we are to fight, it must be a fight armed with peace, culture, and justice. A man once asked Abu Hafs al-Haddad, a Sufi contemporary of Junaid Al-Baghdadi, what justice was. He replied, ‘it is acting justly towards others and not seeking justice for oneself." I do understand that too much of a good thing in this case would make one apathetic or worse a coward, but it must also be understood that there is a time and place for everything. Our time demands the most of this advice. In times of prosperity, this is good advice. In times of a wretched posterity, it is indispensable.

Let me conclude by quoting the First Commandment of God to Mohammad. It was not Off to Jihad! It was not Declare that God is One or that Islam is the only religion to be followed. It was not about the permissibility of music or the keeping of a beard.

It was one beautiful, simple word: Iqra -- Read!

Within books lies salvation.

A whirlpool called Ahad

2007-11-25T01:16:00.000-08:00

I know not love.
I have never loved one
without my self.
That may mean I just might be
more accursed than I think.
And that, dear friends and all,
is a scary thought.

Does hell exist or heaven?
I’ve seen enough to know
we can create our own of either mode.
But if they exist,
they need not my approval.
They will exist
without my earthly stamp.

God lives in me.
I live in Him.
It is only a matter
of death and design.
In the whirlpool called Ahad
We All come together.

I rip the heart of an atom out.
All that spills out is the blood of the sun.
I trip and fall across the aeons
of lost stars and struggling universes;

He stands laughing behind each door.

His shadow sustains me.
And which of my gifts will you reject?
He asks.
I flail blindly with arms spread .
I see one. I see none.

Undoubtedly in My rememberance
will You find peace, my Love!
Says He.
I blabber with amnesia,
and my heart and body fail.

I once slept in a grave
by the side of an acquaintance
who had just passed on.
They lowered his body
and left him there.

My body left.
I remained.

The doors of Heaven
are in my rest.
The torments of hell
are on my body.
Worms devour me.
My soul sleeps on, forevermore.

Sleep, dear heart!
You have suffered long enough.
I loved you for venturing
into the House of the blues.
You vowed to take on
torments refused by angels
and hoories and devils and
demons.

I bestowed on you
a trust which the mountains
- proud and stern
and tall and mighty
they might seem to you - refused,
rumbling in terror,
sending up showers
and curtains of rock and stone
whirling in the air
like cotton wool.
So it was on
that Day of the Covenant
That You bowed your head
and said, "Indeed You are!"

So sleep now.
There’s an eternity for slumber.

At no time did
the door of existence close.
There never is nonexistence
draped in a shallow curtain
of not being.
I defy that.
I defy death to defy me.

I was a hidden treasure.
I created You to discover myself,
whispers my Love.
My Love is my love forever.
He erases me from myself.
He takes away my pain and piety.
He gives me kindness and time.
He loves me like I love my Love,
and what greater than that ever
in all aeons of all creation?

I saw a Ladder once.
It led up.
I followed the rungs like
an entranced child
stepping on ripples of moonlight
across a dark water
to go to the moon.

Each rung was a veil.
Each veil was a kindness.
Each kindess was a darkness.
And the ladder spiralled
round and round
in a whirpool
that centered at my heart.

Submission is the hardest thing
to do in the world.
Yet I lie.

I have no Beatrice,
no Ligiea, nor am I
Dante or Poe.
Yet I scream into the wind
lies that spin and collide
into the heart of darkness.

She is a shade, a shadow, a memory.
A state of being. A state of knowledge.
A sense of time.
A hope of more.
A loss of self.
A gain of sunlight
dappled across my ungainly chest.

We helped each other over avalanches,
over snowy cliffs and slipper slopes.
She placed her hand
on my shadow’s hand.
Touch defiles a goddess.

I dream.
Of parallel worlds
and time holes
and quantum foam
and burnt stars
and lost love,
forgotten friends,
deserted beaches,
broken promises,
burning betrayals,
ashy tears,
incomplete explanations,
tender touch
fierce passion
different I’s,
similar agony,
haunting faces
frosty winds.
I dream I dream I dream.

Hell lies.
‘Tis I who was created before all else.
My presence cools
the flames of Hell.
The sinners gather around me,
their fears vanquished,
their agony long gone.
'Tis I who’s in the mirror
in the mirror.
I live in the heart of atoms
and the precipice of the cliffs
none traversed.
My sound is the scraping
of weary pens on paper.
My eyes are the glimmer
of light on snow.
My ears are the trembling fingers
of the deaf,
my tongue the sorrowful stare
of the homeless.

I am born from the Pre-Eternal Chrysolite.
My name is Man. Man.

Ramble on

2007-11-20T04:10:00.001-08:00

It's such a small world now that we wouldn't know mystery if it came up and bit us on the ass. All the things that we hold dear are moth smoke. We huff and puff and blow ourselves over. But the magic stays hidden and protected.

The world moves fast and quick like a dying man's last breath. In one wink, millions of doors to eternity open up, and in each door stands laughing he of the hundred faces. Each face is a grimace on a smile on a wince. What we feel we dare not put a name to for fear of unburying quite a few old smelly skeletons. And love is like a lost bird in the palm of a magician. Poof! it's gone.

It's such a small world now that we wouldn't know love if it came up and whispered soft sighs in our ears, full of wonderment and amazement. What is the idea of truth and purity becomes cliched and old in the hands of the multitude. A select few will know it, but by chance, not by will, for if one thing love and magic are, they are random chance, a flip of a coin, a whisk of a pheonix feather across ruddy cheeks.

It's such a small world now that we are all ordinary and standard. Nothing substantial exists anymore. Genius hides behing the facade of intellect. And intellect is ordinary. It sometimes is a measure of the size of one's head!

A Tribute to Whitman

2007-11-18T00:42:00.000-08:00

I will fall like a cut dove
I will rise like a swan song

I am the secret
I am the mystery
I am the Lamp
I am the Niche
I am the veil
I am the hidden

I contemplate myself
before I celebrate myself
and in doing so
I live again

I will float like a free wind
I will sink like a pregnant cloud

I was nevermore
Then I was evermore
I was eternal;
and then I died
I do breathe again
like a tongue of fire
in the swirl of old smoke

I will see myself again
through the eyes of a hundred thousand eras

I am intellect
wisdom
foolhardiness
folly
I am not
though

I was, am and will be
I will not be beaten by death for
I live in the tiny crevices in atoms
and in the cavernous mouths of gods
I am God's memory
I am His search for Himself

I am not blasphemy
nor boldness nor arrogance
for I am

I am

Khuda Ke Liye: In the Name of God

2007-10-23T15:54:00.001-07:00

At the age of 14, I stopped watching Pakistani movies altogether.

That won't be a surprise to anyone who has seen the movies produced by Lollywood, the not-even-close quasi-namesake of Hollywood in Pakistan. Afterll, it does get tiring after one has watched Anjuman and a bunch of other terriblly horribly trained 'actresses' run on the big screen, jiggling their gigantic behinds and fronts at the camera, depicting absolutely nothing about anything really going on in Pakistan at all. I remember there was a time when my mother used to get upset when I rented an English movie because it had 'kiss scenes' in it. The vulgarity in Pakistani movies humbled and embarrased me way more than those kiss scenes ever could.

So I stopped watching them altogether. And I hoped. I hoped that one day, I would become a good enough (or rich enough writer) to produce, write ad direct films that made even an iota of better sense.

Shoab Mansoor has beaten me to it.

The Sufism-immersed, music-loving, arts-celebrating writer/director has done the greatest service to Pakistani cinema by setting an immortal precedant...and with what glory and reality!

I will not go into the details of the movie. I need not. Someone once said about the Lord of the Rings that, "The English speaking world is divided into 2 kinds of people-those who have read the Lord of the Rings and those who will." I will say the same about this movie and the Pakistani society.

There are still some glitches in the movie as far as acting goes: Shan adopts his usual Punjabi Gunda style in his first few scenes, the first actor who walks into the shop of a Pakistani living in London to accuse him of not having raised a decent daughter is a bad actor, too self conscious and 'overdoing it', but there are superb bits of acting in the movie as well. Shan, for example, does a brilliant job later when he goes to Chicago and starts learning music, while dating a hot American girl. It's almost as if that the newness of his role as an English-speaking literate Pakistani actually extracts better acting from him.

I will not speak about the political current in the movie, its main theme, of the US agencies playing the role of angry, vindictive, scoffing, arrogant arses torturing a misunderstood, innocent Pakistani Muslim. I've seen enough of that scared, closet racism myself, which in some ways is not completely unjustified. We all fear the unknown. However, I will say this: the movie does a good job of putting across the views of majority of Lahoris, Pakistanis, Muslims. And now, I'll move on to the bit about music in Islam and in the movie.

Shoaib Mansoor cleverly uses the charismatic performance of Naseeruddin Shah to put his favourite, most important points across: "Keeping a beard is in religion; religion itself does not reside in the beard." This is awesome when put in the context of the fact that keeping a beard and attempting to mimic the prophet's way of dressing is the last rung on the ladder of religion, which in many ways for Muslims is Love of the prophet and hence of God Himself. One can be the best of Muslims, a king in a beggar's garb, without a beard as well.

Then Naseeruddin Shah voices one of the most important points regarding music in Islam: David, one of the four Prophets given a Book by God, had a beautiful voice and he loved singing the praise of God.

And here, let's talk a little about the permissibility of music in Islam, my opinions, my interpretation.

Music has always been controversial in Islam, and there are ahadith supporting the permissibility of music and there are those that prohibit it. One of the strongest supportive ahadith has been narrated by Aisha present in at least 3 of the Sahih books, which in my biased mind, proves beyong any question for me, that the Prophet did not prohibit music. I will quote 2 versions of that, both in the Shahih Bukhari, here:

Narrated Aisha:

That once Abu Bakr came to her on the day of 'Id-ul-Fitr or 'Id ul Adha while the Prophet was with her and there were two girl singers with her, singing songs of the Ansar about the day of Buath. Abu Bakr said twice. "Musical instrument of Satan!" But the Prophet said, "Leave them Abu Bakr, for every nation has an 'Id (i.e. festival) and this day is our 'Id."

Narrated Aisha
Allah's Apostle (p.b.u.h) came to my house while two girls were singing beside me the songs of Buath (a story about the war between the two tribes of the Ansar, the Khazraj and the Aus, before Islam). The Prophet (p.b.u.h) lay down and turned his face to the other side. Then Abu Bakr came and spoke to me harshly saying, "Musical instruments of Satan near the Prophet (p.b.u.h) ?" Allah's Apostle (p.b.u.h) turned his face towards him and said, "Leave them." When Abu Bakr became inattentive, I signalled to those girls to go out and they left. It was the day of 'Id, and the Black people were playing with shields and spears; so either I requested the Prophet (p.b.u.h) or he asked me whether I would like to see the display. I replied in the affirmative. Then the Prophet (p.b.u.h) made me stand behind him and my cheek was touching his cheek and he was saying, "Carry on! O Bani Arfida," till I got tired. The Prophet (p.b.u.h) asked me, "Are you satisfied (Is that sufficient for you)?" I replied in the affirmative and he told me to leave.

These are the versions of the same in Sahih Muslim:

Book 004, Number 1938:
'A'isha reported: Abu Bakr came to see me and I had two girls with me from among the girls of the Ansar and they were singing what the Ansar recited to one another at the Battle of Bu'ath. They were not, however, singing girls. Upon this Abu Bakr said: What I (the playing of) this wind instrument of Satan in the house of the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) and this too on 'Id day? Upon this the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: Abu Bakr, every people have a festival and it is our festival (so let them play on).

Book 004, Number 1939:
This hadith has been narrated by Hisham with the same chain of transmitters, but there the words are:" Two girls were playing upon a tambourine."

Another hadith that supports the argument for music, that the Prophet was at least not averse to it (Bukhari):

Volume 5, Book 59, Number 336:
Narrated Ar-Rubai bint Muauwidh:
The Prophet came to me after consuming his marriage with me and sat down on my bed as you (the sub-narrator) are sitting now, and small girls were beating the tambourine and singing in lamentation of my father who had been killed on the day of the battle of Badr. Then one of the girls said, "There is a Prophet amongst us who knows what will happen tomorrow." The Prophet said (to her)," Do not say this, but go on saying what you have spoken before."

And here's a hadith that supports the argument against music, from Muslim:

Book 033, Number 6422:
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying. Allah fixed the very portion of adultery which a man will indulge in. There would be no escape from it. The adultery of the eye is the lustful look and the adultery of the ears is listening to voluptuous (song or talk) and the adultery of the tongue is licentious speech and the adultery of the hand is the lustful grip (embrace) and the adultery of the feet is to walk (to the place) where he intends to commit adultery and the heart yearns and desires which he may or may not put into effect

Note that song or talk is in brackets. Another version of the same Hadith omits the 'listening' portion completely , again in Muslim.

Here are two ahadith that seem somewhat similar and denounce music (Sunan Daud):

Book 41, Number 4906:
Narrated Abdullah ibn Umar:
Nafi' said: Ibn Umar heard a pipe, put his fingers in his ears and went away from the road. He said to me: Are you hearing anything? I said: No. He said: He then took his fingers out of his ears and said: I was with the Prophet (peace_be_upon_him), and he heard like this and he did like this. AbuAli al-Lu'lu said: I heard AbuDawud say: This is a rejected tradition.

Book 41, Number 4909:
Narrated Abdullah ibn Mas'ud:
Salam ibn Miskin, quoting an old man who witnessed AbuWa'il in a wedding feast, said: They began to play, amuse and sing. He united the support of his hand round his knees that were drawn up, and said: I heard Abdullah (ibn Mas'ud) say: I heard the apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) say: Singing produces hypocrisy in the heart.

In the name of fairness, let me point out here that there are more ahadith, both in Bukhari and other Sahih books, that denounce music, but also some others that do not prohibit it.

This was my cursory search into a few of the books of ahadith that talk about music. Admittedly, there are millions of argument that can be made for and against music, based on these ahadith. Some scholars believe music is not allowed in Islam. Some say singing is allowed, but not instrument. Others still state that wind instruments are allowed, but not string. The rest denounce it utterly, based on whatever school of orthodoxy they belong to.

However, one thing that I can understand from all this is that if the Prophet let people sing, play the tambourine, and if one of Daud's miracles was singing in a beautiful voice, music can't be all that bad, can it? I scoff at the scholars who allow wind versus string instruments. That argument is just plain stupid, in my humble opinion. What difference does it make, from a logical POV, whether we play the flute or the guitar? The effect is pretty much the same. At the risk of offending many sensibilities, Ill offer this: Even the athan, the call to prayer, one of the greatest calls to worship is actually SUNG. It has a musical scale with certain notes. Allah chose to call his creatures to him using the sweetness of music in the human voice.

Anyway, these are all opinions, my opinions. I've been rehashing them for ages. To each his own My God is a merciful God that loves beauty, simplicity, order, music. I'm well aware He is the God of Wrath as well, but as Bestami says in Tazkerat-e-Auliyah, "...but for Love, Omnipotence would have wreaked destruction on all things." God is Love indeed.

Khuda ke liye, to sum up, is a living experience, very much relevant to our current politico-religious situation, and best of all, it is in actuality the revival of cinema in Pakistan.

Kudos to Shoaib Mansoor!

Reference: Saheeh Bukhari
Saheeh Muslim

The Infinite

2007-10-19T19:44:00.000-07:00

Could a love be so big that it shadows the sun that is Juliet?
Could a love be so small that it fits into a fist-sized heart?

God is a great Will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. I read this line 14 years ago in Ligiea, one of Poe's masterpieces of terribe love. Love brings back a dead woman who attempts again and again to conquer the Conqueror Worm. God and Love. Love and Death. Death and Hope. Hope and Eternity. Eternity and the Human Element.

I'm supposed to sigh here. I'm supposed to look up into the infinite blackness that the night sky is. I'm supposed to turn up sad, haunting songs that brush my heart with visions and stirrings from a pre-eternal unseen world. A world where in a vast plain stand like silent ghosts infinite human souls wrapped in white cloaks and hoods, their heads bent, all facing the Center.

God is the Center, the Circumference and the Spokes.

His whisper KUNN wafts, blows, rages, storms through the plain, whipping the cloaks, whipping back black hair from pale brows till the whisper melts, echoes and notes melting into each other like lava, turning into the First Question:

Alast-u-Bi-rabbikum?
Am I not your Lord?

Infinite nonjaws creak open, one resonance wafting out, billowing the nonwind, exploding creation into being as a side effect of the Wind, Kunn:

Indeed You are.

Perfect Servitude is born.

It will not last though, for Perfection has been marred by Creation.

The Center is already fading behind seventeen thousand curtains. The souls turn and start trudging. Some move towards the silvery Water that is shaping into the pearly gates of heaven. Others watch with interest as their memories fade and a ball of heat rises, mist-like, from the Wind's echoes, to form Hell, Fire.

The rest move towards the dust from the plain that rises in a spiral forming earth, Earth.

The Center winks one last time and disappears from the sight of the eyes that see not. The curtains closes.

Let there be Light.

The show must go on!

Nonbeing is the pre-condition of being

2007-09-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

Whirling drums beating away into the night with fires lit long the road-side like signs of life...falling rods of steel on blocks of iron, tapping, rising, falling, like silver angels...dark shadows with burning eyes moving and turning and twirling in the night like miniature tornadoes...the scent of sweetmeat wafting along the marketplace like lonely human souls seeking completion...the dust and the glitter of the place...the ebb and rise of magic and mystery...the rise and fall of shy eyes...the beat of frantic hearts...the powerful sound of silent dervish beggars...the clanking of pipes, the clanging of steelware, the chanting of human voices nearing ecstacy in annihilation.

Welcome to Rumi's time and place.

The Dust on my shroud

2007-07-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

Call me a sailor,
call me a farer.
Call me a liar of a thousand tongues.
I got up one morning
and looked at the sun
and knew that my lies were all done.
They were done.

I left home
a few months ago,
and ventured upon a new world.
On the way God died,
and my love shrivelled
like a green tongue on a dried
tree trunk.
My shoots and leaves
fell off, one by one.
Dying, I found, is never fun.
And now I'm done.

Time is my comrade,
my rival, my enemy,
the bearer of poisoned tidings.
I have been fighting
with this ally all my life,
and now, I find, empty guns,
hollow barrels, rusted tongues
of steel on a skeleton.
The battle is done.

Come, let us depart.
Let us depart, you and I,
heads hung,
like broken stalks
of dying flowers
that once rose proudly
towards a dust-stained sky.

It was my dust.
Each atom of my body
exploded outwards in a swarm.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
I will rust forever now.

My dust is done.

Floods, deaths, losses and I...

2007-07-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

There are so many people in the world who seem to have an intrinsic sense of guilt at the things that go wrong around them while they sit, seemingly unaffected. No one knows why they have a vast emotional spectrum while others don't. Undoubtedly there is some genetic component; Jung, I think, might have it right. We all have our dark halves. In some it's more dominant than others; in others, it is not.

Floods, deaths, losses and I are all side effects. Are we? I honestly do not know. Sometimes it seems that way. Whilst people die in my country, I sit here, eating dinner, holding a diet coke in my hand, watching Geo News streaming towards my end of the globe. It makes me sad. Honestly, right now, it makes me feel empty. I am comfortable and secure here apparently while people die in my country, crying and weeping.

I have been talking to a very dear one for a while, some one who's recently become a part of my life, and we were discussing why I'm so adamant or at least wishful that some day extravagant weddings that have become the norm in Pakistani society will vanish. I thought I should put my views and thoughts on digital paper here.

I was nine, I believe, when my family, some cousins and I went to Kalaam in the north of Pakistan. It is one of my most vivid memories, and I still remember those overhanging eaves, from which icicles dangled in the stiff northern air, of a cottage we were stayin at. I remember I sat with an older cousin, both of us lost in a respectful silence at the magnificent sights that surrounded us like Alice's visions of Wonderland, both of us young, yet old enough to understand it was a sight that would stay with us forever.

Suddenly I spoke, "You know what, cuz. When I grow up, I will not take a single rupee in dowery from my bride's family."

My cousin (startled at the sudden 'grownup' topic and amused as well), "Why not?"

I (serious as hell), "It hurts everyone."

I remember those words. I remember I didn't know why I said them. Mayhap it was a reaction to something I'd heard someone say on the TV or maybe my parents or who knows! But I said that when I seven, and I still say them when I'm 25. My cousin's somewhere far off, at least in his/her journey of life, and I'm sitting here in the US, thinking these old, crooked thoughts.

When we grew up a bit, my cousins and I established an NGO called "The Seekers." Well, honestly speaking, it started off as a Young Detectives Agency which Hasnain and I made, inspired by The Three Investigators (Alfred Hitchcock). Having found only one case, that of a stolen dog, and NEVER having managed to solve it (the expensive dog was probably stolen in the covert of the night, possibly with some help from the Liberty Police, Gulberg), we decided to become an NGO. I pride in saying we actually did some good work. We started off by collecting dowery money for a destitute orphan girl's wedding; Sir Younis, our family tutor, was the go-between guy, and he reported that the girl was ecstatic and gave us all lots of blessings.

However, eighteen days after she got married, the girl died in mysterious circumstances when her gas stove exploded in her new home.

I remember thinking how a man or his family could kill another person. Did they? I don't know. Was it an accident? I am clueless. But it's a big big freak accident. She survived seventeen years of solitude, poverty and orphanhood. She couldn't survive eighteen days of a new marriage.

Dowery, big weddings, alcohol, music, dances...they are what Pakistani weddings are all about now. People with money flaunt it. People without it are forced to borrow it, for the social pressures in the neighbour-driven environment in Pakistan demand it. Who cares if people sell houses to come up with money for their daughter's weddings, right? Who cares if our own sisters and daughters and wives become dispensable if they do not come laden with microwaves and furniture and deep-freezers and jewellery and expensive gifts for the bridegroom's family? 'Not my fuckin' fault if you bore a daugter now, is it,' sneers the boy's father.

Is that what our religion teaches us? I recall the Prophet PBUH gave gifts to his beloved daughter, Fatima, NOT to Ali. I also remember that Fatima's wedding happened without any pomp or show or glamor. It hurts my heart to think people consider it derogatory to hold simple marriages now. Apparently they have more prestige and honor than the man who was sent as Barakah (blessings) to all the worlds.

Even worse than this is when they claim religion doesn't prohibit happiness and the celebration of happiness on weddings. I have one question: How many people apart from the involved persons' families (and sometimes not even they!) stay happy a few days after the wedding has taken place with such pomp and glory, or even when it is happening? I know so many people who hate going to weddings and stuff because the wait, the heat, the boredom kills them. Furthermore, we make our sisters and daughters dance in front of other people. I'm not a Mullah in the now-accepted sense of the word, but even I can understand how demeaning that can be. Don't get me wrong. I would not judge others if they do it. But I know of so many people myself who eyeball their own cousins, and friends' wives and sisters when they are dancing. I can even recall a couple of weddings where someone tried to grab his friend's sister in a fit of drunkenness and there was a hue and cry and the man got beaten by the girl's family to pulp, deservedly so. But that does sound a little hypocritical to me. Most men have a dirty, dark side to them. Usually alcohol brings it out. Why would we encourage drinking and dancing at weddings and then expect everyone to act all decent and gentlemanly? It sounds wrong to me, but maybe I'm just old-fashioned. Personally I like music and dancing, and I've sung and danced at weddings myself. But when orthodox Muslims say they do not want it, I can completely understand why.

I calculated the expenses incurred on one side during an average upper middle-class wedding. They fall around 10-15 lacs, around 20,000 US dollars. That's a huge amount. I have 600 dollars in my bank account and my rent check is due THIS week. If I could somehow have 20,000 US dollars, I could probably buy most things I need to survive my residency and live comfortably instead of worrying about where the rent is going to come from. If both sides in a marriage saved that much money, that would be around 40,000 dollars. I could probably buy a house in Minneapolis with that kind of money, keep paying my mortgage, and save all the rent money which I'm wasting right now. Think about it! When we wed a son/daughter, we're wasting 40,000 dollars just like that, with nothing to show for it. Okay, maybe you say, you can afford it. Fine! But can your second cousin afford it too? He borrowed around 40,000 dollars from the bank, mortgaging his house. Yet when he marries someone, he's expected to come up with all the extravaganza and lustor and SHIT too...just because YOU did it. Is that fair? Is it harsh? Are you so insensitive as to not see at all that all we do has a ripple effect everywhere? Mohsin Hamid once said, people don't believe in consequences anymore. He is right. We do what we do, and we wipe our hands later. It wasn't I who used the dagger that stabbed him, you say. Maybe not!

But it sure as hell was your money that probably went in making the dagger in the first place in my figurative example.

Maybe some day, this will all change, One fine day, maybe, you and I will look around us and notice friendly faces and blue skies and smiles and laughter and peace and prosperity. Maybe, we will learn some day that a penny saved is a penny earned. I don't follow that to the dot myself, but at least I'm trying to set up an example in my dumb family where everyone suffers these lavish costs of weddings and parties and no one dares raise a hand and say, I opt out. I will be the one who will prove to others that, despite having the money to do it, I will refrain from flaunting what God gave me. My own relatives, some of whom are really poor, will have my example and will point and say, see, he didn't do it either. He got married in a mosque, and followed his father, the Prophet's example, and created a new wave in a currently deplorable society.

Maybe some day, my people will realise their own follies and myopia. May we all see the big picture always, or at least gain the tolerance and patience to at least try and see it!

Here's the link to how Bibi Fatima got married. I can't vouch for its authenticity to the dot, but the gist as far as I know is there.

Love and peace to all!

Salman Rushdie A Fricking Knight in Shining Armor?

2007-06-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

I don't believe it. I simply don't believe it.

Somewhere in the archives of my blog, I have touched upon the issue of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, -- I have read parts of the book and thought it was very average writing, insensitive and cruel in ma aspects -- but never in my dreams did I imagine that England would do something to wound the sentiments of billions of people around the globe. Rushdie has been a controversial issue for a very long time, but I was hoping that some of his shit would have settled down by now. Apparently, England likes to take loads of it in her royal fucking hands and throw it at the proverbial goddamn fan.

Why? Why? Why? Why would you ever do that? Do Muslims have no rights or feelings? If a cafe puts up Hitler's name on its door in Bombay, Jews lobby their asses off till the cafe is forced to take the name down, but when Rushdie paints a picture of the Muslims' most beloved figure, the Prophet (PUH) with mud, blood, and tears, all of a sudden, the western world starts clamoring about freedom of speech and writing. I mean why so much unfairness? Why such blatant discrimination?

'Tis a sad world we're living in!

On another note, I just started my residency in the US at Hennepin County Medical Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Difficult first days, which is why I have not been able to update for so long. Hopefully that should change some time once I slip into a routine.

See ya all...and please condemn his frickin' knighthood. God! What a nightmare!

A Castle in The Clouds

2007-04-15T04:36:00.000-07:00

A horror short: Go read, enjoy, critique. It's all yours:

A Castle in The Clouds

Ahad!

2007-04-14T03:07:00.000-07:00

Finally. After years of suffering and lazing and procrastinating, Hassy and I recorded a song. We did that in Boston. It's a little experimental, playing around with Sufi lyrics and a hip hop feel, but it's nice if I do say so myself. It has been floating around a bit, mostly in our family's circle, but now we have decided to go public with it, and face the swarming public. Tee hee!

Presenting:

Ahad

Enjoy...and so leave some citique.

Superheroes

2007-04-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

We are all superheroes, so say wise men. Is is true? I doubt it. Perhaps once in a lifetime, for one trivial, perishable, finite moment, that becomes true. For just that one moment, that hour, or that day, one may become a superhero: strong, powerful, invincible, invulnerable.

For the rest of one’s life, one stays ordinary: weak, helpless, insecure, and terribly afraid.

Over the years, I have come to believe that nothing exists really. And I mean nothing. We are caught in a crossfire of death and spontaneous existence. That’s all there is to it. And I do not want to put God or Satan in the equation. They could be the root causes; they could be the side effects of a desperate humanity’s creative effort. I do not care either way.

Like every other boy in the entire known world, I too wanted to become a superhero: Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Wolverine, Captain Planet. You name it and I’ve had my phase. The best thing was I believed almost utterly, perfectly, ever since I was a toddler, that I was going to become a superhero anyways. Of course, I was created for this purpose: to save the world, to become a prophet, to become another legend in the history of tall tales. Stephen King is fond of saying that he was so gullible as a kid that he would buy the Brooklyn Bridge over and over again.

I would buy the entire USA and then argue with Bush angrily about the White House being included in the sale.

But times change. I did too. I grew up. And like every other person that I know, each one, the dream faded away. I became hopeles, bitter, angry too. I could not be a prince; I couldn’t even be the destined pauper, so to speak. Not of Kings, not of dervishes, I fall in that grey area where everyone falls. I am after all ordinary. I too will die like all others. I too will one day look back and see nothing marking my time. No great love story, no mystery, no legend, no adventures, no supernormal powers, no prophecies...and no Khizar, adjusting his green cap, smiling benevolently, whispering, "I show the way to those who are lost."

There is no Zanbeel, no Sulaimani cap, no Aladdin’s lamp, no enchanted ring. Kauh Kaaf is a story, Talism Hoshruba a tale. Umaroo died an old man, Amir Hamza fell in battle. Khizar is a liar, and God a prankster.

And, before I forget, there is no magic medicine either that takes away suffering and disease. No Lotus floating placidly in a lake beyond seven fiery valleys, guarded by serpents and jinns!

There is no magic anywhere anymore.

Five Thousand Words on Why I Should Stay Away From You

2007-04-08T08:18:00.000-07:00

It begins like a dark night in a mausoleum. At first, you venture into the dark like a kid on a dare. The outlines of things around you seem scary and threatening and big and silent, and you take the opportunity to stumble and fall and get up again. Falling seems like the right thing to do; it hurts you and makes you realize that one moment of pain can take the onslaught of fear away. For just a second, you’re cocooned in that blaze of pain and you forget what fear is, and that’s a good thing because at the root of most evil lies fear.

So you fall and fear backs away, and then you understand that the moment you rise again you’re going to have to face the fear again. So you brace yourself and you get back up, and all at once you glimpse something at just the right wrong angle and the world changes. You can feel the shift in the atmosphere. No more fear because some things are greater than fear. Courage is being useful in the face of fear, and you are filled with that. But there’s something more than that; you don’t fear the tombs and the coffins anymore. They are touched by the moonlight and they seem peaceful and romantic to you. You bask in the moon’s halo yourself and feel at ease and secure. Eternity slips into your niche, sees you caressing a pale, pretty corpse, mutters a silent prayer to itself and slips back out.

You are in love with the mausoleum now. The journey is complete…but not all journeys end in lovers meeting. Sooner or later the day will arrive and turn your midnight lover to dust and shadows. Loving a vampire is never safe.

—-

I should have stayed away from you in the first place. That happy hour never came. So now we’ll discuss candidly, you and I, why I should stay away from you henceforth.

You’re too beautiful for me. I can’t handle that much beauty. It fills me with an emptiness which the reed flute possesses and sings about. A longing to return home. A lament on the separation from the reed bed. All nine holes of the flute look out hopefully, emptily, towards an emptier sky. There’s more to you than meets the eye, and what my eye meets is more than I can take.

You’re kind. It insults me. It embarrasses me. In your gentle outlook, you damage harsher hearts. You’re immersed in a placid tarn that lies still at the bottom your heart. Your soul floats like a satisfied duck on the water, and your stillness offends the restless spirit of the winds on top of you. They still seek the ocean, the mountains, the sands, the skies, the vastness of space and the closeness of a whirlpool. You are a lake. You take everything around you and shush it to a restful slumber. I hate the mirror of your watery skin.

You’re pure. Pure as evil. Pure as the day which has been washed by a Lahori rainfall, when a medical student might have raised his head from his Step 2 books and glnaced at the instantaneous beauty tapping its fingers on the window outside his room at 7:30 in the morning. Pure as the possible wish in his heart to become a child once again and run whooping and hollering in the rain with nothing but shorts on his skinny, beautiful body. Your purity hurts my heart. I’m used to complications. Simplicity upsets me.

You’re gentle. It scares the living shit out of me. Gentleness and tenderness are tools of condemnation. We’re gentle with a child to make sure he enjoys childhood as long as he can before we thrust him out into a restless, harsh, confused world which is eating itself inside out. We’re gentle with the lamb as we lead it to the slaughterhouse. You touch me softly and whisper sweet words. They fill my head with death and decay.

You have roots. I have bags of bones. They go with me wherever I go. Memories and pictures and words and whispers wirl in my head and heart like raped banshees, shrieking away multiple layers of time. Your roots remind me of the ground from which I came. They thrust a sweet image of water and satiety into my mind. I don’t have a sweet tooth, you stupid smiling girl.

You like looking at stars. I’m afraid of them. Once they were children too, full of life and light. Time ate them up and spit yellow bones out. The light they give is an illusion. It has traveled over eons across emptiness and darkness to hurt and confuse me. The children are gone; their ghosts hang around. You see beauty and hope in that. All I see are yellow teeth of time getting ready to chew me up real good.

You like Rumi’s poetry. I like Poe’s. Rumi attained Ahad!, Unity. Poe died a drunkard. Unity means the annihilation of Self. Drunkenness means the forgetting of it. And who wants permanent loss? The price for Unity is too much! I’m quite all right with myself, thank you very much…even if my hangovers taste and feel like the very blood of my soul spilling onto a tongue of despair.

You have shining eyes and a quiet mouth. I tremble at the sight of them. They’re disgusting. I can never tell what they’re looking at or saying. The curves that halo them like rivulets of moonlight in the skin of a deep black ocean repel me. They’re too still and lit up. The shadow above your lips, the soft spot right in the middle right there! holds a quiet my heart will never know. The twin points of light in your night-black pupils follow me around with a silent laughter that makes my skin crawl. I reach the brink of a madness that seems to boil from the very air around me. My emptiness empties me out. I hate them hate them hate ‘em.

You’re a country girl. It damages me. I had dreams of traveling the world, tasting goods that have exotic facades and a bitter aftertaste, falling in love with whores and demons, climbing huge glacial mountains, talking to random strangers, taking lives of others and making them my own. You sit home and smile at the world around you, looking at just one grain of sand that the evening breeze might have blown in from a distant construction site. Cats piss on sand. Yet you nod and the light in your eyes grows deeper and lighter. I sense something vast and eery and empty all around you. Yet you’re still and comfortable in that nothingness. You lie, you lie.

You pray five times a day. I’ve seen that forehead with that black mark right in the center touch dirt and dust and clay and cloth. You kneel down, you prostrate before something unseen, something none ever saw, sees, or will see. When I laugh at you, you grin and laugh at yourself, but the rings of our respective guffaws are so different! When I call God unseen, you nod your head sagely and call him The Unseen. It doesn’t work on me, you get it? I won’t be fooled. When I warn you thus, you nod once again. You irritate me.

There was a time when I used to love you. I used to jump up and down and break my crown, declaring to the world that I loved you. I wrote on old parched paper with my own blood words to that effect. I worked out, ran thousands of laps, dropped down and gave myself hundreds, swam miles, skipped rope thousands of times with you in the center of my vision. You gave me hope, you gave me my standards of beauty, purity, innocence, wisdom, kindness, womanhood. I looked at others and glimpsed pieces of you swimming lazily in their eyes, breath, smiles, laughter. Your soul lived in every eye window I ever looked into. Seasons changed, mountains changed, landscapes rose and fell away, and you kept standing at the edge of a cliff I never dared climb up. I put on my dunce’s cap and danced to the tune of your love, and it got me nothing. You married a fool and you raised his child. And I traveled the world, living in dark corners, making a fool out of myself, soaking much, learning nothing, and my bag of bones kept getting heavier. My spirit is restless still, my eyes look into the distance, my conversations are uneasy, my words and music are lonely and wistful. And the keys of my heart keep turning the wrong way.

Stream of Consciousess...

2007-01-18T05:55:00.000-08:00

Hasnain has discussed Stream of Consciousness here. So I won't go into the details of the kind of writing style it is. Instead I'll post here something I wrote as a free write while my friends had put Requiem for a Dream on. The haunting music and psychedelic images of the movie span in my head like a love-struck dervish as my fingers typed away to some unknown rhythm in my head.

This is what I wrote.

I see holes like eyes. O death come and define me. Come and ruin me. The ruin of life is the celebration of death. The celebration of death is the culmination of life...and art and sex and rock and roll are just side effects. What is the name of this game we play, where the actors are pawned off one by one like lambs t the fuckin slaughter, What is this need to be what cannot be reality. It is the shadow in the mirror that looks and grins like a dark moon. The eclipse of one moon is the success of the shining sun and we look at that like little children waiting to be born

There is a rustle in the wind and I would think there is no need yet to rake it in. I throw my lasso and sigh.

What’s your fix, my beautiful little cold turkey? Bye bye butterfly...theres an ink stain in the sky..rip rip rip the heart of an atom out...all u see is the blood of the sun...things move like vast lost shadows rippling away into the wilderness of my dreams...the msic soars and I soar with it. My name is Wisdom in the guise of death and I live in the shadow of the sun..the nude bodies writhe in pleasure that’s ot a far reach from agony...for we take solace in pain...

Things look up. We sktter across the sky, hop from star to star, dive into space and hang fer a moment from the corner of a crescent moon. Star dust kisses my feet. Im the King of the skies...I sit and lose my self in a shining blackness...my business is my own and my screams are out there...I write to have a baby. Im the parent of a million lost thoughts and abandoned kids creeping in dar alleys and starin up at a strange stranger sky...

I want you to know that love died when self was born. Self comes in the way like a black demon holding the sword of jealousy up. It’s all about survival of the fittest in the jungle that is my head...

================

We wanna be in the limelight because otherwise the darkness would eat us up, It gives us a reason to smile and laugh just for a moment when all are gone. Im alone inside where the loneliness smacks of solitude the most The red dress is a metaphor, the tv is a bucket I pour my tears in It is sth to do in a land where you’re human and happyh only if ure yung...the werds come later...the fingers move first...

The deaf and dumb are smart in the heart. He runs like an imp in the night. Once there was magic in the night air,,,now there’s only darkness there that we try to stave of using electricity. The magic and the love and the reach and the portals are al gone...theyve gone to the woods where they cant be caught and put in lil boom boxes and teletubes that would then try to sell em of like products...

Theres a beast in my fridge. His name is Obesity and He sits there and does nothin.Thats the werst of it...I keep comin back to see Him because thats all I can do.
Fragments of my brain hoverin the air like old farts and stains. Theres a wound in my hand and heart...and all it needs is for me to start scoring all night long. The note sounds and echoes off...and my head tries to follow like a relucant pet. She creeps forwqard ike a red haired hag and sits in the doctor’s chair. He turns away from her; he understands that the body only helps those brains who help themseves. Dont cut urself...u have noblood o more to pour...

The streets are long and dry The sheets are starched and spotless, The feet are weary and wounded We rest in the sheen of our dreams.

Sex is an unecessary necessity that whispers in my ears like a ghost of a lover.

The light clicks off. Her body is brown and smooth and right. He pushes against her and she opens up like a longclosed eye, She walks away and she breaks all the mirrors in her purse, She said she went out with me because I had an aura about me...what was that? her own twisted brain wrapped in my darkness,,,she sldes the mascara over her eyes and the tip slips and nicks the surface of her eye ball...she knows not what pain is...she knows not what insanity is. It is when dreams quit on us...when our brain shuts down and breaks its crown and the heart flollows after..he clatters away to the tune hes heard before in some lost song.she moves to and fro like a man standing below a sky of movin water..the bridge f course is upside down...she rips her heart out and tastes it and likes it because its bitter bitter...and then comes the chaos...

The fires blast away my head and my brain peeks ut at my eyes asking em what was the last thing they had seen sorry there wasnt time enuff to process that one last imagery..

this is the eulogy of a sane man...thats the werst of it come to think of it...
------------------

Its darker than a car full of drunken assholes outside. I see the darkness and I wait for the suto light my world again. I call it my world because i’m a part of the human race and I wanted to talk with ypou all regarding the eterntiyy of time anbd I wouldlove t see what you habve to say about that. There is no pain that is not mine; there is no world that I can’t call my own, because I was here when the Truth was spoken for the first time. Truth spoke to Truth and all of us...the rest...we’re like just side effects. We are the mirror of the mirror..the shadow of the shadow and what we will be in some time is angels full of star dust instead of regular dust and all will be good.

My neck hurts. It hurts all the time these days and there’s not much that I can do about it. But we gotta love with some things and one of them is that the world is a messed upplace and Im like a pawn waiting for the King to rise to claim is right to the throne, I wait to be sacrificed.

The Truth of The Unseen...

2007-01-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

I went to bury my uncle, my phoopa, a couple pf months back to Firdous Market. The account of him as I knew him is present somewhere in my archives. When I was there, I saw a tombstone, a graveyard marker, a headstone that sent thrills through my body. It was as if I was being communicated with, that I was being toyed with...for not a singe person in my family or friends knows of the significance Rumi holds for me. I looked at that headstone with eyes that peeked at this world with the light of a hundred thousand burnt stars. I stared at it and then asked one of cousins to take a picture of that headstone with his cell phone. Here it is:

What is that Truth? How does It work? Quran has a verse from which this is taken, "Those who believe in the Great Unseen..." I have known a few weak forms of belief. What is that form which is unchanging, that which is the Face of my God, ever Unchanging, ever Lasting? Why can't I see it that well with a heart that bleeds like a stuck pig? Why must I look at myself the way a beggar looks at a flea-ridden mongrel? Both are relatively better and worse off simultaneously. God is the circumference, the area, the centre, the spokes, the radius and the diameter of the Circle.

There is a Universal Number that describes God. There is the Hidden, Last, Hundreth Name that describes and is God. He is pantheistic, atheistic, monotheistic. He is the Lover, Love and the Beloved. He is the Conqueror, the Distractor, the Sayer, the Said, the Word, the Mouth, the Ears. God Speaks and God Listens. He slays Himself using Himself. He is the First, the Last and the In Between...and I testify to that. There is no god but God...and God is Unity, and He is the Truth.

The Death of Eternity?

2006-12-27T00:58:00.000-08:00

There is smth Ibn-el-Arabi says in his book, The Meccan Revelations, that scares the bejeezus out of me. In a certain chapter of the book, Arabi describes his spiritual ascension and his meeting with different prophets at various levels of Being, and, if I recall correctly -- and no, Im not sure --it's the prophet Idris to whom Arabi puts the question, "Is there ever an end to Time (substitute Creation at will)?" and Idris replies with words to the effect that in all his movement through time and space and all that is in between and beyond, he knows of no point when time comes to an end.

Do you know what that means?

That, in essence, means,

A: Time is nonlinear. If there is no end to it, then it can't possibly be a straight line that moves the entire expanse of eternity. If there is no end, logic dictates there can be no beginning. Thus time cannot be linear...something proven already by current physics and maths. Note though that Arabi wrote that in the eleventh or twelfth century. Fascinating, no?

B: All hell must break loose...at least for me. That means there can be no possible end to misery or the pain that comes as a fringe benefit of creation; that Pandora's box can never be closed in this world. If time is like...like a revolving door, well then, we must be caught in a whirlpool of death and decay that must continue because life continues. It's like Rumi and Hafiz and Ghalib and Iqbal and countless other poets have already decided. We lose precisely because we exist. It is when life switches off that the web of space and time ceases to exist...and we see what we see.

So, turns out there is no death to eternity. It goes on and on like the devil's gullet, spiralling onto itself and then outwards. Time and space are attributes of creation, not the Creator. Hence, we are prisoners of ourselves.

Not a wonderful thought, is it?

My new profile pic...Ha...thats Dante Alighieri

2006-12-27T00:11:00.000-08:00

Ive decided that Dante is uglier than I am. Also, he wrote The Divine Comedy. So...

What would God say?

2006-12-14T21:42:00.000-08:00

We go through life like a thief through a blizzard: head down, face hidden, trudging resolutely and fearfully to get away from something we don't even understand.

One man's fiction is another man's truth. One man's lie is another man's pearl of wisdom. What is there that's constant? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. And the only truth that could possibly be objective and absolute has to come from religion. All things are perishing except His face. That's from the Quran. If that's true, all other truths must be mere shadows of themselves when compared to this verse's veracity. And yet again, even this is true ONLY from religion's POV. At least that's what I understand from the logic going on in my head, which of course can be entirely false as well...

Why am I going through this all? I have my reasons. They're multifold. They exist. They flutter through my head come dawn or dusk. I don't even recognise many of them. I wander aimlessly in the dark hallways in my head. Sometimes, in my meandering, I hurt people without willing it. I hate that.

I'm back in Boston right now waiting for time to pass. Why? I have my reasons.

They're multifold.

First interview...

2006-12-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

Was at Hennepin County Medical Centre, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Pretty good program. Ranked one of nation's best 17 for residency training. Interview went ok. I liked it. The PD really likes AKU grads. Every one was really nice.

Enuff info fer all of u? 'Cause I dont wanna write no more just yet. There still is stuff in the underbrush that i'm taking care of in my head.

Second interview at Saint Louis University, Missouri in a few days.

Third will be at Louisiana State University, Shrevport in January...and that's all she wrote.

Death makes angels of us all...

2006-11-08T12:52:00.000-08:00

Oh me! Oh mine.
I placed my hand
on her marble hand.

Oh me!
She cried.
I dried
her tears,
like dew drops off
a worn out leaf.

Oh mine!
I tried
soothering her so hard
but all the stars
ran away.

What is there!
What you or
me or mine?
It is I, and I'm
in the mirror in the mirror.

Dance, motes!
Dance along infinities.
The everlasting waltz
to the cry of the piper.

[Fee Fie fo fum!
I defy death to defy me.
Shall we walk, hand in hand,
fate lines crisscrossed
with destiny?]

No more, she said.
No more, she said.

Oh me! Oh mine.
'Tis I and I
and I and I.
No talk of you
nor me...

anymore...

I'm alive. Get Busy livin' or get busy dyin'..

2006-11-03T19:22:00.000-08:00

What is life? The element of order in the elements
What is death? The shine of chaos in the same
(Ghalib)

But how does one classify what's alive and what's not. A long time back , the definition of life was based on breathing and circulation. That was changed. Now doctors have a set criteria of 'brain death' which includes cessation of breathing, circulation and brain activity, sensed and monitored by very specific medical means: http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/164/6/833#R4-36

Biologists had their own way of defining life. For a long time, they defined a living cell as one containing a nucleus, or the presence of at least some genetic material such as DNA or RNA. Even that proved insufficient and fickle with the discovery of prions, vampire proteins, that overtake a host's entire body and contain nothing remotely related with any genetic material, leading to diseases such as Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

At this moment, the old question of what is life remains unanswered. Even some obviously nonliving things such as fire can be set to fit some criteria fof what lives. Examples would be growth, metabolism, even reproduction and death. What fire does not do is fit the criteria of heredity. Even so, we might argue that not all living things fit all the criteria of life. That would be true. But as you and I both know that does not make fire a partially living thing...which brings us back to the question of what life really is.

I'm afraid I or modern medical science have no set reply to that.

So if we cannot define life, it follows that we cannot define death either, for one thing is known by its contrast. Death, for example, would not for a living cell be the cessation of breathing, circulation, or brain activity, but something that happens at a microscopic or microcosmic level. And we get stumped there once again. IF so, and we're stuck into reluctantly admitting that there is no definition of life nor death, then we might very well conclude that either does not exist, for how can something exist if it cannot even be defined. I'm sure that in my argument there are hundreds of logical loopholes, but, frankly, I do not give even a dying rat's fart.

I know that I might be wrong...but also that I might be right. And hope springs eternal.

Thus, if neither life nor death exist, what we see or feel must be an illusion. What Hindus call maya. We're faced with a face that has prepared to meet the faces that it meets.

My consciousness is a relative reality. It's mine. It exists in my own space. I know I exist because I'm conscious of my existence...and thus I exist. Had I not existed, I would not have known that, and consequently never existed. It is a dilemma that Mohammad Iqbal has dealt with very well in his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.

I woke up about three hours ago at 4:30 in the morning. No wonder such stupid stuff is going on in my head as to spill on digital paper too!

A Death in the family...

2006-11-02T05:38:00.000-08:00

I've had ample time to get over the minor shock, mere denial and mirrored sadness. So I guess I should write now, although I should have when the impact was fresh. The writing would probably have been more emotional and powerful. Just as well! I'm tired of using pain to create power.

My eldest phoopa passed away yesterday. MI. Heart Attack. Instant death. His name was Malik Amjad Ali and, I guess, name don't matter any more, do it!

He was 63. A recluse in the family. I saw him smile very very rarely. Every one called him Bholey Uncle, I still don't know why. He was 20 days older than my eldest taya, and they were first cousins. My paternal grandfather was his mammoo.

I was afraid of him. Always. We were kids and whenever we went over to his place, we were told never to dare enter his bedroom. He always seemed so aloof, distant, a smoke in his hand. I think to me he was both transparent and intimidating. He seemed to live in a world all his own.

The last time I met him must have been at least one whole year ago. Must have been some family gathering. We are not very close to my phoopos, although I do enjoy meeting with my cousins whenever possible.

He died yesterday in a stranger's car. That sounds so impossible. But as my taya says, "Kallya hi riya saree zindagee; kalya hi marr gya" [Lived alone all his life; died alone too]. He was in his car alone when he must have felt the onset of cardiac pain. Hearsay tells me he went to a nearby doctor's clinic, who, probably noting the severity of his symptoms, asked another patient to take him to Services Hospital. Death overtook him before he reached the ER doors. The docs pronounced him DOA.

Who was he? I will never know. People are frail and rigid, no matter how huge an oxymoron that sounds. I always knew him as a man who was mean to his wife and kids. Perhaps, not mean, but distant and cold. Like lava that has mistakenly flown under a glacier cap.

When I went to his funeral today, there were many people there. Most family. Some friends. None strangers. He lay there, wearing the white cloaks of death. It's strange now that I think about it. Death in Christianity is black. Decay and Fear. Death in Islam is White. Innocence, Peace and Satisfaction. And he looked all that. He looked like he was frowning a bit though...exactly as I was used to seeing him in real life.

Bholey Uncle's mother was divorced before the partition of Pakistan. Sound funny? Not! But her brother, my grandfather, my Barey Abbu supported her, fed her, took her and her kid under his wing. Barey Abbu loved them both to death. Bholey Uncle was like his protege. He got him started in business and life, raised him. Perhaps thats why he thought he had the right to make Bholey Uncle's marriage decision for him by wedding his daughter, my phoppo, to him. Bholey Uncle had always been against the idea of a marriage in the family. He did it finally, but he never forgot it and that's when, my dad says, he became distant with every person in our family including Barey Abbu. He used to be great friends with my taya before that. Not any more. That's how he ended up spending all his life cold and distant and sort of shrivelled up from people in general.

Today he lay there, huggin death with an embrace stronger than any in our world. He had already been bathed by my cousins before I got there. Finally the death charpoy was lifted in a haunting chorus of Kalma-e-Shahadat (I bear witness there is no god but Allah and I bear witness that Mohammad [PBUH] is His messenger) and carried by more than twenty men towards the Firdous Market graveyard, each man alternately lifting and releasing the legs of the chorpoy one by one.

The graveyard has a tiny mosque. I could call it the Bait-ul-Maut, The House of Death, but truth be told, we die when we're born. It's all a matter of time. The man who led his last Death Prayer gave a little sermon, short, decent, true. He said conformist or not, believer or not, we all die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We all walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death...but we are supposed to walk through it not once but at each moment of our life.

He was lowered. The grave was not marble, not stone, but dirt and dust. A hale man, a strong man, he was lowered by three others into his last abode. Time and Space stop outside the grave. We are prisoners of time, not the other way around. He will turn black and blue, his body bloat, his teeth crumble, his skin decay. Death makes us angel of us all and gives us wings as smooth as raven's claws, Morrison would have us believe, but death is like a cruncher. It's like a grizzly. It eats us up and spits out bones out, or sometimes not even those. It's a long way from home.

We stood there and performed rituals, some Islamic, some not. There were prayers performed, given, drifted...but what actually is the dead man's lot belongs only to the dead man. We can hope. Hope springs eternal. Perhaps there is a God indeed with Mercy and Love as His prime attributes!

We buried him and went home.

He lies there, buried under dust and clay and some stones, his eyes closed.

I hope and pray that finally Barey Abbu and Baree Ammi and Bholey uncle and his mom and dad are together now in some Kakka Zai corner of Heaven, chatting and laughing freely; that there is a smoker's corner in Heaven; that the Great Unseen was revealed unto him gently; that the two Inquirer angels were nice and decent to him; that when they asked him who his Lord was, he smacked his head, laughed and said, "I think I've forgotten my encyclopedia at home, but I do believe it is Al-Ilah, Allah, THE GOD!"

I hope he's finally home and at peace.

Inna lillah-e-wah inna ilaih-e-rajioon. We all come from Allah and we all return unto Him.

May you rest in peace and love, uncle!

Tagged by Aya...although I still dont understand how that werks...

2006-10-31T15:06:00.000-08:00

Today

Height: 5'10

Color: Darkish...I look like the HINDU God Hanuman...

Piercing: one in my temporal lobe in the brain...

Tattoos: One. Congenital. Says, "This ass is cheap. ANY buyers?"

Right Now

Time: 7:42 p.m

Mood: Thoughtful. I'm mostly either thoughtful or delightful.:)

Taste: Nestle Orange juice...

Weather: Warm night with a lot of potential Dengue-carryin moquitos...

Bad habit:Lots: Lazy. Laid back. Volatile. love burpiing a lot, and proud of it.

Current crush: Mara this question's for goras...we dont believe in em...

Biggest regret: Leavin arts...

Perfume(s): The scent of not havin bathed in 24 hrs...

Thing I want to do: Go play a frame of snooker...

Favourite

TV show: Many. Lost is good, for one.

Book: Cant classify. Loads...

Non alcoholic drink: Dew!

Milk drink: Hot Chocolate!

Brand: none

Color: Black and Blue...

Emblem: some. Cant rem them rite now...

Perfume: Polo, I think...

Designer: No one in particular.

Chocolate: I love chocolate...all sorts...like some one I know...and
well my all-time fav is dark toblerone choc...

Have I Ever

Broken the law: Yes...

Misused credit card: Yes...

Skipped school: Sure I have...a lot lot lot....

Fell asleep in the shower/bath:No, but i once fell asleep on the toilet. Does that count?

Had children: No

Been in love: No comment...

Been hurt: Yep...plenty of times...no need to count em...

Random

Have a job: No...not right now..hopefully that'll change soon!

My CD player has what in it right now: I prefer MP3's, thank u...

If I were a crayon, the color: blue

What makes me happy: Lots of stuff...not havin to live in AKU
Male Hostel anymore eg.

When/What Was the Last

I got a real letter: Millions of years ago...cant rem...

Got an email: 5 minutes ago

Thing I purchased: day before yesterday/a chocolate

TV program I watched: A few hrs ago...Geo News...

Movie I saw in the theaters: Last year in Boston...cant remm keri...

Hugged: a few days ago...Waheed saab i think...

Place I was: a few hours ago/My dads room

Song heard: Suspended from Class...a few hrs back...

Phone call: a few hrs back...Uzer

Was depressed: A little...two days back when all us friends left fer
our respective places...

What Comes to Mind When I Hear

Car: Ferrari...although im not a big car fan...

Murder: the thrill of a good novel...

Cape: Cape Cod

Cell: the movie...

Fun: Talkin to some ppl...and sheesha...

Shoe: That I shudnt be hit by one...

Crush: Love that hides behind the facade of a minor flame...go figure!

Music: A friend who wanted to be a rock star...he almost has...

Love: Everything...

Chalk: Grating on the board...arrggghhh!

The wanderer...

2006-10-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

I've been wandering these past few days in between a few worlds. Ever notice how sometimes your mind expands and blooms or how your thoughts keep churning, grinding, whirling till they come up with a new system, or a broader or better view? And all you did was stay in your room and study fucked up Kaplan books that keep repeating the same damn questions over and over again.

I had a terrible neck spasm. It hurt. Borrowing words from a friend who's probably had had this kind of tragedy, it felt as if "my head was too heavy for my neck." And this is putting it mildly.

So, I tried everything known to man to get rid of it. I began with pain killers, anxiolytics, gentle rubs, Salicylate patches, creams, lotions, warm baths, decline in my physical exercise till it dropped to absolute zero. I went to a GP, then an ortho guy, even a pehlwaan, and all said it would go away in a few days...and it kept getting worse and worse. I couldn't sleep properly, I couldn't sit still, I couldn't gym, I couldn't even study. I was miserable, and that's the understatement of the year.

I've been mostly healthy my whole life, and that's cause for gratitude. But surprisingly, I've had many afflictions this year, starting with a sebacious cyst excision, one folliculitis that almost turned into cellulitus, blepharitis and then finally this neck spasm...all coexisting with the hardest prep for the hardest exams of my life.

And even though they scared me and hurt me and made me miserable, I learnt a few things from them.

There is nothing like the solace of prayer. There's nothing like the fear of pain, affliction, disease and death that makes you go towards the prayer mat. Had I not had the strength and conviction of religion behind and with me, I'd have gone crazy. Had I not rested my head in my God's lap, the fear and apprehension and hopelessness would have driven me to insanity.

An atheist friend of mine laughed at me and called me weak. He said I was using religion to derive hope for life. I agree. I am. He said I was climbing onto religion's shoulders to get through life. That's right, okay, sue me! He said it was a sign of weakness. Of course...and you're bulletproof, are you? I saw the same guy once break right in front of my eyes into tears, held him, shushed him. Weakness is inevitable. Our bodies break, so do our minds. Weakness is also relative. Each man's burden to him!

My point: Even if I use religion, even if there is no God out there and the greatest debate in history is finally solved, and it's proven that religion is man-made, what or whose loss would that be? God's if He exists? Heck, no. Ours! Religion is a line that saves us from us. It's like the territorial mark that goes around our lives, protecting us from basic animal desires. Once you step out of that line, you're on your own. And since human beings can never really be objective about anything, our decisions henceforth would at many times be made via convenience. And that convenience is a temporal entity. It climbs our laps like a puppy, and bites our butt cheeks, given time...not that I have anything against dogs.

From what I've seen of life, I've understood that religion is a blessing. The human heart is flexible, finicky and infidel. It bends wherever it wills. There has to be something that makes it strong, not rigid but strong. Give it hope, pleasure, simplicity, fidelity and permanence. That's religion's job.

Example: I myself might hold free sex between two consenting parties legal and perfectly fine. The Quran doesn't. Following my penis, or my heart would hurt both my penis (STD's) and my heart. The girl would ditch me after a while. She'd cheat on me for just one impulsive moment, and all would be lost.

Following the Quran would save my heart...and my penis. If Taqwa becomes my critera for anything let alone women or marriage, all that follows is from my Lord, to my Lord, for my Lord. I'd love my wife for herself, for my religion, for my Allah. And at the end of the day, like the Prophet said, My Allah would be sufficient for me. InshAllah.

So who ends up better? The fool in religion or the fool in lust. For Love is a function of generosity, sacrifice, pain and humanity.

Not lust or selfishness or envy.

P.s. Alhamdulillah, Praised be the Sustainer of all the worlds! All the afflictions I mentioned went away with treatment. The neck spasm took the longest, but alhamdulillah, it too has disappeared with some Short Wave Diathermy treatment along with isometric neck exercises.

Hint: If you ever get an acute muscular spasm that doesn't go away in a few days, stop massaging it. Contrary to what people think, massaging is contraindicated in spasms. Sprains are different. Massaging lets more blood flow into the area which bring chemicals that cause more inflammation and pain in spasms and increase muscle tone. If you get a muscle spasm, contact your doctor or physiotherapist immediately. From experience, I can state with confidence that the best treatment for muscle spasms is Short Wave Diathermy which is a kind of heat application on your affected muscles. Cheap and effective.

It made my one-month pain go away in days...

Happy days...

2006-09-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

What is that line in Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coehlo?
"Considering the state of affairs of the world, one complete happy day is almost a miracle."

When I was a little boy, like many people, I too imagined that Life was divided into good and bad days balanced out very evenly. I remember one particular day--I must have been around 7 or 8 years-- when I was so happy for some reason that I said in my heart, "I'm prepared for all trials, Allah mian. Bring it on!" I meant that I was ready enough to be patient. The same day our tutor came and beat the hell out of me.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention we lived in a joint family system, and our parents, traditionalists that they were and are, believed in the power of the Great Maula Baksh, the CANE! We were like ten kids that lived in one house and one tutor taught us all...and he used to be free to do whatever he could to make us LEARN! And my, was he sadistic! lol...I even remember how I once exclaimed to my mom, "He beats me when I do all my homework and he does it anyways if I don't. So might as well NOT do it!" She told me to hush, sweet traditionalist that she was. Needless to say when that tutor beat an elder cousin of mine one day, my cousin went out, took a cricket bat, and whammed the shit out of the tutor's motor bike. That was a day of rejoicing for all of us, our cousin the hero!

My point is, God loves it when we say Nevermore. He loves it when we determine to do something, because that's when the battle of wills begins. Sometimes, we even need to fight God, like Coehlo illustrates in The Fifth Mountain.

Alhamdulillah, I've had a few happy days. I'm worried about the next few. But may He be with us all! We stand to gain, not He, or does He? Iqbal did say,

"It is this star, Adam, that lights up Your Universe, Lord!
The fall of man, then, is my loss or Yours?"

Not much parhai in the last few days. Have been pretty busy. But inshAllah that will change soon. I hope!

To Anonymous...

2006-09-01T04:28:00.000-07:00

The following post is the benefit of my friend, Anonymous, who's been frequenting my page for a short time:

I live in a world where truth, beauty and justice are discussed and dissected, but not preserved. Everyone seems to sympathise with any leftist argument made for any one without his realising that even that is conformism. Humans conform not as a matter of choice but necessity. It's built in. Evolutionarily analysed, this attitude, this basic desire to get in line was needed to be safe, not to be preyed upon, not to become extinct in the race of Creation.

But what good is creation if it's without freedom? The fact is most of us don't even know we're not free. We're bound by family, desires, career, contemporaries, a rat race, selective laws, and, most of all, fear of the unknown. If no strings or chains are visible, it doens't mean that they don't exist.

Lately my blog seems to be quite anti-semitic. I tried reading a few posts objectively and ended up with the reluctant conclusion that I had asserted without proof, that I had transgressed without excuse or explanation. Please allow me to redeem myself.

I don't dislike Jews, nor do I condone racism. Nowhere in Islam does it explicitly say that "O you who believe! Hate Jews fer eternity." It doesn't. My religion is pure of bigotry. It's based on love, surprisingly more so than Christianity is, even though Christ was sent as naught but Love incarnate. The word "Salm", as I've innumerably stressed, means "Gaining Peace through submission unto God's will." The fact is, Muslims didn't start hating the Jews till the early twentieth century when the issue of Palestine first came up. [You can check it out in Karen Armstrong's books. She says the same thing.] It was only then that Muslims began to dig out the Quranic verses that condemn the Jews. However, most scholars of Islam know and agree that those verses were contextual and referred to the Prophet's situation with the Jews in Medina fifteen hundred years ago.

Even history corroborates this. It was Christians, not Muslims, that persecuted Jews for more than a thousand years, and these Jews sought sanctuary in Muslim lands. They lived in comparative peace with us.

My point is, I'm not anti-semitic. I do not hate then or love racism. But that doesn't mean that I will not defend myself or my religion or my people. Have any of you read those posts at GIYUS? You should. They're filled with hatred. Everything in that writer's opinion is anti-semitic, everyone out to get the Jews, Israel the Pure land that just cannot do wrong, and Iran and Muslims and anyone who speaks up against Jews terrorists and mass murderers with nothing but blood and bombs on their minds. That, I will not condone!

I might be insignificant. I might write for only ghosts of dreams...but I shall continue writing whatever I can and whenever I can. Perhaps, Israel will not be taken to task for what they did in Lebanon, perhaps there will never be more education or money or opportunities for Muslims, but history does repeat itself again and again and again.

Maybe my children, if not I, will see good times.

good night and good luck...

2006-09-01T04:18:00.000-07:00

I just watched the movie, "Good night, and Good luck", the new version. And I loved it. I love most things that are done in the name of freedom and truth and justice...though I myself might not be free of hypocrisy myself at times. Here' s part of the speech that Edward R. Murrow makes in his Television show See It Now on CBS (in the movie, of course...):

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."

Truer words were never spoken...

The Politics of my skin...

2006-08-25T11:52:00.001-07:00

Just watched a movie, "The Constant Gardener". Goddamn it. I must have an ovary somewhere in my head. That movie moved the shit outta me, if u dig mah pun!

Will not explore the plot here. Wouldn't want to ruin the fun of others now, will I! But it gave rise to certain sentiments in me which I'd like to sorta throw out to the wind.

It fucked me over. The issues it dealt with were...are...enormous. The problem with the pharmaceutical companies in the West is apparently of gigantic proportions. What and how they're doing their drug trials in developing countries, never mind how unethical and disastrous those trials actually are! And the worst of it is: most of the movie is true. The part about various illegal trials, the part about the red tape actually being red, murder, misery, the death of humanity...and money, money, money being the goddamn issue! All true. All so fuckin' true...oh, my head's gonna explode with all the supernovas of thoughts and madness lighting up the dark countours of my brain!

At the end of the day, I don't need to worrry about the world. It moved and worked fine without me when I wasn't here, and it will when I'm gone. It doesn't belong to me nor you...or does it? Jostein Gaarder in his so-so book, "Through a glass darkly" says a few good things, one of them being, "When a child is born, in a sense, he doesn't come into the world, but the world comes to him." Well-said, Mr. Gaarder! The world exists when you or I exist for the first time. If you didn't exist, how the fuck would you know there was or is a world out there in existence? For you the world is born anew when YOU are born. Interestingly, there's a verse in the Quran that says something to the effect of the world being created EACH INSTANT, something Iqbal agrees with in his Reconstruction of Religious Thought In Islam. How absolutely fascinating! Plots and threads meeting each other at the junction which is human thought. God and man meeting somewhere in the desolation of creation!

I will go nuts some day, I know...:)

But even if the world didn't belong to you or me, WE belong to it, no? WE have taken from it and we must give it back something. What could that be? Nothing in life comes for free. There's always a price. What is the price of existence? Each buyer names his own.

Mine is an aspiration to freedom. A desire to break through. A shot at love. A dart at compassion. An attempt at redressing the horrors that come as the fringe benefits of creation.

I'm scared of paying.

I'm terrified of the sellers.

Cafe Takes down Hitler poster but name stays...

2006-08-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, a Mumbai cafe opened up. Its name was Hitler's cross, and the glass sported a poster of Hitler staring down at you with Swastikas all around him. Because of Jewish pressure from all around the world, it took three days to take down the poster. I doubt it'll take more than a week to change the name too.

Take a look at how the people at GIYUS (Give Israel Your United Support) are celebrating this victory:

http://ws.giyus.org/points/point?id=159

Can you imagine this? What the hell is the difference in intensity of the feelings of Jews about Hitler and Muslims about Mohammad PBUH except that the direction of the feelings is exactly opposite?

This is what I wrote to the editor of The Times, India:

Dear Sir/madam,
It is with great regret and gravity that I write to you. I read about the Hitler's Cross restaurant in your paper and, though, I do not appreciate nor condone what Hitler did, I waited to see what Jews would do against this. Don't get me wrong. I do not support the restaurant naming itself on a mass murderer's name, but the principle of the matter remains that when the Mohammaden cartoons were first published and Muslims went nuts against them, it was 'freedom of press, thought and expression" and now when some one else does something very very similar, albeit a thousand times less harmful and offensive, suddenly the Jews are outraged and 'the influential guardian minister, Ganesh Naik' is saddened and angered for the Jews. What kind of justice is that? What kind of bias? Agreed that Muslims went nuts and stupidly set about vanadalising stuff and setting fire to their own country, but the principle remains unchanged, doesn't it?
Please take up your pen and write on this. Please ignore my nationality or religion, and write about the truth.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Usman Tanveer Malik

Please, please, honest bloggers of the world, Muslim bloggers of the world, write on this. If Jews can unite, why can't we?

GIYUS...

2006-08-23T03:36:00.000-07:00

GIYUS...that stands for Give Israel Your United Support. It's a website that has forums and chat rooms where you can sit and diss more than discuss anything that remotely affects Jews in general or Israel. Holy shit! You should go and check it out. There are some rooms where you're not even allowed entry if your ISP address is Pakistani or any Muslim country's, although how they can figure it out is beyond me...but then again, I'm no comp. genius.

Anyways, those people at GIYUS have developed a software called Megaphone. What this baby does is inform everyone that has the software installed on their computers whenever there is any bit of news or poll online about the Middle east and Israel...and then the software asks you to go to the poll or news' site and vote or write in favour of Israel. It's actually quite impressive. What better way to unite Jews and pro-Israelites online than this? Jews are good at media war...

Well, I might not be a comp whiz but I can write and I can vote. So why don't you all download this software and fight their fight with their own weapons? That's what I do. Twice or thrice daily do I get news about some stupid Jew issue happening somewhere in the world, and the software tells me this eg:

"Costa Rica's president gets scared and moves their embassy from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Write to the president and protest against this."

And then the software gives me the President's official email address.

So what I do is go to the site and if I feel that they're promoting anything unfairly or against Muslims, I just do the opposite of what the software tells me to do.

Now, take a look at what GIYUS claims has happened because of its efforts.

[Thank you for your efforts
Over the past few days we've brought to your attention a number of biased, outrageous articles as well as the appalling Iranian Holocaust cartoon exhibition. We wanted to take the time and let you know the results of our joint efforts on these campaigns:

1765 members filed a complaint with the Independent regarding Robert Fisk's article which called Mizgav Am a settlement and claimed Israel has no right to defend itself against Hezbollah as long as they hide among civilians;

1553 members sent an email protest to the Iranian organizer of the Holocaust cartoon "contest";

1151 members wrote to Reuters and complained that their coverage of the Iranian Holocaust denial "contest" did not condemn the act but rather portraits it as an almost legitimate opinion;

1903 members wrote to the UN's Secretary General and encouraged him to act according to UN resolution 1696 and prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear bomb;

And following Assad's speech, 2542 members wrote to the EU and asked to condemn Syria for their support of Hezbollah and their efforts to "wipe Israel off the map"

Thank you for the time and effort - together we are making a difference in promoting fair journalism and raising awareness to anti Israeli and anti Jewish acts around the world. Help us grow the Giyus community - invite your friends and family, report related articles and voice your opinion around the net.]

Mindboggling, ain't it! And we sit and mope all day long about how Muslims are being treated. Well, this is how today's wars are fought. Time for you all to pick up the guns too. Metaphorical guns of course!

You can download the software here:

www.giyus.org

Best of luck with the knocking at the door of your conscience...

Ah, what a life...

2006-08-21T00:23:00.000-07:00

There is nothing I'd rather do than to ponder on where life has led me. But there's so much shite hitting the fan these days that I'm simply at a loss as to hwo to begin. Suffice it to say that I'm not where I wanted to be...and I'm fuckin scared. But at least Im not terribly unhappy.

My USMLE Step 1 score came in. I got a 92. Very modest score. Nothing to write home about. I was quite disappointed and depressed when it came in. But Alhamdulillah, My Allah gave me strength to see what could have been. It could have been an 80 and I wouldn't have been able to do shite abt that. So better a 92 than an 80. I keep on looking at the brighter side of things...

Career plan: I'm taking Step 2 in a couple of months and then NOT match this year. I'll be applying to the US next year now. I have some stuff that needs taking care of...and till that's done, I don't believe that Destiny will allow me to leave the country. See, I do believe in Destiny, always have, and this time there seem to be some clear signs from Her. STAY IN PAKILAND, whispers She like the mysterious mistress She is.

I kid to some extent of course, but what if I don't?

So game plan is do a housejob in Pakiland this year and then apply for general surgery in the US next year inshAllah. Meanwhile, I'll try to get a few research papers published inshAllah to strengthen my CV. God willing, I wanna do surgery and surgery alone, and Im willing to waste a year here for that. Plus, I could work on my book: something I've dreamt of doing since I was a kid. Now I might get the chance. Also, I want to learn Arabic if time and Allah mian permits. So this might actually be a blessing in disguise.

Anyways, just thought would update my readers. but inshAllah now that the blogger ban is off, you shall see more of me again...

Finally...

2006-05-23T03:45:00.000-07:00

To those who think I went away forver:

Dudes and Dudesses! I am studying these days but that doesn't mean I can't update my blog every few weeks and all! The problem was something had happened to my blogger account. My passwerd wasn't werkin and shit, and well it took some time for me to get things wrapped up and appear on the scene again.

I'm currently studying horribly these horrible horrible days. I'm tired and way behind schedule but at least I'm trudging. I'm on the second last subject of my second read, and well, I'm schedule for Step 1 on the 20th of July. It seems far off but believe me it's not. In fact, it's horribly close. That's right! My favourite word, these days, is horrible.

Anyways, I'm whacked out, I'm cold and frigid, I can't seem to discipline myself and I still need to run the 4 kms before 7 o'clock today. Yeah, I run 4 kms daily now, exept for when there's a storm out there. Lahore is currently deluged with dust storms. Ha! I love word play.

Anyways, so that's me and mine.

So, how've you bin?

The Mohammaden Cartoons...my take!

2006-02-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

So there's a lot of sound in the air about the Mohammaden Cartoon printed by this Danish newspaper a while back, which were reprinted by otehr European newspapers especially french and German.

So what's the hassle about? People who are not Muslims publish a caricature of the Prophet of Islam, one of the greatest and most revered figures on the planet, who has followers in the billions -- that is thousands of MILLIONS! So they publish a caricature.

"The caricatures include drawings of Muhammad wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb, while another shows him saying that paradise was running short of virgins for suicide bombers." Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4670370.stm

The result was that many Muslims were enraged and made demonstrations and did picketings and whatever. That caused other European newspapers to republish the caricatures, and the debate has since become very heated, resulting in democratic recallings and political shock waves and what not.

My bewilderment stems from one question.

Why would the other newspapers republish the caricature?

Okay, I understand the first one doing it to some extent. They're not Muslims. They don't understand how reverent the prophet's figure is to us. They don't understand that orthodox islam forbids making pictures or caricatures or cartoons of the prophets and any literal rendition or attempt to draw or put God on paper. All right, they don't understand...or do they?

Seems to me that after the Rushdi; that Nigerian journalist who wrote an article about the Prophet and Miss World; the Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh's murder when he made a documentary about violence against Muslim women and others...do they still not get it? Muslims are touchy about their Prophet and their religion. Especially now with 9/11 and Palestine and Bosnia and Iraq, Muslims feel helpless, caught in a wave of the New World, and they're trying desperately to survive with their religious and cultural identities intact.

Perhaps Muslims overdo it. Perhaps WE are stupid enough to try to fight cultural, political and military oppression with words and brute force instead of diplomacy and intelligence and smartness. But, why would the Europeans then keep on doing it? Why do something that, they fucking know, would antagonise almost half the people on the planet, that would inevitably lead to political uneasiness and perhaps even deaths of innocent people?

Freedom of press? My fat brown ass!

What is freedom of press? To talk about any issue, any issue at all. Fine! Then why don't they talk about Rachel Carrie, the American woman who died while trying to stop an Israeli bulldozer from running over a Palestinian house? Why won't they talk about the synagogue that Israelis have been buliding in hush hush under the Al-Aqsa mosque? Why don't they talk about so mnay things that other nations and other peoples have been doing? Why does it always have to be Muslims with whom they must concern all their fun and anger and 'freedom of press'?

A friend (www.drpak.blogspot.com) mentioned that instead of worrying why they do it, we should worry about how to make sure that they CAN'T do it! He was talking about education and intelligence and finance and military power. If Muslims had that, then it would have been a completely different ball park is his view, and I absolutely agree. In addition to that, just for a second, imagine that the Arabs kill the US and European oil supply for one week, that's it. One week! What would happen then? If all the Muslims all across the glove, all their governments and peoples, said in one collective voice, 'Apolgise, you Danish assholes! You, the French and German shitty titties in the corner, you fuckin' do it too!"

What would happen then, I wonder.

If all the intelligent and smart Muslim and non (meaning the ones who are well read and informed enough to understand the Muslim POV) people in the world wrote one letter daily to their local/national/international press, explaining with conviction and logic and rationale and a cool head, the issue and all the good and bad things about it, what would happen then?

I keep wondering.

At the end, I have here an article I came across, expounding the power of media, networking and unity. I hope Muslims can be as diligent and smart and united as that Mr. Zimmerman in the following article:

http://www.everyvoice.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=68

And the ball rolls...

2006-02-01T11:47:00.000-08:00

I sit here in the middle of the night, wondering.

I wonder, surprise, surprise!

Where am I going? I study day in and out. Bin doing that a long time.

I was a wonder student back at Aitchison! (Yeah, today, I'm talkin abt my shit, so sue me!) I was an average student in Aga Khan. And these days, my life rocks on the parhai, i.e. study, hinges. I mean, sometimes I wonder if I would even recognise life if I didn't have to study!

Why am I studying that much? I know, I know. Career and money and profession and all...but sometimes it feels like my entire life's slipping by the window while I just stand there and stare at pictures of it. I wanted to be a writer, then a musician, and now all I'm left with is medicine. If somehow I lose it (like not score well in the MLE's!) I lose everything. And how is that defined? Losing everything? It's the absence of anything in your life that makes sense, that makes your existence worthwhile. And what makes my existence worthwhile? Frankly, for some time, I can't think of anything that may have made it worthwhile...

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suicidal, not even depressed, not even sad really. I just watched a good movie with my little sister, and somewhere in the middle of the movie, I looked at her and I realised how much I love her. She's such a brilliant woman, so strong and caring and loyal and funny. I realised how lost I would be when the time for her to go...go anywhere...comes. She's always been my friend and supporter. She takes everything I say and believed it absolutely, and that's such a marvellous and unique thing. I mean how many of you out there have one person who just believes in you completely. Who can just understand what you are and what you want to be, and who thinks you're right in your beliefs.

It breaks my heart when I think she'll go away one day too. Lately, I've started getting close to my brother too, and I'm so thankful to God for that. I always wanted to be friends with my brother, and now it's beginning to become real now, slowly, gradually.

Family is so important. I've always known that, but tonight is just one of those times when it's really hitting home, the fact that I, despite what I used to think about myself, am after all a family man. I like being with my family, I enjoy making them happy even a little bit about anything. I see my father's face, my mother's eyes, and each time I look at them, I realise how important it is for me to keep seeing them, may Allah give them all long and happy and healthy lives!

What would I do without them? How will I make myself leave them when -- if -- I get a job abroad? I have no clue. How will I dare take the last steps out the door on my way abroad?

I feel so scared at times. But then I remind myself that bravery is not the absence of fear, but the presence of functionality in the face of it. And alhamdulillah, I'm functional and still alive. I've lived through difficult times, but so has everyone around me, and that's not an achievement, but at least I can be happy about one thing.

I've always been a fighter in one way or the other...and Allah willing, I'll fight on till the last breath leaves my body.

I hope I can stick to what I say. That's because now I realise that sometimes all a man has is his word.

The American Arranged Marriages...

2006-01-31T04:28:00.000-08:00

I had a revelation today. American singles, once they're in their 30's, start asking their friends to set them up on dates or ( if they still retain self-respect) their friends do it for them even without their asking for it. I understood today that arranging random dates is just like going and seeing men or women for possible arranged marriages. The principle is the same. Your rep counts, your financial security counts, first impressions count, and then you're training yourself to love the guy or girl for whatever GOOD qualities they got, ignoring or trying to ignore the bad. So tell me, where's the spontaneous, make-my-head-spin love working here? Where's the love-at-first-sight?

Imagine the scenario. The guy or girl is at least in their 30's. They're probably working. They lack a family structure which would cover up for not having a lifemate at least a little bit. They're lonely and trudging into middle age. The house is empty, and then you meet a guy/girl who might not be perfect but would be good company and support. The house wouldn't seem so dreary anymore, the other side of your bed would be filled. You wouldn't have to deal with your own private craziness anymore or alone.

Well, that's how the American singles think once they're past youth. Once the parties and the booze and the sex and rock and roll die, there's only an empty house yawning its mouth filled with leftovers.

I understand today that even in the US, where you are supposedly a free person as regards your love life, you're not free. They're too many social, emotional, financial problems all around you. Your natural yearning to be with somebody who can make your existence worthwhile or who acknowledges your existence makes you want to search for some one who would be there for you...and thus their arranged marriage system!

So why do they blame our culture, our way of doing the same thing? I used to think arranged marriages were so degrading. A man, in both ours and the American society, is still at an advantage. He would go and look at women and judge them and then decide to send a proposal. he is the one who more likely than not has the upper hand, and I used to think it was wrong.

Now I think that it could also be a chance to see how things might work out. If you're agreeing to marry somebody for any reason at all, you're making a bet. It could or could not work out, that's all there is to it. It's equally true in both love and arranged marriages. At the end of the day, we would all like to marry the person we 'magic love' love, but how many times does that actually happen? Hell, even the magic love disappears more often than not once you're into a fw years of marriage. So what's the perfect solution?

The answer lies in so many things. Once again, I'm forced to admire Islam as a religion that's 'architecturally very sound' as a friend put it. You marry the person and you agree with all heart to take care of him/her. Adultery is not allowed in Islam anyways. So even after marriage, if you have sexual feelings for another person, your religious inhibitions hold you back. And that saves you from a momentary mistake that could lead to a lifetime sentence of mistrust and betrayal.

At the end, it is values, as we understand them, that save us. An impulse is just that. Acting on it is cowardice too in one sense.

So what about love? As Yeats said:

I whispered, "I am too young,"
And then, "I am old enough;
"Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.

"Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair."
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love.

Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

Sophie's World

2006-01-21T03:19:00.000-08:00

If there were ever a book that should be awarded the Pulitzer for ingenuity and intricate mapping of genuine philosophy upon a decent storyline, it' s this one. The book starts off with your everyday chores and mundane happenings and gradually takes over an entire world. It's simply staggering. Also, the book gives a short and concise history and explanation of philosohpy starting a few hundred years before Christ and moves down to the present day. I learnt so many things I'd always wanted to know. I suggest this book to anyone with interest in the ultimate questions of existence. The book will answer many of them and smartly start you off in the right direction for the ones it does not answer.

Reading Jostein Gaarder's other works is a must now!

My life is just a momentary reflection of God on Himself. Interestingly all the great western philosophers and the eastern sages say that. I wonder how many of those people actually were Sufis who'd experienced God's divinity. Was Socrates or Plato a mystic or perhaps even prophets in a certain sense of the word? Khair, these are not questions I can answer at my current level of Jutsu as Naruto would have me say. Don't scratch your head, love!

I like anime (Japanes cartoons!) too. Naruto is really the only one I've followed loyally over the 160 episodes of it that have yet been released...

Horrible day for parhai...

2006-01-16T04:45:00.001-08:00

Subhah se kuch khas naheen parha! Bad day! Cousins comin over and all...Let's see if I can make it end good...

Horrible day for parhai...

2006-01-16T04:45:00.000-08:00

Subhah se kuch khas naheen parha! Bad day! Cousins comin over and all...Let's see if I can make it end good...

Alhamdulillah again and again and again...

2006-01-15T04:00:00.000-08:00

My life sucks. I know that sorta doesnt go with the subject, but consider this.

I'm studying and doing nothing else.
I study medicine.
I don't earn anything and hence that lovely male ego kick you get every time you earn one single rupee off your own manual labour is not there yet.
I have brilliant friends who will eventually get to the US definitely and earn big bucks. And become big-shot medicine names. A few already have at a student level. That is staggering. I'm zilch compared with them.
I don't have much inspiration for studying. I'm doing it, yeah, but it doesn't mean much to me. And that really really is sad. Sadder than many people could imagine.
My writing is out of the scene. I used to have my own fan club at Deep Magic and RYW. My stories and poems were well-read. Now, I can't find the urge or time to save my life.
My guitar gently weeps while I try to memorise pathologic findings in a case of interstitial pulmonary goddamned fibrosis!

I'm so dumb when it comes to certain things. Why can't I just say 'screw y'all!' and get on with it? Why must I ponder on the inevitable when clearly none of its inevitability is a distinct, definite possibility? Sigh! Boy, am i so screwed!

On a lighter note, Alhamdulillah and Praised be my Lord again and again.

Murtaza and I have passed Step 2 CS. Anyone else would have been rejoicing right about now.

I can only smile for one brief moment and get on with it!

I hope...

Alhamdulillah...

2005-12-25T09:44:00.000-08:00

Praised be my Lord, the Lord of all the worlds. Things are going well...

I am still at physio but Ive started patho as well, and alhamdulillah, it's going well. My sleep cycle has been corrected. I wake up at 8 in the morning now and sleep at 12 at night. I do about twenty pages of Physio and one chapter of Patho, and then I'm mostly free. So the good part is I get time for my family and friends too.

The better part of this is I don't worry about the other defects and problems in my life that much if parhai has been taken care of. If one has done his duty-part, one feels worthy, and that gives one a booster that lasts the entire day, and so as long as my parhai is fine, other things can be taken care of beautifully, alhamdulillah.

Anyways, I'm reading translated selections from Ibn-el-Arabi's Fatuhat-e-Makki, The Meccan revelations, and my, my, what a book! What a book, I say! What philosophy and what beauty and what depth and what spirituality. In the 11th century, the guy talks of reality being subjective to our own perception. We see and therefore cannot see the truth. We hear, and thus can't hear the Universal Spirit murmuring all around us. It's amazing. Muslim philosophy was so brilliant and so fascinating. What happened to us? When did we lose ourselves? The rise and ebb of civilisations make me sad, but inshAllah, I'm hopeful for my generation. I know so many people my age who've big dreams and aspirations regarding this country and their religion. Let's see what happens as it happens.

Meanwhile, life is good, even in the midst of all this parhai, or rather because of this parhai.

You see, I haven't really studies in such a long time. At least 5 years! At last, I feel as if something in me, something that was imprisoned for oh so long is stirring and yawning.

I welcome thee, O familiar stranger. Welcome home and home be good to you now...

Tell me more, tell me more...

2005-12-23T07:12:00.000-08:00

So these days, it's just parhai and parhai and more efforts still towards parhai...I'm trying to study for my MLE Step 1 possibly to be taken in May, and yet I fail to gain momentum.

I know why.

There's something missing somewhere. I don't have a reason to study hard anymore. There is no inspiration, no yellow brick road. I'm tired of meaningless things. Ambition doesn't boil my blood anymore...

Whatever the case, I'm still going at a snail's pace through Physio and me not like it!

More later perhaps!

What is the truth?

2005-12-21T06:39:00.000-08:00

I have spent my entire life, looking for religious truth. I have been asking questions and looking for answers everywhere. Answers that could explain so mnay things that all of us observe and mourn for. I started with my religion, my God, went onto Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, even atheism, and eventually settled for Sufism, because that's the part of Islam, the hidden psychic energy, the current running through the veins of all the religions in the world, that did answer so much of what I asked...

I was introduced to Sufism when I was probably 5 years old. My family was a big believer in Data Sahib, the shrine of Ali Hajveri, the mystic who lived in Lahore 1000 years ago, and at whose shrine so many Sunni Muslims from Lahore go to give their hazree and pray to him to pray for them or to grant certain wishes.

I became disgusted with saint worship and shrine prostrations when I read the verse in the Quran with words to the effect that 'these people are dead, can't hear you, speak, nor grant you anything, so why ask them?' I became arrogant, started making fun of my relatives who'd go there or who'd ask me to go there, because now I was educated, broad-minded and knew how superstitious and ignorant my elders were.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Ten years later, I stand on the same path I started with. This is because with time, I read more, read more diversely, read more about the Sufis and who they were, what they did, what their ideology was, what their beliefs and teachings, and this is what I have learnt about them and, through them, about God. I must still warn anyone reading this that I could still be wrong, very wrong. It is up to you to make your own research, tahqeeq, as the Quran names it. I'm not responsible for any of your misunderstandings:

It is possible to know some bits of God while we are alive. It is not possible to know God intellectually or through inference, but instead through Kashf or Tajalli, which are revelations or inspirations straight onto the heart from God's side through His Divine Grace.
There is a deeper, mysterious side of Quran and Ahadith, secret codes and meanings and levels and hints that point to deeper truths than mere religious symbols and rituals. That has been confirmed again and again in authentic Sufi treatises written by people who were not only known to be Sufis but great Islamic scholars such as Ibn-el-Arabi, Rumi and Ghazali.
It is extremely difficult, barely possible to walk on the Sufi path. To do that, you literally have to give up everything you love in your heart and empty it of all love for anything in this world and just want God. That virtually means giving up not only your loved ones such as your wife, lover, parents, siblings, friends but also personal traits such as self-respect, anger, spontaniety etc. You are basically aiming to become absolutely empty of all wants and longings except a longing for Allah, and even that will disappear with time as you ascend the stations of spirituality till you reach God in a way that is beyond everything else. A place where literally angels fear to tread.
Your two objectives will be to attain fana, perfect self-annihilation, and baqa, when you are sustained through God and come back to our plane as an objective mirror through which the Light of God operates. And this last sentence is me trying to write about something about which I don't know the tiniest bit.
Sufis say that only select people with the right amount of perseverance and mental preparation can walk their path. Everyone can't even if they want to really, really badly. I myself am ample proof of their insistence on this. I tried the mental and emotional tasks the Path demands right at the first step, and I failed miserably.
Sufis say -- and almost all of them are unanimous on this -- that the path cannot be walked alone. You need a Sufi guide. He/she can be physically present or help/guide you from a distance (dreams/hints/spiritual messages). This last is known as the Silsila-e-Qarnia, the Sufi system said to be initiated by Awais Qarni, the mysterious Sahabi, friend, of the Prophet (PBUH), the only Sahabi who never worked with or saw the Prophet (PBUH) in person. In this system, you will be guided by the Hidden Sufis if you're accepted.
Almost all Sufis agree on this, even the ones that apparently and ostensibly were vague on this point, that it is not essential to be a pronounced Muslim to enter heaven. You could be a firm Christian/Jew/atheist and still enter heaven based on how you perceived your own religion and how you behaved in your human relationships.
After a certain amount of reading, you begin to suspect that even heaven and hell as physical entities are laughable concepts in Sufi world. This possibility has also been dealt with in Ghalib and Iqbal's poetry. (I personally do not believe in heaven of hell as places.)

Anyways, these are, what I think of as, the salient features of Sufism. There are million more, but not all of them are understandable by a student of Sufism. To understand them, you have to be a disciple...and there's a world of difference between the two words and what they imply specially in Sufi lingo.

And these days, I have all but given up on becoming a disciple. I wanted to, but I guess I'm too weak and human. I love things too much, material and not. And I do want to enjoy this world while I'm here.

So unless Khizar himself comes looking for me now, I doubt that I will try to become a part of this Path. But I'm happy that I'm at least aware of this mysterious, magical, beautiful side of Islam, that has taught me tolerance and satisfaction, and answered so many of my questions...

So many people never get answered, no?

Patch Adams...

2005-12-20T05:55:00.000-08:00

Again and again I find it funny how media has, does and will keep on influencing all of us. You grow up with images that are shot cleaner than gunfire at you and you are unable to resist. Sound energy bangs against your eardrums and gets imprinted onto your mind, gathering huge wings to brush across your emotional canvas. So many of us are influenced by that, and perhaps that could be one reason why Islam as a code of life is displeased a bit with music. It causes emotional turbulence, music does, but nevertheless, I would not exchange my pain or grief or ideals affected by sheer music alone for anything. I know no other way than this as will be amply illustrated by what follows.

Anyways, Patch Adams is one of my all-time favourites. A movie that actually did help me tremendously when I was unable to synchronise or juxtapose medicine with art, it shaped quite a bit of what was already a bubbling, rebellious personality, till I did indeed manage to inculcate certain qualities that I had always wanted to be in me.

Ramblings off! In the movie, Patch recites this poem by Pablo Neruda to his love, Carin, at her grave, while tears stream down his cheeks and his voice trembles. I looked for a while for the poem, mistakenly assuming that it was by Walt Whitman. As it turned out, it's by a South American poet who eventually went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Here goes. Notice the beauty, the elegance, the simplicty and the darkness of the poem. Vintage my taste!

I do not love you...[Pablo Neruda]

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

thanthis: where I do not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Bilal...the Black Muslim

2005-12-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

You all know who Bilal was. The first Black Muslim in Islam. The poor Black slave who would cry Ahad! Ahad! at every insult and beating his nonMuslim master would give him when he discovered Bilal had converted. The Black fella who had somehow found peace in a meaningless life, a life that began in slavery when he was in his mother's womb. The Black man who later became Islam's first muezzin, the Prayer Caller.

Iqbal wrote two poems on Bilal's love and pain and good fate. Here's one of them:

Bilal

When the star of your destiny shone,
it picked you up and floated you from Habsh to Hejaz.

It gave life and light to the dark of your grieved heart.
O how many freedoms give up I for your slavery!

You never left his dooryard for a single instant.
In someone's love, you suffered joyfully myriads of cruelties.

The travails suffered in Love's path are not travails at all.
If no cruelties are there, Love isn't enjoyable at all.

Like Salman, your eye perceived the truth.
The more you saw, the more you wanted to see.

You were crazy for his vision, like Musa for God's,
like Awais craved one, just one glimpse of him.

Medina was the light of your eyes;
this desert was Mount Sinai enough for you.

Your eye saw and still writhed to see more.
Your blessed heart never ceased to hurt for a moment.

The lightning of Truth fell on your restless body such
that the black of your face smiled at Musa's divinely lit hand.

You looked at him longingly, with perfect adoration;
just looking at him was prayer enough for you.

The call for prayer was your cry of Love since the first.
Prayers became so many excuses just to look at him.

O that blissful time when Yasrib was his home!
O that joyful time when anyone could see his face!

Another one...

2005-12-19T12:56:00.000-08:00

I find that translating Iqbal into english soothes me. Using his imagery and thoughts and blending my words seems like an almost sacred act to me. It feels so right. Perhaps somewhere, he knows what i'm doing and is saying bravo! So here's another I particularly like:

If the stars move awry, is the sky mine or yours?
Why should I worry about the world, is it mine or yours?

If Spacelessness is empty of the turmoils of Love,
whose fault is it, my Lord, is Spacelessness mine or Yours?

How'd he dare refuse at the Dawn of Time?
How should I know! Is Lucifer my confidant or Yours?

Mohammad Yours, Gabriel too, the Quran Yours;
but is this beautiful translator mine or Yours?

It's this same star that lights up Your Creation.
The devastation of Man, then, is my loss or Yours?

A Im Hte Wlrasu

2005-12-19T04:21:00.000-08:00

Sounds japanese, doesn't it?

No reason why it's there. I just like scrambling words. My blog, my rules!

But why do we try to twist words and turn things around and spin the top and roll the ball?

Why must everything circle back to infinity and nothingness?

I have questions. They could drive me mad. Last night I was reading Iqbal's poetry once again, and I noticed how many questions he had and how many thoughts and revelations and inferences and inspirations! He was absolutely crazy if craziness could be defined as any thought process evolving at the borders of Mundania.

He was a thinker, philosopher, poet, artist, asthetist, politician, and most of all, yeah, most of all, he was a man who moved. Was moved, unmoved, removed...

His poetry contradicts itself, thus telling us he was human, that his beliefs and thought processes evolved continuously. Throughout his poetry, he beseeches God to make him understand Ishq, and yet he fails again and again as is proven by the following verses from his ghazal:

(My translation!)

My ill fate the same, Your indifference the same.
Didn't benefit me a bit my lyrical music.

Where am I, where You? Is this Space or Spacelessness?
Is this my world or just Your Magic confusing?

Thus passed my nights in this vortex of thoughts; the music
and musings of Rumi, at times the ruminations of Raazi.

The deceived hawk that was raised amongst vultures,
what knows he of the ways and rituals of Kings?

Ghazal belongs to no tongue; I know all of its tongues.
All I want is a heart-rending lament, Arabic or non...

No difference is there between Sufism and sultanate;
One is the fight of sepoys, the other of The Hidden Eye.

One broke off from the caravan; another hates the Kaaba.
And all this due to the caravan leader's indifference to his people...

As one can see, Iqbal is almost desperate here, heartbroken, at a loss as to why the world works around him the way it does.

And am I so different? At times, I want things for myself. Then at others, I glimpse a glimpse of the whole canvas, the entire picture blazing with misery and poverty and pain and struggle and death and disease...and that breaks my heart. Then, I just want to stop rationalising, stop looking at anything and start working for my people, to mend any broken heart, to put a balm on any wound that comes my way.

I just wanna kill my past then. Take a stick and beat all the old brambles that keep popping their mean heads up in my path. And just walk on, dream on, move on, live on...

Why is it so difficult to do that? I recall that's how Faiz was. The great poet also lived in a world that was his and a world that was Neverland...and somewhere in the midst of his struggle, he made his own niche in Neverland. But just look at his pain and sufferings while he did it!

That is my question to my Lord. Agreed that pain elevates us and death makes angels out of us, but why? Why should pain be there? Why can't greatness and niceness and love come out of happiness? Why must prosperity come of posterity?

Questions, questions, questions.

Like Iqbal said,

Why did You order me out of Paradise, my Love?
The works of days and hands are long; now You wait for me.

When on the Day of Judgement my book of deeds comes to light,
Be ashamed Yourself, my Lord, and shame be on me...

It is that great beast, life!

2005-12-18T08:45:00.000-08:00

I am human. I feel. That's how I define myself -- apart of course from consiousness -- as a human being. I know what makes me tick, what makes me hurt, what makes me happy, what makes me nostalgic and fixed in stone.

But at the same time, I need to unmove myself, to sit quietly in a corner when certain things happen, for that, then, is Kismet, Fate, God, Speaking His Kun all over again.

Just right here and now, I am all right. InshAllah that will be the case with my life too, the one that is to come. And after all the drama and tears and emotions and feelings and lies and distortions, at the end of the day, I now sit with nothing but a resolute decision to let things go their course now. Since I can't control anything -- never could, haha, remember the Great Kun? -- better to see what happens, what life has in store for me.

So now I shall trust fate and my God and see what He has for me. He created me; He must like me if not love me; He must know what He's doing, and I haven't really travelled that far down the road to indifference and atheism. I still believe...and I guess that defines me as OOTY...

Anyways, on a lighter note, I have started prepping for my MLE's. Today was in all actuality, I hope, the first of many evolving-into-better-states study days. I have begun with physio and am slow yet, but will become better soon inshAllah.

So the target now is to take United States Medical Licensing Exmainations Step 1 somewhere in May, 2006. I hope by then I'm good and ready to score well. The rest will be taken care of by my Allah, who is the Cause of all Causes, who is the Writer of the Book, who is the Beloved of all, who pours the Divine Wine, who is the Great Musician.

Like Iqbal said, the Seven heavens keep moving. What care have I, is the world mine or Yours, O Lord?

Ciao!

I'm backkkkkkkkkkkk...in the voice of the late Cybrog in T2

2005-12-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

Hullo hullo hullo...

What shall I say has passed since I last crossed this path? It has ben dark, very dark, light, frickin' light, sad, happy, hopeful, hopeless, tremendous, tremulous, fragile, frigid and all the goddamned adjectives that one could pile on this shitepike...

I have been busy is all.

So anyways life is static these days. Where are the 5 years that I was screwed bent over sideways? Pata naheen! No goddamn idea, dude, and could you please close puhleezee the Book of frickin' 5 years forever!

I'm lost in no-man's land again. Reality strikes and bites and growls, while wonderland sits and stretches and yawns. My room is all set now but for frickin' what? I, dear ladies and gentlemen, am clueless.

I try to study these days. I fail again and again. There is something gnawing at the back of my brain but I'll be daymmnned if I can put a finger to it, no pun puhleeze. Something is missing. Something is gone. I look at the wallclock and it is time.

Time for me and time for me. For a hundred decisions and indecisions and time yet for a hundred visions and revisions which this ticking hand will reverse or set in stone forever. What to do and yet again what to do?

I need to study. That I know and that I will do. But there are things undone and untied. Shall I go fix them? Shall I go fixate them? There is no answer. All answers are right. All hands point to the north star...

I hope I can find the right frame of mind and time to make the right decisions, that I can be patient and smart, that I can be just and truthful to myself. Who will say what is what? Brother Time, will you please set the matters right!

Let us go then, you and I down the rabbithole, while she stands with one foot on the stars and another in neverland...

First day in Boston...

2005-11-14T15:20:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I woke up at 11...Hasnain, my buddy with whom Im stayin had already gone for work. So I took my time brushing and bathing and shitting. Surfed on the net for awhile. Answered a few emails. The usual...and then I left for the Subway station.

U know, last time in the US was really really bad for me, partly because I had to get up early in the morning to go to the Hospital -- I was doing an elective in Ophthalmology at Children's Hospital -- partly because I didn't know anyone in Boston and it was real lonely. In addition to that, I had a completely different set of expectations in my head.

This time it's been fuckin' awesome so far, and I hope to God that's how it remains.

Since coming, I've had brilliant fun with Murtaza and Hasnain, both my best buds. I've travelled almost all over the US by road....or rather lemme give u a brief on what's happened so far...

Arrived in Boston. Met Hasnain. Ate lovely desi food at a Hyderabadi joint.
Left for Hartford by bus. Met Murtaza and the crazy Buddhee. The account of the crazy Buddhee must wait.
Laughed like fuckin' crazy all the while with Murtaza, while preparing for our CS exams. Cooked breakfast, lunch, dinner and stuff. Ate lots of Eddi's ice cream. Man, that's good shit.
Went with Murtaza to Houston by air. Met Shafiq bhai, this amazing paki dude who's extremely funny and spontaneous and abnormally hospitable. Met a lot of great Paki guys through him. Had fun. Offered Isha prayers in a mosque that was more filled than a Paki mosque on any average day. Took the Step 2 CS. Stupid exam; only actors, no real patients at all...hope we pass!
Came back to Hartford. Went to Amherst where Anita, a childhood friend of mine, lives. Had great fun with her. Watched SAW 2 on big screen. Good stuff! Scare the shite outta u...
Took a road trip with Hasnain and Murtaza from Amherst to New York.
Went to Manhattan and Timesquare. Murtaza was dazzled; kept wanting to take lots of fotographs, crazy bastard! lol...
Ate dinner in this amazing Hard Rock Cafe where they have John Lennon's, Paul McCartney's, Jimmi Hendrix's and lots of other rock legends' guitars hung and displayed in glass. Hell, there were even two handwritten songs by Jim Morrison and John Lennon displayed. I went nuts. Any rock fan would have!
Came from NY to Hartford, dropped Murtaza there, came back to Boston.
Am still here

So that's what's bin goin on...I'm chillin and stillin'...I hope this trip stays good, that this isn't as good as it gets!

Other than that, I must plan the rest of my time here. Must visit all the historical places here, including any writers' burial places and shite. I wanna go to a couple of bars, visit the old lady that I was with last year in Boston, go to a coupla poets' gatherings too. So let's cross our fingers and hope things stay well.

Love ya all!

I need to update...

2005-11-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

okay, I'm in Amherst, staying with a childhood friend. She has been nice enough to show wonderful hospitality and show us around and show us the good things about downtown Amherst.

So we went to this bar and we played pool against this gora couple and of course we beat them and we laughed cause we beat goras and that felt gooood. Then we went to this roadside cafe and had green mint herbal tea and listened to this 12-man band of goras jam and harmonise and play country barn fiddle with acoustic guitars and violins and a huge viola.

So things are going good so far. I have taken the Step 2 CS exams and so has Murtaza. And we have no clue what's gonna happen with the results since the patients were all fucking actors simulating their diseases and their signs and symptoms. I had never sorta practised on actors before and it was a bit disconcerting, but hopefully we should pass inshAllah. I hope we do; the exam was fucking 1200$. And I don't wanna pay that kinda money again or rather have my dad pay that kinda money. So let's hope we pass.

Anyways, things are going great so far in the US. Murtaza and I are having fun and meeting all sorts of great people. And let's hope this continues for a while...

will update more later. Our schedule from today onwards is:

One last day in Amherst with my friend
Go to either Newyork or Atlantic City for the weekend
Drop Murtaza in Hartford; moi go to Boston with another friend
Stay in Boston for a week and a half. Have good fun. Watch lots of theatre; go to bars; play pool; club a little; play the guitar with my friend; perhaps go watch opera; write a little; lots more!
Go home!

So best of luck everyone. Pray for us. We shall see you soon...

Thank God that some things don't change...

2005-11-02T09:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm in Boston, US, and I'm living with this friend, Hasnain. Used to be and is still my bestest of friends. The dude hasn't changed at all. Still the same old lovable dawwggg...:)...brilliant man.

So I'm staying with him in Somerville, sorta like the suburbs of Boston, sorta like not cuz it's a different city, but very close to Boston. I'll be leaving in 3 hrs. for Farmington, Connecticut. Have to meet Murtaza, my AKU buddy. We gotta pratise physical exam and history taking skills on each other. We both have our USMLE Step 2 CS exam on the 8th of November in Houston, Tx.

Man alive! The US is still the same it was last year. Very rich, very prosperous, exciting in an exotic way (cuz I'm the alien here!), but still the roads and streets are lonely and sad, especially at night. You don't see anyone walking the roads at night for miles here, especially in Boston.

Anyways, will update more from Farmington. Love to all and best wishes for me, puleeze! I hope I pass the exam. You do the same! ;)

So see you all soon. Very soon, inshAllah

P.S. Uzer and Bulub have once again embarked for the ravaged north to help the Quake affectees. Godspeed and a Heal in your hands, my loves! May you go in peace and safety and goodwill and may you once again take the Meribimur flag high!

Five: What Causes Earthquakes?

2005-10-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

I thought it was necessary to make the Quake discussion a part of my story. An interesting and important offshoot, if you please!

I think its time I address this God's Wrath versus Natural Geological Phenomenon debate that keeps raging on and on amongst our people. I'm not claiming to have access to any special knowledge or any of Allah Mian's Special I-Wilt-Cause-Quake-To-Happen-Today schedules, but I do have access to some interesting emails that circulated amongst my group of friends:

> >The day General Pervaiz Musharraf stated that "the foreign students
> >of madrassas should wind up their work and not come back", one of
> >the leading Sufis in Lahore, my Shaikh, my Spiritual Guide also
> >stated something. Before qouting him let me tell you that Holy
> >Prophet (pbuh) said "Beware of the insight of the believer, for he
> >sees with the light of God". His exact words in urdu were "Ab Allah
> >ka koi azaab aye ga".
> >The foreign students just like the local students were the people
> >about whom the Holy Prophet (pbuh) said, "The Ulema of my Ummah are
> >like the Prophets of other Ummah". And the same prophet also said
> >that Allah says "Whoever despises any of My friends has declared war
> >against Me".
> >Mind you that this was not the first time our President had declared
> >war against Allah; before this his decision on the insistence of USA
> >to remove Jihad from the syllabus about which the Prophet (pbuh)
> >stated as "the reverend of Islam" clearly proved the Prophet's
> >prediction "the dumb people will become kings" which means that when
> >ignorant people will become leaders then the displeasure of Allah
> >with Muslims is a certainty.
> >A lot of people would suddenly come up with naive statements like
> >"Oh look at how he is helping the nation now". Well its one thing to
> >first destroy yourself and then do good efforts to counter
> >it but its another thing to not do those things in the first place
> >which invite destruction!
> >Just 2 days before the earthquake, he was on TV saying extremely
> >proudly & arrogantly "Hum nay economy ko kaha say kaha pohoncha diya
> >hay". Well, what about the change in economy of Pakistan in the
> >space of 10 seconds after 8:52 A.M, last Saturday!
> >
> >My brothers and sisters, indeed it is a time of great loss, worry
> >and need. Prayers do make a difference but practical help in the
> >form of donations is also required and whoever can afford no matter
> >how much he should give it.
> >
> >But the most vital issue is that what causes these earthquakes???
> >
> >I know science will answer this question in its own way of "cause &
> >effect" that what happens beneath the surface and all that - BUT THE
> >TRUTH IS THESE EARTHQUAKES ARE NOTHING BUT THE ANGER OF ALLAH! -
> >These earthquakes are nothing but a result of our sins!
> >Remember that quran says "Whatever good befalls upon you, its from
> >Allah and whatever bad befalls upon you, its because of your own
> >sins". Do you know that the land or earth on which sins accumulate
> >it asks Allah everyday "if you want I can swallow these people" but
> >Allah says "No its between Me and My servant".
> >Believe me there is no time which depicts better how weak & helpless
> >we are than the time when we anticipate an earthquake - See your own
> >self, how quickly you move out, how quickly your feelings change, we
> >forget all our enjoyments, all our future plans and everything -
> >"these are signs, but only for those who understand" (Quran)
> >Dearest Muslims, its TIME TO REPENT AND CHANGE OUR LIVES, if Allah
> >is on one hand "All-Merciful" (Ghafoor-ur-Raheem), the same Allah is
> >the one from whose wrath when its on no one can escape!
> >Since I know that there are always going be people who at even this
> >point of time will say their
> >same pathetic cliche statement "Oh Bhai stop acting like a maulvi" -
> >For them, I will end my
> >message with the beautiful words of Hazrat Ali - "For the people of
> >spiritual insight, there is admonition in every glance and lesson in
> >every experience"
> >
> >May Allah give us the wisdom of understanding His signs - Amen!

This is what an acquaintance who received the aforementioned mail said:

Please don't send me such ignorant pile of crap. Who are you to tell
me what God thinks? Did God tell you personally that the earthquakes
are his form of "anger"? Your version of God sounds vengeful and
destructive but isn't God supposed to be merciful and loving. People
like you have turned God into a fire throwing maniac who seeks joy in
giving pain to humans--such a shame.

While you call others ignorant, your email is full of narrow minded
gibberish. May God help us all when we have people like you calling
others ignorant. Musharraf might be an ignorant tit but you are no
less.

Read a book for crying out loud.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I wanna take my pen to and add my cupla cents...

Quakes happen as an act of nature. It's a geological process that operates according to certain scientific principles -- or perhaps not according to them but through them -- and a geologist will talk of seismic forces and tectonic plates and the pressure generated by it. But regardless of that, I have one question to ask the second guy who wrote that quite rude email -- act like a fuckin' civilised, educated guy if you claim to be NOT ignorant fer cryin' out loud even if you're sick and tired of all the religious "crap" -- which is, "If you're gonna claim to be a Muslim, then, my love, how in Red Hades can you NOT attribute the cause to Allah?"

Your Quran tells you, the Ahadith tell you, every darned Sufi book tells you that the root of all Effect is Allah, that "We are all from Him and unto Him we return", that Every Effect must have a Cause (Newtonian Physics), -- and hereby I free myself from any label whatsoever since I quote verbatim.

The point, dear boy, is that there's no fuckin' way you can prove that it was NOT an act of Allah's wrath similar to the way that our original correspondent CANNOT prove that it was.

"Who are you to tell me what God thinks? Did God tell you personally that the earthquakes are his form of "anger"?"

I agree with your observation here. We have no right to assume that we know anything about God's reasons till we reach the state of Iman where His Nur starts washing over us, and I'm talking a MegaSuper Tasawwuf stage here...

Wallah-ul-Ilm: Allah knows best...but let's talk about this a little more, shall we! Let's talk about the possibilities and the implications.

There was a Quake. Regardless of its Cause, we do know that it affected millins of people. Hundreds of thousands died. Hudnreds of thousands need food and refuge now (and perhaps the Punjab area should now begin getting ready for the largest influx of refugees since partition!), and those guys need help.

It could have been Allah's Wrath. It could have been Allah's Test. It could have been the goddamn magma burning its own ass deep below Hades itself! But we are all -- I REPEAT ALL! -- just making up theories here. A religious guy's gonna interpret it differently, an atheist in his own way, an agnostic somewhere in the middle, but the fact remains that something happened that now requires all humans in the vicinity of the catastrophe to either help the affectees evacuate or provide them with food and medical aid to get back in this silly game called LIFE.

So why can't we all interpret it any way we choose to and let well be that? Why must one preach with absolute certainty that, oh, that Margalla Tower was a den of decadence, and ,oh, Balakot was where all the Lollywood actresses went for their shoots and ayyashee, and thus see what God made of that place? Why must the other -- supposedly better half -- make fun of the religious guys and call their beliefs "piles of crap"? Why can't we just know one thing that if we are to be called Muslims, we MUST acknowledge -- no other damn way about it -- that the Cause of the Quake was most definitely Allah? However, we do not -- cannot unless something significant happens to change history -- understand the WHY of it, the purpose of a Quake that killed so many people, innocent children and women. Even I get sad and angry at a God that does that -- and there's no question that it was HIS Hand that did it; Not a leaf moves without His Will -- but I must also understand that there MUST be a purpose to it...and I have seen enough in life to understand that coincidences are no more than the acts of Providence. There is pattern in the chaos, there is light in the darkness, though it may take some of us -- or most of us -- entire lifetimes to see that.

I must end this now by pasting certain Ayat and Ahadith that a friend of mine sent my way. At the same time, I must admit that I do not believe myself that the Quake was a tolling bell for D-Day, the Day of Reckoning. I believe that man has more purpose still on earth, that there are other worlds beyond these stars we see, that there are otehr trials of love to be endured. But that is however an opinion and not a postulate. Nothing in this world is or can be a postulate for My Beloved's letters, the Quran, say about Him/Herself: "All things are perishing except His Face."

You decide your own damn mind. :)

Do the people of the towns feel secure against the coming of Our wrath by night while they are asleep? Or else do they feel secure against its coming in broad daylight while they play about (carefree)? Do they then feel secure against the plan of Allah. But no one can feel secure from the plan of Allah except those doomed to ruin! (A"raaf 97-99)"

and yet at another place:

(Corruption and) Mischief has appeared on land and sea because of what the hands of men have earned, that He (Allah) may give them a taste of some of their deeds in order that they may turn back (from evil). (30:41)

But the (mighty) Blast overtook them before morning, And We turned (the cities) upside down, and rained down on them brimstones hard as baked clay. Behold! in this are Signs for those who by tokens do understand. And the (cities were) right on the high-road. (Surat al-Hijr: 73-76

Abu Hurayra radiya’Llahu anhu said:

The Prophet, salla’Llahu alayhi wa-sallam said: ‘The Hour shall not come until knowledge is taken away, and earthquakes become common, and time is always too short, and trials appear, and killing is widespread, and until wealth becomes so abundant that it is superfluous.’ (Bukhari)

And I thought I was a doctor. Tsk...

2005-10-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

You Should Get a PhD in Liberal Arts (like political science, literature, or philosophy)

You're a great thinker and a true philosopher.
You'd make a talented professor or writer.

What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

Four: I set off...

2005-10-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

I determined to go to Balakot. Two other Lahori friends (all doctors) wanted to accompany me, but, due to unforeseen circumstances, couldn't.

My middle man, my hero, the guy who arranged my trip to Balakot is an old Aitchisonian senior. Our meeting, or rather, phone-talk happened under weird circumstances.

Ten o'clock at night on Sunday, the 9th of October, 2005. My head spinning from all the television images of people buried under debris and crumbled walls. Telling my parents I wanted to go to Balakot. My mother's expected gasp of horror. My father's eyes widening at this new development. Getting up, calling friends in Islamabad and Lahore and Jhang. My friends made me proud. Nearly all were prepared to go. All we needed next was transportation and some medical contacts. Frantically calling a couple of family friends and doctors to find out if any of their teams were going. Professor Mehmood Shaukat, Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Mao, Lahore, said one of their trucks was going with medical supplies and doctors to Azad Kashmiar and Muzaffarabad area, and I was welcome to join. I was to reach the rendezvous place by 10 the following morning.

I had just hung up, wondering how I'd manage to scrap together enough money for more medical supplies by the appointed time when my cell phone rang.

It was Murtaza.

This friend of mine is an Aitchisonian, a year senior to me. He has worked in a couple of banks and now owns Gellato Affairs, the famous Italian icecream parlour in Main Boulevard. He is, in truth, the Man of the Hour of Doom.

Murtaza's father is DIG Police, Lahore (i forget which area or section). The moment he heard about the Quake, he set up an Earthquake's affectees relief fund in his parlour plus started talking to his army friends in Pindi. Capt. Farrukh (not really a captain, but that's who I thught he was for a long time; his father is a retired brigadier or something!) and Super Fawad (I love naming people!), two cousins arranged food and medical supplies, trucks, tents, and army protection for all of the civilian doctors working in certain Quake-hit areas. Murtaza was the fund-raiser in Lahore and his house the emergent GHQ of us civilians.

So Murtaza tells me on the phone that he has gotten my number from some friends of mine and asks me if I would like to arrange a team of doctors to go to Balakot to help. I say with a big smile on my face, which he can't see, that that was exactly what I was planning to do. We discuss some things on the phone.

Two hours later, at 3 am in the morning, I'm at Gellato Affairs discussing financial and medical issus with Murtaza and a buddy of his. I dictate a list of first aid supplies, antibiotics, painkillers and other medications to him. Murtaza takes out three days of earnings of his parlour, almost 18 thousand rupees, tells me he could get about twenty more. I have asked around too, and think I can come up with 20 thou myself. We're, in effect, thinking of 50 thou worth of medical supplies.

How wrong we were proven!

I came back home at 4 and at Sehri told my parents that I was all set. My friends and I would set off for Balakot early in the morn after purchasing medical supplies. My parents still extremely uncomfortable, my mother almost started crying. I comforted her and told her it was to be. There are certain things in life that just have to be done, that bravery is not not feeling scared but going ahead despite it.

They obliged finally, my sweet, loving, caring parents. My father, once his mind was all set, immediately started calling friends and family, and -- would you fucking believe it! -- by 12 oclock the next time when I went to Lohari Gate in the Old Lahore Walled City to buy medicines, I was carrying 200,000 rupees in my pocket.

My father is an extremely diplomatic and efficient man. I both love him and hate him for it at times.

Three: How came we to go to Balakot aka The Damned Hippocratic Oath

2005-10-27T14:17:00.000-07:00

It was nothing but impulse, I tell you. Nothing but guilt and impulse and the goddamned Hippocratic Oath that makes every doctor swear at the time of their reception of their degrees that:

The Hippocratic Oath (The Classic Version)...

" I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:

To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art - if they desire to learn it - without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.

Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves.

What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

If I fulfil this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.

(Translation from the Greek by Ludwig Edelstein. From The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, and Interpretation, by Ludwig Edelstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943.)

The Hippocratic Oath (The Modern Version)...

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

(Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, and used in many medical schools today)

Damn empathy. Damn love and pity and understanding loss and hating cruelty and helplessness.

Trivialities that powerful people scorn. Unfortunately, we were all doctors.

We couldn't.

Two: What happened on the army's first night out...

2005-10-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

4 doctors and 12 medics, and more than a few thousand wounded, hurt, dazed and thirsty people.

That's what these army docs had to face that first night they got off the chopper.

Of these army people, lemme start naming a few:

Major Younis, the Commanding Officer of this particular army unit, a doctor himself.

Captain Bilal Shah, the Stud.
Captain Bilal, the bearded one.
Captain Ali, the tiny moustached doctor-baby.

Shaukat, Javed, Amjad and nine more army paramedics-cum-lab techs-cum-nurses. I apologise for not remembering the names of the rest but these three are the ones I had the longest encounters and chit-chats with. However, I still remember the faces of the last nine heroes. One asked me for a smoke while suturing, with remarkable precision, the scalp of a little girl back together. The girl kept crying and screaming and kicking, while that man smiled kindly at her and talked to her, and his hands kept moving and swabbing and petting and sewing her skin together. It was ramadan, as you all recall, but none of these armymen (nor us doctors) was fasting. It was well nigh impossible. The midday heat was intolerable and it boiled your brain and tightened all your blood vessels, hence giving you a lovely throbbing headache, and scorched your lips and skin. I at least couldn't have survived a single fast there. None of us could have.

Thus I was smoking and thus this hero medic saw me and asked for a smoke, and I waved my hand and told him to come inside my tent when he took a break ( I was on one right then). I regret to inform you with pride that I simply couldn't fulfill my promise. The guy didn't take a single break for eight hours. I took two, each ten minutes long.

But I digress. Let us return to that fateful night when, in the covert of darkness, these brave men descended to the ground and, while calming down a huge angry mob and holding their own, they started treating the wounded immediately.

Capt. Bilal, the Bearded, tells me that they worked all night without a single break. Sixteen men, only four among them doctors, treated, he says, more than a thousand people in one night. And what a variety of wounds and cuts there were!

Severed hands and feet. Broken bones. Lacerated foreheads and scalps, limbs dangling by mere stumps of bones. Crushed muscle, torn flesh, eyes gouged out, ears torn half-off and dangling. Slumped rib cages, smashed skeletons, protruding femurs and tibias. Open fractures, closed fractures. Nerve injuries and God knows what else...

All night these men worked untiringly, or rather, despite exhaustion. Cleaned wounds, poured iodine, applied antispetic, wrapped bandages, sutured wounds, established IV lines, shot intramuscular painkillers, gave intravenous antibiotics, made splints and plaster of paris traction devices improvising with broken wooden planks and sticks.

All night they worked and all next day they worked, taking few hour-shifts to sleep. And so they would work for at least another week, giving immediate aid and pain relief to the affectees, even way after other NGOs and civilian teams arrived.

And by the time we reached Balakot, the number of army personnel had changed to 7 doctors and 16 medics.

Ours was the first civilian medical team, and ours was the one that would make the most friends amongst the armymen.

I take a silly pride in that, forgive me.

The City of the Dead (One: The First to Arrive)

2005-10-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

How many drunks does it take to hook up a light bulb?
One to hold the bulb, and ten to turn the house round and round...
How many doctors does it need to save human lives?
Only one!

Yup. That's the number of doctors you need to save human lives regardless of any calamity in any area whatsoever...or anyone close to being a doctor, perhaps just a man (or woman) with some common sense, handiness and an abilityto stay calm throughout the crisis. But there's something that comes even before all these -- to some -- superhuman abilities and expertise.

Motivation. Courage. Empathy. Love.

For that's where it all starts.

Thus my salutations to the man/woman who was the first to arive at the City of the Dead that used to be Balakot. Ordinarily, I would just say, "Bless you, whoever you are!"

But this time, I am lucky. I have names...

My salute to the Pakistan Army that reached Balakot by an M117 chopper within 24 hours of the Big Quake. The Quake happened around 9 am on Saturday, the 8th of October, 2005. The Pak army was there by midnight, Sunday, the 9th, and this is what they saw. I quote not verbatim but transcripted:

"We arrived in a single army chopper at Balakot near midnight. The chopper did a water-landing on the Qunhar River since we could not see anything on the ground due to the darkness. The moment the chopper landed and the chopper's doors snapped open, I saw a flood of bodies that inundated any and all space around the chopper.

There were young and old men, children and women, and wounded people with clotted cuts and bruises that begged to bleed again. These were the inhabitants of Balakot, a tourist resort once, twisted beyond recognition now. And these people were shell-shocked, miserable, crying, numb, and pissed beyond measure. And now they cried and swore and hurled epithets and snatched and grabbed and attacked the chopper. Their world was dead. Qayamat-e-Saghara, D-day in 7.5 minutes, had happened to them, and now all reason and morality and sense was gone."

And so Captain Bilal, the bearded one, told me how the army doctors and medics handled the people. The Balakotians were grabbing at the undercarriage of the chopper, snatching at any boxes or cartons the armymen held, and the army guys desperately held to their stuff and screamed that all these boxes were just medical supplies and medicines, and thus of no use to those people.

So it was that 4 army doctors and 12 medics disembarked on the darkest of nights in a century at Balakot. They had medical supplies only with barely enough food to sustain themselves and a few affectees, and from these 16 people would spring an army medical camp that would cover an extremely rough mountainous area of approximately one kilometer diameter within the next 3 days.

Here, like in all life, we must take a break and think about who I am, this bespectacled fellow who writes this at the witching hour on Thursday, the 27th of October, 2005. I am not an armyman. I'm certainly not affiliated with the Paki Government or any political party nor am I related to any of Musharraf's henchmen, nor am I an Amreeki agunt. I'm quite simply a doctor who also happens to be a writer and thus feels the urge to report and praise whatever good he came to know about a certain class of people.

Forget what the papers say. Fuck the media, fuck the rumours, fuck even what the Balakotians are saying, or at least some of them. The Army was the first to arrive on the scene, and it was the army who organised every damn thing right down to the core. It was the army who started clearing all the landslides and debris and rocks and gravel off of the mountain roads, the army who rode in choppers to reach some of the most difficult and inaccessible spots, the army whose men died while trying to save others (you haven't heard of a single NGO member or civilian dead while trying to extract people from the debris, have you?), the army whose men were more honest and courageous than anyone I've ever seen.

Screw you. What dayya know? You scoff.

I lift my head proudly and whisper, I know.

I know 'cuz I was there...

Finally an update...God help my lucky stars...

2005-10-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

So here am I finally, sat down in front of this stupid machine, wondering what to write. It's been such a long time...

Okay. Pointer updates:

Took my last MBBS professional exam (Surgery) on the 21st of September, 2005.
Moved to Lahore with all my stuff and books and shit completely by the 25th.
Took a road trip with my friends: Moiz, Fawad, Junaid, Uzair, Hussain and Murtaza. Missed Mujji, Mak, Waheed and Kashif terribly. We went from Lahore to Islamabad, stayed there a coupla nights, went to Jhang on my Corolla Saloon, had a blasting time in Jhang. Took a bath in a tubewell the size of half my closet. Watched Dil Chahta Hai in memory of all our years of love and friendship. Went to Moiz's old college. Visited Heer Ranjha's burial place. It's a shrine now, where people come to worship and pray and sing and play the harmonium...Love's great tribute, no?
Came back to Lahore. Tried to set up my room. Out of a lot of things. Bought certain stuff. Got my cupboard made. Set up my very own personal library (it's a beauty just to look at; more than 1500 books). Bought a new DVD player and an LG 29i' TV. Got a private phone connection. Stuffed all my clothes in my new wardrobe. Did all the things we do to break a new room in...
On Saturday, the 8th of October, 4 days before my birthday, felt and later heard about the Big Quake...on impulse, arranged transportation and company and supplies for the affectees of the north. Left for the north on the 9th. Spent eight days there. Returned on the 18th. (will post more on that later!)
Since then, have been trying to furnish my room. Need a carpet and washroom blinds. Need locks for a coupla doors. Need some money to augment and beautify its ambience...
Have my USMLE Step 2 CS exam on the 8th of November. have to leave for the US by the 1st. Still trying to arrange tickets, Lahore to Boston and back plus Boston to Houston and back...fucking pain in the ass!
Trying to contact people in the US to make sure I see them there. Old friends and new...
Trying to grapple with post-graduation and loneliness blues. Missing my friends and buddies. Trying to understand and anticipate what the future holds.
Talked to an old friend, a very dear friend with whom I'd fallen out of touch, after 5 years. The SOB is married and has a daughter, Sana. Fuck a duck, the guy and I studied for the AKU test together, and he has an 8 months old daughter now. I was pleasantly shocked and fascinated. What time doth to us!
Will see the same friend tomorrow. Must spend one night together with friends before I leave for the US next week. Need to buy raincoats and shit. Heard it's very cold in the US right now...

That's it, friends and neighbours. Will update more later. The Story of the City of the Dead must wait awhile. Moi needs to do more shit right now...so adios amigos...

Still a little sick and very busy...

2005-10-22T11:04:00.000-07:00

Setting up my room and shit...Amreeki visa's come...gotta leave next week fer my USMLE Step 3 CS exam....shit deep in werk....arranging tickets and other stuff...will update tassali se later....kya karoon ek jaan itne kaam...

Back From the City of the Dead...

2005-10-19T00:17:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Lahore after spending over a week in the north. My friends and I had set off to help the wounded and the sick, and alhamdulillah, we did do it. I will post more details later. Right now, I just wanna eat, sleep and relax. The trip has taken its toll both on my mind and body, and I wanna make sure that I recover as soon as possible, for I have stories that will chill your heart and make your flesh crawl...and for the first time in my life, it's not Usman, the horror writer saying it, it's Usman, the journalist...

Will see ya all soon...

P.S. We went as qualified doctors. A few days before the Quake hit Pakiland, we got our results. We are all officially Doctors now...

I feel...

2005-09-20T01:03:00.000-07:00

Strange. Lost in a no-man's land bordered by my past and my present...

Relieved. The end of an era approaches. It will spell the closure of the Book of Five Years, yet will open another...

Happy. I am satisfied with certain things I have achieved over these years. I learnt to play the guitar, well, I think. Learnt to play pool amateurishly. Sang to my heart's desire. Wrote some good stuff (and got a couple published). Had some magical relationships. Found brilliant friends. Matured well, I think...

Sad. Will lose many friends. Will never see many people again. Will never be that young again. Will face more of life's bitterness. Will never be in college again (probably). Will never regain innocence again. Will never be in the Male Hostel again...

Regretful. I could have studied medicine more. Could have done some more constuctive work. Could have made efforts not to lose a few really good friends. Could have not commited some big mistakes. Could have never begun smoking...

Terrified. Of the future. Of life. Of losing many. Of gaining any. Of seeing the ironies of fate take effect. Of losing myself and my mind. Of losing my love and passion for all life...

Ashamed. Did some pretty bad, mean, humiliating stuff...

Hopeful...can the Beloved Who Stays Hidden In The Mirror Of My Soul not make my faults easy to bear or eliminate them or hide them? Can He/She not allow something other than "All things are perishing except His Face?" Can some good not exist without evil serving its own peculiar purposes? Can I not be allowed to be brave while facing Change, and a Man while dealing with its consequences?

I rest like a deserted card in Your palm, my Lord.

Deal me gently...

Another down...

2005-09-20T00:46:00.000-07:00

Primary Health Care exam was dealt with today, I think, Alhamdulillah, quite satisfactorily.

There's only one left. Surgery.

Time runneth fast, faster, fastest...

I wait, breath abated.

Let the last one be easy too, Lord!

InshAllah...

Exams are so on...

2005-09-19T12:03:00.000-07:00

Had my medicine exam today. It was ok. 77 MCQ's. 3 Essay questions. I think I'll get around 50 MCQ's right inhsAllah at least, and will score around 70% on the essays. So I should pass, touch wood, comfortably.

Primary Health Care and Surgery exams left. One down. Two to go...

Promised a fellow blogger about a certain post. Will write as soon as exams are done with...inshAllah.

An old letter...

2005-09-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

I will leave AKU in less than a week's time. So I have been packing my stuff and wrapping my shit up intermittently for the last few days, and while I was exploring old drawers that I haven't touched in the last five years, I came across a black plastic shopping bag, filled with cards.

They were all given to me FIVE YEARS AGO by my cousins and family and my sis and bro, when I was leaving Lahore for AKU. Remembering that time gave such a pang of nostalgia that I almost staggered. Was it really 5 years back that I came to AKU? Seems like a lifetime.

I was 18 years old, full of excitement and dreams and determination to win life's accolades. I remember I brought two notebooks with me, filled with schedules and notes, reminding me to do my martial arts exercises on time ( I haven't done any in the last 3 years), pray 5 times a day (last I did that was last year in Aitkaf), eat lots of honey (nada), apply oil to hair each night (zilch; I stopped that by the end of my first semester). All my grandparents, Baree Ammi, Barey Abbu, Nano were alive and considerably healthy. I had a 33'i waist (progressed to 36), my hairline was perfect (slightly regressed now), my eyes were bright and shining and mischievous -- my friends used to say there was nothing in them but mischief! Now I have an old man's eyes. I didn't smoke back then; I do now. And I had never known my friends. I do now...well mostly.

Holy shit! I sit here after a good day's work, and all I see is that shiny-eyed teenager dragging a huge suitcase up those brick steps in front of the male hostel lawn, looking at the huge dark, red building in wonder and fear and excitement. I still remember how dark the night was, and how the tiny marble islands -- placed all over AKU -- were casting their eery light pyramids on the brick lane in front of teh hostel, and how naive and young I was. I had never known pain (not absolute pain at least!) or absolute fear or absolute loneliness. i would feel them all in the next five years...

Whewsh. Sadness comes and goes like a shadow, and my words try to capture it and bring it to light and my catharsis keeps chewing morsels of this lost sadness over lost time. Time is always lost, isn't it? It might've been good or bad or whatever, but it's gone..where, who knows?

The worst thing was a letter in that pile of cards in the shopper. My cousin -- my best friend, my childhood buddy -- wrote that to me at the end of my first month in AKU. She was going to be married to somebody she hated, and, well, in that letter she described all her emotions and fears and anticipation of times to come. At the time she wrote it, she wasn't married. She was still a kid (now she has a kid!), and she was worried about life, but pretending, like a pigeon with its eyes closed, that everything was ok, that life was fair, could NOT be unfair. In that letter she described how much she missed talking to me and that she felt really alone and stuff and that she wished I would hurry back. I had not yet attended her farce of a marriage, had not seen her break down and cry on my mother's shoulders, had not ever known anything really.

I looked at that letter, and a powerful wave of grief washed over me. It was grief for my cousin, grief for myself, for my grandparents, for that time, for that young, silly boy with a bleeding heart and a tendency to try to please any and everyone...but most of all, I felt grief for the frailty of time, at its infidelity, at its loss. What is gone is gone, and nothing will ever bring it back. Not my wishes, not my prayers, certainly not any achievements I ever claim from life. Poof and Pop! Goes the Weasel...

I hope life's good to me, that it's good to my friends, to people I have ever known and loved. I hope that life takes all of us by the hands and leads us gently into its heart, instead of battering us black and blue. The proces is unavoidable, but it might be made a little pleasant, God willing.

Paulo Coelho describes this brilliant ritual in his book Miss Prym and the Devil. There are people in this certain village who stand in their houses, once a year, facing the windows, and hold two lists in their hands, and pray: "O Lord! In one hand, I hold all the sins I have commited against you this year, all the lies and thefts and cheatings and hypocrisies. And in my other, I hold a list of all the sins You have commited against me, all Your injustices and trials and calamities. Both are long lists, and both are filled with bitterness, but on this day, the Day of Atonement, let us both sit down together and forgive each other. Let us love each other and start a new year afresh as friends," and saying that, they tear both lists apart.

I think that's a beautiful ritual. And it's so true. And following that, I decided that I would do the same. So in my heart (though at times I might feel otherwise), I forgave all the people around me who had hurt me in some way or the other, and hoped that they could move on in life, doing the same to me. I might not have done it perfectly (I still am human afterall!) but I coudl try, couldn't I?

In the end, I put the cards and the letter back in the drawer. They're gonna go back with me inshAllah, God willing, and they will inshAllah stay with me in my room back in Lahore.

They're memorabilia, and memories are good sometimes. They keep me alive at least...

Just Venting...

2005-09-15T05:40:00.000-07:00

Human beings are such hypocrites. I'm listening to a naat right now, and the reason it seems so sweet and right and spiritual at the moment is because I'm dead tired of studying, and my mind is just begging for any distraction, any way out of this shit-trap, any other thoughts than hyponatremia and the Syndrome of Inappropriate ADH Secretion...

I'm so aware of this. I'm also aware that the reason why I'm blogging so doggedly these days is because that's one of the few breaks from studying I can afford. I also know the day my exams are over, I'll probably disappear from the blogging scene for awhile, like I have done in the past. Turns out, even for me, there are other active pursuits to follow when I'm not stuck in a room with stupid medicine books.

Rizwan Azmi, the great surgeon of AKU, once told me that we never really love our parents. We might have compassion, attachment, dependence, or gratitude towards them, but we're just not capable of loving them deeply, and if we think we do, we're deceiving ourselves. I used to think that was one point where he was wrong. Cuz I used to be sure I loved my mother very strongly. Now, I think he might be right. Ten minutes back, I called my dad, and he says, "Beta! Study hard. I'm praying for you, and so's your mom."

For a second, I was filled with so much shame and gratitude. I hadn't thought of them in the past few days at all, and for them, loving me was something that probably took a major part of their time each day...it's so amazing.

I've come to believe that only parents can love their children with all pretences shed aside. There's no condition on their love, no compusions, no deceptions. They just...love...

Even friends leave us. I have had ample proof of this throughout these five years. Whenever the greatest perils threaten all of us collectively, every one scrambles for an individual cover. At that time, no one gives a shit if another is left behind, or if another is in more peril than the rest. I hate to admit it, but even I've done it. It's just our fucking selfish natures.

Ten minutes back, I had more proof of this. Won't say how, but it felt really bad and sad. Who DO you trust really in the long run? Not your friends, not your lovers. I've loved people in the past and they me; but like Rumi says: "You don't love me but your emotions when you love me." So true. Whenever we broke apart, the love disappeared slowly but surely, till only sadness and nostalgia remained..and even they disappeared after awhile.

Who is really left with you? Who really can help you when faced with such troubles? Most of the time, only we help ourselves...or maybe God, if He exists. I long to believe in Him, but sometimes, it hurts so fucking much that even that becomes difficult...and when the pain is over and I can once again thank Him for little things in life, even that seems hypocritical...'cause at that really bad time, He deserted me. I had to face all the shit alone, forget all that about pain helping us ascend, or Him looking over our shoulders. Cuz really if I am to face such pain and hurt anyways, what use of Him looking over my shoulders? What use of His exhortations of patience and bravado? What hurts hurts. I can be patient or impatient, and the strife will still be there for me?

Oh, my head hurts...such stupid, useless thoughts.

But the catharsis feels a little good...

An Apology...

2005-09-13T22:56:00.000-07:00

On a fellow blogger's page, I, out of arrogance and pride, insulted an unknown person on his/her religious beliefs. It seemed funny and casual at the time, but now I realise how haughty and self-centred I must be to call another human being 'you poor little psycopath'. I hope my apology is sincere and there is no ulterior subconscious motive underneath it...

What I should have told that person is that there is a way of asserting your beliefs. There is a way of dealing with people who hurt our beliefs intentionally or unintentinally. Salman Rushdie is a foolish writer, who's very talented otherwise. His portrayal of the Prophet PBUH or rather his parody of the Seerat-un-Nabi (Life of the Prophet) was bound to make millions of people hate him, millions who hold the Prophet to their hearts and follow the injunctions laid by the man 1400 years ago...but the reaction of the Muslims is also stupid and unworthy of them. Had we generated critical discussions and literary tools to deal with it, no one might have even ehard of the book really. Rushdie became a celebrity and the book a legend precisely because of our reaction. Otherwise, the book is not that amazing...

Even now, when I talked about teh book on the feloow blogger's site, there came this heated reaction from this other person: Rushdie should be killed without mercy or any warning. Tell me, my fellow Muslims, why would you want to do that? Don't you at least wanna give him a trial? Are you aware hat in 1989, when the book came out, and following it Khomeini's stupid, unIslamic Fatwa, 2/3rd of teh Muslim world said that the man could not be condemned to death without a proper trial held and a chance given to him to redeem himself in whatever way?

My point is the pen is way more powerful than the sword (as Rushdie proved! The stupid, inconsiderate man!) and we need to tackle these issues delicately and with sense rather than a blind herd-mentality, bent on destroying everything that threatens to disrupt our traditional system. I'm willing to bet that 99% of people who want Rushdie dead haven't even read his book. It's like I tell you to kill a man and you believe me because I'm a Muslim scholar and you respect me. Would you willingly take another human's life because you were told to do so because of brain-washing Maulvis who don't know their penises from their fingers...?

Take it easy and think before you leap, my friends. Islam has already become a 'hostile' and hated religion because of Muslims' ignorance and illiteracy...

The Beatles...

2005-09-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

I am listening to The Beatles right now as I study for my prof. Half of my brain is working on rattofying the various breast diseases in women including fibrocystic diseases and mastitis, while the other half is marvelling at the variety and depth of the music The Beatles composed. They were such a brilliant band. John Lennon and Paul mcCartney and George Harrison and the drummer whose name I always forget. What music! What passion and hope and love and beauty and sadness! I wonder -- like millions others have since the band broke up in late 60's, I believe -- what was going on in John's head when he decided to go solo. I wonder how Yoko dealt with the hatred and anger directed at her after John's death. More people than not still believe and keep writing songs and books about the theory that The Beatles went down because of her manipulation of John. Roger Waters (Pink Floyd, who else?) makes an allusion to this in one of his songs as well. However, I think it was just that John wanted to try new things and it wasn't Yoko's fault. Instead of destroying John's artistic and musical capabilities, she gave air to them, breathed her own aura and spirit into his music. No wonder when John bounced back with his new band, Plastic Ono, and The White Album (was that the one with Yoko?), it broke all previous records. John was still as charismatic and magical as ever. In fact, IMAGINE and GOD are masterpieces in themselves...

...how many humans have come and gone? How many lie dead beneath the soil? How many voices and songs never heard and known and written are lost?

I hate the transience of life. The short time makes life beautiful maybe, but oh so sad...

I feel nostalgia for something I've never known or experienced. All I have are these feelings and ghosts of emotions that never come to light. Right now, there is this weird line going through my head. I'm gonna write a poem right here, right now:

I have lived in a gulf of shadows
I have tasted tendrils of nothingness
and the taste is bitter, bitter, bitter...

There is nothing that serves as food
nothing that serves as grace.
I see an eye yawning open.
It sees me and gapes...

I have walked through piles of leaves,
leaves that are withered and wizened.
I have tasted insignificance,
and the absence of existence is heartrending...

The purpose of grace is lost
when grace bestows itself through not-being.
I have no known confusions,
mine are new and dissimilar....

when there is nothing to be known,
I try to become empty.
I always fail, always fail...
and failure becomes a loved habit...

A hint of euphoria...

2005-09-12T02:26:00.000-07:00

Exams loom on the horizon like a witch castle, drenched with misery and pain and blood.

I stare at the inevitable like a helpless prisoner.

But fear not! For there has been work done in the past few days. Medicine read and understood and learnt. Syndromes known and memorised. So the dreaded castle has lost its potency...relatively. I'm tired, but happy and proud of my efforts. Still another week of work to go, and then...

...why, I might be free of studying for some time. Added to that is this additional secret glory.

There's a chance I might be able to pursue humanities. Won't say how or where, but I might be able to do masters in literature or philosophy or whatever. I shiver with delight when I think about it (such a geeeek! no?), think about how they might applaud me and even fund me for reading the same books I've been perusing for the past hundred years. What fun! What a life!

Ahhh, I daydream. But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I spread my dreams under God's feet. Tread softly, my Lord, for you tread on my dreams...

I NEED to smell, taste, touch, hear, see poetry and literature, or I might even go crazy...If I get into masters, I might lose a few years regarding the start of my residency, but it'll be a dream come true...so true...

Let's pray then, you and I, that all turns out well. That books of my choosing call me and I heed them and we embrace each other like long-lost lovers...

His masterpiece...

2005-09-10T17:59:00.000-07:00

I had always promised myself that I would translate Faiz Ahmad Faiz into english some day. I love his works. He's probably the greatest Urdu poet that has arisen and worked prolifically since Partition.

Here's my rendition of Faiz's "Mujh Se Pehlee See Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Maang" [ Ask me not now for the same kind of love, my love...]. It's the poem which, to me, represents the initiation of his life into love and its culmination into that same love expanding to include his love for humanity. It is his masterpiece for me. It sums up his life and all his works and thoughts...

Here goes:

Ask me not now for the same kind of love, my love.
Ask me not now for the same kind of love...

I had understood your existence
to be the light of my life.
If I had your pain to worry about,
what need to ponder on life's tagedies inflicted my way?
Your face gave springs
eternity in this world.
What existed here ever
besides your eyes?

If you could be mine,
fate would become a ring on my finger.
It wasn't so, but I had wished oh so badly
for it to be so...

Ask me not now for the same kind of love, my love.
Ask me not now for the same kind of love...

The dark, ungodly spells,
cast by countless centuries,
stay woven in silk and satin.
Scattered blindly in streets and alleys
lie dust-covered, blood-washed bodies.

What can I do when my eyes
return to those horrific scenes?
What can I do even if I see
your beauty as fresh as ever
right in front of me?

There are more sufferings in life
than incompleted love's agony.
There are other joys too
besides the joy of eternal embrace...

Ask me not now for the same kind of love, my love.
Ask me not now for the same kind of love...

----------------------------------------------------

2005-09-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

Yeah...I just love my friends too much...:) Gay Mo' Fo's...

2005-09-09T19:15:00.000-07:00

My friends and I on the way to French beach, Karachi to spend a night by the oceanside...brilliant trip! We ended up getting battered by a huge wave...but no serious injuries...

2005-09-09T17:44:00.000-07:00

My friends and I at the AKU Annual Day 2004...

Urdu. Oh, why oh why, must it be a burden?

2005-09-09T17:38:00.000-07:00

I have talked about English lit. and poems and writers and artists neverendingly.

Time for me to talk about my beloved lingo, Urdu.

Urdu is my language. That's the simple, stark truth. It is really the only language I could speak fluently till at least class eight, when I started practising speaking english properly. Till then, I couldn't even pronounce 'fuck' properly. I thought it was pronounced "fook", ha ha, very funny! Now pass me the remote please...

I started my reading in Urdu. Umroo Ayyar (the correct pronounciation is Amar Ayyar, but I spent my entir childhood saying Umroo, and he's gonna be Umroo for the rest of my life), Ameer Hamza, Tarzan and his beloved monkey Munkoo, Chalosak Malosak, Chan Changloo, Shezada Saleem and his troupe, Ambar Naag Maaria and numerous other works, too many to recount...

What happened to our children? By the time I was in O-levels, I had about five hundred kiddy magazines in my room, most of them Urdu. Bachon ki Duniya, Bachon ka Bagh, Jugnoo, Taleem-o-tarbiyyat, Ankh macholee, Phool etc. When I outgrew them, I tried giving them to my younger siblings. Even my sister, who loves reading, refused them, saying Urdu was too difficult to read. I ended up giving them away to the RaddiWala, the guy who comes to our house to collect junk. I felt empty when I gave them away. I miss them now at times...

Urdu is so beautiful. Its nuances strike exactly the right chord at times, when I wish to express myself in written material...although I'm ashamed to say that I do find reading some classic texts cumbersome. Even I have become rusty with disuse, where Urdu reading is concerned.

My all-time poem in English is "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock", and I still insist that even that doesn't compare with certain works of Iqbal, Faiz and Ghalib. Where can one find the beauty and sadness of a lifetime summarised in "Mujh se pehli see mohabbat mere mehboob na maang" by Faiz? Or the pain and tiredness of a whole civilisation in Iqbal's "Masjid-e Qartaba"? Or the expression of love and longing, of a yearning for God to Be us, instead of us trying to emulate him in Ghalib's "Na tha kuch to khuda tha"? I have read them all, known them all, known the footsteps dying with a dying fall in those poems that transport me to an era where mysticism reigned everywhere, where Muslims could walk from one end of the earth to another without being called terrorists, where a chance to study in the great universities of Cairo and Persia would sent thrills down a Westerner's spine, where I wouldn't have to cry each time a Muslim bombed a bus-full of innocent civilans or a troop of Israelis marched ruthlesly down the banks of Ghaza.

I digress, but it is Urdu that wears the perfume of obsession on her dress...

Do we not know the foremost right of Islam on a Muslim is Reading. Iqra, the first word of Quran, the first order, if you will, by God to the Prophet PBUH was READ. Read in the name of your Lord...Why have we forgotten that? Why is it easy to read Sweet Valley Twins by our teenagers but not the adventures of Chan Changloo. I assure you the latter are as interesting and fascinating as Harry Potter? Is it that we are scared of teaching our children Urdu for fear that they might not study English or learn to speak that properly? I'm disappointed by the educated elite of my country. Fuck you all, really -- putting all my diplomacy aside...

For my part, I'm really glad and proud that my sister has recently begun taking an interst in Urdu as a language. She says that it was a trip to India that initiated it. During her visit, she noticed that Indian Punjabis feel pride and happiness when they converse and read and write in Punjabi. She says she almost had an identity crisis when she realised that she didn't know shit about Urdu. It made her realise the importance of identity and culture. She will learn even more with time, but for now it suffices...

Knock and the Door will open, said one Sufi. Another, a woman Sufi, Rabia Basri, corrected the former: "Why do you presume the Door was ever closed?"

I love my Urdu...although I feel shame and at a loss when I realise that I'm preaching the importance of Urdu in English....

2005-09-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

I am the Doorway...

I hate Parhai...

2005-09-08T23:16:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I said it. I hate parhai. I've been studying my ass off for the last twenty years (I'm 24, and yeah, I'm counting montessori, nursery and KG!) and what has that done for me or the world? Poverty still reigns everywhere. I still feel like an imprisoned, trapped soul, and my beard still grows awkwardly, the hair bent and struggling to make their mark...

Why am I studying Parveen Kumar's Essentials of Clinical Medicine. The book is boring as hell. The rote is exhausting. I've already read it twice this year, and still can't remember shit of it. My mind wanders to all those fabulous lands of Oz, Middle-earth, Mesopotomia, and Pink Floyd Laser Show...it's disturbing, knowing there is so much out there to see and experience, when I sit here in this cell of a hostel room and cram stupid clinical pearls. Pearls, my brown ass! More like dirtballs...

Exams loom over the horizon (the timeline is one week) and I can't concentrate on medicine. The voices of Idris Shah and O henry and Ray Bradbury call me. The empty bytes of a yet-unwritten poem cry out from My Documents. The beauty and sadness of a millenium of my civilisation yearn for me to come read them, taste them, know them. Medicine is just one way of helping people. There's so much else to do besides waiting for another 7 years of my life in bland, crisp OR's with uptight, blank-faced doctors to begin. I have yet to see the Alps, swim in the Seins, trudge in Sweden, taste a hash brownie in Holland. Somewhere over this one-coloured rainbow waits a million years old stone, buried beneath a fossil of a Homo Erectus, just for me to pick it up and exclaim in delight. Somewhere lies the Sufi path, hidden in brambles and bushes of convention and confusion, waiting for my footsteps to fall on it with a final fall. 72 ways to God there are. Medicine isn't the easiest one.

But if I quit, if I become satisfied with a basic MBBS degree, if I don't pursue geenral surgery, I do know I'll regret it forever. It's be another personal defeat, knowing that I could have helped dying people and I backed off due to selfish reasons. I wanna change our social scene, well here's one way, gleaming right before my eyes like a yellow brick road: Take teh shit and the sugar, become a surgeon, help your people. Only it's harder than it sounds.

I wish there were two of me. Kinda like Siamese twins cut free. Go become a doctor, you. Good luck with the writing to you, brother. Wouldn't that be just frickin' great?

But, alas! for there is only I. One I who doesn't know jackshit about the world and dreams of reaching the end of all secrets. See the world in a grain of sand? Yes, dear sire, and get me a phoenix while you're at it. I must strive then, struggle to get beyond it all, find some meaning and inspiration in the mundane chores of mediicne. Insert a catheter up one's penis, a finger for digitial rectal Exam in another's ass. And by the by, don't ferget your daily dose of humiliation from that bitch of a chairman of Surgery. She's stingy, but very scientific, mind you!

if only I were a crab scuttling along the bottom of an ocean. What freedom! Bah free will and bah intellect!

2005-09-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

A fellow blogger posted a piece about the 'going out' that's going on in our society and increasing at breakneck speed in the upper echelons of our society.

I thought I'd post my 2 cents too...

Dating is a term that originated only in the last century. Before that it was called courtship, a term that still commands considerably more respect and acceptance today than dating. I bet if I explained what this particular term and, extrapolating it, dating means to me, I could get the parents of any girl I want, no matter how religious -- note I said religious, not conservative -- to accede to their daughter's seeing me.

Dating, to me, would be going up to a girl, telling her I thought she was pretty and seemed sweet; however since I knew nothing about her, I would like to ask her out for a cup of coffee or dinner, maybe at the university cafeteria. If she said yes, I would escort her -- and not the bad kinda escorting, the good kind -- to the cafe, have something to eat or drink, pay for her food, talk about things that I liked, ask about the ones she dug, do the simple, regular dance, and try to understand if we were in any way compatible. If I thought aye, I would ask her to meet me a few more times, zilch physical contact no matter what, but all those meetings would be in public places where I couldn't get any funny ideas, and all we'd do would be talk. No movies or concerts. Just aim to find out what the other is like, and then make up your mind. Once I did I'd ask her if she'd be willing to be my wife, pending the decision of her elders if they had any say in the matter. She could take her time deciding, but within a reasonable number of time-units. If she agreed, we could get engaged soon and thus enter the official marriage scene with regular dates and phone contact.

That is the scenario I outline for myself and the Paki date setup.

Of course, most people would never stick to it, but what the hell?

See the irony? The scenario given above is in perfect Islamic proportions. There is nothing wrong with talking to a woman and finding out what she's like. There's nothing hellish about a love marriage, even if it's against your parents' wishes. I recall a Sahih Hadith from Bokhari which tells of a man who came to the Prophet PBUH and complained that his son was getting married against his wishes and he wanted the Prophet to intervene. Once the Prophet talked to the man's son, he told the father to let the boy do it, though he was a tad reluctant about it himself because the father seemed in distress.

The fact remains. Marriage is something that lasts us an entire lifetime, even when our parents ar dead and long gone. We battle the fights and tussels of marriage, not those who bind us. Hence, we should have equal right to choose our partners. We might end up making mistakes, but don't our parents too? I was brought up in a conservative household, a joint-family system. And I've seen nearly 70% of the arranged marriages planned by my grand parents and other elders go down the bloody drain. Seen such sadness and bitterness and pain and regrets that I don't believe in arranged marriages any more, although they are an easy way out for most people in our society. Especially guys who could never get women to even talk to them with respect or decency. Arranged marriages are an easy way out for such people, where the woman has to respect and accept the man no matter what. I'm not saying she shouldn't. Most guys end up as decent husbands...but for me, an arranged marriage would be a personal defeat. It'd be like, hey mommy. I couldn't get a woman myself. So why don't you go out, parading my name in front of your friends and acquaintances, saying your son is an AKU grad who's very brilliant mashAllah, and, Firdous, did you know, by the way, that he played an ENGLISH song on the guitar in front of such a LARGE crowd at his last college function?

Sorry, I can't do that. If I want a woman, I want her to have the choice to reject me, knowing mostly my shitty stuff rather than the sugar coat my parents or family are bound to wrap my name in. I don't want that. A woman has a perfect right to know if I smoke or what I smoke and whether I believe in the same God that the rest of the Muslim world believes in, or if I pray the Salat and how I do it. She must know whether I plan to continue my life as such or want to change careers. You see? These tiny things that most people don't consider for their daughters are the ones that really matter.

A case in point: Two years back, my parents were looking for a rishta for me. This was right after I broke up with a girl for undisclosed reasons. So they find out about this brilliant, really laiq-faiq girl, who's studying at Stanford, wears the Hijab, is supposedly very pretty, and to top it all off, has published a book of poetry. At that last, I perked up my ears. I'm in love with poetry and the notion of a Paki Muslim poetess out there somewhere, just within acquaintance, thrilled me. I agreed to meet the girl. My parents were delighted. The girl's parents were delighted. There was only one problem. The girl's uncle or something wanted his son to wed the girl. The girl's mother favoured me somehow, my family's rep being impeccable and the sugar coat on my name, as prepared by my family, impregnable. However, on the uncle's insistence, the girl's mother decided to carry out an Istikhara. Yet before the forty days of worship were over, something incredible happened.

The girl's family had called the girl's seniors and older friends at Aga Khan to ask around about me. I, being the notorious figure that I am, turned out to be a Drug Dealer in Charas and other assorted goodies, on the cumulative recounting of three girls in the female hostel. The girl's family were shocked, and, understandably, ignored the few wagging tongues, also in the female hostel, that proclaimed I was a gentleman and a man belonging to the good fight. Next I know, I'm being woken up early in the morning by my mother who looks shell-shocked, and who asks me to either confirm or deny what the girl's family said. I denied emphatically. Many of my friends occasionally find bliss in the arms of MaryJane, but I'd never sold or bought any Charas in the capacity of a drug dealer. My mother believed me, though she was extremely disappointed by what had happened. The rishta was off. The sugar coating was gone, replaced in its stead by a dusky Rizla wrapper, excuse the word play, ha ha...

You see my point? I was a perfect candidate on account of my family's rep, and I was a horrible, horrible junkie as declared by other people's opinion of me. Both images of moi in their heads were built by other people, none by me. If they'd met me and talked to me, things could be very different in either case. eg. if they didn't know of me at all, either as Prince Charming or my alter-ego, Godfather -- haha -- they might have loved or hated me when they met me, no matter in what circumstances, depending solely on their own judgement of me.

That is what's wrong with arranged marriages. Illusions. Nothing more.

As it turned out, I found out who baptised me drug dealer. Three girls, who had never even talked to me. I never confronted them, choosing silence over anger. If I wanted, I could have destroyed their reps in seconds. Turns out in AKU, it's a piece of cake, doing that to women. Their reps are their most precious commodities.

I didn't do it.

After all, their reps are their most precious commodities.

In all honesty, I would have loved to meet that poetess. I have yet to meet an accomplished published Paki poet, and she and I might have had a lot to talk about.

But, we'll never know now, will we? Another couple of victims of the arranged marriage scene. :)

An incident that happened...

2005-09-07T16:35:00.000-07:00

...And now lemme justify or, if you'd be kind enough to allow the term, explain why all that talk about sex!

I live in a male hostel at the Aga Khan university. Someday, I'll write a long article on hostel life, but today just lemme throw one piece of clarifying info out. There are no gays here. At least none I've encountered in the last five years of my stay here. Of course, I could be a closet homo, enjoying what little man-on-man action I could elicit from a few like-minded friends, but that depends on what you'd rather believe. :)

Anyway, I have lived in the hostel for five years. Have seen it all, inside out. Been a part of all the secret cults and societies that inevitably develop in a men's hostel. And I can safely say that 90% -- he, cross that figure -- 95% of the men here are sexually deprived (Dunno about the female hostel, I'll reserve judgement on them in my spirit of gentlemanliness). Frustration abounds. Pornography rules. Jacking off? Well, guys here have routines and rituals regarding self-love. What more should I say?

The point is, it's not gross, or disgusting, as any lady reading this is apt to exclaim, but it's just the unpleasant truth that we shovel beneath the carpet. Sex is a powerful need and force, especially with men. In our culture, women have their own religious taboos and cultural inhibitions that allow them a psychologicla advantage that, unfortunately, men can't conceive of. And as far as their thinking with their penises is concerned, can you blame them? Most of them are about 23-24 and haven't had sex ever. Considering the stresses that come with a career in medicine, plus the stupid cultural issues that most women have in our society about even being seen with a man in public, it's a wonder that guys here haven't resorted to homosexuality. And while we are discussing sex, let me also say what most women will never believe.

Majority of these guys don't even need sex. It's true they get their urges from time to time, but those are easily squashed. What really comes, disguised as a sexual need, is intimacy. Most of them crave intimacy, or even a little friendship with women, or maybe just an ego booster. Believe me, I've talked to all of them. And nearly all want that more than sex. But our culture prohibits that, and what happens then is the smarter and the richer and more good-looking ends up with the more open girls around while the rest of the lot just poondifies, wishing to be on the other side of the fence.

I have been lucky. I have always been able to make friends with women, and I have always been a part of both the male hostel and the world beyond it. And I tell you, there are times when i pity my society. Men wanting intimacy, and women wanting security, and both ending up at a loss simply because there are too many taboos that scandalise either sex if the sacred distance is breached.

It is the hypocrisy that is disgusting, not the discussion of it.

Anyways, what I wanted to recount is an incident that became a little too personal, but while we're being honest, I believe it should be told and analysed, not only becuse we should and are allowed to, but also, it holds a fascinating psychological bearing.

So my friends and I, all males, mind you, went out on a guys' night out. But that of course is false. It was guys' night because nearlessly all of us are currently womenless. One just dumped a girl, another was dumped, and the rest have never been in a relationship because of religious or cultural or whatever reasons. (Moi will hold my secrets to myself, thank you very much! )

Anyway, we all went to this stand-up comic bit by a Karachi art group called Black Fish. Brilliant artists. Wonderful actors. Extremely spontaneous and funny comedians. May I say that my group of friends has a very sleek and honed sense of humor. We laugh plenty, but never out of politeness, and I was kinda doubting the power of the comedians' punch lines. Turns out the group was highly educated and had a magnificent funny motley of comics, and we ended up laughing like hell at their performances, all of which were impromptu. Totally money-worthy.

But the reason for my recounting is not the funnies or the art side of it. I wanna talk about the the only girl comic there was in the group.

A tall, attractive girl wearing denims and a short t-shirt, she had an aura of confidence, bordering on haughtiness, about her. She sat with her legs crossed, occasionally glancing at the crowd, and, I don't know about the others, but my eyes were riveted on her. Initially in my chauvinism I thought she'd just be helping the comics with their gigs and scenes, but she had her very own limelight, and she was real good at her stint.

But what has made her worthy of being mentioned here, nameless of course -- I don't wanna name her in any context -- is the way she used her body while performing her scenes. She moved her hips and curves seductively, very very sensually. At one point, while pretending to be a super-villain called Doctor Gas (the name adopted on audience suggestion), she thrust her hips out, placed her hands on her butt, and cried out, "Non-biodegradable!" at which the audiecne roared with approval. (I wonder what would have happened if it were a Punjabi Drama stage. She would have probably been gang-raped on stage by the audience that haunts that particualr arena. ) Even when she wasn't doing her scenes, she was twisting and moving herself in sexy curves and was very very aware of the effect she was having on her male audience. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't extremely attracted to her in the most physical way possible. Now, I have been to the most liberal of parties. I have seen people reaching third base right in front of my eyes. But I was astonished at the effect this particular woman had on me. Maybe the fact that she was extremely confident and doing something disapproving on a paki stage, in public really, had something to do with it, but it was remarkable. It made me realise how poweful sexual feelings are. In that moment I would have probably gone to bed with her if chance availed, morality or no morality, all thoughts and feelings and guilt put aside for retrospection. And that told me so much about myself and the human race in general.

Again, I'm not generalising, but most of us embrace religion and traditional values because it makes life easier to bear. It's easy enough to say that you're repelled by sex if you're not getting any. But give you a beautiful naked woman, and you try recalling a single piece of religious advice you've given to many yourelf! Black and white are not that clear-cut. The grey dominates.

I'm not going to comment on what that girl did on stage. At one point, she bent to retrive a lighter from the floor and a little of her butt-cleavage was exposed to the world, for all to see. I enjoyed the sight. My religious values are not strong enough to make me abstain from such a visual present. Boys will be boys, and whatever you say. But at the same time, I wonder what this bodes for my people. That girl has a right to parade herself naked through a hallway full of sainted men, but then, a part of me says, she shouldn't complain that men stare at her chest, or that a few try to cop a feel. A penis is an independent, intelligent entity, that's a fact of life, and she should, methinks, learn to live with it then.

Like I said I won't comment on her moral values. But I can, and should, on my own. She turned me on, and I had no way of dealing with it. I have declared sex unlawful unto me. So what do I do?

I try to write, that's how my catahrsis works, and send my words out into the world. Go away, thy impure, beautiful urge. Go die somewhere in the desert of prohibited fantasies.

But I do realise one thing.

I need to get laid. :)

Everyone has a right to that. So let's wait while marriage makes it lawful. In the meantime, i shall enjoy whatever reasonable kind of friendship I can with the women in my path, without breaking any one's heart. That's my ultimate Law. Never break a heart.

Even the Sufis agree with me on that!

About sex...

2005-09-07T14:21:00.000-07:00

Yea...I'm slipping this bit about sex in between a string of posts about my Aitkaf experience precisely because I wanna convey one message.

It's not that dirty, folks.

Now I can understand why premarital and adulterated -- excuse the pun and the horrible horrible slaughter of grammar -- sex is outlawed in Islam, but let's talk about it, shall we? Let's be open and fair and prod this creature called taboo right in its hiny, see what we can make of it!

So what about sex, you ask, a bit shakily, a bit nervous. I close my eyes and groan.

'Cuz you know, buddy. You do, and yet you pretend ignorance.

Sex is important from a human POV. It's healthy (as long as you keep yer damned fetishes to yerself!), it's a stress reliever, and it's important for conception...but most of all, it's a part of you. Like eating and pooping...

Our society is male-dominated, no question about it. So is our Western counterpart, although the majority of their populace doesn't know it yet. But more importantly, ours has religious bounds and restrictions that theirs doesn't. We have a concept called Zana and its appropriate punishment. They did too -- adultery is mentioned in the bible and the punishment is death, I believe -- but we have one tiny hitch that most mullahs fail to mention or take strong note of.

The punishment for Zana, according to Islamic Law, is applicable only if there are 4 witnesses present who can testify as to the actual occurence of the intercourse right before their eyes.

Do you see? Or shall I pick up a stick and shove it through your ears, mobilise that pudding for a brain that you have?

Who on earth would be stupid enough to have sex with another person in front of four other people, who are all at the best (for them) concealed in shadows or at the worst, enjoying the scenery at an orgy? Who would be idiotic or foolhardy enough for that, tell me?

My point is God cares about the Laws he has given us, but more important than those are the principles and the reasons behind those? If somebody's commited an Islamic felony that is personal, limited perhaps only to himself or another willing party , God would rather deal with that person Himself on the Day of Reckoning rather than give human beings power to enact their own stupid grudges and prejudices. We are frail, jealous, vengeful creatures. A Mullah with a senseless and hard heart would gloat while ordering an execution for Zanah when most of us know that he would have loved to be in the adulterer's position had society and his rep. and his own religious cowardice not been present. I'm not generalising but rather putting out a thought. And for any would-be adulterers who believe in free sex out there, reading my blog: I'm not endorsing free sex. I do not take the responsibility of your actions or beliefs. I do not confirm or deny any suspicions or doubts you might have had about the permissibility of premarital sex. My beliefs are my own and they will remain so. Hell, some of them are not even beliefs but rather conveniences and bits of agnosticism. But I'm trying to be honest with myself, and so here I go.

I believe personally that God judges men very kindly. That would mean that in the best possible scenario (or the most convenient, depending on your POV), God would not punish me for making love to a woman that I really care about and have full intentions of being with for the rest of my life. Note I say, make love, not fuck. The two words are very different and, for me, they have very different implications...

but even so, allow me to tell you what, I believe, will happen to our society once I put this belief into practice.

I have sex. I tell a friend about it, or she does. In either case, my friends are also young and horny. Some have girls, others don't. And each of them is different from me and my woman. So what starts is a domino fall. Men and women have sex. Vigilantly, privately. Both partners always afraid somebody will find out and blame them. At first, they have feelings for each other. But eventually, that goes away. Free sex, a result of horniness, nothing more, enters. Then there forms a group of 'in' people who scoff at the traditionalists, who switch partners all the time, who think free sex is liberal and classy. By now all fear has evaporated for the group has grown in size and they can tackle society and its condemnations. So basically we become what the Paki Middle and Upper Class society has in reality become in the last twenty years.

Now come the side effects. For of course religion's primary goal is the maintainence of a stable society. We begin to get reports of unintentional pregnancies, , simple abortions, fatal abortions, venereal diseases, date-rapes, and all the issues you are so familiar with. In the long run, the divorce rate escalates for of course once you're done with the religious morals, only human morality remains, which fluctuates, depending on our moods and circumstances. Dissatisfaction because of the casualities and ironies of your dreams versus reality arises, and you don't have religious values or niches to bury your heads in.

Ultimately total chaos in your relationships. Kinda like present day West!

That is why, I think, religion is there. To protect us from ourselves. And that is why I'm strongly against free sex. For it will bind us more rather than freeing us.

Now, about solutions, or shall we say, a balance between the two extremes:

I haven't found any. I don't really think there can be anything that justify free sex in religion. The shariat has made it abundantly clear. Thus follow the Islamic injunctions about getting kids to marry early, thus avoiding sin and decadence. But in present day Paki society, I think that won't work either, because of multiple social issus that I won't delve into now.

So what's the answer?

I guess the answer will come with time. Currently we're going through a transitory phase, where two extremes, Un-understood or fanatically implemented Islamic values and born-out-of-rebellion or a herd-mentality Westernism, are clashing wildly. Hopefully, something good will be born out of this tussle.

But that time alone will decide...

A Long OverDue Aitkaf Story (ALODAS) 2

2005-09-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

It's been a year...more...but I remember the mosque perfectly.

The Defence Mosque (called the AllahWali Masjid) is a modest hexagonal structure that actually has a tiny parking lot. The parking is cut off from the main road by a steel rail that in turn is broken by two low steel gates at the entrance. You get off at the entrance (visitors are not allowed to park inside unless it's a funeral or a nikah; apparently VIPness applies inside the enclosure of God too), walk through the gates till you reach a high rise of white-tiled steps. Clamber, and you enter the mosque itself.

While I stayed there, my driver would sometimes bring blankets and food from my house near LUMS University. As a rule that traditionalists -- and ignorant ones at that -- have, once you've made your intentions resolute about staying in Aitkaf and have entered the mosque of your choosing, you are not allowed by Sharia' to step outside the building. I haven't checked it out, but I'm quite sure if I did, it would turn out to be quite silly at worst and quite controversial at best. I don't know the theological logic -- and note, I say logic. Not postulate -- behind Aitkaf, but the historical analogy is that of millions of prophets and saints, including the Prophet PBUH himself, who would retire to solitude in the wilderness or caves in the mountains to meditate and ponder upon the Unseen. If we extrapolate that analogy to present day Aitkaf, there shouldn't be any rules about it. If there are gonna be, then the term standards would perhaps better serve as the approximate guide as to what and how should one spend his/her time in Aitkaf. In that case, having food and blankets delivered there like a McDelivery service should be close to a heresy. But the mullahs and the Moatakiff's didn't seem to have a problem with that. In fact, one fellow I knew got a Pizza delivered to his khaima and nobody seemed to mind.

Anyways, my point is during my stay there, some of my friends who study abroad
showed up at the Mosque. They were leaving in a few days for their respective universities and while chatting them up, I descended the steps at the entrance to see them to their cars. And the junior Mullah, the guy who calls the Azan, started frowning and gesturing at me to go back in. Apparently, I was stepping outside the bounds of the Mosque and that breaks the Aitkaf in his view.

I waved goodbye to my friends, turned to the fellow and said, "Asslam-o-alaikum jee. I understand what you're staying, but are you aware that each time you go to the latrine, technically you're leaving the mosque? Because tradition makes it abundantly clear that nothing inside the mosque can be impure or profane, and the last time I checked, defecation isn't a holy act (at least in your views)!"

He looked at me with disdain and anger. Another western infidel, who doesn't know true Islam, he must have thought.

I begged to differ by saying salam again and walking back into the mosque to resume the Beloved's contemplation through all available acts of love at my disposal...

A long overdue Aitkaf story...

2005-08-26T03:51:00.000-07:00

(On being reminded by a friend after a long long time)...

I turn towards the doorway.

Allahumma labbaik...

I come, O lord! I come...

Hajis recite this as they travel towards the Holy Shrine. We say the holiest of holiest. Some other religion will beg to differ. Who cares? All avatars of the same God, right? The Almighty. Yahweh. Bhagwan. The Immaculate Conception. The Sacred Feminine. ALLAH.

All the faces of the Beloved. Shimmering with eternity's light.

Hajis recite that when they walk towards the Holy Precinct. I've never been able to imagine or feel what they must when the black walls of the Kaaba rise before them, a towering monolith reminescent of the days of the Prophet, of the glory of their religion, of the extant of spirituality humming unheeded in their souls each moment of the day.

I recite that as I pick my books up and wrap a coarse cotton shawl around my shoulders (it's end September, and by now, Lahore starts emitting cold sighs at the departure of the monsoon season). Tradition demands I take only books related to prayers, worship and the history of Islam.

I defy tradition and grab Buddha (Karen Armstrong) and Kuliyat-e-Iqbal as well. Afterall, the demands and importance of knowledge are far greater than tradition's.

****

The first thing that I notice at the entrance to the Defence Mosque is the moustached, grizzly guard holding a pump-action. He looks menacing.

Of course, he has to, think I. He's supposed to fend off, or at the very least, intimidate possible Islamic terrorists.

Islamic terrorists. How I hate the term. And yet what else should I call the Sunni's bombing Shia mosques and the Shias gunning down the Sunnis. Barailwis hating Wahabis and Wahabis hating the Mirzais.

Islamic terrorits. How I hate the term. It is the antithesis of everything my religion stands for.

Islam...derives from Sal'm. Meanings spring from the Abjad alphabet system in Arabic, in which all Arabic words derive from word roots. Each root's made up of three alphabets. Different combinations of these alphabets give off multiple words almost algaebrically, all containing different meanings and different shades of these various meanings, in effect baptising a single word root with hundreds of identities.

The identities of Sal'm snicker in my head. Peace. Surrender. Safety. One explanation derived would be 'finding peace through surrender unto Allah'.

The guard stares at me as I get out of my car. He has peace in his bloodshot eyes all right!

So much for saying Assalam-o-alaikum to him...

****

2005-08-22T10:06:00.000-07:00

tired of looking around

Almost Over...

2005-08-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

Four days...

sounds like a frickin' holywood thriller, doesn't it?

Fact is four days are all I have. Four days to wrap up my business in Aga Khan. To take my last prof. To pack up my room into those blank, dreary boxes that will be transported either via train or trucks from Karachi to Lahore. There will be approximately 25 boxes, 5 or 6 crammed with clothes and other shit. The rest will contain the books I have collected over 5 years like a lover garnering his beloved's belongings. I have around 2000 books in my room at the University.

It's the biggest collection of books anyone has ever had in the Male Hostel at Aga Khan.

I will leave for Aga Khan for the last time as a student in about a week. I will stay there in the hostel for three weeks because all my friends have decided to spend our last vacations in the Hostel in honour of our memories. We know that we will miss this time for the rest of our lives. It's right there in front of us. When again will I ever hit Murtaza in the crotch just because I was getting bored? When will I ever throw Kuppa in the cold waters in front of the Mosque just for teh heck of it?

Nevermore, said the Raven. Nevermore...

I don't know about that. Nevermore is a word God finds very funny.

Anyways, the point is I'm obliged to spend only four days there now. Time enough to take the last prof. And I will be done. I'll be a doctor.

Whoever said, when we face the trial all fear evaporates, was most definetely rubbing shit on your shoes. All fear rushes back and transforms into desperation. It most certainly does not go away. I am scared. We all are. After all, we get to choose our lives for certain this time. To puruse USMLES or not. To do medicine in pakiland or not. To do medicine at all or not...

Whatever the cost, it has to be done. And therein lies the key.

Life will move on, and I can't do shit about it. In fact now, I think I might be ready to welcome it. I might want some good, better, best change now. Isn't the greatest bravado facing change with steadfastness and hope? Shall I dare to eat a peach and walk along the beach, listening to the mermaids singing each to each? Will they sing to me? I don't know. That time will tell...but I gotta make sure that I'm at least there when the music begins. Facing it might be a piece of cake after that...

And what about the past? Well, the past can go fuck my old aunt Fanny! Enough is enough. time to move on. Time to make something useful of my present and future. I can only do that by letting certain things go. So bloody what if I have to leave certain beloved things behind? They are all idols and I gotta break them. The Truth has come and falsehood has vanished. Undoubtedly, falsehood was made to disappear.

I can do interesting things with that verse, but for the moment, let's not dabble in silly religious debates, shall we!

So we're back to four days. Sigh! Whew! Wow! What do I say now? My engine has run outta steam. But well, as long as I'm alive and you are, let's hope those four days go well...

If they don't, well, life's a bitch. What can I say? :)

Ramble on...

2005-05-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

Somebody once said all the stories there are have been told, and they were about: Fear, Love, Hope, Beauty, Guilt and Anger.

I sit here today with no new stories pouring from my proverbial pen. It's all the same old, same old. Time and Space and all that jazz. The world stops for an instant like a dazed toddler, flails its arms for balance, and resumes spinning...

I spent the last one hour sitting with a friend on the male hostel rooftop. He is an amateur guitarist and he was playing random notes and chords. I vocalised with him for about fifteen minutes straight and it was so much fun and it was so much sadness and beauty. The night was beautiful like a bride and it whispered in our ears songs and voices from other worlds than this.

I have no idea what to write. Writing seems to have slipped out of my world like a shadow. All that's left are haunting voices and verses that flutter in my head like wounded bats, shrieking for a way out of their lair. I hurry from hither to thiether all day, from OR to ward, from clinic to the hostel, and they follow me and nod their sad, beautiful heads at me, while I'm bent in front of the operating table, trying to get a glimpse inside the human body, trying to figure out ways to understand how disease can be removed.

Don't get me wrong. I love surgery. I want to be a surgeon. Yet I also want not to forget those otherworlds that I grew up with. The worlds of long gone. The worlds that growing up napalmed. So many universes destroyed, so many dream-people killed and forgotten. I never want to let them go. I have not the power to let them die. I might be pro-euthenaisa but I'm no murderer. So many people are, no?

People are strange, Morrison got that much right. He was perhaps one of the strangest of them all. he dared to dream, to rebel, but never knew that dreams only get real when you submit to them. Who ever controlled dreams? Not gonna happen in the next 20 years either, technology or no tech. Dreams need to be followed, to be soothed and pacified, to be loved and cared about, to be protected and fiercely guarded. Only then do they shed off their misty tendrils and become matter.

I intedn to follow my dreams. I intend to pursue them. I'm scared. Hell, we all are. Doesn't mean I'm a coward. Bravery is standing your ground even in the middle of all your fears. Determination is battling them. Wisdom is using them to win your wars.

I intend to try to do all three.

Incidentally, I read Paulo Coelho's By the River Piedra I sat down and Wept. It was like reading about everything that' ever happened to every human being. Hell, two paragraphs in there were even verbatim from what I once talked to a friend about. That part amused me and gave me hope.

Perhaps I'm not such a fool.

Perhaps I'm not such a rarity either...

Heer

2005-04-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

I am listening to Heer. Written by Waris Shah 250 years back, sung by a Punjabi folk singer, adorned with the nostalgic rhythm of the flute and rabab, the song flows across my soul like a spirited shadow.

Who here knows of Heer? O you deprived souls! O burger-eating, ray-ban wearing, Levis flaunting semi-creatures lost in the wilderness of a no-man's land that exists right in the fountainhead of your psyche, halt! Halt the fuck, I say, and listen...just for a few moments, listen. Open up your heart to yourself, be transported to the old, so old, villages of Punjab. See Heer, the young girl, wearing her dust-stained shalwar kameez, crossing the tiny animal trails through the fields and forests, carrying the water-laden earth pitcher on her head, dreaming of eternity bound in the minutest details of her village. Hear her voice, her sweet Punjabi voice ringing out like an angel's whisper. See the world through her eyes...and know her world.

Heer and Ranjha, Sohni and Mahiwal, Sassi and Punnoo, Laila and Majnoon...the great lovers of our culture and civilisation. I bet if I asked you about Romeo and Juliet, you'd smile and shake your head at the beauty of their tale. What about our own Punjabi stories? How many of you can point out the burial place of Heer?

We have to know who we are. We have to learn and, especially now, re-learn our roots. We are nothing without them. Home is where you belong. And where shall we belong if not here? The place which gave us our first breath, our first word, our first love, our first glimmer of knowledge?

i am idealistic...and I love that. I don't want to lose my childhood. I want to save it in my words, in these pages, in my songs, in my dreams...and who's to say I'm not practical. I do everything pratical people do...and at the same time enjoy my own niches of light. The trick is reaching that balance...and once you do, you begin to love it.

Perhaps you might wanna listen to Heer too. There are many versions available. I recommend Alam Lohar's. he's sung it perfectly...

And if you have a probelm with Punjabi, do what you did when you first heard livin' livida loca...

Ask around and find out from Punjabis what the words mean. best: Get a Punjabi dictionary...

Rabbi Shergill...

2005-04-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

And incidentally have you heard the songs sung by Rabbi Shergill? The guy's an Indian singer who's just realeased an album a few months back. Marvellous music and marvellous singing. But the reason why I've deemed him worthy of being mentioned on a blog that mostly delves into the spiritual, philosophical side of life is he's given music to some of Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah's poetry. Songs like "heer" and "bullah ki jana" will enter your heart like thieves and drive you spiritual and strangely nostalgic. Of course, you haven't forgotten my passion for Sufi poetry? :)

It's brilliant how much of life is repetition. Sufis have a saying: "If soemthing happens once, it will never happen again. But if it happens twice, it will inevitably happen a third time." Beautiful anda very thoughtful saying, ain't it? I run away from Sufism and it comes quietly wearing the cloak of a hundred thousand things that I really happen to love. Makes me wonder, but the good thing is I'm smiling while wondering.

One day I will translate some of Bulleh Shah and Warish Shah's Poetry for you. It won't be an iota of what it is in Punjabi, but you'll still love it. Guarantee you that...

Interesting thing is we never pause to think about who "you" are. People who glance through online blogs; people who read them devotedly. The other day soembody who I'd never even heard of left a sweet message on one of my blogs. I'll never know who that person was, but it definitely brought a smile on my lips. Weird world's all I can say.

Anyways adios for the night. Sleep beckons like the promise of Mohammad, PBUH: "Patience is the key to contentment."

Peace comes dripping from the morning's eves...

2005-04-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

I'm finally in a place in my life where I have made peace with myself. It could be transient, but at least it lets me go through time without bitterness or regrets. I'm finally at peace. Doesn't mean I've stopped struggling for Utopia. Just means I'm concentrating on it more instead of being crippled by my own shortcomings. One of the more imp. steps on the way to realising Selfhood is accepting yourself and being happy with whoever you are. I am. Which basically means WORLD, WATCH OUT! :)

It's been a strange, strange journey. I can't even begin to tell all my juniors at Aga Khan how much change they should expect in them by the time they graduate. I can't imagine how much more I myself will change in the next few months before I become a doctor. DOCTOR. One word, which means so much: healer, helper, friend, professional, responsible human being, intellectual, self-sacrificer, social element, thinker... and so much more.

One advice to any would-be doctor. Don't get into medicine if you don't have the balls to help others. If you want in for the money, wrong profession! Try modelling or acting or civil services. Eat, drink and be merry...but DON'T enter medicine. It's not for you...

I just wish people find hope and dreams wherever and whatever the are. I understand now that God was never selfish enough to limit himself to Muslims only...or jews or christians for that matter. There's a cosmic current rippling through existence each moment and each non-moment...and It's called Allah.

Do not give up hope. Do not give up your dreams. Follow them through. I'm telling you from experience they will happen. All you need is balls enough (or guts enough, for the women out there!) not to compromise your life. Why compromise? The moment we say we can't get anything is the moment we lose it. Think about it. If we're sure of not getting anything or if we feel we don't deserve it, why should the wanted object in question feel we're worthy of possessing it? It's cosmic justice, if you will. Hope to hope. Dream to dream...and the rest follows.

I might not be euphroic. I might not be ecstatic, but I'm at peace and at least happy. I recall something from Paulo Coelho's "The Valkyries". It was about love always being restless and a constant state of transitory emotional flux. Love is a storm. It comes and goes like a twister, uprooting everything in its path. Isn't that simply beautiful? isn't that the greatness of it? But for the moment, I want to concentrate on the practical aspect of life. I hope to love my people...all fellow human beings who happen to be in the circle of my help. I have to make myself worthy of loving them and feel that love draw the Ultimate Beloved from beyond the heavens. Love my people so much that God Himself cries with very real divine tears and comes down to receive me in His Arms. For that, I need to work on my skills as a doctor. Gain all that knowledge and put it into practice. Knowledge without action is bullshit, not manure. Similarly love without dedication and selflessness is hypocrisy. I will work hard to change the state of my people. Time is status quo. It never changes. But I will change the moments preceding me and proceeding from me. I will fulfill my purpose, and wait patiently for my God to come and escort me home. A home where struggle will not be a question. Where pain will be a distant nightmare. Where humanity will have evolved back into the Light of Mohammad.

I will wait for my home...and meanwhile, will lend a hand to whoever needs it to stand up.

The world afterall is a coach-stop. And the Eternal Footman will be arriving soon...but the stop itelf is quite interesting and pretty.

Let's sight-see for awhile, shall we!

My little niche

2005-04-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

How are you supposed to make a decision that changes your life...or at the last fixates it?

I, Usman Tanveer Malik, age 24 years, a passionate man who's never really been able to swing it in any one way, came to med school without even knowing why. I just ended up here because I didn't even know what I wanted from life. In med school, I had a tremendously strange life. I've seen such weird things and had such ups and downs that I'm betting most other people wouldn't believe me if I started counting. But the last bit is always the last bit, and that which doesn't kill you is ALWAYS good for you. Along the way, I had to decide between three careers: MEDICINE. WRITING. MUSIC.

See, I've always had this knack for writing if not the best, then definitely good stuff. I used to dream of becoming a writer, earning loads of money, becoming powerful and famous and intellectual, bending the whole fucking literary world with a twist of my pen-wand.

Then there was music. I can sing well and play an average tune on the guitar...and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about going into music. I have written songs, you know, and not bad if I do say so myself.

And then there was medicine. Boring, stilted, useless (since every one is eventually gonna die anyways, right?) and a pain in the ass. I hated it. Would have left ages ago for creative writing school if it hadn't been for my parents and the look in my mother's eye when she tells her friends her son is gonna be a doctor. Call it cliched, but it matters. It fucking matters BIG if you have a loving family who're counting on you to make their existence worthwhile. And that was the crux of it.

I ended up not leaving med school and drudged on and on like a zombie, studying on short-term basis to pass exams. I have a not bad brain and well, my short term memory's always been fabulous. So I ddin't flunk any exams and kept passingt all that came my way.

Then came final year and everything changed.

You know, things begin to crop up in a different perspective when you've got a deadline. You look at the not-too-distant graduation day and begin to reflect on what you've done with five years of your life. I did, and I hated what I saw. So bloody what if I learnt how to play the guitar and sang a few stupid songs on stage? It felt good, but I've had better highs. So fucking what if I have some good friends who'd do anything for me? So fucking what if I learnt some very valuable lessons of my life here? Fuck all that! My fellow students knew exactly what they were doing and for what. Agreed, some were doing it for money, some for fame and respect, some for sthe simple plain reason of wanting to flee from a country that, they think, had given them nothing. I can understand all those reasons, but not a single one applied to me. When I thought about it, all I ever wanted was to change the world and help people. Optimistic and a little egoistic, I agree, but now I've finally realised that's it. I want to know I'm worthy of something, that people will look at me one day and say, "Ah, there goes a man we can depend on." I want the satisfaction that saving a life brings, but more than that, now, I want the satisfaction of doing it for free...mostly.

I want to be Dr. Robin Hood. Charge the rich, treat the poor. I want to see the look in some one's eyes when I tell him I can heal him for a meagre amount that he can afford. I want to change the medical situation in my country. In a nutshell, I want to live for others now.

I have lived life for myself inasmuch as was possible, and I'm not sure if that ever satisfied me. I want to live it for others now. I don't wanna stay up all those nights and mornings in the wards and teh clinics and the OR's and the ER's for myself. They mean nothing to me in themselves...but if they mean I cna save some one's life, baby, I'm in. I will work doggedly till I break...or till I break through, and that's it for me.

There's a doctor here at Aga Khan. His name is Rizwan Azmi. He's a general surgeon and a gem of a person. Friends who have worked with him tell me he's always looking for an excuse to waive his patient's fees. He once performed a triple surgery on a patient in the clinic under local anesthesia for lessthan 200 rupees. Incidentally another surgeon had told the patient it would take around 30,000 rupees when you threw in the cost of General Anesthesia, the OR charges and the hospital's charges. How amazing is that? How worthy?

I want to be like Rizwan Azmi. I want to grow old and know that I don't have any regrets. I want to be the best general surgeon there ever was. Pakistan doesn't need specialists. We're wokring in conditions that are at least a hundred years behind the US and the UK. We need people that can work as family surgeons at any level, be it tertiary or primary. We need to improvise. Surgeons here use imported stitches, each costing 300 rupees. Azmi uses fish hooks for surgery, each less than 3 rupees in value. There have been randomised trials, says he, that prove each works as good as the other, and his success rate is phenomenal.

I want to be GS now. I think I have found my niche in life. I WILL NOT go abroad. I WILL NOT leave my country and my people. I don't care about money or fame or respect. Now all I care about is my people and how I can help them. Better die forgotten than useless. Better live useful than rich. I will train here in Pakistan, however that might be, wherever that might be. I will become the best of the best, and I WILL do it. I will take my USMLE's only because the five years I wasted here at AKU, only passing exams and not understanding or integrating much, have left certain deficits in my knowledge. I will cover those areas up while I study for my MLE's, score above 95% and inshAllah I most definitely will, and then I WILL STAY HERE. With my people, for my people...

Here's to purpose and determination and God's grace...

I will help my people...

The name of the game

2005-04-09T17:25:00.000-07:00

It's hope, hope, hope...

faith, faith, faith...

I would ask Dante to bend over if he says once more, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." He of course thought he was talking about Hell.

Turns out Hell can be created perfectly, right down to the last minute detail on earth. It can be a by-product of your own head; it can be created by a STROKE of bad luck. It can be due to a weakness of your soul. It can be due to your giving up faith.

I have realised at a young age ( at least I hope I have really really!) that Iqbal and Ghalib and the Sufis never lied when they talked about a limit to the intellectual working. Logic fails after a while. We bounce back onto blind faith and hope that hope does exist...that there is in fact a purpose to all this madness, a pattern to the chaos, peace hiding somewhere in the vortex of impossibilities, restlessness and failures...

Keeping that in mind, the Quranic reference to 'those who believe in the Great Unseen" begins to make more sense. We have to believe in something. For me, even my logic fails to deny the existence of God. I've tried to grow out of Him, so to speak...and it's not possible. He turns up every where. In beauty, sadness, love, hatred, faith and hopelessness. He's like a Divine jack-in-the-box...and I'm sure He just enjoyed this simile.

The point is the greatest thing in the world to me (at least right now. I'm not stupid enough not to know that I'll probably grow outta this too) is hope and faith. Faith that Utopia is possible. That despite the stark realities of life, there is kindness and peace somewhere...that after all this restlessness and madness, a day will come when peace will come dripping from the morning's eaves...that soemthing can be done about the misery of existence...that real selflessness does exist...that some day I will understand the 'WHY" (the ultimate question, in my humble uninformed opinion, the Secret of Existence) of our existence. Why we need to suffer to become elevated? Why couldn't we have been elevated in the first place? Why must we play our parts here on earth? I agree that through struggle we turn into the real Ashraf-ul-makhluqat (the best of creation) but why must we do it? Why coudln't He have simply made us that way in the beginning?

I believe that herein lies the Secret of The Universe...

Like Nusrat fateh Ali Khan sings, "Adam sinned and his sons suffer. What measue of justice have you prepared, O God!"

But as long as we hope, there's still hope and beauty and truth and justice and love and kindness and potential for betterment.

Better an optimist than a suicide. ;)

Tomorrow

2005-04-07T02:23:00.000-07:00

Not possible, not possible,

So whispered the demon
One dark night, and the world
Did stop
Atop
Resolutions and their tangibilities.

He walks every night,
Every night he walks with his pockets full of loads
Full of rattling, snarling loads
He would chuck at every river bend
If he just could.
But the river flows on,
Never rubbing its forehead
In the dust, in the dust
Of the screaming, writhing dead
Of every moment’s triumphant moment.

He is not Khizar, here to teach the Holy Conversant.
He is not Lazarus come back from the dead.
He will not burn on the cross, but for his choice
He will not, to the mountain, turn his head.

Let the mountain then come to him.
He will sit, head bowed, his beard grown thick
While the afternoon weeps and the roofs grow steep
And the stars gather round the night’s soft timeline
Like a crowd peering at a dying man’s cheeks.

Let the yester years fall away, fall away
Like softly ululating mirages come closeness.
Like selfhood claiming lost, hopeless folk.
Like the idols of falsehood come the Blaze of the Truth.

He is the Self, the Truth, the Mystery,
The Lamp in the niche, the Tapestry
Of the cosmic design.
He sits, cross-legged, and becomes
The Buddha, and wisdom comes abegging
At his feet.

And then it’s time…
Time for him and time for him.
When every moment perishes except his face.
The past dances like star-dust
Across the black infinities,
And the present must
Flee like a guilty child,
Leaving only tomorrow and tomorrow only.

To the morrow marches his heart
Like a pilgrim on the Holy Journey
Like a tear down a repentant’s cheeks.
He becomes the cry of Mansur, the Proclaimer.
The question at Mount Sinai,
The answer beyond the Lote Tree
Beyond the brink of all the skies.

Time is a mirror and he’s the sheen;
Thus he wipes the glass with himself
And sees his own countenance
Like a long awaited lover
Asking where he’d been.

He will rise now from his slumber,
Rubbing his eyes,
And stroll along the shore
Of the river, of the sea.
And every wave cresting high
Will laugh at his peace.

He will see the world
In a grain of sand,
The river in a droplet,
The cosmos in a rainbow’s shimmer.

It is possible, possible, possible
(he will whisper back to the demon)
In a vortex of impossibilities,
And tomorrow can become
The First Commandment:
"BE!"

And all will be alight…

The other day...

2005-03-23T04:40:00.000-08:00

I was at the beach with a few friends and a few acquaintances. It was a friend's birthday party...strictly an all guy-affair.

It was night time, and I had gone to the beach after a very long time. The sea (i.e. the Arabian Sea) looked so vast and silent. Yet every time the waves boiled up from the dark horizon and rushed towards the beach with their white hair blowing back and dissolving into themselves, words came haunting back. Words TS. Eliot wrote almost a century ago, and still they rang true and powerful, spanning the decades, slipping through the flirtatious grip of time and death, wiggling their way on paper, off it, through my eyes, straight into my heart and soul:

"I grow old...I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with sea-wead red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

The water thrashed and murmured, and leapt and screamed, and still the five of us talked and laughed and had a few smokes and chips and drinks. I took out my guitar and began to play.

I played many songs that night. The list ranged from Punjabi to Saraik to English and Urdu. We listened to the music and felt the salt-tinged wind from the sea caress our cheeks and looked at ourselves and each other and the stars and the moon. There never was any GUY-talk. No talk of bitches and whores, no talk of sports or cars or suck-my-cock-you-crazy-motherfucker.

It was five guys, all five quite GUYISH in their own ways, and they were all little children once again playing castles with the sand and trying to bury each other in it, listening to soft music, singing along with it, nodding their heads in sleep, walking solitary walks along the magically wavering line between sand and water.

It was beautiful and it was lonely and it was lovely and it was sad. The saddest of all was the Sea. Who knows how many aeons She had spent screaming and crying and laughing and splashing in the water? The horizon disappeared and reappeared at her whim, and She was never getting the sweet relief of death. People always think death is unfair and ugly...but it can be beautiful too. The dying fear it, but maybe at the brink of it, they see its beauty and rush towards it.

We all lay down somewhere in the bosom of that night out of time and space, and rested our heads on our own hands behind our heads. Then we looked up at the sky, and the friend whose B-day it was started describing how you figured out where the North Star was using the Big Dipper. It was a special night and even the heavens knew it. Thus was teh sky clear and thus we made out the Big Dipper easily. It's made up of five stars that seem to dip down to make the shape of a spoon. I watched, fascinated, and somebody said something about how huge the cosmos was, and how each star represented a whole galaxy and how high the probability was somebody from one of those galaxies was looking down at us, wishing he could have the powers us ALIENS had...

I saw a shooting star race across the sky. It was like a spark between two neighbouring skies, and it died out in half-a-second. It had a sizzling tail that had many colours, blue and white and yellow, I think. And it was as if God Himself had scraped a matchstick across a star to light his Divine Cigar...

I lowered my head to my guitar. While my fingers gently played, I rested my head on the guitar's neck and kissed it. I tasted sand and I didn't care.

Two of my friends fought each other with sand bullets and bombs. They hit each other well, but none went down.

I sang to the stars and the sky, and the seven heavens listened, for not even the angels had heard such lament on the human condition before...last they heard it was when Iqbal wrote his "Shikwa" (Plaint) and rent the hevaen's heart apart. In a moment there was time, and for that moment stretched to infinity, I saw everything in a grain of sand.

I didn't see God anywhere, and I screamed silently at the heavens, begging him to show me His Face.

But apparently the Beloved never heard me.

We left some time before dawn. I didn't have the heart to see the magnificent rays of the sun set fire to the horizon.

There was enough inexorable fire imploding and consuming my heart as it was...

And Muhammad is the Messenger

2005-03-22T07:59:00.000-08:00

Annmarie Schimmel, the great German scholar, linguist (and authority on Iqbal's work) has written a masterpiece. She has written in this book about the tremendous veneration in which Muslims hold the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (PBUH), and discussed his merits and qualities as presented in all kinds of Muslim literature, poetry and music. She has talked about the different facets of his existence (eg. the Noor-e-Mohammad, the Haqqiqaya-e-Mohammad etc) which is a fascinating read in itself.

The book is touching in the fact that its shows the ultimate hope and faith Muslims have associated with the person of the Prophet. Whether or not he would eventually act as interceder on Doomsday is irrelevant. The beauty lies in the versatility of beliefs and wishes all kinds and classes and stages of Muslims have invested in the Prophet. He is the Beloved's beloved, the reason for the creation of creation. 'Laulaka' (A Hadith-e-Qudsia reference: "Were it not for you, (O Muhammad), I would have not created the spheres) and "kun" (Quranic reference, "Be!) were for him. The "Lamp in the niche" (Surah Noor, the Light Verse) points to his magnificent existence. Even though, he is not parallel with the Creator, he definitely completes the brige between the Lord and His people. He is the reason for you and me...

Faith is a very powerful force. I have come to realise in the past few months that even if spiritual salvation is possible for followers of other religions, at least the basis of Islam and the pillar of the Muslim society rest on the shoulders of Mohammad (PBUH). Without him, Muslims would all hold different beliefs and stages of faith regarding God and would break up for etenity. It's Mohammad (PBUH) that holds the society together. 'His life was the Quran", as Ayesha, his wife, said. And that is most definitely true. Even if you're an athesit or an agnostic, the greatness of the Prophet (PBUH) can't be denied...as a spiritual reformer, politician, theologian, scientist, leader, and a human being, he was marvellous.

One of the really poetic and moving statements Annmarie quotes from Allama Iqbal: "The Prophet (PBUH) became united with God (in the Night of the Ascention) and then came back to earth to complete his job. I swear by God, if it had been me, I would have never come back." Mohammad (PBUH) reached God, saw Him as He could be seen, was with Him (God alone knows for how many eternities; time and space explode at the place where God's territory begins, where even the angel Gibrael fears to tread!) and then returned to earth, this stinking, filthy, disorganised, painful mess to finish the job only on the pormise by God that he would never be separate from God even in the midst of his daily duties. (Incidentally the Sufis use the incident of the Ascention to describe how a man can reach God in his life, get annihilated, and then come back.)

The Prophet (PBUH) is the crux of creation. He is, to borrow a weak simile, the Dark Tower of existence on whose person revolve the infinite spheres and parallel worlds.

In the end, it is in him that our hopes lie...and I mean that in so many ways that all my prayers and hopes flutter up to heaven borne on this statment of mine...

...or so I hope...

The Pixies

2005-03-18T13:37:00.000-08:00

“When I was young,” began old maid Meedaan, “we used to go to the old river Ravi and gaze upon its shimmering waters and the dots of silver and golden sunlight that speckled it as far as we could see. The river was young then and yet old, and we would wade in as far as we dared and slap at its bosom in delight and glee, and with the water, would splash everywhere the glitter of that light, the tiny lights.
“Even then did we know that the dots were the Silver Pixies of Light that Danced on the waters.
“But then I grew old and withered, and Ravi squirmed older and wrinkled too, and its waters began to thin out and its barren chest, strewn with dead fish and litter and leaves and rubble, began to rise, and the poor fisherman and the poorer peasants would wade in and pick up the fish and the turtles, and clean them and eat them. Sometimes, they ate them raw, and would suck every fish and turtle bone clean till they could use them to make bone-necklaces.
“And the Silver Pixies of Light began to Dance less and less with the thinning away of each line of water.
“Till came the day when the Ravi just lay there, almost dead and panting and black and grey, and the Pixies just left it there for more watery surfaces and greener beds, and the Black Imps of Waste crawled and gibbered on its naked chest, and sometimes, they would allow leeches to cling to the bare feet of children and suck their blood till an adult prodded them with red-hot iron rods.
“And no one came to help the old and dried Ravi, and it lies there still, exhausted and weak, and the Imps hop and creep and slither and hiss but never dance, and all my friends and playmates and cousins and relatives are dead now, and I go there alone sometimes and try to search out the Pixies, any Pixie, one Pixie, and the Imps nudge each other and scowl at me and laugh sometimes, and then I…I give the Ravi my own Pixies, old and trembling as they are, but they stay there bravely for a moment or two, and wink and Dance, and then they too, are smothered as the Imps pounce on them and tear them to pieces…”
The old maid stooped and swept the floor with her jharoo again…
…and two Pixies smiled and winked, as they hung loosely from her jaw-line, and leapt down to the floor.