of pies and expectations

Reblogged from Mellow Creativity:

Sometimes I wonder what kind of a child my mother imagined I would be, and contrast that with how I’ve turned out in actuality.  It is both a depressing and an amusing picture.  The obedient, caring, cheerful girl she probably wanted has been replaced by this sarcastic, debating, selfish individual.

So I’m smart in studies, and she admits this as a good trait – yet I have this strong impression that my mother would rather I were a little dumber and more tractable, than this smart and difficult to handle. 

Read more… 276 more words

I was going to write a sappy post in light of Mother's day. But I decided to reblog this instead, even though its kind of depressing and doesn't really fit. But it kind of defines our relationship. And since I initially posted this more than a year ago, not many of you will have read it.

The Midwich Cuckoos – review and rambling

Well, mostly rambling. Spoiler alert for the major of Wyndham’s works, and I suppose King’s too, since I’m going to mention them too.

So I just finished the Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham.  I’ve read two of his other two works, The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids quite some time earlier, but hadn’t got round to reading this. I still have to read three of his other works, including the The Kraken Wakes, which is fairly famous, like the three I’ve already read.

For those of you who don’t know Wyndham, he writes science fiction books.  They’re sort of like classic science fiction. He’s not as famous nor as prolific as Arthur C. Clarke or Asimov or the other sci-fi giants, but his works are really really good, they’re like compulsory reading for sci-fi fans.  The books are not really futuristic the way Asimov is, and two of the ones I read including Midwich are actually based in contemporary England, also his style is very cosy British-like and rambling (like classics usually are, which is why I like him).  But the scifi aspect is also pronounced and unique, and he brings a creeping sense of horror into the stories using very prudish prose, which is a contrast that is delicious when you pause to think about it afterwards.

When I started The Midwich Cuckoos I was struck by how similar it was to Under the Dome, the Stephen King book I recently finished.  In the Midwich Cuckoos, a small village in the middle of England is suddenly surrounded by an invisible barrier, crossing which causes animals and humans to become unconscious.  In the King book, there is a similar situation, except in that case the invisible barrier is actually solid and cannot be crossed. The King book revolves around the town trapped under the dome and the problems it encounters – like all good King stories, it ends almost apocalyptically. In the Midwich book however, the barrier is lifted within a day, and it is the consequences of that almost innocuous-seeming twenty-four hours that is the real crux of the story.

The second notable thing about the books was the use of telepathy.  In The Chrysalids, telepathy is a secret talent acquired by individuals as a result of a genetic mutation, which latter are common in the post-nuclear explosion world described in the book. Telepathy is what sets the main characters aside, it is portrayed as a good thing to have, though it’s also the reason why the main characters’ lives are in danger. (all aberrations are regarded as abnormal and therefore have to be destroyed).  In Midwich, however, the alien children’s ability to communicate mentally is actually the eerie thing about them, and is regarded as evidence of the fact that they are all one consciousness, one giant being divided into individual bodies.  It is regarded in the sort of creeping horror that I described in the beginning. I found it interesting how the same talent was portrayed in such different lights by the same author in the different books as a result of the varying storylines.

In both Chrysalids and Midwich however, the telepathy is limited to individuals who have the talent ingrained in them, that is, it is not the sort of mind-reading telepathy one envisions when one hears the term.  Individuals in either book can only communicate telepathically with other individuals who have the talent – they cannot “read” minds of people who don’t have the skill. This was a consistent aspect of the telepathy described in both books, though in Midwich the explanation for the phenomena is different.

Anyway. I recently finished the Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson too, it was pretty fantastic.  I especially like the character of Lisbeth Salander – ruthless, cold, emotionless, rational, practical, rebellious and with almost boundless internal strength.  The stories themselves were your typical thriller-mystery-action-crime novel type things, but well-constructed, and the major theme in them, that is, of eventual punishment of men who hate women, was something that would obviously appeal to me in the feminist mood overtaking me these days  I might do a more detailed post on Salander, because its been ages since I admired so deeply a character, female no less, but this is enough rambling for this post.  Just wanted to mention them since they’re fresh on my mind.

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See you guys soon

Incongruity.

I’ve been making lots of feminist, analysing posts in the past few weeks, which is really unusual for me so I’m reverting to my usual narcissism with this latest post. I wrote it some years ago, it was posted as a note on my fb but never managed to make it here. Hope you like.

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I love incongruity. I love doing things, feeling things, completely out of sync with my surroundings. Having a thousand in my pocket and taking a ride back home on the bus. Watching children playing while humming death metal lyrics. Eating daal with pasta.
It doesn’t have to be an overt thing. Most of the time the secret knowledge of my aberrance is what makes it so enjoyable. Like reading erotica while the azaan is sounding outside. Or wishing for death when the skies explode with fireworks marking the end of a lovely, contentment filled year. Or depression overwhelming while the audience claps and I step down from the podium. Or smiling while at a funeral when you suddenly remember something funny.
It’s as though I am a person made less of separate feelings, with their own proper times and proper places for being felt, than clashing emotions – and when they come together in me it is like the dancing of light and shadow on the ground – a secret harmony born of differences. Too strong a light and the shadows will disappear – yet too much darkness and the little light beams will be lost forever. But together? They laugh and lock spirits and dance, under the trees in the cool forest, on the wooden floor in the afternoon sun as it sifts in through the shutters. Together they dance, and so do I.
Night-time is the best time, and you understand why, don’t you? The whole world sleeps. I alone am awake, along with the murderers and the mad and the mating. I don’t do anything out of the ordinary – I don’t need to. Being awake at the time and doing Ordinary stuff is the incongruity itself, and the deliciousness of the knowledge is part of what keeps me up, every night, though I have dragged my bloodshot eyes and tired body with me to university the next day an uncountable number of times.
I don’t think of it as hypocrisy either, unless you can be hypocritical to your surroundings. No sycophant’s smile of geniality while hatred bubbles inside. I haven’t time for incongruities with individuals – besides, how do you know the other person doesn’t hate you too? Then you would both be merely dancing the same dance, and getting in each other’s way. And that is more likely anyway.
It is the dance of incongruity. It is pouring your heart out to a stranger, telling them things you wouldn’t tell your closest friends. It is reading poetry in the middle of a crowded bank surrounded by harassed people gossiping or arguing politics. It is writing about love on tissue papers while staying overnight at the hospital with a dying relative. It is turning the air conditioning on full in the middle of winter, and then sitting and shivering and loving it. It is watching horror movies and knitting – it is full formal dress with tattered sandals or a tacky purse. Being the only one in a roomful of people to pick up the unintentional double-entendre in the speaker’s words. It is gloom caking your heart like dried blood while the world tells you they would do anything to be in your place. It is drinking soup in the middle of summer. It is unaccountably praying for forty days and forty nights of rain when all around you all you see is contentment.
It is a genuine smile from a mutual enemy, surprising you and melting a little of the ice block inside.
Incongruity isn’t something you can really create – it is born of unaccountable urges. Or it is the coming together of contrasting internal and external circumstances, like constellations lining up. Wanting a cake at 3 pm is alright. Baking one at 2 am is slightly incongruous, and the sort of thing I love. But at other times, for me it probably represents a deeper sense of disjointedness with my surroundings, as though having never fitted in I cannot compel myself to now. A deeper feeling of rift between what I feel or think and what forms the collective thoughts of those around me. It might be a result of never completely fitting in anywhere – it might be the result of a sense of the harmony within disharmony. It might be a sudden serious lack of empathy. Or it might just mean that I’m mad.
Who knows? And who cares anyway.
To incongruity then, with love.

Shumaila.

13-4-2010

Of subtle and not-so-subtle misogyny

It’s been a relatively crappy week as far as the internet and women’s rights are concerned.  I’ve come across so many instances of misogyny on both a smaller, more personal scale as well as on a larger, national scale that it’s got me railing, angry and upset.  And of course as a result I’ve come to you, dear blog and dear readers, to vent it all out.

Where do I start? Well, there’s the relatively smaller but annoying piece of info I received last week in which I found out that a nikahnama is necessary for registration for a delivery at the Aga Khan Hospital.  Well, you might say, so what?  It is not the business of anyone who gets pregnant without getting married to be delivering at such a fine hospital as the Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, you say. To which I would say, fudge you.

Let’s leave aside all the reasons why a married woman may not possess her nikahnama or be unwilling to submit it as part of a wholly unnecessary formality at the hospital (such as the fact that it might not be made, she may not be muslim and thus not possess one, she may have left it abroad, etc etc.).  Let us assume (for the conservatives’ sake) that a woman who is unmarried comes to the hospital and wants to deliver her child there.  What is so wrong with that? Is she undeserving of medical care? Is it the place of the hospital to be making moral judgements on her, and to provide or refuse to provide her care on the basis of those judgements?

No, it is not. And these sort of formalities that are in place in even in places like AKUH make me wonder how, at the very core of our society, we are essentially women-haters.  It proves that either the people at AKUH (and society at large) consider unwed mothers a myth, or that they don’t consider them worthy of medical care. I hope there’s a more rational reason behind such a rule, and I intend to find out if there is, but Iwould not be surprised if there was no such reason.

The second incident that has happened is a nation-wide one.  Since 2009, a domestic violence bill has been in the pipeline for Pakistan.  It has, as far as I know, even been implemented in Islamabad, but has still not gained approval for implementation in the rest of the nation.  The bill was not passed by the Senate and as a result it has come to be decided by the parliament.

Wherein comes the idiocy of our esteemed religious right-wingers.  The bill has received outright opposition from the Jamate Ulema-i-Islami-Fazl (JUI-F), who have promised to fight it “tooth and nail”.  Brilliant isn’t it? I always knew the maulanas were misogynists, but I never thought they’d have the gall to oppose a bill protecting women from domestic violence.   But wait, it gets better.

Not only have ridiculous statements about the “westernisation of women” and “involvement of NGOs” been made in conjunction with the bill, but the party’s leader, the infamous “Maulana Diesel” or Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, has called the bill a “copy of Indian law” and denounced it on the basis of that.  Superb, isn’t it? As if most of pakistan’s laws weren’t leftovers from the british era.  Even the PML-N has not been behind in their mistreatment, with MNA Saad Rafiq making unbacked claims of “foreign involvement” in bill’s making. WTF does foreign involvement even mean, dammit?!

I could go on and on, but instead I’d like to link to and quote from an article by Fouzia Saeed, a prominent women’s rights activist in pakistan, who apparently witnessed the trashing the bill received from these pompous male-priveleged scumbags in the parliament:

The main issue seems to be, as one parliamentarian had said earlier, “Now we can’t even slap our wives any more! What kind of system do you want?” That seems to be the main problem, which usually takes the form of saying, “We disagree with the text”.
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Saad Rafique after taking the floor twice and yelling at the speaker, came over to the Maulanas and they all had a laugh sitting in the front rows. I had never seen Maulanas laugh so hard. They were falling off their chairs. I wondered if they even knew the meaning of domestic violence, if they have ever seen a face of a woman covered with bruises, or red marks of sticks on a woman’s back, or broken limbs of a crying sister. I wondered if they are even capable of ever feeling the pain of what it is like to be hurt or sexually molested by someone with whom you have to live every day not knowing when he will turn into a monster.

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It breaks my heart to see this sort of thing happening in my country – I mean, the fact that a bill protecting women from domestic violence actually has to undergo scrutiny is beyond me, but that its facing outright opposition? What kind of a nutjob country am I living in? Dear god. And they claim to have religion on their side, they claim that god has given men the right to discipline the family.  Well that may be the case, but it makes no sense why outright domestic violence should go unpunished.  We’re talking about a crime here, a crime committed against millions of women daily. How can anyone in their right minds justify that?

If that were not enough, the third incident is that there have been protests by supporters of JUI-F, female ones no less.  Protests against a bill for women. By women. If you’re not already weeping at the irony, maybe some quotes from that article will help:

Zakia Abid of the JUI-F said that she and the other women members are literate and educated but they don’t want the freedom associated with this bill as it will “abolish the sanctity of marriage and the dominance of the husband”.

Freedom.  They don’t want the freedom associated with the bill. Oh dear lord.

When asked what “dominance of the husband” means when he is violent, she answered that domestic violence usually begins when the wife tries to become the head of the household.

Oh of course, she deserves to be beaten to a pulp, she’s getting too uppity dammit!

However, she noted that sometimes men act out of impulse and not reason, and then only can they be brought to justice by the peaceful teachings of Islam.

Peaceful teachings of Islam? A woman who gets a little uppity needs to be beaten into submission, but a man who’s crazy enough to do that needs the “peaceful teachings of Islam”.  Please. Show me the nearest cliff to jump off from.

“This bill tries to bring these issues into the courtroom, which will be inefficient and disruptive for society.”

This bill needs to get to the courtroom so these women have some recourse to law.  Does she think women want to drag family matters into the courtroom? Of course not! But if society isn’t going to help you, your inlaws aren’t, your own parents refuse to, then a woman needs help, and apparently even Pakistani law refuses to help her. UGH.

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The fourth incident of the week was a smaller one, but almost as disturbing. In a discussion over a fb wall of an acquaintance regarding this bill, a slightly deluded but well-meaning young girl tried to explain to my acquaintance what the fuss was about.  In arch language, she explained how husbands are ‘majazi khuda’ and are perfectly justified in beating up their wives for disobedience, about how women have no identity in Islam, although they have “importance, persona and rights.” (bari mehrbaani, jee). Her way of speaking about her own gender slightly sickened me.  Not only did it have scant basis in actual islamic concepts (which are far more women-friendly than this young lady thinks) but it just seemed a disturbing exhibition of self-degradation. Maybe I’ve been exposed to too many muslim feminists, but I’d forgotten this sort of muslimah also exists, who geninely considers herself secondary to men.  It shook me up.  What kind of self image are we giving our daughters, what kind of faulty islamic teachings and role models are we providing if this is what they’re growing up thinking? I don’t know. I just know that this feels horribly, horribly wrong.

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And now for the fifth and final incident, the cherry on this week’s cake.  A group called the Working Women Society has apparently been putting up these billboards all over karachi in relation to the immodesty of lawn advertisements.  Exhibit A, on Shahra-e-Faisal:

Don’t get me wrong.  I fucking hate lawns and would cheerfully torch lawn adverts from one end of karachi to the other. But modesty is the jewel of women? No. No. Fuck that.  I am sick and tired of notions like these.  Modesty is no more a virtue for women than it is for men, and obscene is the gaze of the man making me uncomfortable, not a sleeveless dress.  For fuck’s sake. If they’d complained about the commodification of women via lawn ads, or hell, even complained about the price of lawn, I would have supported them wholeheartedly, but this is the WRONG approach. I do not need more lectures on morality by fucking billboards, I already get them by random strangers on public transport.

And who is the WWS anyway? I can’t find a single trace of them on Google.  What have they done for women in Pakistan? How have they helped the women? Are they lobbying for this damn DV bill or are they more concerned with lawn ads? Why does this whole campaign stink of conservative prigs to me?

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All these and more unanswered questions, and I close the week with a weary sigh.  I am sick of misogyny, I am sick of this stupid country.

Will try to be more cheerful next time folks. See you later.

International Women’s Day Seminar: Women Empowerment

So I attended a seminar today at Aga Khan University celebrating International Women’s Day. It was called Women Empowerment: Connecting Women : Inspiring Futures.  Like previous seminars that I have attended and enjoyed, I took notes and will be summarising the speakers’ speeches (or my impressions of what they said – not quite the same thing) in this post.  It was overall a wonderful experience, as inspiring or more than it was intended to be, and I am super glad I attended it.

Starting off with the AKU theme music, which is a beautiful piece of music in itself, and whose composer and conductor I met at a previous lecture on music during the apartheid.

Dr Anita Allana began the seminar with a welcome address and a brief tilawat, after which Ms Kausar Khan took the floor and began a wonderful little talk on the history and significance of 8th March as International Women’s day. Starting off with a video that had a backdrop of Yeh Haunsla Kaisay Jhukay and photographs of women, both ordinary and extraordinary.  She then spoke about how the first two lines of the song really embodied the spirit of women – ye hosla kaisay jhukay, ye aarzoo kaisay rukay.  Despite all the hurdles they faced women were still defying, speaking up about their rights and fighting for equality.

She then went on to describe the history of International Women’s day and its ties to the socialist movement, how it was first celebrated in the US and then later on in Russia and european countries, then China, and then finally coming to us through the UN. She spoke about how the trajectory was important because oftentimes concepts like IWD are disregarded as western ideas, and how that really isn’t so – IWD represents women, not western ideals.  She also talked about IWD becoming less political over the years, and how we need to bring the political aspect of activism for women’s rights back.

Next speaker up was Ms Nazish Brohi, and since she was one of the two speakers that I took notes in detail about, and because  this segment was the most relevant to society I will be doing this bit in detail.  The rest of the speakers Iwill only touch upon lightly – Ms Sindhu’s speech I will invoke in a whole new post, because it merits one.

Ms Brohi started off by saying that if she had to pick up a song to illuminate her experiences with women, it would be the one with the lyrics “Aaj phir jeenay ki tamanna hai, aaj phir marnay ka irada hai” because it really signifies how once you set out on the struggle to realise your dreams then you must also be ready, not only for discouragement and failure but also even for death.

She talked about how there was a conventional view that society in general was against women’s rights and was hostile to her advancement, but how in her experience things were actually a bit more paradoxical – how in some cases there was a lot of hostility and in some cases outright support shown by communities. In her speech she talked about the reasons for support and the reasons for opposition to women’s rights. For example she talked about how honour killings happened every day, but how in the Kasthuri rape case the whole community supported the woman, and how in a case in which a woman named Farzana was assaulted by a vadera for gaining an education, everyone turned out to support her and she was able to gain her case.

Continuing the idea, she talked about how a lot of women and feminists tend to see women’s rights as necessary for social justice, but how communities in general may view women’s rights as sometimes actually being in conflict with social justice and thus will oppose rights. In land cases, women faced opposition in gaining legal rights to land if she and her family were being supported by her inlaws. But if she wasn’t being supported, her rights to the land were seen as a source of social justice and she was thus more likely to receive community support. She said this was strongly linked to the idea of social legitimacy, and how its important to have that social legitimacy because without it you can be as right as you want yet you will not receive community support.

She talked about how women were members of a community as well as citizens of the state, yet often it was seen that if a woman chose to use the tools of the state to gain justice she would forego her membership in the community – for example if she went to court, or to the police, she would be socially shunned. How women often have to make that choice, and how it was not fair.

She went on to speak about marriage as a tool of governance, where the riyasat or state is weak, women’s bodies were used to maintain control and peace and keep things in order.  For us, a girl running away and marrying someone (a kari, as they are called), is someone exerting autonomy on their own body, but in the context of society when a woman does that it in effect takes away another person’s right to govern, using her body as mediator. By exerting autonomy she robs another’s autonomy. That is why karo-kari is such a huge issue.

Ms Brohi also talked about social approval, and how the economic system is in rural areas, it is difficult to function and work without community support, so issues of honour and dishonour become much more significant. Social condemnation not only means isolation and anathema but also often economic deprivation.  Also, an element of fear comes in, because if one does not support the condemnation of stray women then tomorrow one’s own daughters could stray and there would be no one to stop them.

Finally she talked about nation-states, and how it is the state’s responsibility to protect the nation and the nation’s responsibility to support the state, etc. but how in a place like pakistan, the distance between nation and state is pretty uge and widening, and the state no longer has the legitimacy that it would have in ideal conditions. So because it lacks the nation’s support that would give it legitimacy, it loses the ability to affect the private sphere. And that the tradeoff, for example for violence or governance, is that the state would be reserved for public issues and could not interefere in private ones. In effect women’s bodies and what to do with them became a private matter which the government was unconcerned with. This was a tragedy.

The next speaker was Ms Mehnaz Rehman a member of the National Commission for the Status of Women…she talked about her experiences, and a little bit about what the commission was responsible for (examine policies for gender problems, review laws and programs made for women by the government, begin projects and give recommendations).  She talked about two current issues they were insisting the sindh government in particular to give support to – the domestic violence laws and policies regarding home-based workers. She also talked about how in the past few years over 7 laws that were friendl to women had been passed, and this was something to be proud of.

There was a question and answer session after this, which was interesting, and a lunch break in which I enthusiastically petitioned Ms Brohi for advice on how I could do more for the women in the country.  She was very encouraging and guided me  towards Ms Kausar and the Women Action Forum, which she thought was a good place to start from.

After the break there were two speakers, the first being Ms Zaheda Hina, an urdu author of some reknown, who gave a brief history of the empowered woman in Urdu literature, beginning with pre-1857 literature and the birth of the strong woman, how under british rule women slowly gained more and more rights and at the same time emerged a heroine that was both confident and worldly, good and yet not restrcited. She talked about how that continued well into the 60s but how recently the trend had been reversing, and how especially of late male authors would talk about women’s plight with sympathy but no longer created the same empowered characters. Urdu literature had literally given women wings and inspiration but that was largely changing.

The last speaker was Ms Amar Sindhu. She talked about empowered women in Sindhi literature, and she, apart from Ms Brohi, was the only speaker whose lectures I took such fervent notes in. Since she gave a very detailed talk I am unable to include even a synopsis here, but I shall devote a whole blog post to her talk soon. Suffice it to say that she divided sindhi literature into 3 periods of time, classical, second stage and then modern, and dealt with the empowered women described in each stage. It was a very inspiring, coherent and beautifully passionate talk, evidently by a woman who was both enthusiastic and proficient in her subject, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Final words were given by Dr Kausar Waqar, and the seminar on IWD came to a close. All in all it was a great experience, in which not only did I learn a lot but was also inspired to do so much more. One of the better decisions I took this week, was my decision to participate

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See you guys soon.

Book List – 2011

Once again, like the year before last, I have been inspired by Emily Horne (of asofterworld.com) to list the books I read last year along with mini-reviews of each of them.

In general, 2011 has been the Year of the Non-fiction. Like anyone sane, brought up on a diet of Rowling, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien and Roald Dahl, I have a deep love for fiction, especially of the escapist, fantasy variety, and a irrational dislike for reality-inducing non-fiction, that has lasted even into my twenties. However, this year has not only been different in the sense that I read a lot more non-fiction than usual, but also in the sense that I have started enjoying reading non-fiction, whereas before any book that was closer to the real world than Mars would put me off entirely. Credit goes to the authors, particularly Tariq Ali and Harford and Gawande (and previously Gladwell), who made me change my childhood views.

I also managed to reach my target of 50 books this year, in fact I went a bit over, which made me happy ^_^

Anyway, I hope you guys like this, and if you have any suggestions for my list for this year, drop me a comment, I’d love to know see you guys soon!

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Book List 2011

1If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler – Italo Calvino – My first “postmodernist” novel and I hated it. Was boring and I really didn’t like the confusing nature of it all. I like a novel to be straightforward. It also took forever to finish.

2The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood – Atwood is a favourite author of mine and the Robber Bride was characteristically sardonic and brilliant. A swift plot with just the right amount of dramaticness and mystery and real, raw human emotion.

3Five Point Someone – Chetan Bhagat – the movie Three Idiots is based on this book, although I could find only the barest connections between the two.  I liked the movie more, it was succinct and put the message across effectively. The book was nothing special literarywise.

4A Room with a View – E. M. Forster – completely lacking the seriousness of A Passage to India, limited to the feelings and thoughts and passions of a young English girl. Hence not impressive, yet not bad either.

5The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath – I’d been meaning to read this for years, ever since I fell in love with Plath’s poetry. The book was odd and haunting…Some of the quotes and passages from it are gorgeous and the book itself reflects the way life can be fucked up and weird too.

6The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson – classic horror, and a good example of how horror does not have to be gory. It’s unclear if the haunting in this story is psychological or supernatural, the only definite is that it’s frightening.

7Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut – I have never read Vonnegut before. This book was…good, in a way, but also confusing and depressing. Good book for depicting the long-term damage war inflicts on soldiers.

8The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman – I love Gaiman. I just love him. This book is another example of his brilliance in making fantasy appeal to older readers. An enchanting, fantastic storyline and lovely illustrations too. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

9Life of Pi – Yann Martel – An excellent, wonderful book, so realistically written that one completely believes every word of it, despite how unreal the story seems. In fact I found myself unwilling to accept the alternate ending at the end. Anyhow, I loved it.

10The Undercover Economist – Tim Harford – Ah, non-fiction.  I know pop econ books don’t do anything to one’s knowledge base, but I still like reading this kind of stuff because it a) helps even just a tiny bit in understanding the world and b) they make me feel smart. This book did both.

11The Penguin Book of Australian Short Stories – As I’ve said before, the mark of a good short story is that it occurs to you later on, at random moments. This collection had several good ones, odd stories that stuck in my head.

12The Fall – Albert Camus – I don’t clearly remember this book, even on reperusal, only that it was typical Camus, gloomy and confusing. So that’s all I’ll say.

13Smiley’s People – John Le Carré – my first spy novel. It was like a thriller, but with a stateliness and an old-world, james-bond feel at the same time too. Carre is good, I intend to read more of him

14Cannery Row – John Steinbeck – like Steinbeck’s other stories, cute and well-written.  You tend to get very sucked in to the everyday lives of a bunch of people in a fictional backwater far away from anything you’ve ever known yourself. In fact sometimes I think stories like these are more escapist than genres like fantasy or sci-fi.

15Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski – this was a fairly boring book, describing the adventures of a young American man, a bit of a delinquent, during the Depression. On the whole, not a very charming read, though descriptively written.

16I’m a Stranger Here Myself – Bill Bryson – a set of articles Bryson wrote when he moved back to America after 20 years in Britain. They gave me a good glimpse at how newspaper columns can be both personal narrative and also informative; about how to incorporate statistics into chatty prose, make a point without debating.

17The Red Tent – Anita Diament – I’ve quoted this book on my blog and talked about it too – suffice it to say that I thought it was pretty amazing.

18The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner –  a powerful classic about an old South American land-owning family heading towards poverty.  It has a sense of deep tragedy and melodrama pervading it, masked by and mingled in the shifting narrative, like the bitter taste of dark chocolate lurking in a marble cake.

19The Doorbell Rang – Rex Stout – One-day-reading classic detective fiction. Long live Nero Wolfe! May his abilities, like his huge girth, never diminish.

20The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins – My views on things had pretty much cemented before reading this book, so I didn’t find it too impressive – his arguments are good, yes, and he writes as splendidly as always, but I personally think he`s better off explaining biology. All in all, I read it cos I had to, but it was nothing special.

21Life, The Universe and Everything – Douglas Adams – The third in the Hitch-hiker’s guide series. Not as good as the first (of course) but still pretty cool. I liked the storyline and of course, it was funny.

22Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston I read quite a bit of fiction regarding black people (Alice Walker being a favourite)…but I found this focused more on the love and suffering  of the woman central to the plot rather than hardships faced as a result of the colour divide. A moving book nonetheless.

23So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish – Douglas Adams – More Douglas Adams! As wacky and crazy as the other books. I liked this especially for its ending, which was, to use an old term, gobsmacking and hilarious.

24Right to Die – Rex Stout – I’ve said this before and will say it again – Nero Wolfe, like Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, is one of the greatest fictional detectives ever to exist.

2550 Voices of Disbelief – edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk – more atheist non-fiction. Most of the authors reiterated philosophical and other arguments against a divine creator, but some of them gave personal stories of their journey to unbelief, and those I liked more. An interesting read, anyhow.

26A House for Mr Biswas – V.S. Naipaul – This book is probably the main reason why I haven’t crossed 60 books this year. It took so long to finish! I mean one average lower-middle-class man in the West Indies and his everyday tribulations do not make for very fascinating reading. Despite the accurate depiction of life for the near-poor it was still effing boring and I did not like it much.

27Selected Short Stories – Anton Chekov – Chekov’s stories are often abruptly short, and don’t always have a moral or a preachy tone, unlike Tolstoy’s. Like all Russian fiction they are excellent. He’s also written a bazillion of them, but this selection had only a dozen or so.

28The Roving Mind – Isaac Asimov – Asimov is epic. His fiction is definitely awesome, but the nonfiction essays in this were also very impressive. What killed me was that a lot of the stuff he wrote, like about population explosion and the English language and creationists, still applies in today’s world. Though Asimov died like two decades ago. We’re just a sad species yaar, log cheezein keh keh kay marjatay hain, hum un ki eik nahin suntay.

28Girl With A Pearl Earring – Tony Chevalier – Historical fiction, which I normally don’t like much, but this was very good. I bought it randomly from a second hand book stall and now I’m glad I did.

29I Am Legend – Richard Matheson – I have not seen the movie yet, and don’t intend to. The book was good enough for me, especially the unexpected ending. I enjoyed it immensely.

30Frenchman’s Creek – Daphne du Maurier – No one does romance like du Maurier, no one can make a genre I have fallen out of love with still so appealing, add mystery to passion in just the right balance and top it off with tragedy in such a way as to keep the reader satisfied and not sickened.  This was a simply gorgeous read.

31Death of a Dude – Rex Stout – another particularly satisfying mystery. Nero Wolfe, you have my salaam.

32Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky – I’d read BK, The Idiot before I touched this, and frankly I didn’t like this as much as his other works.  It was too hectic, too feverish, like his main character – it made a point but took such a damnably long time to do so. Perhaps it is the anxiety of the main character transmitting to me, but I was in a constant state of uneasiness or uljhan throughout the book, and that ruined it for me.

33The Eyes of the Dragon – Stephen King – An Early-SK book (before the 90s), one of the few I hadn’t read yet. Very enjoyable read, proving Stephen Kind can be as good writing fantasy as his usual genre, horror.

34The Colour of Magic – Terry Pratchett – from one fantasy book to another. My first Pratchett novel! From here begins my relationship with this acclaimed sci fi author. I loved the idea of the discworld and found the book quite amusing and enjoyable to read. I fully intend to go through the entire series, one book at a time.

35One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey – I wish I`d read the book while in psych, the heartwarming and tragic plot centred on a mental ward and its patient…it was one of the BEST books I`ve read this year, kept me hooked to the last page. An absolutely engaging book, and a must read.

36The Godfather – Mario Puzo – At this point in the year it felt as though I was devouring one excellent book after another. This of course was also incredible, I loved the dark underworld it describes along with Sicilian customs and the Don and other characters. Very fast-paced, well-written, thrilling to the core.

37Issues in Feminism – Sheila Ruth – core textbook for women’s studies. It was one of the most influencing nonfics I read this year. This book gave me a grounding in feminist theory and helped me get on track of the various movements that occurred esp in America, and of general objectives and ideas in feminism in general. I finished the book with my eyes opened and a determination to do something about the poor state of women in my country.

38Conversations on Consciousness – Susan Blackmore – I enjoyed this because unlike usual books which present only the author’s perspective on the issue of consciousness, this had interviews from all sorts of scientists and psychologists and stuff and so it presented very diverse and hugely informative views on the topic.

39Posssessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker – Alice Walker is <3. This book is meant to deal with FGM primarily, but like all her books is a storyline about african people and their strengths and weaknesses, their loves and lives.  A warming, poignant story that had me in tears at many points.

40A Case of Exploding Mangoes – Muhammed Hanif – OMG WHY DIDN’T I READ THIS EARLIER? This was such an EPIC novel. Satire has orgasms when it reads Muhammad Hanif. This book not only had me both giggling and sobbing at different points, it had one of the most amazingly convoluted yet brilliant storylines ever INVENTED. I don’t know why this book didn’t win the damn booker or whatever. I want to bow down to Muhammad Hanif and fawn over him. I can’t believe I’m in the same city as this amazing author. This was just so fucking awesome.

41The Light Fantastic – Terry Pratchett – haye, Pratchett. You know, I love the little funny things he comes up with in his stories, like Hydrophobes that run boats, and other things – it makes reading so enjoyable, and he has about a bazillion of these little creative fantastic ideas in each book.

42The Clash of Fundamentalisms – Tariq Ali – Another one of the extremely influencing books I read this year. While IWF  started my feminism and gender equality crusade, Tariq Ali got me hooked onto politics and world history.  I’ve never been interested in history before, but after his book I found myself eating book after book to do with history and reading political articles. I love him for that. The book is great too, a bit old (pub. 2003) so less applicable, but still an interesting analysis.

43The Princess Bride – William Goldman – hehe, this was a hilarious book, and cute too. A fairytale, but definitely not your typical storyline. Had great fun reading it.

44An Abundance of Katherines – John Green – I’m a mild fan of the Vlogbrothers, so when I saw this book I had to have it.  It was a cute read too, very first-world young-teenager-with-problems type of book, but cool nonetheless.

45Our Lady of Alice Bhatti – Muhammed Hanif  – Not as good as Mangoes, definitely. If you’re looking for an unusual, crazy storyline as well as a sarcastic, glaringly sharp picture of public hospitals and the dirt and muck of Pakistani society – then the book’s a good read. But if you`re looking for Mangoes v2.0, you`ll be disappointed.

46The Bride – Bapsi Sidhwa – A harrowing tale by a Pakistani author about the evils faced by tribal women – it was published in the 80s, so I don’t know how much relevance it still has, but it still depressed me and gave me goosebumps.

47The Facts Behind The Helsinki Roccamatios – Yann Martel – these stories are good reads, nothing as quirky and wonderful as the life of Pi, but nonetheless fine stories.

48The Chatham School Affair – Thomas H. Cook – I’ve only read one other book by Cook, several years ago. Like that book, this was also a dark, depressing crime novel with an excellent, detailed storyline – the general tragedy of the story made as important as the central crime. Of modern fiction, Cook is definitely an excellent writer.

49Hi I’m A Social Disease – Horror Stories – Andersen Prunty – my first taste of Bizarro fiction – the stories were so weird! A trippy mix of sci-fi, horror, fantasy…I didn’t know what to make of half of them. I intend to experience the genre more.

50Full Dark, No Stars – Stephen King – like Four Past Midnight, this has longer stories, more like short novellas, and they focus more on the darkness in people than supernatural horror. Good reads, typical King.

51Morning is Dead – Andersen Prunty – my follow up on Bizarro fiction. A good story, very very trippy although it made some sort of sense at the end – still, there was some mystery even at the conclusion. I liked it, it was an interesting book.

52Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond – more nonfic lol. I tried to read this book in second year but just couldn’t get through it.  Even this more recent attempt almost failed. The book’s central theme about the reason why some civilisations triumph over others is good – its just fucking repetitive! Suicide-inducingly so.

53Complications – Atul Gawande  – this was such a good book! I mean, its by a surgeon who writes well, telling interesting medical stuff and narrating fascinating surgical anecdotes – of course I’d love it! It was splendidly written, candid, eloquent, engrossing, entertaining, informative. It instantly became one of my favourite books for the year.

54Quite Ugly One Morning – Christopher Brookmyre – another one-day street-crime murder-mystery kinda thing, but I liked this cos of all the Scottish slang in it, which made it amusing to read.

55The Girl Who Fell From The Sky – Heidi W. Durrow – this was a random book I picked up, and it turned out to be fairly good reading; an emotiona tale written from shifting perspectives, examining the tension of mixed children and mixed race couples in still-racist America.

56Crime – Ferdinand Von Schirach – bunch of short stories based on the real-life cases of its German lawyer-author. Some of them were distinctly out of the ordinary and odd, hence the book was pretty interesting.

Of Babies, and of Women

Don’t look like that. I know I’ve been gone for a while.  I was, um, reading. Yep, I took a break to read the fuck out of some books, and get that total that I wanted for this year’s list. Plus I felt I’d been prattling without knowing for far too long – I took a break to listen and learn, rather than talk and tell.

Of course, I was only able to find the time to do all this because my studies these days are pretty light. My current rotation, which will end in about ten days, is MNCH. That’s short for Maternal, Neonate and Child Health, and it basically involves us going around to community clinics and hospitals and getting a general idea of the problems faced by women and children in the alleyways of this bustling city. Pediatrics and gyne/obs are full rotations coming up soon, so the only real purpose of the MNCH rotation is to give us a picture of ground realities – nothing more, nothing less. Not a lot of studying involved either (plenty of time to plunder libraries hehe).

MNCH was interesting for me.  Truth be told – I love babies to bits.  Every child that comes into the clinic is a gem for me, a pretty bundle of love and happiness.  Yet at the back of my mind I know this is one more mouth for an already overburdened nation to feed. I also worry seriously about its future.

I mean, one child in ten in Pakistan never makes it to five years old. In fact, out of 1000 pakistani kids, 77 never make it to even their first birthday. Our country is one of the only 4 in the world where polio still abounds – there were over a hundred cases reported in 2011. And guess who polio affects? Thats right – kids under five.

Always supposing they do get past five, what lies ahead? With a country that spends several times as much on its defence than on education and health…half the children in rural areas never complete primary school. And then rising expenditures and unemployment – what future do these children really have?

Basically, I am in the unenviable position, you see, of loving babies to bits, but still wanting the general population to put a hold on making them. Yet ironic though it may sound, my love for babies is tied to a desire for population control. I mean, think about it.  In a limited population, every child that is added is a blessing and a boon.  But in our overcrowded nation, do we really have the resources to help each child?

I’ve only seen kids in urban areas, and yet so many of them are malnourished – tiny, helpless things – its so upsetting.  I shudder to think what the situation is like in rural areas :/

Population control is essential for each child to become valuable.  And yet how many women really want to go on bearing child after child? Surprisingly few, you know.  According to our own government statistics, about 24% of pregnancies are unwanted or mistimed. A quarter of pregnancies! Though the general impression is that women want babies, the truth is that they have very little choice in the matter.  Women want to delay or prevent conception, but they don’t use a method to do so.   They are either unaware of, or lack access to, or are forbidden from using contraception.

They can’t even decide about their own bodies.

This was illustrated most clearly to me when a friend of mine told me about how family planning services in certain parts of Pakistan were under considerable hostility, and how women would come to these people secretly for contraceptives, hiding from their husbands.

To some extent, this is the fault of the government in its provision of family planning services and awareness.  And yet to a larger extent this is reflective of society’s perception of women as baby-making machines – heaven forbid that they should not want to have a baby!

How do we change this? Well widespread contraceptive availability would help.  And that’s being provided (free of cost, in family planning clinics), although it still isn’t as effective or widespread as we want it to be.

Yet what is really needed, in my humble opinion, is women empowerment.  What kind of empowerment? Well, education for starters. And will that help? Heck yes it will! The average Pakistan woman has 4 kids (uff!). Stats show this rises to 5 when she has no education at all BUT it drops to 2 when the women has a high school education. If education levels alone are so effective, what wonders will a general empowerment work?

To conclude: Women need to be given, nay, to demand reproductive rights.  It’s their body, not a vassal for the continuation of the family name, not a machine for churning out delightful bundles of joy, not a limitless source of apples for grandparents’ eyes (who produced one too many apples themselves, I should say).  Until women have a say in deciding the size of families they themselves primarily have to care for, we cannot expect a generation of well-raised children to come to age.  When a quarter of the population is unwanted ‘mistakes’ then it’s hardly a wonder we’re not going anywhere.

Women’s liberation is tied to a lot of things.  Reproductive rights is one of the most important ones.  Until women alone can decide what to do with their bodies, we will never have achieved equality, here or anywhere in the world.

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See you guys soon, I hope.  :)

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sources:

Ministry of health, GoP health facts

Unicef – Pakistan

Policies on unwanted pregnancies in Pakistan

They Talk In Riddles

Maryam Z is a beautiful, creative and kind soul that I am lucky enough to call my friend.  She wrote the following piece.  I rarely post stuff by other people on this blog, but I found this so exquisite that I couldn’t resist.  I post it with her permission, and on the condition that I ‘will not use it to build a case against anything’ . It is the last in this recent series of posts related to religion. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

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Why do these self proclaimed men of faith talk in a way that is alien to me
They talk in riddles
Even the way that they utter the word God is super natural, special
They are not men
they are angels
beyond the grasp of a common soul like me

Where can I find a man of faith
Not so different from you and I
Who does not wear the label of self righteousness on his collar
Whose character and not clothes define him
Who has the beauty of all human weaknesses and imperfections

And I look at these angels with wings of Ivory and robes of Satin
Angels sitting on golden thrones of faith and power
so high and mighty
far above my mortal reach
So perfect, yet so bleak and austere
And I hear no calling
Nothing pulls me to them
They make me self conscious of all my sins and short comings
So I walk away

I’d rather walk with men who have welcoming spirits than with angels possessing icy cold eyes.

Condescending.

They live in their houses of glass and white marble

People like you and I….
Our children flourish and play in the dirt and filth of this earth
They do not have wings to leap off the ground and live amongst the stars
They can not walk in houses of glass and white marble
They can not enter with out bringing in the grime
They are not welcome
They do not belong

And I carry on my search
In a crowd of men crawling upon this world
Men covered in sweat and dirt
Men with their differences, egos and Pride
With their dreams of glory and immortality
With their failures and heart break
Their minds perhaps corrupted with temptation and evil
Their intentions questionable
Their souls marred by lust, envy and deception
And I seek out the men of faith with all these flaws
Who can struggle to find freedom and salvation within all their limitations
Who can dare to embrace the reality and weaknesses of their own existence
They do not speak in riddles
They are not angels
But men
Made of clay
And they do not claim to be any thing more or less

-Maryam Z.

of bands and birthdays and delayed reviews

So I learnt that yesterday was…6LA8’s birthday!

Happy Birthday 6LA8! I would bake you one of these, but only half of you would be able to eat it :'(

6LA8 , for the uninformed, is a band made of my good friend, Taimur Mazhar, and his friend Omer Asim.  In the past year, it has grown from a tiny casual collection of songs to be distributed to friends, to a series of four albums and a fan following of over a hundred people.  It has gone from a funny name (when we’d discuss how 6LA8 was actually like a little face…kind of…sort of…well not really ), to a prominent name in the Pakistani ambient scene.  Within a year of these two getting together, they were being mentioned alongside Asfand Yar and Mole and orangenoise, artists that have been around much longer.

IN a year, they’ve released over 73 songs.  That’s a rate of more than a song a week, in case you didn’t know .  They’ve come up with four albums.  They’ve gained international fans.  They’ve even evolved, like fishes getting feet.  And they’re still my guitar heroes <3 lol

I have been stupidly busy the past two months, and so have been unable to review the last two albums, despite the fact that they extremely deserved reviewing.  This Is Not A Conceptual Album, and The Drone Collective were both released in July, sister albums whose successive release told the world just how prolific these guys could be.  Not to mention niggling less prolific artists in the process

This Is Not a Conceptual Album is an interesting album.  It has songs as lovely and soft as Sleeping People Can’t Fall Down, and as strangely disturbing as Our Dog Eat Dog World.  It has funky songs like Murshid Marwa na Dena (which I love) and thoughtful, repetitive songs like Teach a Man to Vote.  The overall tone of the album retains a contemplative atmosphere though, and what with the slightly suggestive titles (there’s one called ‘Here is A Jacket, You Know What to Do’ hehe), it is certainly an album that puts you in a reflective mood.

The album quite seriously Denies Being Conceptual, and isn’t in the sense that the songs don’t really link up the way they do in conceptual albums.  Yet the “provoked into disturbing thoughts” feel that pervades the thing links the songs on a deeper level.

The Drone Collective – which has a title that I adore because of the multiple, multiple meanings you can extract from it – is a different album.  It does have a theme behind it – the theme being ‘drowning in your own misery.’  It had one of my cheeriest blogger-friends in an almost PMS-like state of depression, it is that gloom-inducing.  Which is why out of the two albums, this later-released one had my heart earlier and for longer.

The songs are mostly long and ‘droning’ (ya think), mumbling and repetitive.  Most of the songs are gloomy, with “Where are You?”, ‘We Would Still Need Reason in Heaven’ and “Perched on Swinging Cliffs” taking the cake.  But there are a few surprises.  ’Those are my Bombs’ and ‘Everybody is a Paragon’ are fast paced and interestingly awake, and the latter is one of my favourite tracks from the album.

But yeah. I’d still advise you not to listen to the thing when you’re feeling suicidal. Instead, put it on now, close your eyes, and let the misery slowly flood the room, past your ankles, past your knees, your chest, your neck, and your nose, until you are veritably drowning in it.

It’s an interesting experience.

 

All the albums can be found at http://6la8.bandcamp.com/  If you don’t listen to it, I will personally hunt down and make you. 

Of childhood dreams.

An infinity of empty blackness. This chasm of nothingness seems to extend limitlessly.  It is otherworldly – it seems to have existed since eternity, before time began, and til after time will cease.

In the middle of the emptiness a row of chairs is suspended, extending on both sides into the distance, further than the eye can see. These chairs are glowing with a soft golden light. They are oddly royal-looking, with high backs and seats made of red velvet, and golden carvings on the edges. Seated in them are human figures. Some are alone, at a distance, while others are grouped. The figures also seem to glow with an internal light… strong, austere and beautiful. They are all men.

In the very centre of the row is a chair larger and more elaborate than the others.  In this sits a youngish looking man. His black hair falls to his shoulders.  His face, which is handsome beyond measure, glows with a light more beautiful than the others seated there – more beautiful, in  fact, than any mortal man could possess. He is wearing a long white robe. In his lap sits a little girl. She is brown-skinned, wearing a short pink frock, and her thick black hair, which the man strokes gently, is cut in a bob. She cannot be older than six.  She seems perfectly relaxed in the lap of the great man, and cuddles close to him, while he holds her tenderly. The girl is very happy, content and peaceful. Peeking over his arm, she can see another man a few seats away: tall and bearded, also important-looking, but far more serious and austere.  He is looking straight into the distance. She snuggles closer to the beautiful man, who is kinder and whom she loves. She wishes she never has to leave, that she could sit in the lap of this good, gentle man forever.

After a while, or after an eternity, the man stirs, and murmurs something to the little girl. Reluctantly, she slides off his lap. For a second, she stands on nothing, suspended in front of the beautiful man with the radiant face, holding tightly on to his hand. Then, as he gives it one final pat and lets go of it, the black emptiness seems to exert itself. And I find myself falling, falling into the blackness with no way to get back up…falling, uncontrollably, irresistibly into the black pit of oblivion…

 

Shuddering, I wake up.

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Now, dreams can’t be ‘prophet’ic…can they?

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