Truth Be Told

Women have it tough in our world. With all the odds against them, they have put up a great fight and shown the level of strength that can put anyone to shame. All this leads to the oft repeated statements like ‘the world would be a better place if women ruled it’.  This statement is quite an ego booster and at times the closing comment of many arguments. The reality is quite different and bitter, as our daily encounters tell us.

One such recent brush with reality happened in the audio visual departments of one of the top medical colleges of the country. The schematics there are such that the women are in majority, including the head of the department. Among the male employees, there is a deaf and dumb individual, who has a MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) from Punjab University and is appointed on pure merit bases.

The expectation here would be that that his colleagues have a combination of admiration and soft spot for him, given his efforts to support his family with a lot going against him (A year ago he was diagnosed with kidney failure & went through transplantation). 

This employee’s life has been made hell at his work place in every possible manner. He is being cornered all the time, while the rest of the department goes about their work. Isolating him is not where this ends. When a third party intervened trying to solve the unseen problem, the head had a long list of complaints and they are quite interesting in their content. The high lights include:

• He sits in the same room, the women are in majority and they feel uncomfortable in his presences as they can’t talk among themselves with much ease.
• He takes a few minutes’ walk (something he has to do because otherwise his legs swell) after every hour on campus, which in her opinion makes the students uncomfortable. The students have never made any such complain. 
• Then she had a lot to say about his sister who at times picks and drops him.
• His presence is the source of overcrowding the ‘just four’ spacious offices that she has under her command.
• She can’t attend a senior doctor in the rooms due to his presence.

The list is a long one and has a lot of other similar serious allegations, none of which have anything to do with the quality of his work or anything that is somehow related to the workplace.

Handing over the world to women is not going to make things different. Power in whatever shape has a strange effect on people and women have fallen in the general line as well, except for few exceptions. Many a time a woman is suffering at the hands of another woman only. All these morons that are out there have not materialized from outer space, a major responsibility is on parenting and a lot of hypocrisy is going on in that department that calls for some serious attention. 

Old Book Shops Handing Out Memories

Old book shops are amazing places. The chances of getting unique titles & that too at amazing prices are much more compared to your regular book shops & the online book shops  (the general consensus at my end is that down with online book stores, they don't match up to the whole experience of book shopping).

Added to this books from old book shops transfer other peoples' connections & experiences with those books as well. I came across this biography of Sir Michael Redgrave in the mobile bookshop. As I started reading the book these newspaper clippings of Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph & one more publication whose name is not visible dated Friday, March 22, 1985, fell from the jacket cover where they were partially attached. There are no signatures on the book but whoever owned the book seems to be a huge fan. I have only seen a couple of films of Redgrave but now the movie junkie in me is tempted to explore more of his work! 

Balance between Words & Pictures

A picture is worth a thousand words.

I for one am an adherent believer of this statement. However, there are some limitations to it as well & the conflict erupts when a picture is used to overpower the strength of the written word. This I feel is happening a lot more these days. It feels that the attention span of people is reducing by the day, something that for me does not really indicate the result of a higher evolution. 

A few days back, while discussing ideas for how to get maximum traffic for the Pakistan Sustainability Network, a fact that came across was that a simple random picture of a spoon got around three hundred hits & if any of our blog posts get these many hits we might just hit the roof ourselves. (And NO, we don’t do boring stuff). This episode instantly took me back to Gary Shteyngart’s novel ‘Super Sad True Love Story’. A story portraying the future ultra technology oriented world, where the main character Lenny Abramov, is being looked down because he reads real books & has a ‘wall of books’ in his apartment; instead of just streaming the stuff & covering the main points. In one of the chapters when he is on a flight & opens his book, the passenger sitting next to him tells him that the book has an awful smell!!!

Not really a bright picture.

The point is not to state as to which way of expression is better because there are things which can’t be compared & this is one such point, where comparison is pointless. The concentration point is the loss of balance. Skimming through material can work at times but for in-depth understanding one needs to get in detail. There is no alternative to this. A lot of misrepresentation results because people don’t bother to go below the surface and discover the details and then analyze them. All this requires proper attention span and concentration. In this age of technology, to ensure that this advancement is used for proper progress, people need to return to a balanced position, only then we can move from the complaining stage to solving the problems stage. 

The small thoughts

There are incidents and moments in one’s life that spontaneously make you think about matters that usually never cross your mind. These thought provoking incidents don’t need to be big in magnitude. In fact it is the small things that touch the cord more often.

Few days back I too had a similar experience and the idea of human beings & their general attitude of arrogance struck me. The subconscious feeling that humans are superior and all powerful make us the arrogant brats that we are. However, this though is so hollow in reality and it doesn’t take something very serious to burst this bubble.

A small external infection at my lower back had completely left me torpid. For a week I was trapped in one posture and that was to lie down on my stomach. So even when I tried to kill my boredom with reading, I ended up cramping my neck which was not pretty, with my entire body hurting dude to stiffness and exhaustion. 

     

The point of this post is not to detail out as to how I spent my last week, but to share the conclusion. Instead of staying in the bubble of arrogance and considering it a part of our nature, we should be actually looking at the other side of our nature, which is quite humble and wants good for everyone.

It is the power of the human minds that differentiates them from animals; unfortunately we see that humans have used this ability to be the cruelest animal to walk on the face of earth.  

Using separate lens for analysis

The analysis of some recent events has amazed me. Same people have used different core concepts to define the lens through which they see things.

We have been hit by the worst form of natural disaster in our history. The devastation has been said to pass that of tsunami & the 2005 earthquake combined.

The international response to our devastation has been pretty slow, as they say too little too late. One of the major reasons for this has been attributed to the low trust deficit that our present government has. However, though there are no two opinions that this factor holds true to its core still there have been divided opinion as to how people should react. While one group is of the opinion that any aid given to the government institutions will be equal to dumping it in a deep dark pit hence the aid should be directed towards the international & national organizations which are working independent of the government & which we can be rest assured that will deliver to the needy. Therefore, people from this group have been quite vocal about this issue & have been termed as anti-government. And some have went so far as to term this lot as anti-Pakistan. American Naturalist once wrote “Patriots must always be ready to fend his country against its government”.

On the other hand we have the group which is of the opinion that though the government is not reliable but keeping in view the devastation we need to keep our difference aside & help them get aid from the international forum. And one way of aiding can be that we stop demonizing the government & work with it.

My Personal opinion about the difference is that the former group has real sharp memory while group the latter has very short memories. 2005 earthquake anyone??? At that point even though the trust deficit was not that low, but the results were equally hopeless. There was aid that never reached the victims, aid that was sold in the open market, aid that went in for the personal use of a select few who were not in need of it. Something similar has started to happen. People have sported eatable goods being sold in the open market which have the UN aid for flood relief’s seal on them.

Coming to another incident, that has shocked us. The Sialkot lynching incident of two teenage brothers by the mob in the presence of the police officials & the Rescue 1122 personnel. Some people took no moment in declaring the whole Pakistani nation as savages ready to kill with just the slightest provocation. Yes, we all are & should be ashamed of what happened to those two boys; to be more specific to a family who will be living with this for the rest of their lives. However, just because the group assembled there became part of the infamous mob culture & didn’t stop the madness how does this put the blame on the whole of the nation? I have never came across countries being labeled as outright barbaric societies who have destroyed other countries just to secure their personal benefits. If this is how nations are to be defined then I think the whole human race should be declared as worse than animals as we all have been watching the massacres taking place in all the occupied countries around the globe.

Are we not looking in the wrong direction then?

As the new reports are pouring in can no one see that those involved in this brutality were acting out of desperation as well, though I in no sense mean to say that their sickness is justified; But just blaming the people & reacting by saying that all those involved should be treated in a similar fashion to serve justice is not going to help in the remotest sense. It will only aid the cycle & keep it running. Those labeling the nation as savages forgot that these very savages when go to a different country temporarily or permanently fully abide by their laws & show no signs of being the raw ready to kill types. Ever wonder why? Because they know that the machinery of law is not completely dead & people are not helpless for justice as we have become.

Justice delayed is Justice denied.

The people involved in the brutality justified their action based on the concept of serving justice as they have been at the receiving end of robbery & murder all this time & they had lost patience at this point. Had this been the result if the law enforcement machinery working for what it has been designed for; making sure that justice is neither delayed nor denied to the people. Instead the realty check is that they are part of the core problem themselves & aid this chaos which has surrounded us.

In all this analysis did anyone realize that the small children present on the scene should never be accepted to act in a calm manner when confronted with a similar situation in their own lives because what got imprinted on their raw minds would be near to impossible to change. And when the cycle will repeat itself analyst will take the easy way out & sum it all up in a single line, the nation has always been full of savages.

The focus has been on two things, one saying that we are mad people & second that were the boys innocent or involved in the crimes alleged by the people at the other end. Whichever case be true the focus should be to bring the relevant authorities too task so that people don’t continue to take the law in their own hands because if we look at the long term consequences of such a trend, we are inviting a self made disaster. Now even the all are politicians have gone silent too, who were ready to bring justice at the door steps of that family when the other side of the story surfaced. This only shows that they endorse the fact that if they were criminals treating them that way is acceptable to them.

Not much attention is being given to the protests that were held on the 24^th of Aug in Lahore & on the 26^th of Aug. in both Lahore & Karachi. Those people are part of this very nation trying to be part of the change that they want to see around them. Why have their efforts not been given the due share? Why only concentrate on the negative which only results in attracting more negativity? 

Acting on Instincts

Every specie stands for their own kind except for the Homo-sapiens if we see the trend. We have mastered the opposite art; to hurt our own kind in the deadliest of the manner.

Youtube link of the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HJTG6RRN4E