Uncomfortably Numb

I represent the common man. Lot has been said about the recent events by those who claim to represent the sensibilities of the common man, but these analysis feel quiet biased and sometimes outright lunacy specially when some are clearly trying to advance their own agendas thus ending up being the laughing stock of all those who witness & can see beyond the farce. The problem is the society's tendency to accept whatever is presented as true, if the voice is louder than the rest and the facts & claims presented are absurdly outlandish. All that's needed is a little spoon feeding a throat that can yell as hard as it can and an audience conditioned to obey. The more absurd and provocative the claims the more credible the presenter and the channels become. No one has the time or the inclination to verify or refute the claims & it just becomes entertainment, real issue become distorted and trivialised while pathetic non issues get primetime. The masses are k

Looking for saviours but never looking within ... The worst Pakistani problem is not poverty it's the lack of education. A good education not only gives the opportunity of growth but also a good teacher can nurture morality a clear line between right and wrong. Parents worried about the conduct of children should evaluate their own, no lecture on morality is effective if rules dont apply universally.  This generation has unprecedented access to means for corruption of character via interaction, ease of anonymity & abundance of decadence. Decay of moral values has corrupted & blurred the perception of acceptable social conduct destroying families & relationships. Any conduct which requires anonymity or makes you hide something from those who trust you has the potential to destroy your life. The power to stop what's wrong in your life and in your actions  is always there, Always ... Even if one is buried deep, if you know its wrong, you can stop, you must

Trying to fix something that cannot be fixed is a mistake that leads to running in circles of hopeless, endless pain. Although hard to see at the time there is always a simple solution. Whatever the reasons one has, to endure torment become meaningless when examined through the lens of time. Life, a series of moves and countermoves with destiny, fate and blind chance weaving the tapestry. We make the mistake of assuming anything to be permanent, it is as permanent as we make it our selves, even pain. To endure cruelty at the hands of another in the name of any emotion is in fact cruelly to one's self. The realities we don't want to confront make us hide, to seek refuge in temporary shelters but we forget that these shelters have no foundation and they crumble at the weakest vibration. We devise clever ways to bend reason to justify the existence of those shelters and hide their existence but in reality no truth ever needs to be hidden and if it does then whatever the reas

Being a parent is a constant learning experience. The happiness and joy one feels when one does become a parent is unlike anything else. So is the despair of losing a child. There are natural calamities that one cannot help avoid like sickness or other natural causes and one feels helpless and perhaps comforted too that there is nothing else one could do. But there are situations and circumstances which however are totally under our control.  Rules are made for a reason, they help save lives. I am particularly talking about basic rules of road safety. Simple things we normally don't pay any attention to can save lives or perhaps save from potential injury.  For example when your walking on the open road with your child it only takes a moment to keep the child away from the road with you in between. Just a simple step. Or teaching your child how to cross a road properly and specially be more careful when on blind turns etc or perhaps simply holding his hand. Kids don't

There is a silent surrender going on. The demise of humanity, the death of the very soul. Who did it and how it happened is irrelevant now, it has become a matter of survival. The thinking man has bought his life in exchange for silence. Those who teach, teach hatred, those who preach, preach death. No boundaries, no limits, murder of innocence, a mother of 60, a beloved son, a passionate teacher, just statistics. Destroyed lives, broken families, the innocence robbed from a child's eyes replaced with fear. Greed rules empty lifeless hearts which cannot feel, all consumed with wants and desires, the lust for power, the destruction of faith. Words like love, loyalty & sacrifice long forgotten. Such barbarity, such cruelty, sermons of hatred, and those making them on pedestals of highest order. They ride on the shoulders of mindless drones conditioned to never question, to look the other way when they hear screams. For there is safety in burying your head in

Can't run can't hide, fear resides Blood sweeps bruised hides Wounded battered can't speak No one cares none hear cries Minarets of hatred rise high Pretence abound, the soul dies Looking for solace from idols Following the path made of lies Boundless abyss of ignorance They fall oblivious of demise Friend or foe cognition forsaken Bare deception clouds naive eyes Those who seek truth find it Absolution comes to the wise Love for All Hatred for None Answer stares you in the eyes

Today as the Jalsa UK 2013 is about to start , the mind is full of memories of moments spent. This time the focus of these memories is the Jalsa Salana that was held in Rabwah. My memories are conflicted between two emotions, one is filled with the beautiful mements of Jalsa Rabwah and the second is the fire of longing that burns in my heart which is reignited when I start to remember, its like a thirst which cannot be replenished & the reason for that is, like so many others I am of that generation which has not witnessed the Jalsa Rabwah in its full glory. There are a few vague memories, which are blurred by the limitations of childhood. Going through the streets of Rabwah when one passes in front of the different Langar Khanas in every Mohallah of Rabwah one cannot help but wonder at the hustle and bustle these places would have seen and what our elders tell us about. 1983. The last ever Jalsa held in Rabwah, the last time a populous of more than 250,000 made Rabwah

No one said a word when the target of persecution were Ahmadis. No one cared because they agreed! They kept quiet or even cheered while mothers mourned their sons and sons buried their fathers. The terrorists went on and started cutting throats and still you kept quiet. The bitter truth is that you and I are to blame for the current situation in Pakistan. The ones doing all this are from within us. Why didn't we stop a molvi [cleric] when he preached hatred in his sermon? Why didn't a crowd stop just a few who were beating a man to death? Once when they caught a vicious murderer and asked him his last wish before death he asked for his mother and when she came he tried to bite her ear off... today these terrorists are biting our ears off. Persecution, discrimination, cruelty and brutality under any guise cannot be justified. Once the dominoes of persecution start falling, every segment of society eventually falls. The sword wielded in the name of Jihad has take

All around, I see marriages breaking up & a general sense of unhappiness in those marriages which do manage to survive, among many old and known reasons some new ones present themselves. One of the reasons is accessibility, accessibility via technology be it internet or mobile phones or any other means of modern communication & its relative concealed nature has made the prospect of promiscuous behavior within reach. But technology is just a means, what really needs to be addressed is what social and emotional tendencies are behind such behavior. In pakistani society the biggest change that has accrued in the last 20 years or so is the so called opening up of the media reaching into our living rooms. With this influx and saturation of media and the desire to get higher revenues the media has silently abandoned any effort to educate or uphold any semblance of moral decency. What this in turn is preaching is an invitation to decadence and glamorizing wanton behavior to a p

Pakistan. I loved the name and when I grew up I loved the idea. Since then Ive accepted the bitter reality that the idea though how beautiful at its inception, remains as fragile. Ive seen many years and have witnessed the decay of morality and humanity seeping away. Things that once were rare and were enough to jog the conscious of a nation, now dont even register. Pakistanis seem to have and endless ability to devise ways to plunder, murder & inflict endless pain thus becoming less then human blood thirsty sadists. A population with no moral values, no human decency invites a destiny of annihilation. No amount of human endeavour can alleviate the collective sickness that runs in the blood. There is no cure for this plague except extinction. An extinction well deserved. When you remain quiet when they murder brothers, mothers and children. When they burn houses and you look the other way. When they spew hatred and you accept. When you dont think and just obey. You don

How do we believe something? How do we go beyond a shadow of a doubt about something? What are our convictions & beliefs and are they really forever and do we cloud our judgement with our aspirations and distorted view of the world through our limited knowledge and by simply believing what we are told? As terms like Islam Ahmadiyya or #JalsaUK trend at the top positions on Pakistan's twitter page, previously terms like Promised Messiah or Mirza Masroor Ahmad and others also trended. Now assuming that most of the pakistani twitter users check to see what the current trends are, why did they choose to ignore it, or why does it stir so much hatred thats what I am trying to figure out. "Mostly" the literate intellectuals choose twitter as their social network, ones that can see through the uselessness of Facebook and are interested in serious dialog and discussion. It seems logical when a term like The Promised Messiah pops up it should warrant some investigation...

It was 1984 and I was 7 years old. That day was strange my dad brought a box home and it was filled with kalima badges I had never seen so many badges before. As I vaguely recall I asked my father what were they for and he said they are for proudly showing that we are Muslim. Why do we have to show anyone that were Muslims? was my question and his reply was cause some bad guys think they can read what's in your heart. Darker days were ahead Zia's ordinance had been enforced I remember that day when they said you cannot do Adhan in your mosques and you cannot call your mosque what it was. I remember the prayers where my father and brothers and sister and others would cry and one could hear the cries of lament that emanated from their souls. Soon news started to arrive of arrests being made, their crime? "posing as a Muslim" and I would wonder how can I be any other way, I am a Muslim thats all I know how to behave like... Will they come for me too? Then one

I wrote some of this a month after the attacks in Lahore,  in which more then 86 Ahmadi worshipers were brutally murdered. It was the largest attack of this kind on Pakistani soil and modern Religious history, even after so many years the memories remain vivid in my mind and every new atrocity brings back the pain to the surface again. A lot has been said for how it happened and why it happened and who is responsible. For that I only say that we have rested our case to Allah Almighty and He will do us justice Inshallah. Although this event had a profound impact on all of the Jamaat what I want to share here are my personal observations as a person who was involved in reporting the incident via MTA International. I got the news while I was at home cause friday is the day off. I was called to the office immediately as our teams were getting ready to go to Lahore. At that time I was sent to the Aam Qaberstan (the graveyard next Bahisthi Maqbra) to get the shots of the graves being

For what its worth all a persecuted man can do is try to reason, try to explain that what you're doing in the name of God has nothing to do with the teachings of Islam, try to appeal to the one thing that binds us all, humanity, to stop the barbarity, stop the hatred before it consumes everything... that the path Pakistan is being forced to take will lead to its destruction. No matter how many times I try, they still murder my brothers. I force my self to be calm cause I don't believe that my resorting to violence is the solution but that does not mean that I don't feel anger ... I do... I feel rage and that rage turns to tears when I pray... I pray that may Allah crush to a paste those who murder in the name of God and those who help them. I have a firm belief that Allah listens to the prayers of those who are in pain and who are the persecuted. One might think that this prayer is just a cry of someone who is weak and worthless but beware if you close your eyes

So I was surfing the net & this link pops up on twitter. As a rule I have decided not to watch Pakistani television for mental health hazard reasons but heck this was from the net and must be something funny but it turned out to be shocking. A mob of Vigil-Aunties lead by Maya Khan attacking kids allegedly on dates in the parks... well to tell the truth it was kinda funny for about 3 seconds and then it turned to horror and outrage. Who is she to be the moral police was my first reaction. Its sad really to see the lows people can go to just for cheap fame. The reaction from the internet was overwhelmingly negative as well. I think all the rage and the disgust stems from the fact that this one incident illustrates how close to the brink we really are. The fact that Pakistani society has extremism now embedded in its very core. You dont need to be mullah or bearded religious fanatic to be an extremist, years of programming of the pro-radical islamic doctrine to the

When I was in the 8th grade there was an essay in our english book about  Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space and it detailed all of her hard and rigorous training which ranged from extreme pressure, noise to severe vibrations. Zero gravity training and also extreme heat and cold conditions. Thats when it hit me while I was crammed in a rickshaw with 15 other kids on my way back from school that all Pakistanis can be Astronauts. Yes we fit the criteria of training perfectly. Crammed in that rickshaw I was subjected to all kinds of extreme pressures, thats was one condition meet and then there were extreme vibrations due to the broken road mimicking the NASA training to the letter and since it was in July so serve hot conditions was also valid and when the Rickshaw would suddenly encounter an unexpected speed breaker we would all receive Zero Gravity simulation, take that Vomit Comet.   For selecting astronauts NASA prefers Air force pilots but if Pakistan had

It seems that everyone I know watches  Big Boss  another import from India, proving that our Pakistani media simply is not capable of producing quality programming and have no problem putting something on Pakistani screens which is at odds with our so called religious boundaries, hence the double standards of the media and the people of Pakistan, who are ok with scantily clad women dancing on the screen but will  rise in fury to kill anyone who wants to believe in whatever  he sees as the truth, its seems that you can do whatever you want as long as its hidden & you take the oath that declares your elegance to the state approved  Ummah  Coming back to  Big Boss,  after watching it for a while for a day I started wondering why would a person watch something like this? whats the appeal? and I have come to a conclusion, that people have lost all confidence in mankind's inner goodness. For me whats disturbing & disgusting really, is that people enjoy all the scheming

If you know me then you know that I'm no conservative but sometimes some thing comes up that makes my blood boil. I stopped watching Pakistani television some time ago but today happened to watch a drama on Geo and what they were preaching in that drama really pissed me off. My concern is this. I don't care if they show porn on television as long as its clearly marked as porn and not shown in primetime.  They always say to me that english movies and dramas have much more violence and sex and bad things in them, you don't say anything about them? but the thing is that the program or a movie has clear indications of whats in it and if there is something you can just skip that part and it's over also due to language most dont understand it anyway. The problem is that Pakistani media is in urdu and easily understandable to children and the themes being discussed in primetime when children are watching have far greater impact also the writers take no pains to ma

A bomb blast kills 87.  87, just a number, a statistic, doesn't even shade us anymore. The more the brutality, the more numb we become, reaching to the point when we just flip the channel. We ignore it.  Life is everything to us, no other truth needs to be learned, who cares if the only thing absolute in this world is mortality. We all want the high life. We dream big, we have high aspirations and most of us have agendas. Some crave greatness, breaking the rules, they step over every moral, ethical and religious boundary.  But what we don't think of, and let slip our minds is the inevitability of death. Some people die for a cause and become martyrs and some become useless statistics, martyrs for some, demons for others. How can we know which one is which? Have you ever wondered if your death would be a statistic or will it mean something? All those who see a crime and let it happen are more guilty than the perpetrator himself, this is the law of

I stopped following Pakistani news media long time ago and whenever I am forced to endure some media pundit's sermon my views are reinforced. There were a few which I thought were better then the pack but soon it dawned on me that they were also no different and not in it for the truth. When I was studying tv journalism, one of our teachers who had been an MD for PTV plainly told us that there is no such thing as a fair and unbiased media and in an environment like Pakistan where news is bought and sold with the presenters, its foolish to expect fair and objective reporting. Still one hopes and wants to believe that there are a few who would dare to speak the truth and channels who would dare to air them. These last days have seen a drastic increase in the incidents of Anti Ahmadiyya violence and rhetoric. One person murdered another shunned from society, someone looses his job or some students are expelled, keep on repeating over and over again but no one dares to speak out