Gleaning Wisdom Interlude

62. "In your despairing, you are a free man (hurr); but in your coveting, you are a slave ('abd)."

70. "Infer the existence of ignorance in anyone whom you see answering all that he is asked or giving expression to all that he witnesses or mentioning all that he knows."

The Judge. - He who has beheld anyone's ideal is his inexorable judge and as it were his bad conscience.

The human lot. - He who considers more deeply knows that, whatever his acts and judgements may be, he is always wrong. 

"The scraps from the meal of the Emir are larger than the gifts of halwa from the merchant." - Timur Fazil

"If you want to be with the Teacher when he wants you to be apart from him, you must obey him or shun him. If you argue about it, you are worse than disobedient." - Halqavi

302. Preference for specific virtues. - We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total lack of absence in our opponent." 

444. War. - Against war it can be said: it makes the victor stupid, the defeated malicious. In favour of war: through producing these two effects it barbarizes and therefore makes natural; it is the winter or hibernation time of culture, mankind emerges from it stronger for good and evil."

459. - Full of character. - A man appears full of character much more often because he always obeys his temperament than because he always obeys his principles.

516. - No one now dies of fundamental truths: there are too many antidotes to them.

531. - The life of one's enemy. - He who lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in seeing that his enemy stays alive.

220. "Do not attest to the validity of an inspiration (warid) whose fruit you know not. The purpose of rainclouds is not to give rain; their only purpose is to bring forth fruit." 

227. "If you do not want to be dismissed, then do not take charge of a post that will not always be yours."

"A friendless man is like a left hand without a right." - Hebrew proverb

"Though I am different from you, We were born involved with one another." - Tao te Ching

"Kabeer, we are puppets of clay, but we take the name of mankind. We are guests here for only a few days, but we take up so much space."

"Kabeer, the world is a room filled with black soot; the blind fall into its trap. I am a sacrifice to those who are thrown in, and still escape."

"Kabeer, all the strings of the instrument I played are broken. What can the poor instrument do, when the player has departed as well."

"When she is a virgin, she is full of desire; but when she is married, then her troubles begin. Fareed, she has this one regret, that she cannot be a virgin again."

"First, the bride herself is weak, and then, her Husband Lord's Order is hard to bear. Milk does not return to the breast, it will not be collected again."

"Fareed, I was worried that my turban might become dirty. My thoughtless self did not realize that one day, dust will consume my head as well."

"Fareed, a stone will be your pillow, and the earth will be our bed. The worm shall eat into your flesh. Countless ages will pass, and you will still be lying on one side."

"Fareed, if on that day when my umbilical cord was cut, my throat had been cut instead, I would not have fallen into so many troubles, or undergone so many hardships."

SIFTING

O Pedant! Sift, all your life, the writings and the sayings of the Wise. But first of all learn one thing: you are using a sieve which lets through chaff and discards the nutrient, the wheat. - Shab-Parak

GIVE AND TAKE

The Chief takes less then he is given

And gives more than he has taken.

(Kitab-i-Amu Daria)

51. "No deed is more fruitful for the heart than the one you are not aware of and which is deemed paltry by you."

260. "Meditation (al-fikra) is the voyage of the heart in the domains of alterities (mayadin al-agdo naahyar)."

209. "That part of your life that has gone by is irreplaceable, and that which has arrived is priceless."

160, "Sometimes ostentation (ar-riya) penetrates you in such a way that no one notices it." 

294

Copies. - We quite often encounter copies of significant men; as, as also in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals.

311

Against the trusting. - People who give us their complete trust believe they have this acquired a right to ours. This is a false conclusion; gifts procure no rights.

303

Why we contradict. - We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it was expressed.

413

The shortsighted are in love. - Sometimes it requires only a strong pair of spectacles to cure the lover, and he who had the imagination to picture a face, a figure twenty years older, would perhaps pass through life very undisturbed.

496

Privilege of greatness. - It is the privilege of greatness to give great delights with meagre gifts.

564

In danger. - One is most in danger of being run over when one has just avoided a carriage.

568

Confession. - One forgets one's sins when one confesses them to another, but the other does not usually forget them.

Amusing Ourselves To Death

by Neil Postman

Courtesy, BT



We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another-slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity arid history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies ([Huxley's sense stimulating movies], the orgy porgy [group sex in the novel], and the centrifugal bumblepuppy* [a child's game in the novel; see description at end of essay]. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain, In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

The Huxleyan Warning

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prison. In the second - the Huxleyan - culture becomes a burlesque. No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison-cultures whose structure Orwell described accurately in his parables. If one were to read both 1984 and Animal Farm, and then for good measure, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, one would have a fairly precise blueprint of the machinery of thought-control as it currently operates in scores of countries and on millions of people. Of course, Orwell was not the first to teach us about the spiritual devastations of tyranny. What is irreplaceable about his work is his insistence that it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon worship equally pervasive.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

In America, Orwell's prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley's are well under way toward being realized. For America is engaged in the world's most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug. This is an experiment that began slowly and modestly in the mid-nineteenth century and has now, in the latter half of the twentieth, reached a perverse maturity in America's consuming love-affair with television. As nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing to a close the age of the slow-moving printed word, and have granted to television sovereignty over all of their institutions. By ushering in the Age of Television, America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future.


Those who speak about this matter must often raise their voices to a near-hysterical pitch, inviting the charge that they are everything from wimps to public nuisances to Jeremiahs. But they do so because what they want others to see appears benign, when it is not invisible altogether. An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. We are not likely, for example, to be indifferent to the voices of the Sakharovs and the Mandelas and the Walesas. We take arms against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe and Jefferson. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter? I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter. Their warnings have customarily been directed against those consciously formulated ideologies that appeal to the worst tendencies in human nature. But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology. This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past eighty years.



For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing? But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.

Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the printing press to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.

Aldous Huxley believed, with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

The World as I see it or A Catalogue of Death

ow oortaOr the world as I want you to see it. Both statements, according to me, are the same. You might disagree. Which is important. But not to me. Or maybe it is. Or it remains to be seen, as most print/electronic reports say in conclusion.


Traversing across the world of information, news and reports, one come's across more appalling phrases than the one mentioned above, and even worse, there are details of death and destruction. Anywhere you look, there is a calamity waiting to be noticed.

Hurricane Ike, that battered Central American Countries, is now on a rampage in coastal states of America. Rescue teams had found 500 corpses, while another 1 million have been left homeless. Cuba has also been ravaged, and so are smaller Islands in the Carribean.

The mayor of Turks and Calicos island says more than 80% of the houses have been destroyed. Yes, we have never heard of the two islands, but we can still imagine how it would be like when 80% of homes in a locality are destroyed.

Feel the shiver when you are inside a multi-storey house which is shaken from its roots, knowing this isn't the end of your misery, and you can't get out unless prepared and able to raft or wade across shoulder-deep waters.

While in the U.S., evacuation saved thousands from premature death. But nature showed how little consideration it gives to differences of real-politiks. The Gulf Coast suffered equally devastating destruction; floods wiped across with as much gusto across Haiti as across Texas.

But this is just nature reminding mortals of it's powers which dwarf all else. Human follies too play their part - resulting in more death and more misery..



This picture is not from the Gulf of Mexico, but from Indonesia, where stampede during a Zakat ceremony resulted in the death of 21 people.


Soon one will be reported from your city, if not your neighbourhood.

One occurs each year, caused not by pious hunger, but by the piously hungry; at Mecca, as they run helter-skelter during the Stoning of the Devil.


Another stampede, another 13 killed, this time at a soccer match in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The goalkeeper of one of the teams tried to use Witchcraft to influence the outcome of the game.




Another 88 people perished in a Russian jet crash in the Ural mountains. Just like the Talibans are spread criss-cross across the mountainous Pak-Afghan border, the Ural mountains had Imam Shamyl and his brigade of asetic followers; fighting the mighty Russian Empire. But they, too, perished, one after the other.

Meanwhile, in good old homeland of Pakistan, hundreds are slaughtered each day. The altar differs, though. Sometimes its for national security, sometimes to establish the writ of the state, sometimes because the US-led forces want to, sometimes to establish the writ of the militants, but never in anyway to benefit the residents of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or the once scenic Swat valley.

While there are conflicting reports on the number of the dead, this report catalogues the number of casualties in Pakistan.

A staggering 2900 casualties since March, 2008 alone.

Another report puts the number of security personnel killed in combat since Pakistan's alliance with the U.S. in the War Against Terror at 730 - discounting the injured and the maimed.

Every day a headline stares you in the face citing a number, usually in double figures, that are killed. For an entire week, everyday 10-15 civilian casualties were reported only from U.S. airstrikes within Pakistan. Thousands others have become collateral damage in the war of attrition that rages on in Pakistan's once-scenic-now-rugged mountainous north.

Suspected Al-Qaeda militants are not confined to Pakistan, though. According to this report, Al-Qaeda suspects were behind the killing of eleven members of the Mauritanian Army. Mauritania is a small country in North Africa which had its democratically elected leader removed in a coup. One wonder's if Al-Qaeda wants to kill an African dictator, what love he had for the Pakistani one for so long. Tacit support, I reckon.

And then there's the Battle of Baghdad and the Killing in Kabul, which goes on all-year round. Also, numerous others, one-off deaths or in small groups, anonymous victims of hit-and-run, albeit on a much smallter stage, but of the same (in)consequence.

But I will come back again, cataloguing more.....lives as often as deaths.

Another start

As umpteen times before, I am once again committed to a new start. My commitment to blog regularly as fickle as God's commitment to the parched lands of Sindh....

Just like intermittent rainfalls, my thoughts rain in spurts and then dither away, as if they never were. Did not exist. And not like some God particle scientists are trying to unearth through a billions of dollars experiment, but just like the hunger of the homeless. Inconsequential.

But I will try to be consistent. Infuse discipline. Just like cricketers with a religious bent infuse discipline in their lives. I will strive.

To this new beginning, a toast.