Epiphany

It all started when the Kasur Incident broke last year. It was devastating to see children in our rural areas and towns being exposed to sexual assault and the being made to suffer humiliation and pay for this atrocity by being blackmailed by the perpetrators. I had long wanted to do social work, first getting a taste for it when i helped people during my time on field postings as a civil servant in the administration. I saw with my own eyes how weak our links are with the vulnerable groups in our society, how limited is the governments ability to reach out to them. I had toyed with working for poverty reduction, women empowerment, as these are subjects close to my heart. With this incident, I decided that children should be the ones i should work with. Call it fate, call it epiphany, but it dawned upon me that day that this is what I am meant to do.

My sensitivity to children began early, I was always too attached to them. I endured an unhappy marriage for twelve years, only for the sake of my children and their need to have a wholesome life, not one in splinters. When the end came, my heart broke, not for myself, but for my children. I wrote down on a piece of paper that i would never claim for their custody and gave it to their father, this is how much i wanted them not to go through any pain, not to have them have to choose between mother and father. I tried in the last four years since my divorce, to make the fall as easy for my kids as possible, to make them as happy as possible. In the last four years, me and their father have been able to provide them with all the love and affection, and the best life that we can, as divorced parents. I think this is what I am proudest of. That i never forgot my children, and never abandoned them. They are the reason that I go on, despite all sorts of difficulties.

After my divorce, I began looking at children more closely, thinking more of what they need to be happy, and to grow up as well rounded individuals. In our society, it is appalling how little we think of the physical security and mental well being of our children. We produce them mindlessly, we use and abuse them at will, but we don't do our duty towards them. And the most vulnerable are the homeless and orphan children.

With my decision, Panaah finally arrived. This is a small charity organization that I have started, which provides clothing, books, food, and education to children. We support their school fees, and try to fill in the gaps that exist in their daily requirements. Panaah means shelter, refuge, safety from harm. This is what i want to give, not only to my own children, but as many others as possible. I m doing it on a small scale which my donors , mostly private persons, and I can sustain with my other commitments. I work with existing orphanages and edhi centres. When I think of how much difference I can make with this, I tell myself that if i can make the life of even one child better than it was, and make them smile as I like to see my children smile, my efforts are worth it.

Wrinkles

Women are afraid of wrinkles. Not sure about men because they won't admit to so many things in any case, and tend to keep their fears under wraps.For women, it is the first sign they are aging, that they will not be as desirable, as attractive as they were in the effortless bloom of youth. The face is slowly wilting, drying, losing lustre and vitality. Men also think that a more youthful appearance and a tauter body is more attractive. Perhaps it is, in a basic, carnal way. But there is another dimension to attraction , which resides in the soul , the mind, and the heartWomen are afraid of wrinkles. Not sure about men because they won't admit to so many things in any case, and tend to keep their fears under wraps.For women, it is the first sign they are aging, that they will not be as desirable, as attractive as they were in the effortless bloom of youth. The face is slowly wilting, drying, losing lustre and vitality. Men also think that a more youthful appearance and a tauter body is more attractive. Perhaps it is, in a basic, carnal way. But there is another dimension to attraction , which resides in the soul , the mind, and the heart. Wrinkles do not affect it at all. 

Memories are embedded in wrinkles. Memories and experiences. The life that we have lived keeps writing on our face, laugh line by laugh line for happy times, wrinkles for cares and strings that we have felt and sustained. Like life, we can see wrinkles any way we want to, lines if we are thinking wistfully, laugh lines if we look back happily. Each feeling, each struggle, each ordeal is engraved on our face. The fights that we have won and lost, the ideals that we stood for, successfully or unsuccessfully, the life we have lived, sometimes happy,sometimes difficult, the people we have loved, adored, cherished and despised, felt envious of, tried to hurt, or those that hurt us. They leave their imprint. Why do we then try to hide these wrinkles? Why do we use creams, treatments, even botox to make them disappear? Why do we strive so hard to keep our faces looking like the clean slate of a baby's mind? We like to hide all the ravages of time and travail, and present to the world an innocent, untouched countenance, not sullied by experiences, not damaged by hurt. Fresh as ever and open to new experiences. perhaps that is why we hide wrinkles, because we do not want to appear like damaged goods that nobody would want. It is true, who would want to write on a slate already cramped with writing by others? We would have to wipe it clean, to start a new story on it. 

Those who look back on a life well lived, stages of life successfully passed, do not want to stay at a particular stage. They are done with it and have evolved. But those who feel they have not been able to make a success of some part of their life, they want to do it over, so they try to make themselves over too, to match their efforts. They do not deserve pity, it is just that they want to make a go of it. But nothing makes a person more attractive than ones who embrace their past life, wrinkles and all, and feels confident of themselves for the future also. If you have lived, your experiences just add to your mystique, they add depth to your personality. Embracing your past, whatever it was, engraved on your face as wrinkles, is the only way to face the future with confidence and poise. I look forward to wrinkles as they come with new feelings, new experiences, reflecting the life force that is never still.

Don't Lose Yourself

This week a feminist issue again, which is close to my heart, but about relationships. Women are supposed to be the fountains of compassion, symbols of sacrifice and epitomes of self abnegation, for their loved ones, family, children, significant others. It is so, we are capable of a lot of sacrifice, and can bear a lot of pain and hardship for the sake of our loved ones. But in romantic or conjugal relationships, there is always a question of domination, subjection, and balance. It is of course a man's desire and nature to be in the dominant position. That is how he is designed to be: to take charge of the situation, to protect the woman , to take responsibility of the family. But mostly the devotion to her man makes a woman give in too much, retreat too much, sometimes at the cost of her own self respect. In the long run, it is neither good for her nor for the relationship. 

Its true that you must show the person you love that he or she means the world to you, but if you show somebody that you cannot exist without them, they will start taking you for granted. Somebody who is totally dependent is instinctively less attractive than an independent mate. And many times the man thinks that he has been able to fool the woman, otherwise how could she think so highly of a no good person like him. It does not cross his mind that she may be overlooking his faults and indiscretions to maintain the relationship. Once he thinks he has fooled her, he looks for others to fool, he thinks he can pull it off. Here infidelity creeps in. 

A woman can take a lot for her man, as long as she believes he is true to her, that they both belong to each other. But when you start feeling that what he is doing is not for you, what he is saying is not for you, there is somebody else on his mind and near his body, you do not feel like tolerating his tantrums, indulging his whims and desires , or making any extra effort for his sake. in your heart, he does not belong to you anymore. many women will refuse to look this feeling or intuition in the face, because it hurts too much, and its always better to exist in the la la land of contrived trust, because facing the reality of a beloveds infidelity breaks you yourself. So she goes on, not caring anymore but not facing it, nor letting him know, that she knows. 

But all this self abnegation or delusion doesn't get you anywhere. The moment you lose trust, you must react and ask the other person to renew it, otherwise its just a farce after this moment. It is not worth anything to live in a relationship which is against your self respect. If you lose your self respect, you lose yourself, you lose your way in life. And the person you compromise it for will never appreciate your sacrifice, in fact will rather hold you in contempt for being the weakling that you have become just to hold on to him.  I always tell myself, that the one who truly loves you, will never put you in a situation where you will have to do anything against your self respect. 

Love him as much as you like but don't lose yourself in your love. Nothing is as precious as your self respect. If your lose that, you will soon lose your love also. If a person has lost your trust and confidence, you can try to rebuild it, if you both want to continue. One loves a person for what he or she is, not only for looks or material trappings. But don't let somebody trample your spirit.Nobody is worth this much.

Tasweer

Blue-grey clouds cover the sky, and the green Margalla Mountains seem to touch them, hiding a muted sunset. The pine and cypress trees sway gently in the early evening breeze as the returning birds call out to their companions to hurry home. As I look at the window, I have an image of my own beloved in my minds eye, which seems to permeate through all the sights, all the sounds, encompassing my heart. I turn to look at his image, on a day when I have to make do without him.

I like to look at him. In person, or his picture, or Tasweer as we call it in urdu. It warms my heart . When he is not with me, I look at it to assuage my constant longing to have him before my eyes, to hold him, to hear him speak, laugh, and scold me intermittently. He likes to test how much I want him,whether I can match the great passion he feels but likes to hide behind his sweet smile. His Tasweer keeps his sweet smile with me at all times. And his shining , ever hopeful eyes, which reflect the goodness of his heart. I look into them and they speak to me, at times with love , at times admonishing, but always reminding me why I fell in love with my darling. Why I chose to be with him with so much idealism in my heart. Despite what he may think of as his shortcomings, I have never felt disappointed with him. I do complain, but only to remind him that I am there, waiting for him to smile at me and do the simple little things he does to make me happy, and sometimes to make me jealous, only like he can.

Why do we need a tasweer when we have the image of those we love engraved on our hearts? why do we adorn our walls and desks at office with their images? why do I need to see his face so much?  Perhaps to sustain ourselves with their images, to remind us of what they mean to us and how significant they are in our lives, what part of our life, emotions and selves do they represent. When I look into his eyes, I see all that is good and idealistic in me, my hopes, dreams and desires. I don't think he has ever tried to rationalize why we love each other, and why we need to be together. He just feels. I have a tendency to find and list reasons. But his smiling eyes makes me forget to think, but only feel.

Rab Di Marzi (The Will of God)

Picture this: A hot Lahore forenoon in July, Main Market, Gulberg, one of the poshest areas. I get out of my car to go to the ATM machine, my son and I are going to do some shopping. Actually I am, he just likes to tag along. I love him for tagging along. Just next to the machine in the veranda, two boys, seeming to be street urchins, are sleeping on an old foam mattress that has lost its cover. I looked at them, i looked at my son in the car, wearing his nightsuit and waiting for me in the air-conditioned car while he played some game on a Samsung Note phone. And yes, apart from all disparities, he is fair, and the urchins are brown, with sun bleached blonde hair. I didn't like it. I felt guilty. Now if i were to follow the usual political rhetoric, which is reflected in wearing of khaddar, establishing it war bazaars and turning off ACs in offices to show solidarity with the plight of the poor, in vogue in Pakistan, me and my son would come out of the car and stand in the heat with these guys and postpone our shopping plans. But would it help them? No. Neither would it if i gave them some money and got rid of my guilt. The charity would help them for some time, but would not take them out of this vicious circle of poverty. What we need in our country is not superficial acts of charity to give impressions of caring, but a system that throws a lifeline to the poor to get out of poverty with their own efforts.
I , perhaps cruelly,  and certainly not respecting their privacy, took their picture and posted it on twitter, calling for a safety net for such children. it got lots of response, but one comment hurt and revolted me to my core. Somebody wrote, Rab di Marzi, or that it is as Allah has willed. It is the same mentality that feeds the above superficial acts. It is engendered by the erroneous belief that somebody who is born at a particular class is supposed to remain there because he was born there through the will of God. And, as good muslims, we are supposed to surrender to His will and not try to change things too much. This attitude is in itself tragic. It makes us take the opium of acceptance, and prevents us to make an effort to change even the things that can be changed. As Muslims, we are supposed to accept the things we cannot change as the will of God, but we are exhorted to make efforts to change the things that we can. In fact, it is our duty as muslims to struggle to put things right. If we recall, it is called Jihad, and is one of the pillars of Islam. It is this effort to create a more equitable society that Jihad envisages, not terrorism .
Now whose responsibility is to establish a more equitable society? Individual effort definitely counts, but it is the State which has to do this huge task, because it taxes us and then decides where to spend its revenues. Right now, whatever efforts are being made at State level are in the old mode of giving charity, subsidies, and short term relief to the poor. Very little effort is there for creating an enabling environment for them to get out of poverty through their own efforts, learning some self respect and gaining confidence along the way. But we are ignoring our children the most. We have so many young people, and we need to very quickly devise a system, a safety net to enable them to get out of poverty and illiteracy. The answer is in giving street children access to education, nutrition and skills to get them off the streets and into educational institutions, and then to workplaces. Our children are the future and we can jump start progress by investing in them. A mega project that funds such a safety net for our young people is much more valuable for us than brick and mortar. This is the real will of God. This is what He enjoined us to do.

The Lost Generation

The name of this blog post seems a bit cliched. Im not talking about the lost generation of the American history . I use this cliched phrase because it is the name of one of my worst nightmares.

The existence of such a feeling began for the first time a few years ago, when we were recruiting some people for an energy sector organization. I was responsible for these recruitments and was a panelist. We usually like to say in our public discussions that we have lots of talent but our youth has no opportunity for employment. However, the young people we were interviewing had serious deficiencies in knowledge, understanding ,expression, work ethics. Most of them were not worthy of being employed. That evening when I drove back home, I noticed for the first time the pursuits of people in our streets. Usually idling, gossiping, or doing work without much interest, not able to make a success of what they were doing, and our young people, not adequately educated, lacking exposure and knowledge, many of them unemployable.
Everywhere I go, I meet young people like this. Lacking adequate education, weak ethics, weaker work ethic and motivation. Listlessness and lack of belief in their own ability to make things change. But we have used the earlier generation at the alter of expediency, of jingoism, of vested interest. They have not done well.
Last night, I was watching tv and there flashed names of young men who, in the nineties, were responsible for political shootings. They had such illustrious names: Naveed Nusrat, Minaj Qazi, Saulat Mirza, Mustafa. Surely their educated parents spent a lot of time to give their children meaningful names and did not foresee the future that would befall their sons. These are just a few. In the name of ideology, in the name of Jihad, in the name of social norms, our young people have been used and abused. Their minds have been played with so much that this generation finds it difficult to believe in anything, even themselves and their ability to control their lives. Why should they? Can we even decide whether a crime is a crime or not or where and when in our history should we start holding people accountable? when the normal definitions of right and wrong seem to blur and merge more and more as we progress to the higher echelons of society, how can we expect our young people to find their way out of this labyrinth of life? The only thing that holds a person together in adversity as well as in times of fortune, is belief and values, ethics, which one holds on to as the winds of upheaval blow. What do our young people have to hang on to? what kind of lives have they seen their elders live? what kind of social values have they grown up with? Only and only hypocricy, selfishness, twisting what is right to make it wrong just to suit people who have might? They have not learnt indolence on their fathers knee, they have learnt how to be a sponge, how to prey upon your near and dear ones instead of pulling your own weight and being proud of it. They have learnt self abasement and sycophancy, not self respect and respect for difference of opinion. They have seen brain washing and indoctrination without question, not tolerance and quest for real knowledge ,which starts with a question, not acquiescence .
So we have fifteen year old boys, beautiful , brawny, blonde, bursting with vitality, leading terrorist attacks in Charsadda, rather than leading a hockey or football match in high school, or doing charity work during school breaks, like my fifteen year old daughter does. There is a disparity of class and what a child from a specific family background can expect from life in our country. They are taught at the outset not to presume to be equal. Then why should they not be listless and slackers? they cannot be sure if they have a level playing field. And they are right. They don't. Unless we give them one, we will keep churning out multitudes of such directionless people. We say we have a huge youth bulge with great opportunities fro growth. But what we consider gold is turning into dust before our eyes.

Just a Light Beating

Pakistan's descent into the dark ages seemed imminent with the statement by the islamic ideology council head Molana Shirani that a husband may give a light beating to his wife as and when required. While humankind has evolved to a stage where the lasting psychological and emotional scars inflicted by physical violence are known to most civilized societies, this is an interpretation based on tunnel vision , the only motivation being to maintain the social ascendancy of the man over the woman in Pakistani society.

Now this approach has a number of aspects and implications. First, what constitutes a slight beating. depending upon the girth and size of both partners, it can be an unequal match mostly. But the more important question is, why should any of the partners need to resort to violence, albeit light, to get their way in a marital relationship. This reflects the ascendance of the man who can punish the woman as and when he feels right. If the concept of light beating is incorporated in the law, it will again establish the principle of the man's ascendancy in the relationship in a physical way, calling into equation so many freedoms that the law presently gives to women in Pakistan. The whole issue revolves around the idea of an unequal relationship between man and woman. Why a relationship may be unequal is because physically she is weaker and he is supposed to take care of her. But taking care of a weaker family member does not mean being their master. We take care of our children and old parents, but if we use the ability to take care of them as an opportunity to wield power, then the unfairness begins. This paradigm becomes even more irrelevant as more and more women are financially independent and have more of sense of self than they used to. On the flip side, the woman also takes care of the man in many ways, but does that make her justified in trying to gain mastery over her mate? No. The only answer is an equal relationship, where both partners respect and love each other, wish each other the best and try to be partners in life, rather than adversaries or competitors . The only way to achieve such a partnership is to be fair to each other, communicate to each other, not that one partners keeps taking and the other keeps giving. Both need to be aware of and be willing to make an effort to give importance to the other's desires. such a meeting point only comes when there is respect in a relationship. One partner feeling entitled to beat the other is enough to destroy respect, affection and sharing in the relationship. Allowing men to feel entitled to light beating will just reinforce the concept of being master of the woman, throwing out of  the window any chances of a mutually satisfying relationship. Considering how much importance is given to men and womens likes and dislikes while deciding marriages, the chances of being happy together are already rather slim.
The second implication of such a ruling is lack of communication in a marital relationship. How many times does a Pakistani man thinks of discussing with his life partner what her wishes and desires are? Usually its a monologue of what he wants. Many men think about asking and in their hearts their sole wish is to keep their woman happy, but our social norms inhibit his natural desire to make her wishes and thoughts important to him. It is the natural instinct for men and women to treat each other as companions and partners. That is what they were created for. However, our society scoffs at sensitive men, calling him hen pecked and so on. The concept of beating being permissible is again reinforcing this view of the man-woman relationship, which is unnatural and erroneous. It is not even Islamic. It is only an attempt to maintain the status quo and protect all the abusive men from law. Islam is not an unfair religion. It has not concept of papacy as rightly pointed out by some. However, the authority that such bodies wield allows them to affect our social fabric and to damage it in cases such as this one.
As the issue has been reduced to the supporters of the status quo against those who would change it, such as the Punjab and KP governments, Its time that the government thought about introducing women clerics, lawmakers and lawyers into these bodies, so that the ascendancy of one gender over the other in our social life is diluted. We need a system based on fairness and mutual respect.