Latest Read: The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad

 I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it. It may offend some people from my part of the world but I think it is written truthfully. It shows how complicated people are.
This is what I think about women’s rights in my part of the world: Generally women (or anyone for that matter, but I am talking about women for now) are not treated well. If someone can be trodden upon, they are. That is not true for everyone of course. I used to get very defensive when I first came to the US and people were surprised that I was a very well educated girl from Pakistan. However, I have changed my opinion about this. I feel that how a girl is treated in my part of the world is totally dependent on her family. If her family happens to be open-minded then she is treated well and her personal ambitions are taken into account. If they are not, well, too bad. She does not have any real legal recourse. If her husband is a good man, all is well. If he is not, even in good families she is told to bear it. The system is not with her in any meaningful way. And that I think is what people mean when they say that women are not treated well. They are not. I agree.

Latest Read: The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmed.

I want to gauge my eyes out and punch the walls till I break my knuckles. I want to scream so that everyone can hear me. And then I want to curl up on a hard floor and weep. Bravo Mr. Ahmed, for writing so beautifully and honestly!

 It’s not that I didn’t know. Everyone knows. But where are the prideful traditions that I was told marked the strong people of FATA? I cannot take pride in any of this. Resilience maybe, but other than that, it is all about oppression and stubbornness and cruelty. There is no beauty here. Who bloody cares if this is what they have been doing for centuries – that argument became moot fourteen hundred years ago in Arabia.

A must read people. This one is a must read. It’s a beautiful beautiful book about things that are old and ugly.

A world in another in another

If someone could tell an ovum that one day it would stop being an egg and be joined with another and become something else, what would it think about it? And then it does happen and the egg thinks it is dying but it passes through that death like stage and is greater than just an egg.
Then, if someone told that baby in the womb that his placenta and his cord are not him, and one day he will leave his world and go into another, what would the baby make of it? He becomes bigger and as he does, he finds his world not as comfortable as it used to be. He cannot swim freely or do somersaults anymore. And then comes death and he discovers he can eat and breathe and there is a wondrous world around him. And it is because he passed through that death like stage that he is there.
And someone tells the now grown man that one day he will leave this world and go into another and that his body is not him. What would he think of that?
The old man is not comfortable in this world anymore. His body aches; he cannot run and jump as he used to be able to do. And he dies and leaves his body in this world.
Do you only die and go into the other world if you listen to the obscure fantastic voices telling you that this body is not you? Or do you die and go into the other world when you have developed all you could in this one? Does believing in the next world help in adjusting in that world? The egg becomes the baby becomes the baby in his mother’s arms becomes the grown man. Did the egg become the grown man because it believed it would? Did the eggs and babies that don’t make it did not because they didn’t believe?
This grown one is thinking about this. Still thinking.

Latest read: The Good Muslim by Tahmina Anam.

Tahmina writes about a woman and her family learning to live in post Pakistan Bangladesh. Good book. Made me think about why someone intelligent would move towards 'fundamentalist' Islam.  (I am using the popular meaning of the word and use it to refer to the beard bearing, strict segregation wanting, miswak wielding fellow we all have often met). The woman is angry at her brother for turning towards fundamentalism and feels betrayed. She is unhappy that the Bangladeshi people do not realize how hard fought their freedom was. She tries to rescue her nephew but that ends in tragedy. And of course, the atrocities done by the Pakistan army are a back drop to the novel. The book ends with hope though and I liked that and more importantly, it ends with the acceptance of what happened.