Eastern Vagabond

Essays on travel, cities, memory, and the unnoticed textures of the world.

Author: Muhammad Sarosh

  • Madness & Sanity

    In the following essay, i will examine the terms madness and sanity, their evolutionary backgrounds, whether a harmonious equilibrium between the two is achievable, and the role played by each in our survival as a species.

    Sanity, in colloquial sense of the word, means to be in your right mind, conforming to the standards, being a part of the mob and going with the flow. Madness, on the other hand, is being socially aberrant. Wear a suit in mosque, sherwani in x-country and shorts for an interview and you’re already up for the title. To understand this painfully immense pressure one feels about conforming to certain standards of the society, and hence called sane, we will have to delve deep into the secret vaults of history from the point of view of evolution.

    Millions of years of evolution have hammered in us human beings, instincts that have helped us fight off extinction. Programmed to protect us in potentially hostile primitive environments, our instincts have managed to steer us clear of the lethal grip of natural selection and ensured our survival as a species. However, the civilized world today has rendered most of these instincts much less useful, if not exhausting. Remember the last time, you walked up the ramp for a performance and you looked pale as ghost. It just so happens that every time your brain detects a fear signal, it draws in all your blood from the skin so as to minimize the blood loss in case of injury. There is no way you can tell your fear instinct that the stage fright is technically different from the fright of a pouncing jaguar; that you are not likely to bleed therefore it should probably stop drawing further blood from your face which is reducing you to a nervous stuttering wreck on the stage. Adhering to the community, just like that, might once have been important for our ancestors to survive. Hunting together, bringing up children and securing a safe habitat were all legitimate needs and community living provided for them well enough and hence embedded itself successfully as a compelling instinct in our nervous systems. After we moved on to cities with governments and sophistiated procedures in place so as to protect us from possible harm, leaving little, if any, job for the instincts to do for our survival, the real conflict started to emerge. There were people who still wanted to pursue the same homosapien-ic life except in a more sophisticated fashion, wearing a bow-tie, cologne and all. There were people, on the other hand, who though appreciated the role community instinct had played thus so far, now wanted to break free of it to allow the current of evolution push them further on. Those who stayed put, they believed, would be those who drowned. The people who upheld this radical idea acquired the title of madmen.

    Contrary to the popular belief, true madness is not the absence of sanity. It’s just the triumph over it. You can be a madman if your madness defeats your sanity and is served by it all the same. Once you pull off this balance, evolution will make sure that your children don’t wipe out from Earth as the dinosaurs and mammoths did millions of years ago.

    P.S.: I’ll hopefully elucidate the role of love and madness in evolution in a series of posts. I understand that the essay needs more explanation. Please let me know if you find anything that does not make sense to you.

  • Mysticism and Contemporary Mainstream Islam

    One of the prominent teachings of Islamic mysticism is that everyone is entitled to their own personal quest for God. An enticing implication of this idea is that one has infinite freedom in making choice of The Path, and nonconformity is not just welcome but highly looked upon, which perhaps is why Islamic mysticism caught on right from its early years. Delivering a serious blow to the contemporary monolithic understanding of religion of the time, it made greater space for spirituality which had almost died when religion began to be commonly equated with the do’s and don’ts of Shari’ah.

    The general acceptance of un-orthodoxy slowly altered the way people understood vice and virtue. Being socially deviant did no longer equate with being a sinner. With that came a greater appreciation for all the ways in which people pursued their Creator and lesser scrutiny of how they dressed, behaved and looked. Uniformity was no longer called for. The complex cultural milieu that took birth was rather celebrated. In fact the whole enterprise of judging people from their Zahir (outlook) came crashing down.
    Logically so, the Eeman acquired the status of a variable that could not be, or rather, needed not be, physically measured in inches (i.e. how high one’s pants from one’s ankles were, how long one’s beard was etc.) and returned to its original definition of piety.

    However, today, more than we want to acknowledge, binary logic runs in the veins of contemporary Dar-ul-Uloom thought, which is sadly the sole representative of religion, rivaled by none. Since the beginning of time, binary logic is known to have made distinctions and bifurcations between different schools of thought instead of bringing about a unification which is the obvious need of time. The result is a highly confused and debated upon system of mainstream Islam. If ever humanity could take a break from that, it was in the period of mystics who made fundamental reformation in the way people saw the religion and taught them its real essence i.e. love, which threads the universe, connecting and molding every fragmented reality into The One.

    Rumi makes exactly the same point when he states in his Masnawi Al Maanawi with an authority only he is entitled to:

    I have lifted the marrow from the Quran and have left the empty bones for the dogs to quarrel upon.

    By bones, he meant endless, trivial debates on Ilm-ul-Kalam that scholars of the time engaged in, leaving out the matters of consequence that demanded greater and immediate attention i.e. spiritual well-being, referred to as “marrow” here. More or less the same thing was said by Jesus as quoted in Matthew [23:23,24].

    You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

    P.S.: I’d like to expand on this post. Ideas, questions and critiques are welcome.

  • نمک آلود

    نمک آلود

    ماضي کے نيم وا دريچوں سے رِستي ياديں
    کھڑکي پہ رينگتے بارش کے قطرے
    کسي آنکھ سے بہتے آنسو
    سب کتنے مماثل ہيں
    سب نمک آلود ہيں۔

  • آسيب

    آسيب

    ‘چيختی ہوآئيں
    ‘دھڑدھڑآتے دروبام
    کڑکتي بجلياں
    –اور اُن ميں اُبھرتے مٹتے کچھ دھندلے نقوش

    !سنو

    دل کے کھنڈر ميں
    يادوں کے مدفن ميں
    آج آسيب ہوا ہےـ
    ‘پھر محفل سجے’ رونق لگے
    وحشت سے ديواريں تھرّا جائيں
    کچھ صدائيں’ کچھ سسکياں
    اِن قہقہوں کے جھرمٹ ميں
    کہيں دم توڑ جائيں۔
    دُور’ بہت دُور کوئئ ہنس کے رو ديا ہے
    سنو! آج يہاں آسيب ہوا ہے۔

  • Symphony

    Symphony

    There is a fable that once upon a time, right after the town-clock struck midnight, the gangsters gathered in the town-hall and fired pistols at moon. The suburban sky lit up, the stars faded in the brilliant firework and a sweet smell of sulfur filled the damp night air. The moon bled silver that night. The gunshots rhymed. The bats fluttered back and forth through the bullet holes in sky and sang:

    “Watch out. The gangsters make symphony tonight!”

  • Tempest

    Tempest

    You,
    a raging storm,
    in ocean deep.
    I,
    a fisherman,
    far from the shore.

  • Remem-Trance

    Remem-Trance

    3 am:

    Like an uproar of stray dogs

    in the quiet, shady downtown;

    irrational, wild, intense.

    Your remembrance.

  • Backstreet

    Backstreet

    Treading the backstreets,

    On the hopscotch-chalked sidewalks,

    And in the strings of strange Trennbare verbs

    Of a stranger language,

    I have often secretly tried

    To trace your immaculate form,

    Connecting the invisible dots

    That lay all around,

    Scattered,

    Like silver mercury on earth.

  • A Canvassed Dusk

    “Do you see the red line floating across the golden ball of sun? This thin streak that splits it into perfect halves like a neatly cut melon?” He fell silent contemplating the moment, the texture, the rich acrylics.

    “Can you imagine what was it that she thought, that her brush dipped in red ripped through the heart of the sun, and it must not have taken a single stroke, you see. She must have swept it twice. Or thrice maybe, for that matter. Do you know what exactly makes a fragile brush in a delicate, feminine grip stab and rip and tear like that?”

    “No.”

    “I don’t either but it must be something really intense. Something that has set the sky ablaze, the wild grass crimson, the lake murky, the kayaks fluttery and the sailors, silhouettes against a scarlet sky.”

  • Ticking clock…full stop

    Now that you’ve hurled the stone, you turn on your heel and walk away.

    Somewhere far down, there’s a splash.

    Under the orb of night, little silvery beads of water try defying gravity, creating ripples, gyrating spirals in spirals. The murky waters quiver; your stone fades somewhere in the dense amalgam of dirt-brown and gloom.  An endless army of ripples sets out to pillage the unbounding shores of consciousness – the ravaged shores just beginning to move on so long after the storm.

    The stinking memories surface like rancid corpses in canal. A wound slowly begins to open up and an old, perverted yearning seeps out silently. I look into the streaming lymph. It’s long since kept; now it’s not going to stop. At least not for a while. I’ll shatter bit by bit, piece by piece with the hands of clock, ticking their circle tirelessly, endlessly.

    But you just hurled a stone.