Eastern Vagabond

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

Tag: life

  • The Melodrama of Glass

    First time i discovered that glass had an amorphous structure on a microscopic level, an infinitely disordered, messy arrangement of molecules, it was in my science class in grade 8 and i remember to have felt defrauded, even betrayed. It was a weirdly emotional moment. Glass was the most sacred thing to me before, a symbol of perfection, beauty and purity. It was hard to believe that it’s fabric, just like everybody and everything else, had it’s own unholy patches.

    Growing up, as it happens with all the children, I started off with the imagination of a perfect world created in the image of a perfect god. Slowly and gradually, as the reality hit home, I realized that perfection or absolute divinity is rather a rare thing on Earth if it exists after all. I saw that my nicest class fellows cheated in exams, teachers were ignorant, parents were distant, things stood way inferior to their imaginable ideal selves. It was like ideals were bugs and my experience an efficient insecticide. As my ideals diminished with time, the greater was the force I held on to those left. Fast forward to grade 8 where glass was pretty much the last thing I was left with. Giving up on it would mean, giving up hope, if ever, of catching the reflection of God because if not in the glass mirror, where else could you catch it! Though I was too small to enunciate it back then but I knew it in my heart of hearts that it was religiously important for me to establish that glass was divine/beautiful in its own way.

    So i looked closely into its molecular structure, surfed through the internet, downloading all the possible images that I could get my hands on of the striking, though still not ordered, molecular arrangements of the glass insides. I realized beauty does not have to be ordered. Perfection is not averse to messiness.

    Life is probably hard for an honest, thinking man. As long as I hated glass, I broke my fair share of it and now that I love it, I feel bad for all the fragments I have left behind in my path. If that’s a sacrifice life calls for, I think i have paid my dues in full. If there is one take-away from this melodrama of glass, it’s that perfection is over-rated and idealism is unrealistic and needs reality to pivot on to make any sense. All things are beautiful in their own right. Absolutely nothing in this world is totally impure, and if you find one, check the lens you’re viewing the world with. That might just be the only dirty thing around.

  • Konya – Rumi’s Abode

    As Vayu, the tropical cyclone, approaches the coastal towns of South India and particularly Karachi, I think I’ve found a brand new metaphor for my own religiosity in it.

    Recklessly unbridled from outside and hauntingly hollow from the core. Creating a stir all around and changing directions all the same; powerful yet empty in the eye.

    I hope it achieves enough in its power, recklessness and destruction that long after I’m gone, it’s carefully preserved, if not in the meteorological journals then at least in my memos, letters and emails to my victims.

    Call it a stroke of luck or a sweep of typhoon (if you allow me to drag my metaphor this long), I was able to arrange a reasonably long stopover at Konya, Turkey in my upcoming official visit to Italy next week – long enough to pay my respects to Maulana Jalal ud Din Rumi. If you don’t already know my interest in and association with Rumi, now is not the time to share it because this blog will otherwise turn into a treatise. My feelings about the whole affair are quite mixed. I think this is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my poem “Tempest“.

    Have you been to Konya?

  • Xoxo & Goodbyes

    One of my foremen used to wear a premium, jet black baseball cap with silvery bold letters ‘xoxo’ printed right on its front. The first time he wore it to my office, i studied his face for any sign of humor but all I could find was his usual, blissfully ignorant, childlike morning smile. From that day on, everytime he visited me, which was a lot of times in a day since he is my direct subordinate, I would find myself smiling. Our conversations would go something like:

    Foreman: Salam Sir

    I: Wassalam come sadaqat noticing the silvery xoxo and beaming ear to ear

    Foreman: Sir you seem to be quite happy these days. You’re getting married, I suppose?

    I: Not really. It’s just your cap. I like it.

    Foreman: Sir the moment I saw it yesterday in a jumble sale in Attock, I knew I had to buy it. Looks good on me, sir. Doesn’t it?

    I: Yes it does. It does still smiling like crazy

    Foreman: But sir you don’t smile like that, I smell something fishy.

    I: It’s just that I haven’t seen you wearing anything fancy like that before. You got taste.

    The man has just proceeded for retirement a couple of weeks before and the office is not the same anymore. As I go in to work each day and look at the sea of dull, weary faces around, I miss that refreshing child-like grin under the silvery xoxo front of a black baseball cap. I hope that smile, wherever it is, keeps shining through all the dullness around.

  • Sb Maaya Hai

    Yeh ishq bhi ajeeb hai
    Kabhi saccha kabhi jhooṭa
    Donon taraf se mann mera mann tera looṭa

    The song Sb Maaya Hai catches attention with its generous understanding that love essentially remains armed with its characteristic capability to devastate whether or not it’s ‘true’. With it’s rather surprising opening, it calls into question the conventional connotations of ‘true’ and ‘false’ love, tacitly implying that they are but meaningless, irrelevant adjectives that don’t and can’t dampen the severity and vulnerability called love. The song might come as strangely uplifting to anyone who has ever engaged in a love that didn’t eventually turn out to be the ‘ultimate’, and hence what’s conventionally known to be ‘true’, love. The importance placed on the singularity of the beloved in the journey of True Love is perhaps overamplified; love can still be true (or if we discard the meaningless adjective, love can still be love) if each beloved is thought of as a step in a thousand miles journey, a moment in an infinity, a vanishing mirage giving way to a new one in a distance, along the same path.

    I like to think I haven’t overanalyzed the lyrics. Here’s the link to Coke Studio’s version of the song:

    https://soundcloud.com/cokestudio/attaullahesakhevi-sanwalesakhelvi-sabmayahai

  • The Grey World

    The concept of the grey world was first explained to me by a doctor of philosophy I came across rather coincidentally, when I was a morbid radical undergrad who had just begun to look for alternative paths to The Meaning. I remember what a pain it was to listen to him the first time. He was surrounded by his disciples who I would later come to describe as ‘cultists’ which held true for every definition of the term except that they would conveniently leave if they deemed it better, and the cult, given its fundamental principle of intellectual freedom, would make no tantrum or effort to hold them back (quite a thing for a radical associated with a highly possessive, volatile organization). I carefully listened to him, disagreed with him strongly and finally gave in to his eloquence, authority, reason but far more importantly, his history. It ‘felt’ like he traveled the same road as I did, only twenty years ahead of me. As i look back, it feels to be the greatest irony of my life that I chose the path of ‘reason’ because an ‘intuition’ told me so. Perhaps it was the first grey of my life, the grey between the black and white of reason and intuition, that eventually opened up the grey universe for me.

    It took me quite long to embrace the ideal of greyness that suggests that there exists murkiness between black and white which isn’t necessarily a wrong as opposed to right/sin as opposed to virtue/falseness as opposed to truth/ or zero as opposed to one. In a way, it made the job trickier because it directly implied that if there is such a thing as a ‘golden rule’ in this mayhem of a universe – a rule that would streamline all its contradictions and bring them into harmony, then there is a possibility that such a rule may exist NOT in the light of its whites but the murkiness of its greys.

    The grey world, I’m beginning to realise, is more like a black hole – As vast as a universe in itself yet invisible to the external eye. Those who enter it, never come out. And somewhere along the way, they lose regard for what’s white/ one/ light/ virtue because it holds no proprietary right on the Golden Rule which is quite fair; only too far from what’s conventional and orthodox.

    The black-hole similitude for the grey world leaves much to say. Signing off for now. Cheers.

  • Where Earth meets the Sky

    Three kilometers into the x-country, i decided it was time to gear up the pace. I looked up at the pacer to my left to check if he was ready for the blast. Raja had just taken his shirt off letting the September sun wash over his sculpted torso, his abdominal muscles gleaming like rippling waves of bronze and his pace perfectly locked with mine with the kind of natural synchronicity that I had doubted before could even exist. In the agony of a race, it was a delight to look at him – his body leaning forward, neck craning slightly ahead of his shoulders and gaze fixated firmly on the dirt ground that rolled beneath us in a flurry – he was strong and steady and didn’t seem like giving up anytime soon. Neither did I.

    Ever since i had discovered him, Raja ran like that. And I have always marveled at his style which is beautiful, child-like and allows him to run fiercely fast. Out of hundreds of people I have run and competed with over the years, he seems to be the only guy who reminds me of Pre. The same lightning quick starts, mid race burnouts and the devil-may-care attitude once the race gun fires. But so long as he is running, there’s no denying the fact that he is a moving, huffing and puffing masterpiece.

    I am a big believer in the fact that where you look at in your run tells a great deal about who you are in life. And if it’s true, Raja, with his eyes always dug into the rolling dirt trail beneath him, in fact, is an earthrunner. Humble, generous, caring and easy to be friends with. I, on the other hand, am a skyrunner. Cocky, cold, private and aloof. And how the two of us can get along so well in a x-country run is a fascinating mystery that I might never be able to solve.

  • Purpose

    While doing a quick round up of the eminent theorists from some major schools of thought in Psychology, Dr. X told me why he thought Viktor E. Frankl’s psychoanalytical system left a “working” space for religion, not just a symbolic, sympathetic one, as you might find with his more popular counterpart, Carl Jung, and his brethren. I was familiar with the growing fascination among boys over Frankl but wasn’t able to read him before. Dr. X’s eloquent synopsis was something that came in handy.

    He said that Frankl’s system was unique in a way that it would begin to treat a patient by stressing him more instead of trying to relieve him of it. And it worked as miraculously as the tenth century Chinese inoculation where they injected the patient with the same virus they wanted to protect him from to immunize him from future viral attacks of the sort. However, the way in which Viktor E. Frankl stressed his patients was surprising. His psychotherapeutic method began with insisting the patient to find a meaning in life, hence his best-seller book, Man’s Search For Meaning (Have you read this book yet? Please do. It’s enlightening!).

    That brings me to my topic. At some point in our lives, we all wonder if there is any purpose to this meticulously elaborate drama of life. We ask ourselves, for example, where do we fit in the grand scheme of universe? What does it mean if we lie on top of major ecological chains as ultimate beneficiaries of all that universe has to offer – why exactly does this universe seem to be at our service? These questions have substance and they demand answers just as substantial. Everything that matters hangs delicately on these questions.

    We, as human beings, have an innate tendency to find our answers – to know the reason of our creation, to shake sense of all that is out there in relation to our own self and its connection with the universe. We are sometimes referred to by the evolutionary scientists as the only intelligent design that inhabits the universe. Of several hundred million different species of Earth and counting, it’s really flattering to know this but it has its downside: we can’t just wake up in the morning and leave to make a living unless we have figured out what is it that we want to live for. Even a jackass is smarter than us in that it just grazes away when it has to and doesn’t really need to grapple with this conundrum.

    During my discussions with people, i have discovered that the very term “purpose” induces great anxiety in most of them and they don’t want to pursue the discussion any further. While they might have their own reasons to do that, the reason I’ve been frankly cited at times is that purpose, in its own cold, calculative and mechanistic manner, tends to kill freedom. And its totally understandable. If you wake up in the dead of the night hungry as a wolf and aim for the fridge with a clear purpose in your head to eat something, you definitely won’t be much amused with a Santa Claus, should you find one, standing in his chariot blocking your way. In fact, you might as well walk right through him! That’s the case with purposes. They block a significant number of exciting possibilities from entering your life. But then, you have to ask yourself what’s more important after all? Finding your destiny or living ‘one hell of a life.’

    The decision, ultimately, rests with you.

  • Void

    When God created us, he left an aching void in us that could only be filled up by His love. Therefore, mankind embarked on a painstaking journey to find Him back and since nobody had actually seen God or knew what He looked like, the only tool they had to identify Him was the love-void inside of them: whatever filled that void up was to be the God!

    As long as His Beauty transcended the reach of their senses, they kept searching for it until they caught a reflection of it somewhere. Every time that happened, the caravan would halt there, closely inspect the thing that’s apparently exuding the Light of God, term it as mere illusion, discard it (or carry it as a relic) and move on. The ancient journey stretches to and continues up until our time.

    Our unconscious mind is a mysterious, intricate web of memories, lived and default. The Promise of Alast عہدِاَلَست is one such default memory that’s not actually lived by our bodies (although our souls were made witness to it in The World of Souls i.e. عالمِ اَرواح), is weak and hazy and lacks objective details like all other memories – but amazingly, it has a surprising capacity to override much stronger memories in order to storm our conscious mind to remind us that we have a Beloved to seek. The dormant yearning, thus catches fire. The torture it brings is familiar to us all.

    Our love-void is like a massive black hole consistently drawing us into anything that resembles God in the least. It could be anything from purity to strength to character to beauty because God alone is the origin of all likable attributes. Even if we encounter a single one of these traits, in the least of degrees, in somebody or something, we might feel immensely attracted to them because of our predisposition to fill up the void in ourselves, and start loving them. We can love them for as long as they stay true to our idea of God. Obviously, none but God fulfills this promise. So there come disappointments and the love eventually fades away with time as we start again to seek His Beauty until we find someone else. Only this time round, we make sure they last longer in the face of our godly ideal.

    People ask if the journey ends somewhere. No, it doesn’t. They’ll keep asking for more. At least, that’s the case with the perfect lover and the perfect Beloved: no one can love Allah more than Muhammad (S.A.W.) did, yet in His last days He used to say, “Forgive me, God, I couldn’t know Thee as I should have.” You see, he yearned for even more of His love.

    Don’t you hate your Nafs ever. It’s something that eventually gets you to your destination. What happens when you place an obstacle in a fast moving river. The water initially stops, gathers around the obstacle and its level begins to rise. The river gains greater strength near the obstacle until it either breaks it apart or sweeps it along. Same goes for Nafs. While attempting to resist our pursuit of Beauty by engaging us in distractions, it only manages to be an obstacle in the course of the free river of Love flowing inside of us. Every time that happens, our river stops for a while, we feel that we are missing something important though we might not know exactly what it is and we may even fall into depression. But ultimately we break away the obstacle and come out stronger and nearer to God in the journey of love. That’s how it goes. Had there been no obstacle, there would have been no progress either, see?

    Last and the most important question: How can you gain His love in this world? There’s a mystic saying about it: there are as many paths to God as there are human souls on earth. However, there are some baby steps that we can take. Read about the people who actually gained His love. Drop your guard for your inner sense of Beauty in order to let it guide you freely. But above and beyond everything else, read Allah. He, of all the beings, knows how do we get to Him and He has made no secret of the Path. The opening chapter of Quran, Surah Fatiha, consists solely of the supplication that addresses this fundamental need of ours: اھدنا الصراط المستقیم i.e. Guide us to the right Path and it seems like, as Dr. Israr says, the whole of Quran that follows, is a divine response to this supplication.

    So it’s definitely well worth a read. But what happens when you first open it? I’ll hopefully write on this later and I’m quite positive you’ll be able to relate!

    ________________________________________________________________________________________

    P.S. This was originally written in response to a host of questions posed by an old fellow who grew up mainly in a liberal atmosphere but felt a growing void and a yearning for the divine inside of her. I just wanted to connect the two using Iqbal, Dr. Israr and Dr. Rafiuddin. Another thing that i had in my mind while writing this, was a casual discussion with a fellow blogger. Please feel free to comment, add, discuss or correct!

  • Seek the Ordinary

    There is a growing frenzy for the ‘extraordinary’ in our world. Appearance has overshadowed the Essence. The god of capitalism is actively creating a parallel universe of false images. Time has quickened its pace and people feel the strain to have to catch up to leave their print. If time were slow or the god of capitalism not fast, people might have some space for the ‘ordinary’ in their lives. Now there just isn’t any.

    God intended beauty and happiness to surround man in His world. The commercial god, however, wants mankind to run after them. In order that people seek what they already have, they should be told that they don’t really have it. The commercial god, therefore, makes use of his ungodly satellites to curse people into believing that certain things are devoid of Beauty and certain actions are devoid of Love. And that love is finite and should be selectively bestowed. And that happiness is the sense of fleeting satisfaction that vanishes as soon as you begin to suspect it’s actually there.

    I see a dismal situation: Denying the true idea of Love and Beauty to the people of a loving and beautiful God creates a mega-vacuum in the society. This vacuum, in turn, drives all the commercial machinery, allowing it to create even more powerful ones. More convincing illusions are created, more people believe them to be true and more lives are lost seeking the non-existent Meaningless.

    People develop a tendency to deny the spirit, deny its exigencies and as a result, there is a growing void in the society that can swallow it up whole. Here, have a glimpse into this void: You see that the corporate culture promotes confidence, boldness and expression. As a result, we are already left with a limited number of shy, quiet and inert people. A time will come when we won’t have any just like we don’t have Caspian tigers, Dodos and Eastern Cougars on our planet anymore. Also, a time will come when digging for the real faces under layers of permanent organic cosmetics will become as impossible as guessing the original contours of a plastically engineered face – thanks to the endless streaming of ‘supposed beauty’ by the ungodly satellites. The worldwide advertisement agency will utilize our left-over originality and plot how to make maximum money out of it. People might move to Mars to get easy land allotments, invent high wattage heat pumps for survival and give birth to Martians.

    Human race is on the verge of extinction, people.

    Lets find our way back to life. As ordinary people, we can not slow down time or stop the god of capitalism. They will stay and they will do what they will. The only thing we can do is to realize that all the beauty and happiness we really need is by our side, breathing delicately in the most ordinary of the books, faces, streets and shores, waiting patiently to be discovered. If ordinary people seek the ‘ordinary’ in their ordinary lives, extra-ordinary things can happen. A belief in that will restore Life on Earth.

     

  • My Guide

    The Sabres were notorious in the college for running a daunting pace in rigid flight-formation at 6 am each morning (except Sundays), and the rule for the freshers was too simple to be misunderstood – lead us and if you stop, you’ll be run over by us.

    I still remember my first cross-country vividly. Merely an eighth grader then, i told my guide that i would literally die if i ran any farther. A strong runner himself, guiding me through the long, snaky track of my first cross-country, he informed me quietly that nobody had ever died running. He was right. I made it. Alive.

    The sophomores were appointed as guides over freshmen in their first year as pre-cadets, and though they retired from this responsibility after a year, i continued to look up to my guide for many years to come. There were many reasons for that. Most important of them all being, unlike most seniors, he would not treat me like a bloody junior. Naturally, when you are away from home and parents and a life that’s normal, at an age as tender as twelve, there is a vacuum inside of you so unfathomably great that it draws you into anyone who is least bit nice to you. This explains why i could not imagine running a cross-country without him. Besides, he had always made the ordeal look so easy. I don’t know if he always ran like that but ever since i started to run with him, he ran at a stride manageable for me to match – strong yet magically peaceful. Running with him always meant finishing at a decent place and saving your lungs some suffering.

    The years kept rolling by and we gained enough seniority to be allowed to run independently from the flight formation. So we often broke off in the start and ran ahead. And so did all the elites of the college. Though our paces had gained greater strength over the years, somehow we still fell short of what was needed to be the top-notch elite. Over these years, i noticed one thing though: running with Azeem had grown increasingly easier – almost effortless. I never told him that though, out of his reverence and besides, there was some kind of comfort in running by his side, so i let the things the way they were running on the track.

    One morning, when i spotted him running in his usual, favorite place – the geometric center of the broken pack, i hastened towards him, matched his stride and fell into the blissful meditative peace that he always carried about himself. That morning, my legs felt like freshly greased hinges, though – too fluid, too runny. A couple of wannabes blasted past us. I felt my adrenaline surging so i asked Azeem if he could pick up the pace a bit. He struggled but didn’t sustain it. Assuming that he did not want to run any faster, I asked if he would like to increase the length of his stride at least. He looked at me, gave me a subtle nod, opened up his legs and soon he was flying. What else could i want! I opened up mine and before long, we were overtaking the elite of the elite. I almost felt like a raven gliding – effortlessly navigating a step behind him through the throng, overwhelmed by the joy of our newly discovered speed.

    The track had a rigid hierarchy firmly established by years of cross-countries which had taken place on it and though upsets kept happening, they were often very small and everybody generally finished where they had been over the years. Now imagine you manage to destroy that revered hierarchy and are being gaped at by boys in total awe. It was euphoric. It didn’t last long, though. Azeem slowed down to a slog, all of a sudden. When I looked at him questioningly, my worst fear materialized: he was grimacing in pain. The only thing he said to me was: keep that pace.

    When I broke off from him, it almost felt like i was betraying the camaraderie of several years. But disobeying him was out of the question. I told myself he had wanted me to do this. So i gained my focus back and ran really hard. That day, for the first time in my life i caught up with Zargham – the most furious runner of the college. Though he sprinted away in the final stretch anyway, having reeled him in from such a lead was some feat!

    Azeem had seen the duel from behind and was really happy about it. He said he always knew i had it in me. I asked him angrily why he had slowed down, and that i couldn’t fathom he too had limits. He laughed and said, all flesh and bones had.

    That day on, he never ran with me.

    But you hear that, Azeem? I call you my guide still!