Writing from the Bus

Monday, 14th June, 1:40 P.M

There will be days when I'll be staring out of my window wondering why the sun loves us so much that it can't stay away for more than half a day. Days when I'll be stuck in a traffic jam and wishing that the sea was a little further away so that Karachi would be a little less humid. Days when I'll wish I lived in the north pole. But those are just some days. All said and done I think Karachi has the kind of weather that people in all other parts of the world crave. A sunny warmth countered by a fresh salty breeze and the perfect golden tinge to the landscape.

Come to think of it, Pakistan as a whole is really a marvelous country. In the high north you'll find people who look like the Chinese; a little lower down you'll find people who look like Europeans; further down and you'll find those who look like Africans and to their left, people who look like Indians and Americans. All of these different races in one tiny dragon-shaped country; all because it's longer than it is wider.

In which other country do you find a city by the sea in Sindh, followed by the vast deserts and dunes of Baluchistan, followed by the lush greenery and fresh air of Punjab and the mild frostiness of N.W.F.P followed by magnificent mountain ranges home to the second largest peak in the world: K2. It is as if this remarkable piece of land holds a pinch of every bit of the world, preserved so far, in it's natural form.

It's struggling under an ugly mask. It is like it's trapped in a room of burning mirrors, forced to gaze unwillingly at the mask that corrodes its face. And every time it finds room to breathe it is pulled back under by those who dig their sharp little heels in its soil. But I don't want it to be a puppet anymore, forced by the rats who sit in its clockwork head to pace underground in frustration. I would rather snip away those threads and kick away the rats and push the dragon out of the cave. Even if there is a chance that it may hurtle to the ground. Because I really think that if it got a chance to spread its wings, it could soar.

Phet and Philosophy

Sunday, 6th June 2010, 12:00 P.M.



I woke up at four thirty today because my alarm clock was screaming and so was my sister. I dragged myself blearily out of bed and out of the room and walked into a world that was black and blue. Beaten black and blue by Mr. Phet to whom Karachi had apparently been the unwillingly hospitable host since three in the night. You could hear the reptilian sounds of dripping water in the distance. I felt like I was standing in an underground cave. And as I scaled the stairs in the darkness with my guttering candle flinging shadows on the wall I felt like a character in one of those Victorian 'penny dreadfuls'. I picked up the first book my hands found in the dark and went out onto the terrace. The place was flooded, ice cold water sloshing around gently, threateningly with a trace pattern of mud. I pulled my feet up on the wicker armchair and, in the vague blue light from the clouds, began to read the book I'd picked up.

Prejudice, that's the word. I'd always been prejudiced against philosophy. I guess it was because my grandmother used to say that if you start thinking about how there's you in your house, your house in a town, your town in a city, your city in a... well you get my drift, then you'll go berserk thinking about the planets in the universe and the universe in the nothingness. And you'll drive yourself mad wondering where it all ends. And who is at the end of it. But then with 'Sophie's World' (yes that's the book I'd picked up), I dove into philosophy and realized that it was really not that convoluted. Socrates (or Plato, or Democritus) must have found himself standing on a metaphorical terrace watching a hypothetical storm rage in the sky turning the weather into perfect misty cold and showering raindrops on the the unfurling blossoms of the trees and he must have realized that there had to be someone directing this whole act. And since nobody could tell him who that was and he was certain that it wasn't Mr. Zeus, Mr. I-want-to-have-sex-with-anybodybutHera coordinating this marvelous scene he had to do the thinking himself. And that's all philosophy is. A sequence of logical deduction to get to the answer of a question.

And that made me realize what our problem is. It's like when you're sitting in the dark and somebody turns on the light and you contentedly resume your work, unaware of where the light came from because you never had to wonder. But if you had been Thomas Edison sitting in the dark you might have racked your brains to invent the light bulb, or if you were Aristotle you might have taken out your telescope and ransacked the skies to find out where the sun is and what it does. Our problem is that somebody else turned on the light for us. It's like we are blind because we never felt the need to see since somebody else was planting the pictures of everything around us in our minds. And we can never be sure if those pictures are the truth because we didn't bother to train ourselves to see. I've noticed that people who convert to a religion are always more attuned to it than people who've been born in a religion. I guess that's because the former consciously discovered what they wanted to believe in. So even though I think my grandmother was right in saying that there are some things that the human intellect cannot comprehend, I think we should still, occasionally, wonder why things are the way they are, even if they're questions we can't answer. Because if we don't we'll never be the Socrates of our generation, we'll be the mob that fed him hemlock.