The ugly truth

For some days I have been thinking of a few interesting scenarios that happened to us as a nation.

Scenario 1:

A few years back there were continuous killings of Shia minority throughout the country. Shias all over Pakistan used to condemn it in general discussions, facebook and staging formal protests. The protests were exactly the “Pakistani way” i.e. burning and destroying valuables private and public property on the way.

The reaction to it was like this:

1.       Liberals condemned it on Facebook. That’s all.

2.       There was a dislike from Barelvis for this targeting but they were silent.

3.       Deobandi/Ahl-e-Hadith kind of people (in general) felt it’s no big deal. Some were even happy with it and openly used to say that Shias should limit their activities to inside their mosques and Imambargahs and not get out of it.

4.       Shias protested against it.

Scenario 2:

Then time changed and military forces started operation against militants all across the country and started killing them.

The reactions followed:

1.       Liberals condemned it on Facebook. That’s all.

2.       Barelvis were silent, sometimes happy with what was going on.

3.       Shias were very happy with that.

4.       Deobandi/Ahl-e-Hadith protested against it and they had “emotions” for those who get killed no matter they were terrorists or not.

Scenario 3:

Then time further changed and Mumtaz Qadri (Barelvi) got hanged following are the reactions:

1.       Liberals were happy and some posted on Facebook to support it. That’s all.

2.       Deobandi/Ahl-e-Hadith were happy. They condemned the protests by Barelvis and one sentence was very commonly used “Allah inko hidayat day”.

3.       Shias have a dislike but they were silent.

4.       Barelvis still protesting on a large scale.

My conclusion of this situation is:

1.       Liberals are kind of losers. They only can write some Facebook posts and they think the responsibility is over. If you start discussing with them they don’t have any in-depth knowledge of what they actually believe.

2.       All the three major sects in Pakistan are bunch of hypocrites. They condemn a thing that happens to them but appreciate it when it happens to someone else.

3.       Specially in case of protests if you are protesting and setting fire to public property you think it’s the right thing to do but when someone else does it then “Allah inko hidayat day”.

4.       People who discuss issues of national interest knows nothing about how much their monthly grocery costs but they will still link everything to the new economic policy set by the USA for getting oil out of Iraq and invading Iran to destabilize the Gulf region and hence approaching towards Saudi Arabia so Pakistan can be destroyed. Well that’s like the typical conversation nowadays.

I would only say “Allah ham sab ko Hidayat day”.

The contemporary get-togethers

When did you last hosted or attended a live BBQ? Hopefully you'll have to think about it to remember when it was the last time. I'm a big fan of gatherings where we do everything ourselves. For example in a live BBQ we do cooking from start to end. When I go hiking with friends we do not take porters with us. Even after a long walk we prepare our camp site, get the food ready, eat it, clean the place and then start playing cards or go to sleep.

Due to busy schedule I have been out of all these activities for quite some time now and I have felt a very disappointing trend in people. You try planning any activity and people will vote for a lunch/dinner at an expensive restaurant. When you reach, following is the sequence of events.

1. After you reach most of the people don't forget to check-in to facebook

2. Order food
3. Take selfies
4. Once the food arrives take pictures of food and post it to fb (without even tasting it)
5. Finish the food and leave

This is happening too much nowadays and it has raised a couple of questions in my mind.

If we are planning a lunch or a dinner together, what is the purpose of it?

Everyone will have their lunch separately if we do not plan a get together. No? We plan a lunch together so we can spend some time together that is fun filled. An activity like cooking food together with friends give you a lot of time to have fun. If you just go to a restaurant, order food, eat food, post on fb then what is the purpose of the gathering?

Also if we start posting about it on fb that means we are ignoring the people sitting around us and talking to some other people who are somewhere else. Then what is the purpose of the get-together?

Why do we post pictures of food?

Food is not a piece of art, it has to be tasted to be praised. Deep in your heart just ask yourself, whenever you are posting food on fb are you not being pompous? Are you not trying to show-off the expensive food?

P.S: I write all of these feelings I have just to provide some food-for-thought.

Things that we lost in between

Today as I was driving back home from office. As I saw traffic increasing on the main highway I took a service road that passes through a nearby residential area just to avoid traffic congestion. I saw a person standing by the road and as I drove past him he asked for a lift. I hesitated and moved forward but thinking that I should have stopped for him because it was a service road and there is a long walk to the nearest public transport facility from there. A few minutes later I was feeling this "guilt" of not stopping for him I saw another person asking for lift. This time even having an urge to stop for that guy something came to my mind and I silently moved on but ashamed of myself.

It's been a few hours since that happened and I'm still thinking about those precious things that we have lost in our lives. I still remember when I was a child I came to my uncle's house in F7. He was going to Super Market (F/6 Markaz) and took me with him. When we reached the main double-road he asked for lift, a car stopped and dropped us at F/6. It was first time I saw this so I asked my uncle what kind of a taxi it was as he didn't ask for any money. He smiled and said "he was my friend so he dropped me here". I was not convinced because I knew that was not the case and we just found that car by chance on the road. Later on I realized that he was like "sab musalman aik dosray k bhae hotay hain (all Muslims are brothers)" kind of friend.

I felt sorry for our nation today. In the past one and half decade of security phobia we have lost many innocent lives but more than that we have lost trust. We are afraid of our own people. We cannot trust even if we want to. We are too scared to offer someone help in certain conditions as we think that might cause us trouble. If we are eyewitness to an incident that involves police involvement we never ever agree to testify it in court as we know we can get killed for that.

Who is responsible for this incredible loss? What made us so mean?

I'm dead sure if I start a survey on this question the result would be as per my previous post "People only see what they want to see". Those who hate Gen Musharraf will blame him for all the happenings. Those who hate Taliban will blame them for everything and those who have a love-and-hate relationship with USA will put all the responsibility on US govt keeping aside the fact that they once applied for US work visa which got rejected. Not to forget the anti-India-cum- pro-pak-army lobby that thinks behind every shortcoming that we have, India and Raw are involved.

And last but not the least the pro-religion fellows who have the same answer to every question "ye deen say doori ka nateeja ha (this is all because of not following religion)". Ok I can agree to that if after saying that you don't start imposing your own flavor of religion on others.

I have thought a lot about it but couldn't finalize my answer to myself. I'm not satisfied with any justification that I came up with. Can someone help me find the answer?

Hajj Stampede Controversy: People only see what they want to see

Today I have yet another thing to share that I observed on Facebook in previous two weeks. The after effects of Hajj stampede controversy can still be felt in our daily conversations but I had an interesting learning from all this. All the facebook community got divided into multiple groups and according to my observation following are the major types of people:

1. People who are strongly anti-Arabs (in general)

2. People who are strongly anti-Saudi Govt i.e. Saud Family
3. People who are strongly anti-wahhabism (school of thought in power in Saudi Arabia)
4. People who are strongly pro-Saudi Govt, pro-Saud family and/or pro-Wahabism
5. People who are strongly anti-Iran (this one is interesting :) )

I want to now summarize views of all mentioned type of people and also provide a suitable justification of how it should be.

  

Type	View	Justification
Type 1 the anti-arabs	Their opinion be like "all Arabs are morally corrupt and their corrupt nature has resulted in this tragedy"	Arabs has nothing to do with anything happening in Hajj, the Sheikhs in Dubai etc does not have any impact on Hajj preparations (I think) as it's not their responsibility in the first place.
Type 2 the anti-Saud Family	They think like "Saud Family has not done their duty which resulted in this tragedy."	First of all Saud family members are rulers they just rule, they are not field workers, they don't manage everything. Yes two things can be blamed on them: If the report of the affected road being blocked for a Saudi prince during Hajj is true then of-course they are culprits but (as of now) it still is unauthentic. May be their intentions (نیت) were corrupted so two incidents happened which resulted in severe criticism on rulers, but if that is the case its between them and Allah. We don't need to be judgmental.
Type 3 the anti-wahhabism	Typical posts are like "these wahabis are ignorant, they are making money of this holy event, they are disrespectful, they are responsible" etc etc	Well ok the rulers of Saudi Arabia belong to a certain school of thought but that doesn't make other people of same school responsible for everything that happens there. Its as simple as 2+2
Type 4 the pro-Saud family	They have posted a lot but overall there are only two things they have. 1.    Some pictures of Saudi police rescuing children and elderly Haaji's 2.    The point of view that these things happen every now and then and its not a deal so we don't need to make an issue out of it	1.  It all happened under their administration and it was their duty and responsibility to rescue people, they were being paid to do that. It's like I'm an IT guy and whenever there is a bug in my code its my responsibility to fix it, I can't claim to be a hero just because I fixed it as I am responsible for the bug in the first place. 2.    YES these things happen in Hajj, hundreds of people die every year but NO this was not normal that 1200 people died in a single incident. Their has to be a blunder somewhere and it needs to be investigated.
Type 5 the anti-Iran	They would blame Iran for every single news that is floating in social media against Saudi Arabia. They would think every news against the Saudi govt is Iran sponsored.	Well ok Iran and Saudi Arabia are rivals and politically they lash each other but if Iran asked for investigations of the incident and criticized Saudi govt officially it doesn't mean every negative news comes from Iran. Iran does not have that much influence on social media, they are still a long way to go in IT advancements because of sanctions by US.

I think even if some of the people I described above may be correct in their opinions there is no need to be one sided as there always are multiple factors involved in incidents of such a big impact. In such situations people want information, they listen to everything but they believe only on things that they like. If something is not according to their opinion they think this is false information and they start floating conspiracy theories then.

To conclude first I would say only if we become a little bit reasonable and try seeing things without our biased lenses things would be better.

Second and most important thing is sense of responsibility. I strongly believe that this could have been handled very easily if Saudi govt could play are leader's role in whatever happened. No matter who is responsible, instead of finger pointing they could have issued a statement saying that "Hazarat Umer (R.A) said if a dog dies at the bank of River Farat it's my responsibility, similarly we as rulers of Hijaz own this tragedy, we apologize and promise to make better arrangements next time". Don't you think this could have solved the problem?

Everything we hear is an opinion not the fact, everything we see is a perception not the truth.

With the rise of social networks we have become very loud and confident in raising our opinions. This obviously has many benefits but at the same time such independence becomes a two-edged sword sometimes. The opinion maker destroys others as well as himself. We often do not care for the quality of information we have about the topics and we start judging others. In other words we give the benefit-of-doubt to ourselves but refuse the same to our opponents.

A typical example from our everyday facebook stream, a few days back I read a post on facebook where the "opnion maker" slammed some of his friends for being "fb scholars" and not researching a topic before sharing their opinions (I will not tag that post here to avoid public ridicule of my friend :)).

He said he had done a little research and has found the facts about the controversy in question. I got interested in his so-called "research" and started reading his facts but I quit reading it in less than a minute because he was also being the same fb-scholar type. What he did was to paste a few biased and opinionated articles from some blogs and claiming that he had done "research".

There was nothing like what is the authenticity of his information etc. If you want to correct someone you need to provide correct "authentic" information. But nowadays everyone get information right or wrong from internet. How do we check if it is correct? We can't travel thousands of miles to actually see what is happening and also we can't have our "authentic" sources everywhere.

Then what is the solution?

Simple,

1. Don't be judgmental, everyone has his own perspective which might not be known to you. Let them have it.
2. Don't take your wishful thinking as facts. You might like to believe in something that looks wrong to others. You don't need to impose it, just live your life with your own beliefs.
3. Don't try to impose your opinions onto others, you are not responsible for the rest of the world.
4. Be respectful
   You have every right to post anything to your social networks but same is the right of others as well. Respect their opinions and they will respect your's
5. Be inspiring
   If you want to look "scholar", be one first. You can't tell the world that you are an expert, it's your continuous excellence of your ideas and your contribution that make the world believe in you. And once people start believing you, you don't need to show off, you already are a shining star.

Words have tremendous power to influence, use them wisely. You can look at the below excellent speech from Toastmaster's 2015 world champion on the power of words.

"Everything we hear is an opinion not the fact, everything we see is a perception not the truth."

P.S: The post is just my opinion, you have every right to agree or disagree. :)

I feel like writing out the jumping bubbles... !

I read somewhere that if you ever feel something that you cannot express it slowly consumes you from inside. That’s why it is important to express your thoughts and psychologists are of the views that if you can’t say it you can still write it to feel better even if you burn it afterwards.

 In my everyday life I’m a very keen observer. I observe my surroundings and later on when I’m in a peaceful state of mind those observations gives birth to small bubbles of thoughts and ideas that keep jumping here and there. These jumping thoughts sometimes divide into multiple pieces and each piece possessing a separate identity. Sometimes they merge to form a bigger one and sometimes they just pop up like they never existed. But even if they pop up and die they deserve to have an identity, they deserve to be remembered in some form negative or positive. That’s the reason I feel like writing them. I’m starting this blog to write everything that comes to my mind and sharing it without the fear of contradiction as if not I may be someone else can benefit.

 Let the bubbles jump everywhere, let them spread their message, let there be light !