i'm walking on the edge of my roof, you see....way up there, beyond the clouds. beyond your reach. the normal rules don't apply. there are no rules. except gravity. and i live on the edge. i tip-toe now, moving across the concrete, to gain a better view.

except gravity. lets see where the music takes me tonight...

"there's another world inside of me that you may never see,
there's secrets in this life that I can't hide,
well somewhere in this darkness there's a light that I can't find,
well maybe it's too far away,
or maybe I'm just blind,
maybe I'm just blind...

[...]

i won't tell you a damn thing that I could not tell my friends,
roaming through this darkness, I'm alive but I'm alone,
and part of me is fighting this,
but part of me is gone... "


-'when i'm gone', three doors down.

BEIJING, March 14: China's parliament amended the constitution on Sunday to protect private property, a landmark move in the Communist ideology of the world's most populous nation.

But Premier Wen Jiabao, a populist and cautious reformer, has not forgotten the roots of the party, which was once the vanguard of the proletariat but now tries to be everything to everyone.

More than 99 per cent of 2,896 delegates to the National People's Congress approved Wen's work report - his first since taking office last March - in which he championed workers and peasants. "The Communist Party wants to represent everybody," Chinese political commentator Wu Jiaxiang said.

Five decades after sweeping to power, a period during which private property has been nationalized and campaigns have been waged against landlords, China's parliament amended the constitution to add the clause: "Private property obtained legally is inviolable."

"The artist is one who is full of questions, who cries them out in great angst, who discovers rainbow answers in the darkness, and then rushes to canvas or paper. An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in this world. Along with Plato's divine madness there is also divine discontent, a longing to find the melody in the dischords of chaos, the rhyme in the cacophany, the surprised smile in time of stress or strain. Perhaps the artist longs to sleep well every night, to eat anything without indigestion, to feel no moral qualms, to turn off the television news and make a bologna sandwich after seeing the devastation and death caused by famine and drought and earthquake and flood. But the artist cannot manage this normalcy. Vision keeps breaking through, and must find means of expression."

-Madeliene L'Engle

trickles of red,
carving their way along my hand,
down my finger she falls...

wine. tracing a path to nowhere,
aimlessly, darts left
around the bone.
i can make it dance.
left..then right, up and down the ridges.

stretch. A line...my wrist next,
to be bound in scarlet,
branded.
twist,
turn.

splash. which hit first?
the tear, or the drop? we'll never know -
i'll never learn how to play with your blood.

time shuffles by,
beams of moonlight - unable to penetrate the haze,
orange sodium is our guide,
corner to corner,
street to street,
lost little rabbits, caught in the headlights.

sleep eludes thought,
or thought killed sleep,
who the murderer, who the murdered?

in bed.
alone with their faces, hands, voices,
watching, clawing, baying at the moonlight.
is it the pain that makes you real?

I must be sick...I want to suffer. Not because I want your pity, but because I want some escape...God, from this guilt! If i were them then maybe, maybe I wouldn't feel this way. People are dying for no reason!! theres never been justification for it.....never, ever. not this way.
if i can't help them, God, atleast let me die! anything, something, to rid me of the feeling that I've only got to this life by stepping through the blood of those before.....let it be my blood. How do you escape a fate you have no control over?

I used to be able to skim past it....

Two Iraqis die in Mosul attacks
MOSUL, Feb 22: Two Iraqis were killed and three wounded in separate attacks in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including one against the home of the provincial police chief, the police said on Sunday. ...

Palestinian suicide bomber kills eight
AL QUDS, Feb 22: A Palestinian suicide bomber killed eight people on a crowded bus here on Sunday on the eve of World Court hearings into a controversial barrier Israel says will ensure its security against such attacks. ...

Post-poll clashes claim seven lives
TEHRAN, Feb 22: At least seven people have been killed in southern Iran after sporadic violent clashes followed the announcement of results of Friday's parliamentary elections, reports and officials said on Sunday. ...

Massacre in Uganda
KAMPALA, Feb 22: Ugandan rebels shot and burnt to death 192 people in a camp for displaced civilians in their bloodiest attack in years, a local official said on Sunday. ...

In the matter of a single page of newsprint: 209 dead, 69 injured. I used to be able to read past it. When I was a kid. I'd go straight to the funnies, and delight in Garfield and Bizarro and Ziggy, and then complete the Jumble and feel smart. Then as I grew older I'd start reading the front page...but the numbers, they'd never register. "Eleven dead in Karachi violence." The numbers meant nothing...it was just like it hadn't really happened. Eleven people. Died. Khatam. The End. Never meant a thing to me. I must've seen the blood of thousands of people on those pages. When did people lose their respect for life like that? When did it just become information? Why did they die? Was their rhyme & reason, or was it just 'maktub'....haha. maktub. ways to explain things we don't want to. it was 'their time'. how do you know that, mr.must-lessen-guilt? Maybe it wasn't their time at all. Maybe it was time for one of those seven people in Iran to go back home to a wife and kids. Has the thought ever crossed your mind. It is not OK for people to just die...for no reason at all.

Anger. Resentment. Frustration, above all else. It's understandable that Death is inevitable, but must it be inflicted by Man on Man, must it be suicide? How can you say nothing's wrong when this is happening. Look around you. People are dying. For you. If you can't live for yourself, atleast live for the dead - the lives they never had.
My life is not my own. It belongs to you. And to the dead.

3 weeks ago it must have been, I wrote to blueroses. More and more lately, I find myself re-reading my own words, trying to believe them again. I did it once. Deep down, I still do. But in the here and now....why are people dying?

"
[......]

We should be happy, shouldn't we? I mean look at us...going to these nice, shiny colleges. I'm living the dream. When i get out i'll be a money making machine....except for the tiny, detail that i don't want to be. we never were the content ones...
i don't know..when i started writing this mail i had all these things to say to you. now i'm just drawing a complete blank.
*silence*
don't feel guilty about living your life, br...why? just because you haven't got your chance yet? it's one thing to be miserable about things now, but quite another to consign oneself to being miserable forever. I don't feel guilty about where I am, or who I am. I feel responsibility, yes...tremendous responsibility, but no guilt. hmm..responsibility? to whom? to lots of people, i guess....ami, abu, baji, papa, myself, not least of all. And the kids named Asad dying in a back alley somewhere in the ghettos of karachi who never dream of anything but tomorrows meal.
Someone spoke to me while i was in karachi. she goes to a college in lahore...has this friend who's in college in georgia, but really isn't sure he should be there. "I really don't believe you'll end up doing something you don't want to do for the rest of your life."

life doesn't give us just one chance to do anything....if you want something badly enough, br, you'll do it. you'll sacrifice everything for it...but only if you want it badly enough. we take baby-steps towards our goals......right now even thought is rebellion. belief is outright war against life as we know it. and if you believe, you'll live the life you want to....doing all the little things you can, and waiting for the big things to come. baby-steps.
"wait for the opportune moment."
you get a cookie if you remember where thats from.

I will not change the world today. I will not change it tomorrow. I may never change it....may. But I hope i will....i do not banish the asad ten years down the line who may be in a position to do that to a place in a cell crying about the injustice of life...he will have his time. right now it is my responsibility to him to keep living. somehow. some way.

we walk that fine line....dying, living. you can switch anytime you want, kid...its just a different point of view on this crazy,stupid,constantly amazing thing we call existence.

"Outside the rain fell dark and slow
While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistable pastime
I took a heavenly ride through one silence
I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life"
-Coming Back to Life, PF.

it sounds better in the song...ill make you listen to it sometime. we are not alone, br. Others have walked this road...they've felt this. they survived...somehow...some way. i believe that...i have to, because im not conceited enough to believe that im the only one capable of feeling the way i do.
you'll never be alone.
[...]"


How am I going to survive this?

Why anarchy? Why...anything? Why is anything necessarily 'wrong', asad?

Staring out my car window, on hot, sweaty karachi afternoons. The air conditioner's broken again. I'm staring at the same intersection. Shahrah-e-Faisal, Sindhi Muslim. Carpet Inn. Roma Computers. Khokas. General stores. Motorcycles weave their way through the gaps between cars, like ants threading their way through a particularly difficult piece of terrain. Beggars, showering their blessings on you, and then sometimes rapidly taking them back and damning you to hell if you didn't have that rupee to spare. Fathers telling you about their sick daughters, for whose medicines they have not the money. Apparently. Truth or Lie? Do you dare make the choice?
Staring.
Did you ever feel that maybe, somehow, you could figure it out...maybe it was just something excessively simple staring at you in the face. Did you ever feel the thought slip away just as you thought you'd gotten your mind to twist quite that way?
I have. Every time i passed that particular intersection, incidentally. almost everytime. other times id close my window, id be living my life, not staring, and be too busy to care.

Everytime i wonder if something really is wrong, i think back to Sindhi Muslim and Shahrah-e-Faisal. If everything really is fine, and everything really is meant to be this way, then why did a 13yr old kid who had no right to think life was imperfect keep thinking he saw a truth turn a corner before his mind could get to it?

You cry for those you read about. The sorrow filled, tear stained stories of those lost for stupid, stupid reasons. 9/11? Sure. They were people too. Fathers, mothers, daughters, brothers, lovers, people. They deserve your tears as much as the people you don't cry about dying from starvation in a back alley somewhere. Cry. God knows it's something to cry about...

But I don't. Your tears are enough for the graves of the people whose stories you hear. I'd rather cry for the people who's stories I don't.

"When people run in circles,
It's a very, very mad world."

I hate Sundays.

Why are people patriotic, in this day and age of the self-as-individual? If we live in a society where we exist as individual entities first, and a group second, why do you find people who are willing to die for a place? People willing to give up their lives for their allegiance to a geographical location?

It is only when you live an alien culture that you realize what you were protecting. It isn't a place, and it isn't a government, or a constitution. A patriot is protecting a way of life, a culture, a mode of thinking. The patriot protects that culture from which he was spawned, he protects a way of thinking, the only culture which will provide him real comfort. And hence a patriot is protecting home.

I do not owe my allegiance to Pakistan. I owe it to it's people, in whose arms I find home.

...in the end, its the silence that gets to me. No bus horns blaring. No rickshaws. No motorcycles bereft of silencers. No aza'an. No bustle of activity. No mass of humanity, gently undulating with that sound you can only get when a thousand voices are speaking at once. No beggars showering prayers on you at every intersection, regardless of whether you can spare some change. No telephones ringing away, demanding to be answered. No shouts of "(insert name here) PHONE!!!!!"
Just silence. Walk to your classes. Walk out of your classes. Goto your room. Study, eat, sleep, exchange a few conversations in the middle on everything ranging from philosophy to television, sparking life for a few seconds. Is a place really alive if you can't hear its heartbeat?

Over the sea and far away, I can hear something...

It's too complicated to actually sit and plan out. To even have expectations is an insult both to the fickleness of Fate, and to your intelligence, for not being able realize that. Yet we all do have expectations - of ourselves, and worse, of others.

People change..

You hear that all the time, but what...what does it mean? It means that as you live your life, and people live theirs, slowly but surely tiny imperfections will appear. Paths will diverge ever so slightly. They will converge, too, but once two lines finally meet they have nowhere to grow but apart. It's foolish to think people remain the same since the day you mert them to the day you die. The most you can hope for, particularly in the here and now, is that you will grow together, changing in the same ways, for a while atleast. Hope lives in the fact that we never stop growing...

There is no such thing as unconditional love, I realize. There's always, always something that could make that loves continuing existence impossible. The test of love is how extreme that limit is. What all can you forgive? What can you forget?

I don't even know where this stems from. Thinking of relationships, with people, with places. People - you can't avoid them. Places - you need a home. Everyone needs a home, even if it is a constructed cacoon where reality doesn't exist, and you're forever 17.

I've grown during this trip.

The word 'home' suddenly has a new meaning. It used to be a building, an actual brick and stone structure. Now, though, it has a more immaterial quality. It's a place, and knowing everything about it. It's a culture, and understanding why people believe what they do.
It's crisp winter mornings - where its not quite cold enough to put on a full-fledged sweater, but just right to drape a shawl around yourself. It's being able to call complete strangers 'bhai', and have conversations with them on everything from cricket to politics. It's the hug a man gives another man because they're friends, and theres nothing awkward about that physical touch. It's the shining, shimmering sea, with all those laundas off somewhere in the distance as you find a nice quiet spot to sink your toes into warm sand and just think. Or not think, as you prefer.
Home is in the arms of people. Give me a handful of certain people, and I'll be home anywhere in the world. Be it driving aimlessly through Karachi *trying* to get lost, or sitting on a bed in a flat in London till way too late, just talking, or sipping piping hot tea on a green porch.

Home is comfort, whichever way you find it.

All for now. I land in my current city in half an hour. Home is four months away. The thought - even just the thought - warms me.

Anarchy.

Finally, we come to the issue at hand. Is it the answer, or merely another flawed solution?

Let's see here...

Let's conduct a simple exercise. Ask yourself, when did human civilization begin? 9,000 yrs ago? 10,000, maybe? With agriculture, at any rate, correct? When man started farming is when he became Man...for that is when we truly began to progress.
I'll get back to that term 'progress' in a second.
But back to civilization. I have another question for you, then. What were humans doing for the other 990,000 yrs, then? Sitting around? Staring? Living out primitive lives in wait for one of them to get the bright idea to start cultivating land,
and start us down this path we find ourselves hurtling down? How is it that they survived for 990 thousand years, these 'primitive' creatures...
"Oh I don't know, all I know is that it couldn't possibly be the right way to live. I mean LOOK at them...they lived in
caves."

So here's the thing: people back then lived in a tribal culture. In such culture each individual looked at the self as a 'self-in-group', not as 'self-as-individual'. Not as an individual in a society where the driving aim is to do just that...drive. push yourself. struggle against society rather than live in it....that is a defining feature of the 'self-as-individual' society. Tribal culture rejects that way of thinking of things. Or rather, it simply never occurs to one bred in tribal culture.
That culture, as explained, pertains to each person within it looking as oneself first and foremost as the 'self-in-group'. One has a specific task to perform within the tribe...and one will not rebel against the tribe, for it is because of the tribe that one exists. Without the tribe one would not exist...for there would be no protection. And so one finds one's place within the tribe, and protects the tribe as one would protect oneself. In fact one is protecting oneself, in essence. This, my friends, is called a self-sustaining system.
There are no rules. Why? Because there need be none...people will not work contrary to the purposes of the tribe, for that hurts the tribe...it hurts you. And hence there need be no rules set in stone.

A tangent just for a second...
What is anarchy?
Chaos? Disorder? What does society today tell you it is? It's bad, isn't it? Its fighting against the system...its fighting against order. And order is good...order is healthy. Order is what keeps this society going.
Ah, but that isn't what anarchy is.....anarchy isn't disorder for the sake of disorder, it isn't breaking rules just because they're there...
..its the absence of rules altogether.

Do you see a resemblance here? Tribal Culture.....no formal rules, yet it works perfectly. each individual is an individual second to being a member of the society....and each society is small enough for this to work effectively. Each tribe follows this theme, but each tribe is an individual element within the larger sphere of many tribes. Each tribe has no formal rules, yet the world system as a whole works so long as each tribe follows this system. This system of anarchy, which, strangely enough, works.

Alright, and how do we know that tribal culture works? Simple enough....it still exists. Look at the Aborigines in Australia, at the tribes of people living in the Amazon, in Papua New Guinea. These tribes live in isolation from our world system, this system where we inherently know that something is wrong. Yet they work. Odd, that...isn't it?


And how do we differ from tribal culture, then? Well we're children of the agricultural revolution...the prime driving thought behind which was to produce more than what was needed. Some smart people in the Euphrates valley decided that this was a good idea....and lets just say its snowballed from there. Each tribal culture fell before it, as they could not overcome this drive....this struggling mentality, until only a few were left.
Perform an experiment in your head: There is a population of 5 people. They produce enough food for five people. How many people will there be in this population after a few years?
5.
Now if food production drops to 3 people. How many people will there be after a few years?
3.
And if it increases to 8, even though there are still only 5 people in the population at initialization...
8.
And if one continues to produce more food than that which is required for subsistence? Well then it follows that the population will increase at an exponential rate, does it not? And is not this the prime thought behing wide-scale agriculture: to produce more than that which is needed.
This is why tribal culture fell in the path of this new culture....the Agricultural Revolution bred a new kind of man. One who was not content with what he had, forever wanted more.
Compare our prime values now with what i just said. They haven't changed much.
And we all agree here that something is quite wrong. Quite definitely wrong.

Tribal culture offers us something else, as well. It offers us relief from this flawed axiom that human beings are essentially flawed. This is because it doesn't base itself on struggle...on trying to somehow make ourselves 'better'. Maybe we aren't flawed, essentially? Has this ever occured to you? Or has society been shouting it too loudly for you to ever notice?

And, as we know, our current culture is so deep-rooted in this philosophy that its burnt into our skulls....from the day we're born to the day we die. And as we also know, something is quite wrong with life as we know it.

I will come back to this later. But i donot want you to read this and feel as if something great has been revealed to you. It has not. It will not until you come to these conclusions on your own, through your own independent thought processes. It is all I ask of you. Think.