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.

There are those, here, there...everywhere, who think. think!! they engage in existential thought, they question the world they live in. they question society, even their own very thoughts, as being a product of said society.
They understand that everything exists in dimensions...there is no such thing as a line of thought. It is a plane, gently undulating, with infinite shapes depending on each way you look at it. Absolute truth does not exist, only absolute thoughts.
What does it mean to say 'absolute thoughts'? It seems easy enough to put it down...it looks all nice and shiny in contrast to absolute truth, but what does it mean? This is the trap of the so-called intelligentsia: re-defining things into new terms so that only people who think the way that you do can understand them. And consequently, to the 'ordinary' mind, you seem superior. you know something they do not. apparently.

Absolute Thought: The existence of thought such that you find yourself in a position where you can see every shape that thought can hold.

It is, therefore, near impossible. yet we strive. Or i strive, at the least. I am not of the intelligentsia. I am not of anything at all.

Yet I am a product of society.

We are all explained, even in our rebellion. It is a belief that we hold that something is wrong. We cannot pin point it sometimes, and sometimes we can. I have my own idea regarding this, which i shall not belabour you with here. We all share this...not just the intelligentsia, or any other class of society, but everyone. Ask anyone, and if they look deep enough inside they will find that the thought that something is wrong resonates within...somewhere. It is true...and if you think for long enough you find that you cannot deny its truth. And when i say ask anyone...i do mean anyone. Even the man with the big house, three cars, loving family. drive him out to an open field..and ask him. and then leave him there.
there is only one answer.
there is something wrong.

And we, the so-called rebels of society, are the only ones who act on our 'gut-feeling'. Or at the very least we strive to articulate it, to bring it to conscious thought in everything we do.

Yet We are products of this society we strive to understand in terms of absolute thought...to understand from every angle, even those which have not been driven into our heads since the day we were born. We are the allowable error. We are the negligible imperfect products of the Culture machine. Every generation must have them. Millions of them, even....and yet negligible.

"There is no proper place: this includes ghettoes and kitchens, and all corresponding systems of the proper place. The politics of a rooms of one's own has to be rethought today, however enlightened it was yesterday. The question is a hard one, surpassing as it does the video game logic of good versus evil, winner and loser, presence and absence: can there be an atopicality of the community that nonetheless gathers, a community going nowhere, but ecstatic, a community of shattered egos, where the control towers come tumbling down, and where the other is genuinely anticipated?"

-Avital Ronell, 'A disappearance of community'

i am not you.

i don't want it...any of it: sex, money, power, ambition...the life. to an extent, even love is tainted.

give me my room. give me my space. a nice little comfortable life....is not going to happen. i realize that now. human beings love borders, edges of spaces. mine is on a roof, somewhere in Karachi. the border between up and down. safe and unsafe. life, and death.

over, and over....i play with the things in my mind. thoughts, ideas...rolling them around, looking at them from different angles. trying to find resonance...

....yeh raat irtiqa chahti he.

something is happening. and this is good, because for a long time nothing was happening. This, however, is different. i can feel something...growing...inside me. im changing, or ive changed and im coming to realize in what ways. whatever it is, it casts a new light on everything i see, hear, touch, feel.
its awareness...heightened awareness of everything around me. im not just seeing anymore, im seeing. Not breathing just to breathe...theres something more.
its growing.
and all of this sounds melodramatic as ever, ofcourse. which makes me question it....makes me think im raising everything past its significance....but i can't help but feel i'm not. judge me at your own peril.
everytime i go out there its new. i experiment, feel my way around. everythings new, and different. its like taking your first steps again...but this time you're aware of what you're doing. The baby isn't aware of the significance of his development, only we are.
again that word...awareness. it keeps popping up.

drifting, drifting....floating..flying....in a sea of new things, new ideas, new interpretations, new people. a new life. somethings going to happen soon.

soon....

...awakening. Irtiqa. A new life. Fresh, yet tainted by everything that has led to this point.

i can feel the gears whirring away, slowly...grinding back into life. I've been away too long. Never again...this is my unique freedom that i'll never ignore again. The freedom of the blank page.

Its sitting there...asking me to paint upon it my picture. so what're we going to play today, old friend?

*sigh*

Awareness...of every minute thing. my mind is beginning to notice the smells, the sounds. i can hear you, feel you, almost touch you. Life, I'm back. It's been a while...of introspection, of nostalgia, of fond remembrance, and stagnation. Never again.