Sometimes there is such a disparity between culture and beliefs that it encumbers you. I wish to go for a conference on recycling in Romania, but the people I grew up with - in fact - the society I grew up in - especially close friends and family, scorn at ideas such as recycling, social responsibility and such.
It is true, my mother did teach us not to throw garbage on the streets. She taught us to try to utilize every blank spot on a piece of paper before moving on to the next one. As a mother and a school teacher, she even taught us to buy those disgusting pink-coloured 'rough copies' which are made from recycled paper in Pakistan. But when we all grew up, most of us preferred to use paper cups and plates instead of reusing porcelain ones.
Studying with a sibling in a foreign university, we often bicker about washing dishes amongst each other and friends after cooking every meal. My kid sisters who are visiting me in Singapore surprise me by the amount of paper they waste, tearing them out one by one just because of an accidental line here and a mistake there.
Awareness is not embedded in our society. It is an acquired attitude. In a corporate environment where a mistake is treated like it is the end of the world, to send out just one letter on behalf of a CEO could require up to 20 pages or even more paper being wasted in the process of rectification. To have a sip of water means wasting an 'expanded polystyrene foam' (Styrofoam) cup, when it could easily be reused while taking care of proper hygiene at the same time.
It is difficult for me to accept these things because I notice and I can not do anything about it. But of course, I am no angel myself. Being a smoker, I have extinguished thousands of cigarette butts and thrown them around unconsciously, not realising these are pieces of foam that are not bio-degradable. While at university, I have made a countless number of reprints when submitting research papers and sundry, in the name of 'presentation', for if I were to edit a printed paper using pen, it would look messy to the professor. But of course, I am able to justify each such instance that reveals my hypocrisy with regards to the cause of recycling and environmental sustainability. Human beings are justifying machines, but we can always try, can we not? That is what they say about following religion anyway, so why not a social cause?
Recycle IN is the first International Conference on recycling organized by AIESEC Timisoara, being held from July 30 to May 6, 2009. Through this conference, this branch of AIESEC in Romania is hoping to inform and educate participants (as well as the Timisoara populace) about issues such as recycling, sustainability and being friendly to the environment. The conference is split into three tracks: Out-of-service Auto Vehicles if you have an interest in the automotive industry, Waste Products to learn about recycling processes for common materials, and Electronics and Appliances for those with an interest in the Physics or History of Electronics and how they are recycled.
The conference application form is very basic and simple to fill, and the fee is just 90 Euros including meals and accommodation for EIGHT days! With that deal one can also save money to visit Serbia or Hungary.
The issue for me now is: how can I wake up this morning and sign up for a conference on recycling when I had dinner in Styrofoam plates and cups just last night?
I may blame society for inhibiting me from taking an active stance against environmentally unfriendly behaviour, but the fact is, I still allow it. It is still within my control. To resolve this disparity between culture and beliefs, I have no choice but to develop a consistent attitude, whether my close friends and family like it or not. I must minimize my hypocrisy with regards to this issue by being more environmentally friendly, whether I sign up for the conference or not. People might think I am rude for pointing out such things, but I can live with that, as long as there is some positive impact. (After all, I am still alive after pointing out facial hair and pimples on women a countless number of times!)
In the end, everyone of us likes to believe that we are good human beings (despite all the nasty and selfish things that we know we have done). So why not be proactive and assertive as we adopt better attitudes to become better human beings? The world is our stage and we are the actors, but when will we actually start doing something?
Ruminations of an 'artist' of 'sorts'
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Hold Me?
Standing face to face, Enemies at war we build defences, And secret hiding places...
More than angry words I hate this silence, It's getting so loud, Well I want to scream, But bitterness has silenced these emotions, It's getting hard to breathe....
I'm willing to do anything, To calm the storm in my heart. I've never been the praying kind, But lately I've been down upon my knees. Not looking for a miracle, Just a reason to believe....
Now we don't live we exist, We just run through our lives; So alone....
Friday, June 19, 2009
Remaking Women
I absolutely must must MUST get hold of this book and read it - whatever the cost may be!
(Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East - Lila Abu Lughod; Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History)
In fact, this is not the only book on this topic that I want to read - there are so many others...
(Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East - Lila Abu Lughod; Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History)
In fact, this is not the only book on this topic that I want to read - there are so many others...
Monday, June 15, 2009
Judgments of Food and Finances Influence Preferences for Potential Partners
Cultural psychology can be roughly understood as the combination of two theoretical perspectives—first, that people are very different in different cultures, and second, that some attributes are culturally universal (Fiske et al., 1998).
In the broader quest to determine which aspects of culture are universal and which are relative, one must look beyond specific norms and practices to the underlying processes that produced them.
(Portions of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, Texas, February 2001, and at the annual meeting of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, November 2003.)
Monday, June 8, 2009
We Will Not Go Down (Song for Gaza)
We Will Not Go Down (Gaza) by Michael Heart
Download now or listen on posterous
we_will_not_go_down_6502.mp3 (4382 KB) Download now or listen on posterous
(Composed by Michael Heart)
Copyright 2009
A blinding flash of white light
Lit up the sky over Gaza tonight
People running for cover
Not knowing whether they’re dead or alive
They came with their tanks and their planes
With ravaging fiery flames
And nothing remains
Just a voice rising up in the smoky haze
We will not go down
In the night, without a fight
You can burn up our mosques and our homes and our schools
But our spirit will never die
We will not go down
In Gaza tonight
Women and children alike
Murdered and massacred night after night
While the so-called leaders of countries afar
Debated on who’s wrong or right
But their powerless words were in vain
And the bombs fell down like acid rain
But through the tears and the blood and the pain
You can still hear that voice through the smoky haze
We will not go down
In the night, without a fight
You can burn up our mosques and our homes and our schools
But our spirit will never die
We will not go down
In Gaza tonight
All Music and Content Copyrighted. All rights reserved. © 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Obliterated History
May 10, 2009 passed without any official or unofficial event in Pakistan to remember that historic day of May 10, 1857 when a last, ill-planned, and fatal attempt was made to get rid of the overweening English traders who were becoming de facto rulers of the vast subcontinent. What began on that Sunday morning in the town of Meerut would be later called "Ghadar" (Mutiny), "the Great Rebellion", "the Indian Mutiny", "the Revolt of 1857", "the Uprising of 1857", the "Sepoy Mutiny" by those who wrote its history for the colonized people of India and inserted this appellation in the textbooks which were to be used for generations.
When we went to school, we read about the "Ghadar" and Sayyid Ahmad Khan's account of the "Reasons for Ghadar". The appellation may have now changed to "India's First War of Independence", but there is certainly very little public discourse on the larger and long-term changes which followed that historic day.
Crushed with brutal force, this last armed resistance against the occupation of India came to an end on June 20, 1858, when Gwalior fell. A reign of terror followed. Men were tied to the mouths of cannons and blown to pieces, as Richard Holmes has vividly described in his 2005 book, Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750-1914. A note from General Montgomery to Captain Hudson, "the butcher of Delhi" exposes how the British military high command approved cold-blooded massacre of general populace of Delhi, reminiscent of Halagu Khan's massacre of the residents of Baghdad in 1258: "All honour to you for catching the king and slaying his sons. I hope you will bag many more!"
A policy of "no prisoners" was adopted, whole villages were wiped out on the flimsiest rumours of sympathy for the local soldiers.
An estimated ten million Indians lost their lives, as Amaresh Misra describes in his two volume work, War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, published in 2008. Back in England, the accounts of atrocities of the British "Army of Retribution" were generally considered justified in the wake of exaggerated press accounts of Indian "savagery" against the "Europeans and Christians". During a year of terror that followed the events of May 1857, and for a long time to come, India went through a gigantic transformation which must be considered as one of the largest and most cruel experiment in social reengineering in modern history.
First the Company and later the British Crown, through its representative in India, the Viceroy, attempted to remake India in their own image. A society that had lived in a certain manner for centuries was remodelled from ground up. Memoirs, chronicles, letters, and personal accounts of the time describe cataclysmic events. "My dear sir," wrote Mirza Ghalib to Nawab Anwar al-Dawla, "what shall I say about the destruction of houses and mosques! The builder of the city might not have exerted so much planned effort for building them as the owners of the country [meaning the English] have for their destruction. My! my! Almost all buildings from the times of Shah Jahan within the walls of the fort and most of these in the city were demolished painstakingly and where picks and shovels and other tools did not suffice, tunnels were made and explosives were used to demolish them."
Aristocratic families of old were ruined, thousands were killed, imprisoned, or sent into exile, a whole new administrative was imposed, and new institutions were implanted which changed everything in the vast subcontinent--from the judiciary to education. The ill-fated effort also led to the insertion of the Jewel that India was, into the Crown of the British monarch, thus conveniently shifting the exploitation of Indian resources and people from the control a trading company that had come begging for concessions from the then mighty Mughals to the British monarch.
Ninety years later, when the British finally left the Indian subcontinent, they had produced so many brown sahibs that there was no further need for their physical presence; now they could achieve what they wanted remotely, although now they had to share their profits with a newly emerged tyrannical power. This shift would be so drastic that all previous history will be quickly obliterated to make room for an entirely different public discourse.
People who lose their history, simultaneously lose their future. We are such a people. Any attempt to reclaim history is simultaneously an attempt to reclaim future. Yet, it is neither the details the armed resistance against the occupiers nor the heart-wrenching accounts of those who were blown to pieces which make this attempt meaningful; it is in understanding the present in the light of the past that makes this act of recall a meaningful process of reconstruction and reassertion. Those who refuse to see their present in the light of their past, have no understanding of the extent of transformation Pakistan is now undergoing. They cannot imagine the new history of our people which will be written fifty years from now. That history will transfigure not only the May 1857, but also May 2009.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Quantum Note
by Dr Muzaffar Iqbal
Email: quantumnotes@gmail.com
When we went to school, we read about the "Ghadar" and Sayyid Ahmad Khan's account of the "Reasons for Ghadar". The appellation may have now changed to "India's First War of Independence", but there is certainly very little public discourse on the larger and long-term changes which followed that historic day.
Crushed with brutal force, this last armed resistance against the occupation of India came to an end on June 20, 1858, when Gwalior fell. A reign of terror followed. Men were tied to the mouths of cannons and blown to pieces, as Richard Holmes has vividly described in his 2005 book, Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750-1914. A note from General Montgomery to Captain Hudson, "the butcher of Delhi" exposes how the British military high command approved cold-blooded massacre of general populace of Delhi, reminiscent of Halagu Khan's massacre of the residents of Baghdad in 1258: "All honour to you for catching the king and slaying his sons. I hope you will bag many more!"
A policy of "no prisoners" was adopted, whole villages were wiped out on the flimsiest rumours of sympathy for the local soldiers.
An estimated ten million Indians lost their lives, as Amaresh Misra describes in his two volume work, War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, published in 2008. Back in England, the accounts of atrocities of the British "Army of Retribution" were generally considered justified in the wake of exaggerated press accounts of Indian "savagery" against the "Europeans and Christians". During a year of terror that followed the events of May 1857, and for a long time to come, India went through a gigantic transformation which must be considered as one of the largest and most cruel experiment in social reengineering in modern history.
First the Company and later the British Crown, through its representative in India, the Viceroy, attempted to remake India in their own image. A society that had lived in a certain manner for centuries was remodelled from ground up. Memoirs, chronicles, letters, and personal accounts of the time describe cataclysmic events. "My dear sir," wrote Mirza Ghalib to Nawab Anwar al-Dawla, "what shall I say about the destruction of houses and mosques! The builder of the city might not have exerted so much planned effort for building them as the owners of the country [meaning the English] have for their destruction. My! my! Almost all buildings from the times of Shah Jahan within the walls of the fort and most of these in the city were demolished painstakingly and where picks and shovels and other tools did not suffice, tunnels were made and explosives were used to demolish them."
Aristocratic families of old were ruined, thousands were killed, imprisoned, or sent into exile, a whole new administrative was imposed, and new institutions were implanted which changed everything in the vast subcontinent--from the judiciary to education. The ill-fated effort also led to the insertion of the Jewel that India was, into the Crown of the British monarch, thus conveniently shifting the exploitation of Indian resources and people from the control a trading company that had come begging for concessions from the then mighty Mughals to the British monarch.
Ninety years later, when the British finally left the Indian subcontinent, they had produced so many brown sahibs that there was no further need for their physical presence; now they could achieve what they wanted remotely, although now they had to share their profits with a newly emerged tyrannical power. This shift would be so drastic that all previous history will be quickly obliterated to make room for an entirely different public discourse.
People who lose their history, simultaneously lose their future. We are such a people. Any attempt to reclaim history is simultaneously an attempt to reclaim future. Yet, it is neither the details the armed resistance against the occupiers nor the heart-wrenching accounts of those who were blown to pieces which make this attempt meaningful; it is in understanding the present in the light of the past that makes this act of recall a meaningful process of reconstruction and reassertion. Those who refuse to see their present in the light of their past, have no understanding of the extent of transformation Pakistan is now undergoing. They cannot imagine the new history of our people which will be written fifty years from now. That history will transfigure not only the May 1857, but also May 2009.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Quantum Note
by Dr Muzaffar Iqbal
Email: quantumnotes@gmail.com
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