Lessons from the simple steps
With my right hand first
I open the door to the room where my woman gave birth
To my first born son
Only minutes before
I was in the waiting room, nervous
Moms giving me comfort
Family support
As I approached I could hear him crying
I didn’t notice
That my tears were running
Pictured myself for a moment in the arms of my father
Flashback to the bended shoulders
On which I’d sit
Grabbing his finger
Taking my first step
Would I become like him?
After a certain age bottle up
Stop showing love
But cold handshakes throughout the years
Replaced by hugs
Father whispered in his ears
The family was gathered
Pictures were taken
My hands still shaking
My joy was beyond words
Him in my arms
3 generations of tears running so calm
He came with Gods blessing and grace so we named him Faizan.
As I drive through the half-deserted streets of Manama at 5.30am after one of those difficult nights, listening to a man sing about the deeply personal experience of becoming a father. I can't help but notice things around me.
There's something magical and mysterious about fog, everything seems to be draped in it and things take on a different appearance. The mosque's minaret, shrouded in fog, its lights a beacon to those lost in the fog of life, its morning call to prayer an alarm to those asleep to the Message of Islam. It draws men from all sides, cars parked around it, even at 5.30am, wanting to perform the morning prayer and greet the day inside its holy walls.
An Indian couple, walking along a reasonably wide street but with no real footpath, walking slowly, not in a hurry, deep in conversation, he - dressed in simple slacks and a white shirt, she - wearing a yellow salwar kameez, walking along on a deserted residential street at 5.30am. What does he do here in Bahrain? A menial job to earn menial pay, being treated like dirt by most members of this society, far away from home. Is it of comfort to him, to have his wife by his side at 5.30am on this deserted street? Are they greeting the day together, whatever it may bring?
As I pull up outside my apartment and get ready to get some sleep before another day in the office. I can't help but wonder where is my beacon? My call? My sidewalk partner? Don't get me wrong, I'm in no urgency to find these things, this is not a quarter-life crisis... yet... but I can't help but wonder what new things await. This has certainly been a time of change in my life, nothing momentous has happened but I feel I have changed immeasurably. But in the words of Outlandish, "Looking back on my life, No regret only the sweet journey"... I do hope those words ring true for the rest of it.
Looking back on my life
Life that’s gladly been given to me
Open my eyes and embrace the smile
Given to you & I
Looking back on my life
No regret only the sweet journey
Lessons from the simple steps
Taking by you & I
Labels: bahrain, life, people
Top 10 Books read in 2007: Second 5
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
Published in 1939, this classic Depression-era masterpiece by Steinbeck helped him win both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes.
It focuses on the Depression-era farmers of Oklahama State that are being ravaged by a combination of the Dust Bowl drought that hit the USA at the time, and the mechanization of agriculture putting many farmers out of work. The family in the centre of the story, the Joads, decides, like many other "Okies" that they want to travel to California... encouraged by a massive amount of propaganda that life there is somehow perfect and amazing.
The way Steinbeck so slowly and methodically, with many heart-wrenching plot points in the middle that point to what is going to happen, turns their dreams to absolute disaster is indeed something special. I also enjoy his two-page ideology bashing chapters where he harps on about the ills of capitalism and the need for a collective solution, one can't help but want to enlist in the local socialist party branch straight away... or go to an Obama rally.
All in all a fantastic piece of leftist literature, an excellent story, and very good to read some blatant social commentary that is bashing you over the head with ideology only just enough... while still being moderately subtle for the most part. Far better than socialist non-fiction.
George Orwell - Animal Farm
Orwell's Animal Farm is considered to be one of two classic novels written by him, the other being
nineteen eighty-four, of course. I personally think
nineteen eighty-four is the better book but that doesn't make Animal Farm any less cool.
Unlike
Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm is ridiculously blatant when it comes to putting its point across. It is a satirical allegory of Soviet totalitarianism, put across as a farmhouse named 'Animal Farm' which undergoes a revolution resulting in the animals taking control. The different social classes among the animals and the different roles they play in conducting and maintaining this revolution is really quite hilarious. It was very enjoyable reading it and imagining what specific aspects/figures of Russo-Soviet history it was referring to.
While it would be very tempting, should I have a copy on hand, to type out large swathes of text and then laugh at them, as the allegory of Stalin being a despotic pig named "Napoleon" is really rather amusing. I shall resist from doing this and just say that it's a short novel, and well worth a read, especially for the historically inclined.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Chronicle of a Death Foretold
The story of the murder of Santiago Nasar by the two Vicario brothers is told in almost a similar fashion to a journalistic reconstruction of a murder through the interviews and recollections of several citizens of town in which it took place.
The book is an interesting variation on Marquez' usual magic realism style as the magic seems to permeate the story in a way, rather than be confined to certain events and happenings as in some of his past novels. In this case, the entire town seems to have anticipated Santiago's murder and the feeling that they are somehow complicit in the events that occurred in the lead-up and execution of it is very heavy in the way they tell their stories.
From a philosophical point of view, it is interesting how Marquez' depicts an entire town so affected by the death of one man. It seems to point to the fact that we, in life, are always somehow consumed by the idea of death: the anticipation of it, the dealing with it, the memory of it.
All in all a very interesting short novel from another Nobel prize winner. If you enjoyed
Love in the Time of Cholera or
One Hundred Years of Solitude then you should definitely check this one out too.
Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns
There is very little I can actually say by way of review or recollection for this novel. It didn't espouse any particular philosophy or ideology, or work in any interesting or unique literary style. The language was fairly simple throughout and its certainly not going to win any literary prizes but...
It was very good. And by virtue of the fact that it was so simple, and communicated the emotions of the moments encaptured within it very well. I think this is part of the key to Hosseini's runaway success with both this book and the last,
The Kite Runner, he is very good at making people cry.
The second part of the key to his success lies in his choice of subject matter and theatre for his stories, Afghanistan. There is a huge fascination all over the world, at the moment, with this country. Seemingly bombed back to the Stone Age by Bush after 9/11, in the early 21st century, it has once again entered people's consciousness, but this time as an exotic, Eastern location shrouded in mystery, Islam and tragedy. All a very good recipe for selling novels.
Luckily for Hosseini, his stories are intricate, interesting, evocative, dramatic and very much engrossing. It's easy to finish one of his books in a few days because they really are tough to put down. Good, simple story-telling.
Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies
This was probably the last book I read in 2007 but it was easily one of the best, and one that really affected me for some reason. This was Lahiri's first book and she managed to win the Pulitzer Prize with it, thats pretty special.
The thing I love most about Jhumpa's writing is that it's not complex, but it's not simple. Her modes of expression are simple, she doesn't use complicated words and phrasing to get her point across, however her stories always intricately put together and are always somehow different. The way she puts across the experiences and emotions of her subjects in seemingly every-day situations is really something else. There is something deep and human about the way she writes and it really touches people.
This particular collection of short stories deals with the lives of Indians living abroad and at home, Bengalis primarily, and includes a large number of different topics... however all of them seemingly typical of Indians, Bengalis, foreigners and feeling like a foreigner.
The best set of short stories I've read since Chekhov, I thoroughly, thoroughly recommend this one. It's a gem and I prefer it to her better known
Namesake.
And with that my literary recollections of what I read in 2007 comes to an end. Hopefully 2008 will open even more doors for me in this department. :)
Labels: literature
Dubai ticking time bomb
Thanks to my man
Tom, formerly of Zemalek-Cairo fame, soon to be of Abu Dhabi fame, for providing these links and prompting this blogpost.
A very interesting viewpoint aka.
leftist/socialist take on the phenomenon that is Dubai.
While the Dubai piece is certainly far from unbiased, and it does lampoon Sheikh Maktoum's gigantic ambitions fairly cleverly, it does also bring up some very interesting points about Dubai's history, srategy, laws and class society.
Historically, the article talks a great deal about Dubai's very humble beginnings, and how, interestingly, it has used many underworld links to ensure the security that it currently enjoys.
Dubai now enjoys high marks from Washington as a partner in the War on Terror and, in particular, as a base for spying on Iran; [26] but it is probable that al-Maktoum, like the other Emirati rulers, still keeps a channel open to radical Islamists. If al-Qaeda so desired, for example, it could presumably turn the Burj Al-Arab and Dubai’s other soaring landmarks into so many towering infernos. Yet so far Dubai is one of the few cities in the region to have entirely avoided car-bombings and attacks on Western tourists: eloquent testament, one might suppose, to the city-state’s continuing role as a money laundry and upscale hideout, like Tangiers in the 1940s or Macao in the 1960s. Dubai’s burgeoning black economy is its insurance policy against the car-bombers and airplane hijackers.
The article also points out how, rather obviously, how much the Gulf economies are reliant on positive fluctuations in the oil price, and how these fluctuations come about:
Every time insurgents blow up a pipeline in the Niger Delta, a martyr drives his truck bomb into a Riyadh housing complex, or Washington and Tel Aviv rattle their sabres at Tehran, the price of oil (and thus Dubai’s ultimate income) increases by some increment of anxiety in the all-important futures market. The Gulf economies, in other words, are now capitalized not just on oil production, but also on the fear of its disruption.
The article also makes a very interesting point of the current guest worker situation, that is of course applicable to all the other Gulf states (though not quite so much as Dubai with its ridiculously tiny single-digit local population).
The unruly voice of labour echoes louder in the deserts of the uae than it might elsewhere. At the end of the day, Dubai is capitalized just as much on cheap labour as it is on expensive oil, and the Maktoums, like their cousins in the other emirates, are exquisitely aware that they reign over a kingdom built on the backs of a South Asian workforce.
The question on everyone's lips of course, is how sustainable this strategy is exactly. Perhaps because the article was published in October of 2006, it fails to mention the impact that the falling value of the US Dollar is currently having on worker morale in the Gulf. If we look simply at the state of the US economy, and the concurrently nosediving interest rates (down 0.75 percentage points last month, and another 0.5 a week later), the picture for the US currency sure looks bleak indeed. Which also means that the outlook for those of us earning Bahraini Dinar, Saudi Rial, Emirati Dirham, or any of the other Gulf currencies pegged to the USD is similarly not good. Particularly for those that are earning these wages in ridiculously tiny amounts, all on the premise of being able to send some home to South/South-East Asia. Now when these currencies begin to depreciate at a great rate to the Indian Rupee and other South/South-East Asian currencies, the trouble begins. Working conditions have not improved, wages have not appreciated in nominal terms and are depreciating now when stacked up in real terms against the wages they are meant to supplicate in the workers' home countries. Combine this with the already simmering discontent of being treated like slaves with no rights to mobilisation, let alone collective bargaining, and you really have a problem. It does indeed seem that, at least in this respect, the Gulf is a ticking time bomb. Food for thought, and we thought sectarian unrest or a strike against Iran were the problems, this seems to be the least of our worries.
..
Labels: bahrain, dubai, politics, world happenings
Top 10 Books read in 2007: First 5
I managed to read 32 books in 2007 and I'd like to somehow wrap them up, so I figured a Top 10 list might be in order (I was aiming for Top 5 actually but just couldn't make the necessary cuts) to help process my thoughts on at least some of them and reflect over which of them had the most impact. So here goes, in chronological order read:
Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss
This novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 and I read it while I was in Singapore at the start of 2007. The novel deals with a number of different issues, in particular, the changing face of rural North India (set in a remote hill station in the Himalayan foothills) and the alienation that goes with migration to the west. The main protagonists are a small family, at the head of which is a retired judge, Mr. Patel, who's relationship with his granddaughter, Sai, is the focus of much of the storyline. The parallel storyline follows the son, Biju, of Mr. Patel's cook who is trying to make a living as an illegal immigrant in New York.
The musings are deep and interesting as they follow the alienation felt by the older generation of India, especially those more favoured under the British Raj, and the comparison between the crushing weight of expectations felt by poor migrants from India trying to eke out a living abroad and the realities of eking out this living. The novel also deals with the Nepalese insurgency at the time and the impact it had on the local population.
Albert Hourani - A History of the Arab Peoples
The late Hourani's tour de force history book that chronicles the history of the Arabs from the birth, and subsequent rise, of Islam up until the late 20th century (Hourani died in 1993). An absolutely essential read for anyone wanting to understand the history of one of history's most influential races, and most disputed and important regions of the world. One of the more interesting aspects of Hourani's book is the focus that he gives to explaining the rise and fall of many of the most prominent empires (Ummayad, Abbasid, Ottoman, etc.) and doctrines (Arab nationalism, Salafism, Ba'athism, Islamism, etc.). This makes the book useful and interesting not only in terms of historical information but also as an intellectual study into many of the forces contributing to the state of the Modern Middle East.
Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This pseudo-philosophical novel is Pirsig's exploration of, what he terms, the metaphysical aspects of Quality. The book is part a philosophical journey through the thoughts and research of a ficititious protagonist (under the pseudonym Phaedrus). The philosophical musings themselves are far too complex to condense in this shurt blurb discussing the novel but it is a very valuable read. Indeed, it has sold millions of copies in many languages and is considered to be the "most widely read philosophy book, ever". Pirsig's writing and philosophy are heavily influenced by Eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Vedantism, but his outlook is heavily imbued with the rationalist/logical traditions of the West. As a result, Pirsig often employs both Western (often Greek) and Eastern (mostly Buddhist) philosophy to underpin many of the concepts he writes about. Another classic and another must-read for anyone grappling with the concepts of God and/or meaning/purpose to life.
Albert Camus - The Outsider
It's quite incredible that it took me so long to read this book, however I am absolutely glad that I did because reading it later in my life, I feel I have a better chance at understanding it better. The Outsider is the best known piece of absurdist literature, and is commonly attributed to the greater body of existentialist literature (though Camus fervently denied belonging to the existentialist community and preferred to consider absurdism as a separate line of thought).
The novel focuses on the protagonist Mersault, who is moved primarily by sensory influences on his person, and who's approach to life is extremely passive. The first part of the book examines Mersault's simple life and reactions to the event of his mother's passing. The second half focuses on Mersault's killing of an Arab and the subsequent process of trial, imprisonment and execution and the thinking that Mersault does during this process.
For such a small book, it deals with many complex and interesting philosophical themes. One being the absurdity of society in the way that it deals with issues of life and death - the court proceedings focusing more on Mersault's reactions to the death of his mother (not deemed normal by society as he wasn't very grieving) and his choice of sticking to aetheism rather than turning to (or even pretending to turn to) religion in his final days. This seems to be at odds with the concepts of Justice and Truth, as it is entirely a moral judgment placed on a man by society without examining the issue at hand (the murder itself).
Another theme being the key existentialist point of view that Man is responsible for his destiny and not God or Fate, and that the universe is entirely indifferent to Man's plight, indicating that there is no per-ordained meaning to life. This is not a nhillistic view, Camus is trying to indicate that it is Man's responsibility to create meaning in life for himself, rather than rely on a pre-ordained religious doctrine or philosophy.
EM Forster - A Passage to India
Written in 1924, A Passage to India is set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movements that were gathering traction at the time. It centers around a few key characters, namely the "mercurial" (as he is described on the blurb) Dr. Aziz, an Indian Muslim, Adela, Fielding and Mrs. Moore.
The main plot of the novel focuses around a key event that is thought to have occurred somewhere in the Malabar caves, though the event itself is never described in the book. Adela accuses Aziz of rape and the ensuing process of arrest and trial brings out many underlying forces of ethnic tension, prejudice and racism between the indiginous Indians and British colonialists.
For me personally, one of the most interesting things about this novel is not how the ethnic tension affects the plot itself but how it affects the relationships of the characters. Fielding and Moore, for example, are sympathisers to the Indian cause, however both leave India very bitter. Adela, is a typical product of ingrained prejudice, she has nothing against Indians personally but lives in a culture of perpetual hatred and disdain and can't help being a party to it, at least for part of the book. She is, however, aware enough to question this eventually and that has a considerable effect on the outcome of the novel. The relationship between Fielding and Aziz, in particular, is an interesting one... even though Fielding is pro-Indian, it seems the gulf between the two nations is too wide for a friendship between the two to blossom in the end.
The novel has been named one of the greatest of the 20th century, and it's easy to see why. It has a very interesting plot, is beautifully written and addresses a very important issue dexterously and from many angles. Hats off to Forster for that one.
OK so those are my first 5 of my Top 10 of 2007. I will put up my next 5 later... if anyone's read any of these and would like to comment, please be my guest.
Labels: literature
