the problem really is......i am not a flower whose name most people would know. i am not exotic like the lily or the orchid. people wouldnt like to spend money to take beautiful long dark green stalks on which i ride gloriously with the wind. i am not sure if that's ll taht bad. i do not need to go through the torture of being cut at the knees and then left to silently turn into a leper in absket full of salt water. these humans seem to think that salt burns only on their wounds. who am i to tell them?

if they cant read whats written on every leaf. if they cant read the lines inscribed in each flower and leaf and the veins which carry life...not just nutrition but also the fate of all of us. of them. they have learnt indeed to turn a blind eye.

i know all the uses humans put us to. i just cant help wondering if i am ever to know when i am still in control of my destiny...what it is that i was blesssed this life for. but this is the beauty of life. nobody knows who is pulling the strings on which you ultimately trip to fall. and even if they did. how many of us could change it? the tiger lily really just likes to bask in teh sun. to see its shine mingling with the glow of sun afar. but it is torn apart and looks at the sun only through huge glass houses if it is not thrust into the cloistered offices.

dissapointing pakistan-i

Watching cultural sojourns on discovery is usually an interesting hour spent fruitfully. Or so i believed till about half n hour back. Saira khan’s Pakistan journey was a episode I was really looking forward too. having heard second- hand accounts of how the country was in good and bad ways so much like ours....culturally rich and vibrant with an added subtitle in Urdu on most of the billboards and street markers. I was looking forwards to the all night food market, the spices, the beautiful clothes, the wonderfully embroidered shoes, the beautiful mosques, the confluence of the old and the new, the beautiful valleys, the Sufi gatherings and more that I do not know.
Saira khan is an embodiment of, “angrez chale gaye...inko chod gaye”. She is a thoroughbred brit who reminds me of the feudal accounts of Asia and Africa that were written by Christian missionaries. Only they were not the natives (not usually) and they were largely hence ignorant of the cultural assumptions and practices of the natives. They could be called presumptuous fools who happened to have modern technology but what does one call a native who looks down upon her own culture and people, who shape her very person? Her discovery was no discovery but a journey to affirm what she had already thought Pakistan was. Going to the truck wallah’s roadside tea stall for the sole reason of invoking the glares of the truck drivers to prove that they are feudal can safely be termed feudal. It almost seemed like the report of a journalist trying to convince the world of the poor and denigrate country which needs necessarily to be pitied and funded. Feudal is the Pakistani equivalent for the Indian snake charmers and till the west decides to see better they will remain that.
The condition in Pakistan is perhaps as bad as she records but to show only one side of the culture and that too with a decided and detached superiority is going a bit too far.
Apart from everything else, the show was not particularly engaging because of the disengaged hosta s well as the itinerary. Pakistan is a beautiful place, i personally wish she could have done a better job at capturing that beauty.