The country has gone nuts, and I haven’t updated my blog. What can I do? The protests, the arrests of instructors and fellow students, the assassination, the whole bloody confusion of living in Pakistan…how can anyone convey what’s happening inside their heads?There are five main points that must be in a certain happening in order to call it an experience…immersion of self, continual harmony of the spiritual and the material, negation of the self, perception of reality…and the last and most important, inconveyability of the experience. I cannot draw a neat parallel here, because my thoughts are obviously not as high-flown as that of the Sufis and the Prophets (PBUT), but everything just seems to bind together in these five main points. But I can never convey my thoughts in a neat and logical manner whenever I’m feeling something with intensity. Don’t know whether this makes all the rubbish that’s being made of my country an experience for me, but maybe it’s extreme form of a downside experience, whereas what the Sufi tradition meant to convey by these five points were the spiritual experiences of the Prophets. Let’s leave politics then, if we can, because the more awareness I gain of the systems governing this world, the more depressed and stagnant I become. My fault, for taking subjects like I have. My mind is conflicted and afflicted and restricted and expanded all at once. In one course I’m all into the Sufiist tradition and the Urdu poets—Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz, no less—and I’m just about at an ecstatic pint in class. In another course, the harsh realities of the modern world, the way those white skins changed the map of the world and reduced, yes, reduced us and the rest of the world to what we are today; not to mention the idiotic excesses and greed that festered in our beloved old rulers. It’s like you can’t even do anything about it; East is East, West is West, even though the world is supposed to be a globe. Mass consumerism will continue to feed upon the natural resources at a parasitic and unnatural pace, and nothing will be done about it, because all the after-effects are for the third-world countries. And in order to leave the status of a third-world country, you have to give up all your values and beliefs and become…the others. Maybe this is why I can’t stop watching the seasons of ‘Lost’, because just now I begin to understand that the others want you to imbibe their beliefs and do what they want you to do…simple really, it’s just the system of the whole world, only they’re all isolated on what they think is a remote, uninhabited island. The series is expected to end in 2010, the same year I would hopefully graduate. Till then, I will continue watching it and try to make sense of what going on in that world and this one.
