I'm climbing a spiral staircase and not hoping to turn again...

Monday, June 19, 2006

No peace of mind...

No peace at all these days…I guess I should give up looking for that in my life. Look at it…more than a week of the blessed summer vacations have gone by and I haven’t updated my blog. My sweet lil cousins are still hell bent on reducing my eardrums to ashes by the end of their ten-day stay…when they’re not at their gaming arcades (don’t they have these in Karachi?), they’re on their Playstation, or the laptop, where all their computer games are…or were, until I uninstalled all of them-I don’t trust these kids, they’re wild, unpredictable, spoilt and they don’t care abt other ppl’s stuff. Actually, that could be said about a lot of people I know… So what do I wriiitteeee???? I’m doing nothing special these days, just exercising to loosen myself up after abt three months of studying…man, I’d turned into a veritable bed potato…a studying potato, but a potato nevertheless. I’m also FINALY reading Moth Smoke, the ‘in’ book that everyone’s supposedly crazy about…and it’s depressing me like hell. You read Kamila Shamsie, you get the elite Karachi; you read Mohsin Hamid, you get the elite of Lahore…drinking like they weren’t Muslims at all, doing drugs, no life, no thoughts…they’re written brilliantly, but is that all there is to it? Are the upper classes just that? It makes you feel like there’s no hope for this country at all, and maybe there isn’t… I love my country, but not its people, not their actions. The culture-yes. The drugs, the Westernisation-no. where actual Muslims think you’re showing off if you pray, if you fast…where the elite, the most influential ppl are the most useless and the most dangerous. And there’s no hope at all, except what’s inside you, and even that is attacked everyday by everything. Books like Moth Smoke. Bribery, so unashamedly linked with the police. The newspapers, which say again and again that we are a ‘failed state’…is that really true? That there are still honour killings, still forced marriages…and are the people who betray the parents whop gave them their whole life any better? No one’s better, and no one seems trustworthy. So what am I? Do I love this country or hate it? Do I love or hate myself? I’m just typing on and on…do I even know what I’m saying?