Wednesday, July 25, 2012

About Sins


آتا ہے داغِ حسرتِ دل کا شمار یاد
مجھ سے مرے گنہ کا حساب اے خدا نہ مانگ
غالب 

आता है दाग़-ए हसरत-ए दिल का शुमार याद
मुझ से मिरे गुनह का हिसाब अय ख़ुदा न मांग

Aataa hai daaGH-e-hasrat-e-dil ka shumaar yaad
Mujh se merey gunaah ka hisaab, ay KHuda na maaNg
~Ghalib


The count of wounds sustained in the grief of longing come to mind,
Oh Lord, please don't ask for an account of my sins.


This couplet is another example of Ghalib's superior skills at word play and how he was able to quickly flip the scenarios in just 2 lines. 2 possible interpretations can be derived here:


The import of the above couplet is that every sin that he has committed was a result of some desire or longing. The very thought of those sins invokes the memory of those longings and desire. Hence, he pleads with Lord to be merciful and not ask him to account for his sins as they invoke the memory of pain and grief.


The second meaning is more of classic Ghalib wherein he expertly flips the blame back on God himself and absolves himself of all guilt: 
All the sins that I committed were a result of the temptations and grief that you (Lord) put in my path. So, Lord, it's very ironic that you should ask for an account of my sins. There would have been no sins if you (Lord) had been kind to me.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Paradise?


taa'at meiN taa rahey nah mai-o-angabeeN ki lag
dozaKH meiN Daal do koi ley kar bahisht ko
~Ghalib

ता`अत में ता रहे मै--अनगबीं की लाग
दोज़ख़
में डाल दो कोई ले कर बिहिशत को
طاعت میں تا رہے نہ مے و انگبیں کی لاگ
دوزخ  میں ڈال دو کوئی لے کر بہست کو

taa'at (ता`अत)- worship
Mai-o-angabeen = wine & honey
laag = temptation
dozakh=hell
bahisht=heaven, paradise

So that, in worship, the temptation of wine and honey would not remain,
Let someone, having taken Paradise, fling it in Hell

A common scenario of Paradise includes streams of honey and wine (unlike the one available on Earth) is plentiful for it's residents. Ghalib uses these props for this sher.

When people worship, they are actually seeking this paradise. It is this temptation which is the reason for their obedience and not the love of God.

If we can just dispense with or remove the concept of Paradise then the worship would be a pure and selfless one.

A worship that is performed in the hopes of a reward after death is no worship at all.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Oh Google! What hast thou wrought?




Its a bloody nuisance.
Everyone is a freaking intellectual. 


The smart phone carrying wise-ass who has Google up his ass and who never stops to think that most of what you see on the internet is anything but the truth. 


Google has doomed the generation as much as it has helped it. Probably they now need Google to know how to spell Google.


Information is cheap. The hard-disk is cluttered with movies that we will never see, songs that we will never listen to, presentations that we don't give a crap about and eBooks that we will never even glance at. What then? We will keep on hoarding till the hard-disk crashes and then we will rebuild the collection all over again.


The days when we had to hunt and beg unashamedly for a single track of Simon & Garfunkel is long past. The gleam in the eye at the prospect of laying our hands on The Doors box-set is perhaps history. Stealing old mix-tapes of Dad and recording Beethoven's Symphony #5 on it are tales of the past. The round-robin-polling, once something new arrived in the group, is so laden with nostalgia. Information was shared but only among the sincere pursuers. 


The age of information has indeed arrived and jogging on its heel is the demon of ignorance which rears its ugly head and does a vulgar dance. We are being seduced by the overwhelming amount of information into a passive ignorance with the additional baggage of goldfishesque attention span. 


The general premise or assumption would be that as information becomes more easily accessible, the recipients ought to become wiser and more intelligent. However, apparently, it has led us to believe that the earthquake in Japan was a result of people tearing up the Quran or Bible (depends on which sms you got) and that not forwarding the pic of Ganesh to 50 people would result in 7 years of badluck. Wiser indeed! Intelligent much!


Perhaps, what I really wanted to say is that before internet, information was valued. We worked hard to get it and we clung on to it. Once accessed, we owned it and guarded it with the ferocity of an animal. 


Now we don't even know half of what we think we know. 


Information is illusion.


Our memory is fleeting. We can't even remember our phone numbers. The price we pay.




Monday, March 5, 2012

Francisco d. Anconia - Money Speech


Haven't re-read Atlas Shrugged in a while now. But I have picked it up and went straight to page 308 to read the money speech now and again. In essence what she says about money is not an exaggeration, far from it, but there are a lot of things in there that I don't agree with. Just wanted to share it here:

------------------------------------------------

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil – and he's the typical product of money."
Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile:
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.
"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.
"Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.
"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood – money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.
"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.
"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out."

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Discovering Hafiz I

There is something to be said about ancient languages and how I wish for the eloquence of past masters to express myself without making a fool of myself. If I had enough style, I wouldn't really mind making a fool of myself.
Very little is known of the life of the great poet and all that is known comes from oral tradition or biographies that are not totally reliable. A lot of fabulous stories are associated with the poet and, true or not, they are inspiring.
It is said that from his father recitation of Quran he learnt the entire Quran by heart at a very early age, and hence the name Hafiz (or Hafez) which literally means one who has memorized the whole Quran. He is also credited with memorizing Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, Saadi, Farid ud-Din and Nizami.
Hafez at an early age was employed at a bakery and once he saw a woman of great beauty and knowing that this union was improbable sat on a mystic vigil to try and make it probable. During this vigil, he had a vision where a divinely beautiful woman identified herself as an angel led him on the path of spiritual union with the divine. Hāfez hints at this episode in one of his verses where he advises the reader to attain "clarity of wine" by letting it "sit for 40 days".


One of the most entertaining incidence of his life for me was when Hafiz was summoned to Shiraz by Timurlane as he was displeased with one of verse:
اگر آں ترک شیرازی بدست ارد دلے مارا 
بخال ہندوش بخشَم ثمرقند و بخارا را 
Agar aaN turk-e-shiraazi badast aarad dil-e-ma raa
bakhaal-e-hinduwash bakhsham samarqand o bukhara ra

If that Turkish beauty of Shiraz agrees to hold my heart in her hand
I swear by the mole of Indian beauty that adorns her face, I will endow Samarkand and Bukhara to her.

Timur asked Hafez, "Do you have any idea of the amount of lives I have put to this sword to win these towns, and you say you will endow it to someone who catches your fancy"

Hafez bowed and said, "Sire, it is because of these extravagance that Hafez has been reduced to this state of poverty".