On Marriage and Gaining Weight

      When i got married an Aunty of mine shared a very interesting information with me which i ignore until recently. She said "After a year of marriage women generally gain about 5 pounds which are conveniently ignored as it is expected in our culture for women to gain some weight after marriage. But then the poor girl gains 5 pounds every year...  and there she stands 50 pounds heavier after 10 years of marriage! "
      How could i have ever ignored such a precious piece of advice!  Recently after almost a decade her words were echoing in my head and my weighing machine laughing at me. Also many years of various kinds of diet plans, exercises , gym routines and tight clothes stare me at my face as i look into the mirror. My Mother thinks i am lunatic thinking that i am carrying extra weight, and makes me swear that i will never ever starve myself, or try to lose weight...well but that's my mother.

Me and Hammad on our Wedding Day in 2003

      I think the problem lies in genetic memory or social culture or just my love for food. I mean i belong to a family where people generally gain weight in Ramadan instead of losing it. I used to have embarrassingly large portions of lunch packed in school and college during Ramadan because my parents worried i might go hungry... and then as the pace of life changes those large portions don't do you any good.
     No matter what Christian Gray says about being well fed for good sex, i think too much food slows you down. I mean most of the scholars or mentally smart people are also physically smart. How many fat geniuses have you come across? Hardly any right? Its because your body is working at wrong places providing extra energy to digest and transform the food you have put in it and there is very little energy left for everything else then.
      Anyways..thats all .... i sometimes just feel bad that i let this happen, and now i have to think about losing my weight and be conscious of what i eat :(
      So all you beautiful young ladies out there.... be careful of those 5 extra pounds that you acquire after your marriage... do not ignore it...and do not get used to it.
      After all they say :You are what you eat, so don't be Fast, Cheap,Easy or Fake :)

Types of Mother In Laws ...

I am one of those few lucky people who happen to have a good Mother In Law. Generally most of the people i meet have horrible, beyond humane kinda MiLs... or so i am told. On the basis of a decade being in the married zone i have concluded that though there are no perfect MiLs (just as there is no perfect Daughter in Law) but you can generally categorize 2 types of MiLs:
1: Good
2: Bad
Now we all know that the Good ones are a rare breed and they will sure go straight to heaven. But the second genre of Mils has further sub-categories. In my opinion there are at least 9 kinds:
1: Born Evil
2: Attention Seeker
3: Superiority Complexed
4: Inferiority Complexed
5: Greedy
6: Miser
7: Perfectionist
8: Only Son Syndrome
9: Has Too Many Women in Her Life

1: BORN EVIL:
Certain people have a bad karma i believe. As it is said that there are kind of people who spread happiness wherever they go, and then there are those people who spread happiness whenever the go! And this attitude is developed really early in life i think. Born evil is just pushing it further back, but actually i mean that they have some kind of bad upbringing or bad childhood , which leads them to be pure and simple evil.
       Such Mils don't let the DiLs breath. Everything that the young bitch does is wrong in their opinion and since they are not happy they will not let her DiL be happy either. They like to back bite and are also the ones who leave the gas stoves/ovens on to murder the innocent young girls!

2: ATTENTION SEEKER:
This kind of MiLs are really annoying, as they don't necessarily do anything evil but they suffocate their children by being over demanding and wanting to be the centre of attention at any given cost. Such good old ladies get sick-a-lot, throws a lot of parties for the children, grandchildren and even the daughter in law as long as they remain the get to play the most important part during the arrangements and celebrations. Such MiLs also can be really embarrassing as they love to grab mike or to the contrary say NO to something that everyone is insisting upon.
    They usually get into accidents or some minor illness when the son and DiL has a holiday plan where the MiL is not tagged along.

3: SUPERIORITY COMPLEX:
I feel the worst for the DiL of such a woman. This stuck up woman will keep reminding her DiL about her being:
from another cast/creed/city
her family owning more riches than that of Dil's
under-educated
not good at house-hold jobs
not knowing how to cook for her son
unable to raise kids properly
not as pretty/thin/jolly as she (MiL) used to be
not being able to give birth to prettier/taller/male children
etc
These ladies eventually make the poor young girl believe that she is no good and might even turn into that sad lowly creature that the MiL keeps describing her as.

4: INFERIORITY COMPLEX:
If the DiL belongs to a richer family, has given birth to too many sons or has won the son's heart completely , it might give the MiL an inferiority complex. Such ladies tend to get depressed and find ways to show the DiL down whenever they can, especially in public.

5: GREEDY:
Such MiLs give the DiL and her family the toughest time perhaps, by constantly asking , demanding , comparing or threatening with divorce. She will always be greedy for more and often pretends she has lost the gold gifts that she received so that they be replaced with more. Such women will either be fat or quite thin but never in the middle, perhaps because their greed either comes out in the form of gluttony or they try to suppress it by hiding it.
There is generally no cure to such diseased people.

6: MISER:
Do not confuse the miser and the greedy. While the greedy wants more and more to spend, the miser wants more and more to hold on to. Such ladies will count the Botis (Meat) in your food, won't let a single tomato or onion go waste and insult the crap out of the DiL for wasting the washing liquid in the kitchen, "when 3 dishes can be washed with the same amount why you keep adding water to it"? These ladies will constantly whine about their DiL's unaccountability and make sure that the time is used on activities that save money. When the DiL can cook , why hire a servant for the kitchen? When the father in law can teach , why hire a tutor? When i can talk, why turn on TV and waste electricity?

7: PERFECTIONIST:
Do i even need to say anything about her?

8: ONLY SON SYNDROME:
Ah the patriarchy has doomed us all!!! In cultures like ours , the importance of a penis regardless of its size or functionality is beyond explanation, whether it belongs to you or to one of your significant other. Women thrive on having to be associated with a man and if some unfortunate female cannot bear a son , she is as good as nothing. Hence sons are all and everything to the Mommies in the sub continent. Now if someone has only one Son, remember not to marry your daughter off to that guy ! It's a plea! I have seen many a cases where marriages were arranged only because "he is the only son...will inherit it all alone!"  and the poor DiL suffered the wrath of the MiL all alone too. such MiL's tend to perform all kind of chores for their sons by their own hand. They are insecure that is the DiL starts taking care of the son she might steal him or he might start getting stolen. I have heard of cases where the son mostly slept in the MoM's bedroom while the wife and kids slept in the other...tch tch tch

9: GOT TOO MANY WOMEN IN HER LIFE ALREADY:
Yeah and this sort are ruthless in a very indifferent way. Since they have got their sisters or daughters already filling the void which needs to be filled with incoherent talking, hence they don't really have time to mingle too much in your business. They have a lot of trivial worries of their own to solve e.g sister's husband is cheating on her; daughter's mother in law is giving trouble; friend's daughter is having an affair etc. Such MiL's can be dangerous because all the theories and stories they hear from other ladies are applied to the DiL. Hence such a DiL can save her ass by being friends of all the other women in her MiL's life!

I am sure there are more kinds out there that i still have not been informed about. But what i really would like you to think about is that how many of such Mother In Laws live inside you? Each one of us has some part evil, some part bad, some part unseen or unaccepted by our own selves.
Sometimes it is beneficial to be self critical..isn't it?

My Glass is Half Full...Yours is...?

Choosing to see if your glass is half empty or half full is a matter of your sanity if you are living in urban Pakistan these days. Since you have to constantly counter the crises of electricity,water and gas supplies, educational, economical and political contingent situations, unwanted relatives and so called friends and again electricity. I'd like to share with you one such day to elaborate my point.

     I woke up drenched in sweat and my children stuffed in between me and my husband...not to my surprise (though only God know how they end up there every morning, while i ensure they are tucked tightly in their bedroom every night ! ). I 'm sure most of my Fellow Pakistanis are familiar with the sweat drenched mornings or midnights as the Air Cons turn off as the electric power goes off, and if the power doesn't come back in an hours time then the UPS also starts to slow down and eventually the fan dies too. Now if your husband has any active bone in his body that works during the zombie hours then he'd get up to turn the generator on. or you will wake up soaked...as it happened in this case.

    Thank the Lord above it was already morning and we had to wake up anyways, and i was hoping that my cleaning maid would turn up earlier that day as a long lost friend of mine was coming over to visit. She had returned to Pakistan after 8 years, from the USA. So i got up, got everyone up and welcomed the day. As i went to the loo , to my surprise there was no water! As it happens sometimes the electricity crisis had affected the water tank that supplies water to my neighbourhood, and no one bothered to announce or inform us. Our over efficient gardener watered the plants and left the hose on to replenish our newly acquired American grass, and leaving us waterless. But thank the Lord above, we have a lot of drinking water in the kitchen and refrigerators, and whatay delight it is to use chilled water for poo poo and pee pee purposes on such hot and electricity/water-less days.

   From 10 am to 1 pm i was getting the kids have breakfast and do their school home-work, ignoring the noise of Jenny (our generator), facebooking and anticipating my maid's arrival. By lunchtime i finally accepted that she is not showing up today, so i got my wits together and got up to sort out the house. With no water and now will it was a drag. My cook and driver had already had a fight about some trivial issue not to my surprise as it happens on hot days in Lahore. 

   Anyways.... the day dragged along and by the mercy of the Lord above things somehow turned out fine before my precious guests arrived. The cook cooked food, my cleaning maid, water and electricity all showd up after lunch, i got the kids cleaned up, phoned hubby to remind him to come home early,ordered nik knacks, got a massage and finally got dressed. The sun retired and the guests arrived by the evening prayer and i found myself in a very uncomfortable situation , climatically and socially. It appeared that out dear guests who had decided to bestow Pakistan with their presence after almost a decade were not happy to be back with their Old widowed mother and Blind Sister ( its a reference from Indian Cinema's Amitabh era... just so that you know). They thought that Lahore's society had lost all its manners and etiquette in the last 8 years. People walking the earth on this part of the world resembled "Mental Dogs" (pagal kuttay), and all the doctors and In-Laws were "Educated Illiterates" (perhay likhay jahil). The traffic system was run by aliens and  the electricity crises reminded them of stone age. Since their children couldn't speak urdu, they were very apprehensive of the education system here as their kids had problems communicating with others. 

     Their lives back in the US and A were so perfect that they couldn't wait to go back. They had come for 3 months and now were regretting their decision. They confessed that they missed their busy lives there ... lives where they wake up at 5 am to go to work and come home at 6, cook food, do laundry, meet the kids and go to sleep. Where they dont have friends as they don't want to interact with the alcoholic infidels. Where they socialize on Eid only which is not a day off from work either. Where they are ensuring that their kids do not turn out to be like other kids or God forbid treat them how the white people treat their parents. Where there is no electricity failure ever!

     I was trying to look at my cup which was half full literally ... sipping coffee and thanking the Lord above that my husband was somehow still keeping his calm. As soon as they left i apologized to my husband for inviting such disrespectful people over, and i couldn't be grateful to him as he only beat me with his shoe that night and not with his belt. He has told me i cannot meet any of my friends ever again and i'll make sure i never ever do that. 

   After all how could they say such things about our homeland? after all it is our land which has kept us grounded and connected to our religion! and it is our religion that connects us back to the land of the holy Arabia. If the roads of Lahore do not remind you of the desert of Arab, how will you remember who you are? The palm trees provide us with the shade not only from the sun but also from the satan.

   May we all drink mango juice as smoking is injurious to health. After all all super hero movies now are in 3D and we have got to respect that.

Letters from Pakistan: "I" The grown up "Misfit Modern Muslim" woman : HUKM-E-HAKIM... the order of the almighty ruler

Letters from Pakistan: "I" The grown up "Misfit Modern Muslim" woman : HUKM-E-HAKIM... the order of the almighty ruler: torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world...this makes it hard to plan the day... E.B. White its intere...

HUKM-E-HAKIM... the order of the almighty ruler

torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world...this makes it hard to plan the day... E.B. White

its interesting once you get focused on something , the whole universe seems to be helping you to find the clues... Amber. H. Hammad

no no, this is not about sayings by others and me but its about changing weathers today. its all about FALL. autumn has stepped in, and finally the days of worrying over electricity load shedding are over. now we'll worry about the gas and cooking and heating our cold homes. i came home the other day to find no electricity, no water and no gas supply. if you get used to a luxury, it becomes a necessity and the constant dependency on the providers pulls you away from the ability to provide for it yourself. now i cannot imagine going to a well or canal to fetch water for my household chores, and i don't think it is possible that i can consume that water (particularly Lahori underground water) and survive, as my digestive system has forgotten how to fight all those live bacteria. just like i have gotten used to a life where i have a mobile phone, internet and cable TV service, car, fast food, medicine and now tab and i pod etc. up to a few years back i was pretty much used to celebrating Basant every coming of spring, just like i am used to celebrating Eid twice every year. somehow Basant was my favorite indigenous festival, as it involved fun and frolic as well as food and family. but the establishment could not contain the joy of people and the few black sheep made the whole flock of these dumb sheep suffer. instead of controlling the chemicals used on the kite strings, they simply banned the whole festival. Intizar Hussain writes in Bandagi Nama about this whole situation, and his title can tear those apart who feel; its called "HUKM-E-HAKIM, MARG-E-BASANT"  which means "the order of the ruler, the death of Basant" . the intensity of this phrase is literally lost here in translation though. 

so reverting to the begining , in a country like ours, being in a position like this where you are delerious that you might be able to bring a change in the society and perhaps try to make some efforts, and at the same time understand that your time on this earth is short so you must take life as it presents it to you each day.... it does get hard. when i plan to visit a sick relative with a homemade bowl of soup , and leave home with a feeling that it might make somebody a little happy , and spill some soup on the pit in the road that wasnt there the day before, and get stuck in a trafic for an hour because a new bridge is being constructed, i can only curse the Hakim-e-Ala under the mask of Khadim-e-Ala, that he gets to drive on the roads which are alreay built and not maintained, so he realizes that there is not much point in constructing new ones with bridges , as they might all just spill soup after a few months. 

this fall , i cant help but worry about the fall of this nation, into the abys of  numbness.i recieved an SMS recently which was forwarded as a joke. somehow it gave me goosebumps , and i m sharing it here:

A Raja once decided to check the limits of patience of his people. so he asked his Vizirs to put tax on the bridge that the people used everyday to go to work. noone protested. the raja double the tax and triplled in the following weeks. noone uttered a word. the raja added a condition that they had to pay tax daily for using the bridge as well as bring wheat to pay. people still obeyed silently. pushing his own limits, the Raja asked his ministers to also give a beating to the people at the entrance of the bridge. the very next day ther were people outside the palace demanding to protest to the Raja. so he summoned them, feeling kind of relieved that finally somone has made the effort to stand up. when he asked those people what bothered them they requested the raja to increase the number of the people who gave them the beating on the bridge because there were too many people and only 2 men to beat them , and they had to wait in long queues waiting to cross the bridge.

i feel like part of that kind of a flock, getting ready for the new elections, waiting to support our torturers...being so comfortably numb.

"mujhay dar yeh nahi keh yeh mulk kaisay chalay ga? mujhay fikar yeh hay kay yeh kahin aisay hi na chalta rahay" Shahzad Roy

OMG = Oh My Allah

OMG (Oh My God) is a new Indian film being shown at various cinemas across Pakistan. we downloaded a pirated version and watched it the other night. very interesting and entertaining flick. like most successful Indian movies its ending is audience friendly. but what hit me really hard was not its take on religious practices, but the fact that IT IS BEING SHOWN IN CINEMAS ALL OVER PAKISTAN. that too right after the whole incident of the making of a blasphemous movie about our Prophet, and the globe wide protests and riots against it!
I will just brief you about the movie.
Oh My God is a recent 2012 Bollywood comedy movie satirical towards organized religions. It is based on a Gujrati play( Kanji Virudh) and apparently also is quite similar to the Australian film called The Man Who Sued God. It is the story of a middle-class Hindu athiest shop keeper named "Kanji", who sells Hindu Idols and statues and encounters misfortunes coninciding with his blasphemous behavior. one thing leads to another and he ends up filing a case againts God in the high court. and somehow God appears personified as a handsome man and helps him out in friendly yet abstract ways.while Kanji is busy fighting the case againts Acts of God,God tells Kanji to read the Hindu Gita, Muslim Quran and Christian Bible. in the movie God also implies that He created man, and man created religions, and of those religious customs He seems not too happy about.

anyways, tons of books have been written, movies have been made and talks have taken place ( Small Gods, Sophie's World, Matrix, are few) regarding the subject of God, Man and Creation. but the interesting thing for me about them all is their place in the current religio- political environment of Pakistan. we as a nation are showing the world that if they try to hurt our religious pride , we have the ability to completly destory ourselves. self destructive behaviour.. is it? now if (God forbid) the main content of this film was about our religion, i really dont think that they would have allowed the Pakistani cinemas to play it here. but why then are they ok with it , if its about some other religion? If we demand respect for our religion , is the respect of other religions not our concern? is it not about coexistance and harmony , but only about i am right and you are wrong?
Or is that i am reading into it incorrectly. maybe, perhaps, possibly,in some weird way, the acceptance of this particular film signifies our slowly increasing tolerance?

just a thought .... when you say Oh My God, what do you really mean?


(P:S; now i don't want this movie to be banned here!! instead i want the prevalence of coexistence and tolerance. )

The phenomenon of your birth was not your choice?

how strange is the phenomenon of birth. we don't have a say in it. where and when we are born is the most important step of our whole existence, and we don't get to make a choice. it shapes us, makes us and eventually breaks us. all the while we are alive, we torture ourselves over petty choices ; what to eat, what to wear, where to study, who to marry, how many kids to have, bla bla. and we don't remember that the most important decision of our lives was totally inconsiderate of our desire and choice. what if i could choose the time and place of my birth. would i choose the royal bedrooms of the Mughal era? hmm.. well i am not sure. there was too much sickness, no TV, no internet, no airplanes, and no pizzas.there weren't too many books either. on top of that there were lots of wars and royalty often died for just being royalty. Ok so perhaps i sould have liked to be born in Venice during the renaissance period. maybe i had a chance to meet Da Vinci and all those mega minds... No i would have like to be there perhaps during Ice Age, or the time of Prophets... Nah. the more i think about it the more i realize that in the whole of this amazing history of mankind, now is the best time to be an human being. we have ruinced the environment, sucked on earth's resources, teared the Ozone, killed millions of humans and other species, but to be born in any time of human history, this is the best. well what is there not to like? Readily available food without hunting? being vaccinated in childhood to be protected against horrible diseases? education of all sorts available? communication with people far far away instantly?a blast of knowledge, entertainment and choices? to sum up all that mankind has been working towards through last million years or so, has almost come true. with of course its pros and cons.
now imagine if you had another choice. To be born at all! now i dont know what that would mean. i read somewhere that "you dont have a soul. you are one". so perhaps i could go on living as a soul? floating in the universe (or MULTIVERSE as Michio Kaku puts it.). or in heaven? none of us have a memory from the times when we were not born. we dont know if we existed in any kind of form before that ( are you also thinking about post death existance now?) well, there are lost of way to think about this phenomenon, religiously, spiritually, scientifically etc. but how i want to see it , is as a blessing. i see the world created for me. i see myself having a special place in it and i feel that i have a right to enjoy it, feel it, live it. the beuty and significance of life is beyond words , only if you see it . yet the hum drum of daily existence, survival and intellectual masterbation fogs our vision to "look beyond what you see" (as Rafiqi puts it in Lion King).
"Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. i never thought of it before: i'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness."  from the first chapter ("I Am A Corpse" ) of the book My Name Is Red, by Orhan Pamuk.

so live and let live :)