Thinkers Forum USA Affiliates!

Mirza I Ashraf wrote a blog “Life is Plugged in Today” about Science and Information Technology.

Wequar Azeem and Babar Mustafa wrote comments. You may read the original article and comments in www.ThinkersForumUSABlog.org

Noor Salik wrote a comment on Wequar Azeem and Babar Mustafa comments.

Saeed ul Hassan wrote a comment on Noor Salik’ comment. The comments of affiliates is the real power of Thinkers Forum USA.

I am entering the comments in chronological order. Please read them and comment on them if you feel like.

Editor of the Month TF USA.  (Editors@ThinkersForumUSABlog.Org)

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=========  Comment by Noor Salik ======

An interesting comment by Wequer Azeem

Three intellectual giants of TF USA.  (1) Mirza Iqbal Ashraf  (2) Babar Mustafa  (3) Wequer Azeem  There are lot of other intellectual giants in TF USA but normally either  they are busy or they just choose not to participate in intellectual  foray.

TF USA provides you empowering intellectual environment.  You decide what you want to say.> But you should be ready to face some intellectual onslaught by other affiliates who have the capacity to look at an issue from different angles.

TF USA does not have any agenda. All views expressed in TF USA are personal.  You are most welcome if you are a conservative/regressive thinker.> You are equally welcome if you are a progressive/analytical thinker. I mentioned two groups/categories.  I will never know your if your point of view is different until you respond.

NSalik

==========  Comment by Saeed ul Hassan  ====

Who decides based on what criterion that an interacting person is conservative or regressive, analytical or progressive.

Merely being skeptical towards divinity and act of disowning one’s roots gives him or her impressive look?

Only gratitude turns denial into acceptance and chaos into order.

Saeed

My comment is not on trail of the mail below but on Noor’s remarks.

> On Dec 6, 2013, at 1:19 AM, editors@thinkersforumusablog.org wrote: > > > An interesting comment by Wequer Azeem > > Three intellectual giants of TF USA. > (1) Mirza Iqbal Ashraf > (2) Babar Mustafa > (3) Wequer Azeem > There are lot of other intellectual giants in TF USA but normally either > they are busy or they just choose not to participate in intellectual > foray. > > TF USA provides you empowering intellectual environment. > You decide what you want to say. > But you should be ready to face some intellectual onslaught by other > affiliates who have the capacity to look at an issue from different > angles. > > TF USA does not have any agenda. All views expressed in TF USA are personal. > You are most welcome if you are a conservative/regressive thinker. > You are equally welcome if you are a progressive/analytical thinker. > > I mentioned two groups/categories. > I will never know your if your point of view is different until you respond. > > NSalik >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< > > > > > > > A new comment on the post “Life is plugged in today” is waiting for your > approval > http://www.thinkersforumusablog.org/archives/6875 > > Author : Wequar Azeem > E-mail : Wequar Azeem > Comment: > Hear,  Hear,  Baber Saheb ! Well said. Those days are gone when 3 R’s used > to be the foundation of education. We are in cyber age. I realize that > elderly among us are stuck in the 1950’s and 60’s and find it difficult to > keep pace with march of Time. The only constant in the universe is Change. > Not many people understand the difference between moment to moment passage > of time and the continuum of Absolute Time and its essence. We the humans > have come a long way and have a longer way to go. But the pace of change > is accelerating at geometric progression and even one life-time is too > long to cope with the changes. >

======  Comment by Babar Mustafa ========

Mr. Saeed has raised a very interesting question, “who decides …?”.

I would like to question the labels he mentions (and applies pretty clearly) in his question too of skeptic, gratitude, acceptance, denial, one’s roots, chaos …. Who is skeptic, one who thinks there is a God or the one who can’t find an iota of evidence of divinity? Who is in denial, one who can’t accept that all life is related and has diversified from a single origin or the one who thinks he (species wise) is created as a special being? Who is accepting myths as reality and who is following logic and reason to get to reality? Who is lost in a chaos, one who looks at diversification of life or the one who sees the symmetry in the building blocks of all life? Who is showing gratitude, one who is humbled to accept one’s origins and relations to all animal kingdom and even plants or the one who believes that angels bowed on one’s creation? Roots, ah roots; who decides that one’s roots lead back to ethnic divide, race divide or Garden of Eden or out of Africa or to the primordial soup or from out of other planets of solar systems or other galaxies may be or from the core of stars of this universe or perhaps from multiverse? There are some labels I would like to throw in too for my friends to elaborate, for instance” self righteous”, “custodians of morality”, “enforcers of one’s belief on others”.

Babar

============  Comment by Mirza I. Ashraf ========== Dear Brother Salik Sahib,

Please do not bury me under the weight of “intellectual giant.” Though it is to compliment the drop of knowledge which I am still trying to understand, but I have not yet stepped into the shoreless sea of knowledge . . . . Mirza

بس اتنا جانتا ہوں کچھ نہیں میں جانتا لیکن میں بے خبری سے با خبری کے افکاروں میں ڈوبا ہوں

اشرف

A worth reading article ( shared by Zafar Khizer) by Mubarik ALi on historical perspective of religious consciousness that lead to the partition of India and is further fragmenting the society in Pakistan. ( F. Sheikh ).

In medieval India, people were conscious of their social cast and ethnic identity but in the colonial period right up to 1813, new political and social changes significantly shaped religious identity and its consciousness.

In its earlier days the East India Company, being solely interested in economic expansion, but also aware of the religious sensitivities of the subcontinent, discouraged missionaries from coming to India. Later, as the government became more stable, their policies changed and they supported the missionaries who arrived in the subcontinent to convert people to Christianity. The government believed that if the people converted and became Christians, it would be relatively easier to govern them on the basis of sharing the same religious beliefs.

The missionaries condemned the religions of the subcontinent and persuaded people to embrace the Christian faith. They openly preached in public places like Lahore’s Anarkali bazaar. Their activity intensified when in 1837, a German missionary known as Karl Pfander arrived in the subcontinent at a time when the Muslim community had lost its political power, vitality and energy. He believed that the society was backward and degenerate, so it would be easy to convert people to Christianity, which was — in his view — an advanced and progressive religion. But his argument was refuted by Dr Nazir and Maulvi Rehmat Ali in public discussions and a disappointed Pfander left India in 1857.

The activities of the missionaries alarmed people who began to feel insecure about their religious beliefs. The Hindu and Muslim religious leaders came forward to defend their religion through munazra or public debates held in different cities, where people would gather to listen to religious scholars criticising each other’s faith while defending their own religion. These debates created a religious consciousness among the masses while elevating the social status of the religious scholars within the community.

Religious activity was further enhanced when religious organisations such as the Arya Samaj for the Hindu community; and the Tablighi Jamaat and Tanzim for the Muslim community, were founded in order to protect their respective religions. To reach out to the masses, newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets were published to highlight the truth of their avowed faith. Hostility and conflict increased between the communities and riots broke out that continued up to partition in 1947.

http://dawn.com/news/1058176/past-present-a-deadly-consciousness

On Capri they show you the sheer cliff from which those who displeased the Emperor Tiberius were reportedly flung (though the Capresi, who call him by the softer name of Timberio, insist that the death toll was much exaggerated by muck-rakers like Suetonius). The court of Freud was similarly absolutist in its punishments: if you displeased him – by bad timekeeping, unprofessionalism, or disobedience to his will – you were tossed over the cliff. In the painting which shows Wyndham flaubertising in the foreground, the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first American client he showed it to.

Penelope Fitzgerald thought the world divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. Certainly it divides into controllers and controllees. A typical controllee is someone who is love-dependent; Freud was that once, and swore never to be so again. He was always a controller, and sometimes an exterminator. Martin Gayford and Geordie Greig’s accounts of Freud’s behaviour reminded me at times of two unlikely novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have to have a drink?’ He replied (and it was a reply that would have fitted a vast number of other exchanges): ‘Look, I’m Kingsley Amis, you see, and I can drink whenever I want.’ As for Simenon, he practiced two things obsessively: his art and fucking (though his speed at writing contrasts with Freud’s slowness at painting). Simenon once winningly observed: ‘Maybe I am not completely crazy, but I am a psychopath.’ Freud confessed his ‘megalomania’ to Gayford, adding that there was a bit of his mind ‘that believes, just possibly, my things are the best by anyone, ever’. Amis, Simenon and Freud all had controlling, interfering mothers, which may or may not be relevant.

https://blu173.mail.live.com/default.aspx?id=64855&rru=inbox#n=460057914&rru=inbox&fid=1&mid=5a519074-582b-11e3-bc1e-00237de46206&fv=1

An honest account of the deadly travails of Pakistani Americans that receive scant notice.( Nasik)

“People think that in America, dollars grow on trees,” Asad once told us at the tavern. “And when you tell them how difficult America is for immigrants, they get offended.”He said he shared his troubles with a cousin in Pakistan, he said: “Yes, you enjoy all the luxuries of the first world in America and try to discourage us. Why? Did I ask you to get me a visa?”

The moon is fragrant. And this fragrance links us to the moon. Don’t you see these little boats, floating in the moonlight? Board them and they will take you to the moon.”

This was Asad, a 30-plus young man called lunatic by most of his friends because of his obsession with the moon. He had a vivid imagination, which became even more vivid in a moonlit night.

“You guys just see the outer surface. If you borrow my vision you can also see the dimensions I do. Touch this counter and you can still feel that warmth of the customer who just left. See, the idea is to feel. Touch. Embrace.”

Today, Asad is in a hospital, struggling for life. A bullet pierced his skull and came out from the other side. The doctors are still trying to determine the damage the bullet might have done to his brain.

He was doing the night shift in a relatively safe area of Northern Virginia when some people broke into the shop, shot him in the head and ran away with the cash.

Before he moved to that 24-hour shop, Asad used to work at another shop in our neighbourhood and often came to the tavern for “gup-shup (a little chat).”

As we gathered tonight to pray for his full and early recovery, we remembered another man known among his Pakistani and American friends as Khan Sahib or Mr Khan.

He was hacked to death outside his pizza shop in a rough Washington neighbourhood two years ago.

Then there was a cabdriver we did not know but attended his funeral prayer when we went to our neighbourhood mosque for the weekly prayers one Friday. He was also shot in the head and died on the spot.

And it was in December 2010, when I received a call from the late film and television actor Jamil Fakhari, asking me to help find his son, Ali Fakhari.

His son went missing in New York in early 2009 and the Pakistan Embassy in Washington had told him that his son was murdered, apparently by carjackers.

Jamil Fakhari refused to believe the embassy. “My son had no feud with any one. Why would someone kill him?” he said to me.

I wanted to explain to him that most immigrant workers are killed because they work in dangerous place and at odd hours. But I could not say this to him. I did not want to break his heart.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1058068/dollars-do-not-grow-on-trees-deaths-murders-and-suicides