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

“When it comes to criticizing ideas, nothing should be out of bounds. Nothing should be unsayable simply because someone finds it offensive. Particularly in a plural society, offending the sensibilities of others is both inevitable and important. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. Important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities.”

When does criticism become bigotry? The line is crossed when criticism of Islam, of ideas or beliefs, become transposed into prejudice about people; or when critics demand that Muslims are denied rights, or be discriminated against, simply because they happen to be Muslims.

We should oppose all discrimination against Muslims in the public sphere, from discriminatory policing and immigration laws that might specifically target Muslims, to planning regulations that make it more difficult to build mosques than other similar buildings or restrictions on the ability of Muslims to assemble or worship that apply merely because they happen to be  Muslims.  Whatever one’s beliefs, there should be complete freedom to express them, short of inciting violence. Whatever one’s beliefs, there should be freedom to assemble to promote them. And whatever one’s beliefs, there should be freedom to act upon those beliefs, so long as in so doing one neither physically harms another individual nor transgresses that individual’s rights in the public sphere. A Muslim should have the same rights and obligations as any other citizen.

We should also oppose all attempts to use criticisms of Islam to demonise Muslims. But criticism of Islam, of whatever kind, even if it is offensive or bigoted, should not be a matter for the criminal law. Bigoted speech should not be a legal but a moral issue. Just as Muslims have the right to express their beliefs, short of inciting violence, so should everyone else, including the right to express the most pungent beliefs about Islam. A society that outlawed anti-Muslim arguments would, in my mind, be as reactionary as one that banned Muslim immigration or pursued discriminatory forms of policing. Click Link for full article;

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/when-does-criticism-of-islam-become-islamophobia/

( Shared By Tahir Mahmood)

1. Fast population growth is coming to an end

It’s a largely untold story – gradually, steadily the demographic forces that drove the global population growth in the 20th Century have shifted. Fifty years ago the world average fertility rate – the number of babies born per woman – was five. Since then, this most important number in demography has dropped to 2.5 – something unprecedented in human history – and fertility is still trending downwards. It’s all thanks to a powerful combination of female education, access to contraceptives and abortion, and increased child survival.

The demographic consequences are amazing. In the last decade the global total number of children aged 0-14 has levelled off at around two billion, and UN population experts predict that it is going to stay that way throughout this century. That’s right: the amount of children in the world today is the most there will be! We have entered into the age of Peak Child! The population will continue to grow as the Peak Child generation grows up and grows old. So most probably three or four billion new adults will be added to the world population – but then in the second half of this century the fast growth of the world population will finally come to an end.

Peak child is here, and peak adult not far away

2. The “developed” and “developing” worlds have gone

Fifty years ago we had a divided world.

There were two types of countries – “developed” and “developing” – and they differed in almost every way. One type of country was rich and the other poor. One had small families, the other large families. One had long life expectancy, the other short. One was politically powerful, the other was politically weak. And between these two groups, in the middle, there was hardly anyone.

So much has changed, especially in the last decade, that the countries of the world today defy all attempts to classify them into only two groups. So many of the formerly “developing” group of countries have been catching up that the countries now form a continuum. From those nations at the top of the health and wealth league, like Norway and Singapore, to the poorest nations torn by civil war, like DR Congo and Somalia, and at every point in between, there are now countries right along the socio-economic spectrum. And most of the world’s people live in the middle. Brazil, Mexico, China, Turkey, Thailand, and many countries like them, are now in most ways more similar to the best-off than the worst-off. Half the world’s economy – and most of the world’s economic growth – now lies outside Western Europe and North America.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24835822