As I write I tremble

Don't you think this title is wonderful? It's so ridiculous yet awful. Not one to usually praise anything I do, I give praise where I think it's due. Quite frankly I think it's better than pretending to be humble. At least this way, when I am self-deprecatory, you know that I mean it. Of course, being self-deprecatory is just so darn funny that you are always going to do it unnecessarily to win friends. Still, the popularity shift from praising oneself to mocking oneself is a step in the right direction. History shows this trend comes and goes in waves: the ancient Greek moral of arrogance in strength was supplanted by the Christian tradition of self-abnegation, which soon became replaced by the tendency of 60s rock stars to praise themselves too much. As the current brave new era of self-mockery is still in its youth, I have made a daring and pioneering step by coming out publicly with self-praise. I want to set the stage for the end of history where all people mock and praise themselves and each other in full equal brutal honesty.

But onto the point of this blog post, I want to write about writing. It is so typical of me that the best I can come up with after hours of staring at a computer screen waiting for inspiration is self-transcendence. I have always had writing ambitions (well, only since last year), but I've always liked words and always dreamt that I would someday do something creative and interesting with them. When I considered doing it 'for real', buying the Writers' and Artists' yearbook 2007, and only then putting finger to keyboard, I was excited. It didn't take long for this excitement to turn into despair. When I hear people say 'yeah, like, I wrote this novel, yeah' I feel like punching them in the face, but the remembrance of the suffering of some of our literary greats stays my hand. Yes, art is suffering. You have to suffer in life to have good source material and suffer while you compose what is supposed to promise cathartic release only to suffer when you get rejected by publishers, or even if you get published, when you get the inevitable bad review. It's suffering from start to finish. We all get a sick sense of glee when we read over Tolstoy's notes to his Anna Karenina to pass the time, not thinking of the the sheer amount of agonising hours that went into producing the work, or we all esteem Hardy's classics with no thought to how much struggle and rejection preceded them.

Modern technology has made it easier to write for two reasons: Microsoft Word has made composition and editing instantaneous, and the internet has given every writer their ultimate goal- readers. For those who write for fun, they'd have to be complete morons not to publish electronically, and for those who want to earn a living from it, it's not long before virtual paper will replace our dead tree system. Yes, I would still like the prospect of being published in print, but we need to get with the times, espcially you mainstream publishers who don't even accept manuscripts for consideration, that are likely to be thrown on the heap anyway, unless they're on paper: what are we in, the stoneages?

Anyway, I have what I've always wanted: an audience. Now all there's left to do is write and I'm far from suffering for it.

Today I...

Today I'm writing a more desultory post as opposed to my usual mini-essays with their sculpted paragraphs and coherent linear progressions. I guess I've realised this is just a blog. I've always had that tendency towards verbosity and trying to sound all clever, even when I write private entries in my so called diary, so called because it also serves as a notepad and sketchbook with only very occasional written entries that don't follow the conventional diary format of 'Today I...'

So why not try this format for the first time on an unsuspecting public? It makes sense. Here we go:

Today I was contemplating religion, again, and realised I may have been a bit harsh lately. I have recently shocked myself when watching Richard Dawkins interviews and finding myself agreeing with him wholeheartedly. I don't know if this is a reaction to my recent virulent skirmishes with religious sensibilities or whether my previous annoyance with him was a result of the lazy inertia of a religious upbringing. Either way, I have regained some of my old criticisms and realise his "Stalin did not do his terrible deeds in the name of atheism" line could be a bit harsh as it only has religious people committing terrible acts for the sake of their convictions. I've never been of the school of thinking that draws somewhat random cause and effect linkages like religion = evil. This is becoming increasingly popular these days. But all in all, I have to admit that I am glad that people like Dawkins, Hitchens, AC Grayling and their ilk do exist in a world where religion and religious factions that seek to repress criticism and dissent are as popular as ever.

The battle between theism and atheism has taken on an additional personal dimension in my life. I wish it was a purely intellectual endeavour, but a lot hangs on the decisions I make based on which way the debate goes for me and a lot of my sanity before, during and after making these big decisions depends on how strong my new found convictions are. And all the while I feel strangled; the imprint of nearly 25 years of self-censorship still weighs on me and until I've made the leap to shed all these restrictions and be open without fear of fear itself, I'll continue to hide behind vague and ambiguous literary devices. It is something quite apart from saying what I've just said if I were to say, 'I think I might be an atheist'. There I've said it. As for the 'think' and the 'might', that uncertainty is a permanent fixture of my personality I'm afraid.

Thank God for a secular liberal system that allows people of such diverse views to coexist, the advantages of which religious people are the first to praise. And yet it allows for parallel universes. The religious and non-relgious, my family and me, can occupy such differing worlds that are mutually exclusive, where one can never understand the other. One group goes about its life with the view that there is a better one to come and use its 'heart' to acquire and process this kind of knowledge, while the other at the very least doesn't have certainties about death and acknowledges that it relies on its reason and sense perception in its knowledge of its surroundings. I don't think any era in history has witnessed such schizophrenia within one place, one house. For those of us whose personal relationships suffer as a result of this schizophrenia, we can rest assured that our suffering is a historic one.

God through the ages

As the world becomes a battleground for the figurative enemies of God and Darwin and Richard Dawkins is on the way to earning as much fame and money as any self-made messiah, I can't help feeling there's only one real crucial divider between these enemies and that is time. The religious don't necessarily believe in tradition for tradition's sake, but in order to follow their religion, they have to preserve tradition, because their religion itself is a tradition, a set of practises that goes a long way back.

Religion starts and stops at a particular time in history, allowing for a few accomodations here and there as it is painted by the cultural and political milieu it has gone through in its lifetime. These are fine as long as the core beliefs and practises are not affected. But where do core beliefs stop and where does history begin?

When religious reformers paint a picture of their reformed religion, it looks so different to how the religion was first practised it is unrecognisable. It makes you wonder why they even bother keeping the same name. Traditionalists are understandably afraid that what they believe in and hold sacred is being erased.

Religion today is a reverence of the past, of a tradition clothed in divine rhetoric, whereas in their founding days religions were the opposite: they were radical movements and upheavals, but spoke in the then universal terms of God and salvation. Now these terms aren't so universal, modern attempts at religion simply become 'cults'.

The ramshackle nebulous set of beliefs and practises that is religion is not to be seen against a pure and timeless secularism. Now that it has in part been susbtituted by science, philosophy and art, the battle we're witnessing is one of preservation versus change, tradition versus innovation and past versus future.

God and Stalin

The king shows his inherent weakness and fallibility everytime he extinguishes someone who opposes him. As much as he likes to make you think otherwise, the King is not God's chosen representative on earth, but a terrified and self-obsessed little tyrant.

Aren't you just sick of people who take their role as vicegerents on earth to its literal maximum and feel like they have to defend God's honour eveytime it's insulted? What? Can't God do it Himself? A bigger question is why the hell would He want to? Surely He's above our petty insults, and would probably find it cute that His little creations are so futilely trying to rebel. In fact, He'd probably pity them.

Even as I tried to get my head (although that seemed an inappropiate word at the time) around the pantheistic deity of the Sufis, I would still squirm when God was insulted on the Simpsons. Why? Why did I squirm so?

It took me a while to figure out something was wrong with blasphemy. It seems now that only the powerless need taboo to protect them, just like the dictator needs a totalitarian state. Then it wasn't long before I realised that the concept of the sacred was no different from the untouchability of the Soviet government.

The very title of this post is enough to generate a small lynch mob on my doorstep tomorrow. And we all know, where there are lynch mobs, there is justified moral rage. Oh hell. We need to grow up.

Pain and beauty

Beauty can be very painful. Sure, it isn't so painful on the eyes, but people, men mostly, have no idea of the pain that goes into meeting the current beauty ideals as touted by Vogue and Nuts: electrolysis, eyebrow plucking, spending any amount of time balancing yourself on 6 inch heels and especially doing so on one of your regular and long shopping excursions, regular hair removal, toxic make up, creams, lotions, hair dyes, hair spray, jewelry, more hair removal, expensive handbags, hair removal methods that sound and feel like medieval torture procedures, and if you're especially hairy, more hair removal.

Is patriarchy to blame for these painful ideals of beauty? Interestingly, I'm going to say no. Long gone are the days of mandatory foot binding. Women have every choice about whether or not they conform to these ideals and the ones that do, happily do so in a kind of self-serving masochism.

The ones that don't, of course, become background noise, unstriking and invisible, not ogled as they walk down the street or have doors held open for them. In other words, the lucky ones. It's win win for them They're free from the tortures of beauty and the attentions of inane men. More often than not, they're mistaken for lesbians.

But the reality is, it's not just lesbians who couldn't care less about impressing men. And I'm not talking about prudes or nuns either. I'm talking about ordinary heterosexual women who only care to impress the kind of man who doesn't require them to go through a car wash every morning; who likes their raw natural beauty, or even better, who they are on the inside. Content that they look fine to the person they care about most, these women boldly give the two fingers to everyone else.

Everything is relative. But if I blame women for betraying the sisterhood, for raising men's expectations so all women have to follow and lowering their own expectations, I will be just as bad as those feminists who blame Muslim women for raising the modesty standard and making them look like whores. Whatever you're comfortable with, do it. I certainly don't think an overly decorated woman is stealing my light. If anything, I think I'm stealing hers. When in doubt, love the skin you're in.

Do I have a lame blog title?

Do I have a lame blog title? Sorry to repeat the question, but I think it is seriously lame. It lacks any kind of wit or subtelty. Maybe I could be straightforward for once? Maybe.

But I do like the Rumi quote, it's so prescient, pertinent and sums me up like a treat. What a genius that man was.

But on the topic of blogging (it seems like most of my blogging is going to be about blogging, but what can I say, I love blogging), blog branding is important as it is part of your blogger identity and therefore your blogging impact and longevity. Should you change this identity on the pure whim of your capricious moods, it would be like waking up every day and starting a different life (well, not exactly). Like any brand, you've got to pick your name and stick with it. Pick it sooner rather than later, but at the same time give it a good think because you're pretty much stuck with it for life.

You could always take the cop-out and use the name someone else chose for you before you had barely gained human consciousness. I'm talking about your real name. The one your momma gave you, the one you had no choice over and that you have based the whole edifice of your self-consciousness on. It seems to make so much sense that such an important word in your life was dreamed up by someone else in the first few minutes of the aftermath of agonising pain. If my mother went to so much trouble, I don't see why I should throw that all back in her face.

So I'm sticking to my real name (notice how it's in the URL?). The title of the blog is irrelevant and will change on the whim of my capricious moods.

Liberty, multiculturalism, fraternity

So, here I am wondering why I'm blogging in broad daylight. The only opportunity I have to say whatever I want with impunity, with the protection of a screen, distant internet connection and anonymity, and I choose to blog under my real name.

I guess it's because I have a naive penchant for openness. Self censorship and taboo make me chafe, to put it mildly. If I were to go wild under a nom de plume, my defiance would wither in its shame-faced cowardice and the taboo would remain just as deadly, as it stood proud in triumph.

Those things which need to be said urgently, to save lives, can be said under other pseudonyms, but in the sphere of realworld indentity, the workaday life of bureaucracy and boardroom meetings, my real face is revealed only gradually and in small units of measurement. Few want to stir, or spark revolutions; those with notoriety seem to actively seek it. We all want to live; have something to live for. Well, most of us.

The taboos that weigh me down exist only relatively. In parallel, modern day, small big cosmopolitan city communities, and capture what many now term 'the problem of multiculturalism'. But at least with multi we have a choice, and can hop from one to another, not always with ease, but there at least is hope, an escape. I don't see how the critics of multiculturalism can sleep at night in the knowledge that they would rather bury a common human problem, push it away to where they don't have to look at it, deal with it, blocking any chance for those in stifling cultures to escape.

At least in our parallel and mini worlds we can practise striking at the heart of authority for when we have to do it in the real world.

Tyranny of the minority

Minorites aren't always vulnerable groups. It depends on where you're standing. Muslims, for instance, are a minority within Britian, but are powerful enough. With the privileges afforded them by a tolerant majority, they can watch their numbers grow as they suppress their own minorities and dissidents.