If I had a personal mountain where I could put up a flag at each victory, at each achievement, at each milestone, I would put one up today.
Something went whacky and my son developed a hearing problem two months ago. It got so bad he couldn’t hear his dad calling his name more than a dozen time while sitting right beside him.
My son did not know a word of English. The first month at school and thereafter, I saw him sitting on a bench by himself. Alone. I was afraid loneliness would befriend him too.
He began mumbling and losing home language words too.
I had to shout at him. 10 times. Then when he would finally hear me and look at me, he would be horrified to see me so anxious and yelling at him.
Today, he has gotten better. He can hear a little better. And speak some more words.
Its God’s greatest blessing. The happy heart of a mother. A feeling you may tell everyone in your life, but no one can feel it like you do.
I saw him today at school. At home time. It felt elationd beyond cloud 9 to see my baby son talk to other kids. Kids that don’t look like him. Or speak like him. But they are now his friends. I feel a proud mama, walking home with my son, half a dozen kids waving him goodbye and yelling out his name. And him waving them bye!
It warms my heart, to finally see his teachers happy when he turns up to school in the morning. His cute goomoning to his teacher. And her big cute smile. Totally heartwarming.
Thank you God. For opening my eyes. For making me see the happiness around me. For noticing milestones. For overlooking things I don’t have. I thought I would die. I would die being ungrateful. I thought I would bleed out and die without having to bow my head on the ground.
Thank you God for letting me live. For saving me grace. For being merciful. For shining light upon me so I can see better.
Thank you God for making me a Phoenix. Thank you for letting me rise up each time, each time I kick myself off a mountain.
You know what happens when one gets above and beyond their need, one sometimes forgets to be thankful. One forgets to be grateful.
And then this happens. Time gives you time. Guilt pokes you. And for impertinent fools like me blessings then become the biggest challenges of my life.
It is not of my nature to be ungrateful. But I did. I forgot to be thankful. I forgot to acknowledge my blessings.
And now, I have become a ticking disaster. Every thing that was my blessing is slipping from beneath my feet. And the good news I got?
It became my nightmare.
As I walked home from the subway, in this very chilly windy weather, I felt like the fallen leaves. The faded autumn.
I was clearly an ass. I had a wonderful summer. A wonderful early autumn. I got what I yearned for. Everything..and even more. And like a fully bummed ass, like a stoned fool, I let time pass. Being grumpy about the things not in my hands or what I don’t have.
So now, I am paying for my mistakes. For being unthankful. It’s easy to make up to man. But to God?
How do you tell God you are sorry? How do you tell God that you forgot to pray. Or that you remembered to pray each time but it off, binge watching some stuff that would never do any good anyway.
I had came here with so many hopes and dreams. And now, I don’t know.
But then no. I am a phoenix. I rise from my own dust. I shall plead with God. To forgive me. For not Thanking Him. For not remembering him for this unbounded favor. I have had a little difficult life. But now when it got easier and fun, I forgot God,
We get so easily hurt by our dear ones when they forget us. We are so dear to God. Why was I so lazy?
Just like the spring, I have to come back, To give Thanks again. To pray again. To be grateful again…..
There’s a wrist watch in my house. It belongs to my hubby. Pretty cool watch. Digital and all.
Somehow someday, an alarm got set on it. It would ring everyday at around 9 am. Annoying time to ring.
We fidgeted around with it trying to shut it. The alarm.
We couldn’t. All we could is change the alarm time, somehow to a random 11:45 pm.
Thereafter we couldn’t do anything about it. No matter what button we pressed, neither the alarm time budged. Nor did the alarm shut.
So what did we do?
Learnt to live around the beep beep.
We race to bed each day. If we got to hear the alarm, we’re late to sleep.
If no alarm heard, perfect early night.
I guess some problems in life are as permanent as our wrist watch with an unfixable alarm. We need to learn to live around problems that cant be fixed by us.
Somehow they stop looking like problems. But milestones of progress….
So for the past 6 months, I have watched a lot of movies and Dramas.
While some of them were really awesome and I really wanted to blog about some of them, nothing compelled me to write about as much as today’s movie did.
This world is such a facade. People give out so many opinions and sometimes the opinions sound so real and everyone believes in them. More than the actual thing.
There was a muslim girl band from Kashmir that was banned from singing. Those were girls in Hijab and were trying to sing. They were trying to break the norm and rules. But they were silenced.
A few months later, a movie was released titled Secret Superstar. This movie was distributed or I should say sensationalised in the lines of the Kashmir incident. The lead girl sings hidden in a Hijab.
False.
That is not even close to what the story is about.
I am a big fan of movies that star Amir Khan. That is because each of his movies has a strong impact on the viewers and they are not silly chummy romantic bandwagon. They are always laced with emotion and fragrant with a message.
Such is the secret superstar. It has everything to do with a Mother’s level of sacrifice and strength for her children. The wall of resilience and the window to the open skies.
This story has nothing to actually do about singing. Shallow is the public who thought this was about a girl not being allowed to sing so she sang secretly and then won the award.
This is about a mother who fought with the society to give birth to a girl child. A mother who withstood physical torture but protected her children from everything.
A mother who recognised her child’s abilities and nurtured them. Never let the cruel world stomp down on the dreams of her children.
The West may not understand. But to come from an Asian household where you are a girlchild, and you are talented, you would understand. You have take your dreams and make chutney out of it. You are supposed to study like a normal girl, no matter you top the class or win a medal or prize or anything. You study, then you marry, then you birth children, then you make them study, make them marry, grow old and die. The end. That’s an Asian girl’s life summarised.
Not every household is like that though. Take Sania Mirza for example. The gorgeous talented super duper Tennis star. Her parents saw her talent, her dreams and cheered her on.
Just like this girl Insiya in the movie. Her mother sells her only Gold Necklace to buy a laptop so her daughter can record her songs on youtube. Just so that the cruel barbarian dad doesn’t break her guitar because he thinks its just a wasteful teenage phase of his daughter where she should have been studying instead, her mother gives her the idea of a secret superstar.
Beyond all odds, she stands up for her daughter, realising that sometimes standing up for yourself and your dreams is very important because a human isn’t a machine and God doesn’t give ambitious dreams to everyone. Those who get this God gift, must know that they are chosen and they must follow it. Fight the world if you are convinced you are chosen. Fight the world if you know you can fly. Everyone laughed at Einstein and every other big guy and girl of this universe. But years later their hardwork paid off. We write essays on their work from school age and we dress up like them. Why?
Because they knew they had a dream, a talent. They protected it, they fought for it.
Salute to you Amir Khan. Extremely fine storyline, concept. Although your character in the movie was just a little breeze, the theme of the movie is a Blockbuster.
Mother.
The beginning of life. The first touch. The first face. The first voice. Everything is Mother.
It is not easy being a mother. Constantly feeling guilty that you aren’t good enough. The society holds the most special spices to sprinkle at a struggling mother. Still she never bends. Wiping her tears away, she will roll away at the kitchen, or type away in the office, or drive, or teach, or write or do anything. Anything she can so that her children are strong, they have everything and become someone great.
We need to love our mothers more. They aren’t wrong. They are just doing their utmost best.
Its not simply said that Paradise lies beneath the feet of the Mother.
Things have looked brighter than my previous post. Such is love. It kills you once and you think that you are done with everything. Then one smile, one hug and one heartfelt embrace, then all the angst melts away. Like new…everything rebirths itself.
Toronto had one windy rainy Monday. I was taken by surprise, utterly overwhelmed. I wasn’t wearing too much warm clothes and the rain hit my face through my children’s umbrella. I ran across the store and got a huge lovely one for me.
Man must never expect anything from man. Man must only expect from God and that too in full faith. Simple to say. Simple to believe. Hard to execute.
I caught a cold, a headache and a lousy itchy throat.
Feeling a lot better today, hence out and about in the library.
I was hell bent on getting a part time job last week. Everything was out fine till Saturday morning when my partner asked me to give myself some more time before I plunged into the workforce. I know I have lots of hours between my kids schooling. It broke my heart for the thought to not work again and wait for I don’t know how long. But I am glad I waited and listened to him. I fell ill this week. That would have been fatal on the job first week.
I have hence come up with a new idea. I shall teach people English. There are many I see here struggling for the same. I shall do my best flex my schedule.
I hope to do a lot of things:
Buy a new laptop
Buy a cellphone for myself
Redo my wardrobe and kids too
Get a Canadian Degree
Buy a car.
Till here. I want to reach till here minimum. One day I hope to run an empire. I dream of running an organisation. Make a change in people’s lives.
Its been so long. Once again. Do I lack consistency? Maybe, maybe no.
Have you ever fallen. Into a deep abyss. Such that you feel you are climbing out. But as soon as you look up to see how much more to go. Then you gawk at how much more to go on. Then you slip. Then you fall back down there.
Kya shay hai ujadna
Hamein maloom nahi tha
Hum royenge ithna
Hamein maloom nahi tha
Behjayega chehra
Hamein maloom nahi tha….
I got stuck on repeat to this song.
As I sit here at 12:05 am in the night, I just retrospect on myself. I have drifted away. From who I used to be.
There has been an emptiness within me since childhood.
I have been waiting to read this book since 2013. That is like 5 whole years!
A combination of self made-excuses, lack of budget and my own procrastination kept me away. Every time I picked up this big book, I would crave to read it with all my heart, but then I would put it back on the shelves of the bookstore. The bookshop had a lovely name, Crossword. I really loved the store. But the books were always out of my budget.
Fate and prayers bought me here, to a land that has offered me a free pass at my book heaven, the public Library.
So here I am, completely transported to a whole new level of reading. “INFERNO” by Dan Brown.
This thick 600 something paged book captured the reality, a horrific yet real picture of the world.
A little review; Robert Langdon, an Arts Professor at an American University is being chased along with a young intellectual doctor in a hunt for a bio hazard that a mad scientist has created to destroy the world. A real thriller that puts the reader in for a ride wondering who is on the right path and if the world famous Langdon has really done a major theft. The book runs intricately through world Art history, majorly focusing on the commendable works of Dante Alighieri.
Dante Alighieri
What hit me from the book:
It took me a whole week to completely read the book. This wasn’t a book to skim. I checked out each mentioned historic site and its importance on the web. Exquisitely described, the city of Florence and Turkey has landed on my places to visit list. Someday.
City of FlorenceCity of Venice
The levels of hell as expressed by Dante sparked my interest to a great deal. Being a Muslim, I have read about the horrors of hell. But nothing prepared me for the horrendous visual trip as is the painting by Botticelli for the Divine Comedy, a description of the levels of hell mapped by Dante. The concept of passing through the levels of punishment, meeting Satan himself, walking out reverse to the purgatory and finally to paradise. It was a real treat to the eyes. It also made me wonder, how deep must have the two geniuses thought on the topic, read scriptures and books and conjured up the most horrific depiction of Hell I have ever seen. Langdon finds this map of hell in a projection canister he takes along with him, trying to unravel the mystery.
Map of Hell by BotticelliLa Mappa Dell’Inferno
Hunting for clues, Dan Brown has painted a visual tour of the city of Venice, Florence and Istanbul as Langdon races to unravel the mystery.
Standing from a distance, the book revolves around the core issue of the world, the rising population and the consequences of it. A threatening reference to the Black Plague that terrified the world centuries ago, Bertrand Zobrist creates a mystifying virus that threatens the population. All the top officials along with a powerful shady organisation join hands to close in on the virus, only to find out that it has been released into the atmosphere and has embedded itself into the genes of the world population. Zobrist’s assistant who is the only one who knows everything about the secret, herself hides her identity so well, that I did not have the slightest clue. When her cover blew, I was like Whoaaaa!!! Dr Sienna Brooks, eventually realises the gravity of the issue, tells in the whole story and brings out the truth. The virus was meant to cause planet-wide selective infertility that would narrow down the population without any harm as in the Plague.
The Four Bronze Horses of St. Mark
This raised the question of how wrong is wrong. How immoral is being immoral. Who decides that. According to Zobrist, he did a service to humanity by creating the virus that would narrow down the population and allow the living ones to a better life of technological advancement and comforts of life. According to the WHO and every other scientist and humanitarian thinker, a human does not have the right to control the fertility and choice of reproduction on behalf of another human, let alone the planet. That is morally and ethically wrong to meddle with the genes of others no matter what the justifications. Zobrist however argued with his logic that over population would lead to the collective death of people.
Death Mask of DantePlague Doctor Mask
This is a very intriguing and debatable topic. I believe that none should meddle with the way of nature. The end is definite. Till then, maybe we should focus on making the most of our lives and the ones we love. Maybe we should stop being judgmental. Maybe we should focus more on forgiving than in breaking apart. Maybe we should spread more love and think less of reasons to hate. Maybe we should be happy with what we have than to let the deadly sins overtake us for want of more.
The Cistern where the Bio Hazard Virus was immersed.
Why this book fit my interest? I lust after intelligence. Reading a book filled with an insightful viewpoint, etched in enlightening knowledge, painting history better than school books, throwing a fresh limelight on writers, painters and philosophers, completely blow me away.
For me, an intelligent book is like the eagle that flies higher than the rumbling clouds. A clear sighted map that guides the reader, makes a difference, leaves a mark.
Inferno did that to me. I am a person of depth. I like to think about different things. About concepts, about solutions to problems.
I am here 2:00 am in my room, unable to sleep, unable to shoo away my laptop for the night. I have a fire in me. The fire that is making me type away with fury. There is more to this world than just eating and running chores. No, there is more to it.
There was a fresh breeze that flew through me each time I turned the pages of Inferno. When I finished reading the book, the world looked different. Every human looked different. It made me powerful. It made me think that a little person like me could make a huge impact in the lives around me. I could change a lot in the world if I wanted to. It takes a good and right education, self power and confidence, an enlightened mind to drive a person to make a change.
Maybe…someday..I might write out my thoughts to the world….
