A Ballad in Plain D-monic Logic
by Ginkminos
Our world is changing. Fast. And in ways that even the more visionary of our ancestors could not have imagined. Believe it or not, many of these changes actually do benefit mankind as a whole, or at the very least a significant part of it. The dreaded curse of consumerism, for instance, has led to an unprecedented rise in the living standards of millions across the globe who would otherwise still be floundering in the murky waters of abject poverty.
Man has been to the moon, can order pizza delivery without speaking to another person, and is able to replace the human heart. These are just some of the marvels of our age. The imminent end of religion as the preeminent guiding principle in our lives signals yet another miracle [sic], which the more rational amongst the populace of terra firma are preparing to celebrate with the kind of fervour more commonly reserved for rave parties fueled by sex ’n drugs ’n rock ’n roll.
On the flip side, the long awaited and much vaunted renascence of Muhammedanism has been cheered by many. It has also been denounced Continue reading
There is far less political commotion in Pakistan than there is on the Internet, and it makes you wonder. Have some people nothing better to do than to unload their thoughts on whatever is going on or not going on in Pakistan?
Iqbal’s disclaimers that he is not a poet, or at least not a good one, are well known. ‘This voice of mine arises in discord with its own elements,’ he says, ‘do not receive it as poetry!’ Or again: ‘What of my ghazal? It has no tongue! What of myself? Ignorant of language!’ Such disclaimers are strewn all over the Iqbalian literary corpus. When the Lucknow magazine Awadh Punch cast the microscope of its linguistic bigotry on him and picked holes in his poetic expressions, he remained elegantly unfazed: ‘Why do they consider me a poet anyway?’ he asked. Then he would trivialise the matter utterly, lowering it from the poetic to the mechanical: ‘Quite often they base their censure upon printing errors… People keep printing my poems without asking me; at least they ought to show me the proofs!’
ISLAMABAD, July 8: Eminent historian and thinker Dr Mubarak Ali says the history written in Pakistan had been “dictated” by the ruling Establishment and represents its wilful perversion of facts “to accord with a fabricated ideology”.
