Osama of GreenWhite.org tagged me on FaceBook to describe a metaphor that I would use for ‘hope’. I would have shied away from such an invitation, but since Osama’s objective is to “get people talking” (and hopefully, thinking and doing as a consequence), so I’ll bite and dump my thoughts on ‘hope’ here, but first, the disclaimer.
Disclaimer:These are my own raw and twisted ideas - unresearched, unrefined and uninfluenced by anything Obama (or Osama). I know Obama’s campaign revolves around Hope, but I have deliberately missed his speeches, though his book is in my reading queue.
My personal metaphor for hope:
Hope is a Pain-Killer
At its most basic level, I think hope serves as a harmless ‘filler’ between an action and its consequence. A pool player shoots and hopes that he makes the shot and wins the game. A poker player bluffs and hopes his bluff is not called. A professor teaches and hopes that his students change the world for the better. People doing their thing and then hoping their efforts are fruitful. This is what I call ‘positive hope‘ - a positive force and a good thing in any shape and size. It is still present and available around us in small doses, though very rare.
The rest of this post is about a couple of other flavors, shades and variants that hope comes in, variants that we sometimes mistake for this ‘positive hope’.
Opposite to the ‘positive hope’ is the ‘fantastic hope‘, which is actually a wish in disguise. It is the hope of a negligent student to get an A in the final exam, or the hope of an obese person to look slimmer without exercise. This kind of hope is responsible for selling miracle cures and forms the basis of many marketing campaigns. It is still hope, but the important thing missing is ‘action’, and that lack is something to watch out for.
There are millions of people in the world who have not touched a cricket (or baseball) bat or kicked a football in years, and yet they sit hypnotized in front of their large screen plasma TVs for hours to watch a match, or even go abroad to watch a whole game series if they can afford it. They root for their favorite teams (or their home country), wear the merchandise, talk for hours about the permutations and combinations, and passionately argue, fight or kill to defend the honor of “their” team… and to let corporations sell them “stuff”. They do it every other day, and they do it most of their lives. This is the most abundant form of hope that I see all around me, every day. I call it ‘cotton-candy hope‘.
We read about about how Romans used theater, arenas and gladiators as an energy outlet for their warriors in times of peace - I think that somehow, over the centuries, arts, games and sports have all devolved from a useful tool to keep the “warriors” alert and healthy into factories for hope-generating scenarios, and even though the “war” has changed its form, we have degenerated into hope-addicts. We hope our team wins, we hope the hero of the movie breaks out of the prison, we hope team X beats team Y and changes the standings table so that our team gets to play in the finals. We hope, and we hope because it feels good and because it generates a warm and fuzzy feeling in primitive parts of our brain, especially when our hopes are fulfilled.
Sometimes we amplify the effect of our hopes by putting up personal bets on ‘our’ teams, and experience small hits of joy when we win those bets. Some of us get so addicted that they start hitting casinos in the pursuit of hope - hope that starts from the time we insert a coin into the slot machine and lasts until the time the symbols come to a stop. This is the kind of hope that conditions us until we become the experts of ‘fantastic hope‘ - whenever things go wrong, we start ‘hoping’ them to get fixed by a miracle or some divine intervention, without any action to back it up. As we sink deeper, we wonder about all that is wrong with the world that we live in, and that gives us a reason for further hope.
Just like heroine, a painkiller that has turned into an illegal drug due to abuse, we get addicted to hope to the point where we start hoping that our hopes will materialize into solutions. Instead of using it as a relief from a headache, we start taking the hope painkiller as a panacea to all our problems, and instead of thinking of hope as an after-effect of action, we start idolizing it as the action itself.
Some people may define ‘hope’ as the opposite of fear, despair or a defeatist attitude, which is true too, but just as fear is the mind-killer, hope for its own sake is usually a progress-killer, almost as counterproductive as these negative emotions.
If we really need to select an emotional response to our circumstances and situation, we should try a bit of rage - there is a higher probability of (controlled) rage breaking the inertia and inciting us into action. Once we gain enough momentum through our actions, perhaps we will be able to switch to autopilot and let hope guide us from the backseat.
Last night, some terrorists succeeded in planting three time-bombs in the Garhi Shahu area in Lahore, an area that is 4-5 kilometers away from my house. Thankfully, nobody had died until the last update.
I had to turn on the idiot box (after many months) to catch the live report, and was lucky enough to witness the uber-intelligent reporters standing inside the shop that was destroyed. Using their extremely intelligent brains, and standing on top of the scene of the blast without caring about forensic evidence, they decreed that “The bombs were planted to create panic in the common citizens”.
I think they are wrong, and I have an alternate theory. It involves the terrorists’ big boss telling them to → continue reading
It started with the perceptive ProPakistani people noticing how Google has never had an Islam themed doodle on their homepage, and Dr. Awab picked up the discussion the next day.
I personally think that Google not showing any Doodles for Islamic events has something to do with their “Do No Evil” policy Seriously though, while Google can not be forced to cater to each segment of their customer base, especially since doodling is the secondary responsibility of the guy who creates them, but given that → continue reading
I just watched the movie ‘Mongol‘ which is based on the early life of Genghis Khan, or Temujjin. The movie was shot in the Mongolian language, so I was surprised to spot many words that sounded like their counterparts in Urdu. I always thought the word ‘Urdu’ was from Turkish, but after a bit of research, I found out that ‘Horde’ means ‘Military Camp’ in Mongolian too:
Urdu is a Mongolian and Turkish word meaning “military camp” and is the root of the English word “horde.” When the Central Asian tribal warriors came into northern India, Urdu is the creole that ended up being spoken in the camps so that Hindu traders could sell the Muslim grandees their goods).
Among the Urdu sounds that I recognized were “Aba” for “father” and “Utho” for wake up. I’m sure there are many more common roots, but sadly, most of the mongolian online dictionaries use their alphabet, which I can’t read.
Not a lot has changed since the 12th century - we have continued being a horde, there is something in our nomadic roots that disagrees with settling down mentally and calling a place home. Our military camps are always at the forefront, and like a military camp, we still don’t really care about trashing this piece of land with death and destruction. Like Mongols, we trade and kill our women like animals.
I never thought I would waste ten thirty minutes of my life praising our new president, but I just have to write this one. This post on Karachi Metblogs is criticizing Zardari’s comments in the visitors’ log of Jinnah’s tomb on his death anniversary. Though I secretly hope for a day when discussing the Pakistani President’s language skills becomes our only concern, but we have to solve a lot of more fundamental problems before we can focus on developing the desi version of Bushism.
The blog also shared this scanned image of his comments, which says something like:
May Good give us the strut to save Pakistan. Asif Ali Zardari, President, Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Zardari Comments
I think there are many possible reasons for this ‘writo’ and I believe that we should forgive Zardari for this writing “Good” instead of “God”. You see…
He was not typing it, and hence, did not have a spell checker handy. When was the last time you wrote a complete sentence using a pen? (for me it was many years ago). This shows that he may be a l33t geek in disguise who relies on the underlined red lines too much.
He has written either ‘Gaad’ or ‘Good’ - if it is ‘Gaad’, he was either in his l33t mindset, or he wanted to emphasize the word but lacked the tools (bold/italics) to do so, and used the long ‘aa’ as a last resort. If he used ‘Good’, then he was probably trying to translate one of Allah’s 99 names to English. I’m pretty sure one of those names means ‘Good’. This shows that he does care about Islam.
He did not use Allah, as these days, the word has negative connotations, thanks to our terrorist brethren. God is a more neutral and ‘enlightened’ word. After all, the American Army top guys are visiting Pakistan these days, what if the next visitor signing the visitor book is one of them, and what if he gets the wrong impression? We must appericate his foresight and attention to detail.
Good, God or Allah, the important point is that he capitalized the G, and that, my friends, is the line that separates a believer from a non-believer, or so I have been told many times. So Zardari strives to be politically and religiously correct.
Even though the above is enough to start respecting Zardari, we are not done yet. The second word that he used, and one that has been misquoted as “strength” by many people, is actually “strut“. Let us check wikipedia for the various meanings of ’strut’.
A strut can be
A structural component designed to keep two other components apart. Struts provide outwards-facing support in their lengthwise direction, which can be used to keep two other components separate, performing the opposite function of a tie. That is a beautiful analogy! It doesn’t take an engineer to see what Zardari is trying to say. Not only that, but a strut can also mean
to walk proudly and with a bounce. and pride is one thing that we need, if we want to save Pakistan.
The above is conclusive proof that Zardari picks his words carefully and has a good command over the English language - good enough to make puns and say a lot in a few words. On top of that, I am assuming he can speak Urdu and perhaps Sindhi equally well, which makes him a trilingual. Now you tell me - how many languages can the US, Chinese or the British leaders speak?
Oh yea, one last thing, he loves his deceased wife so much that he still carries her picture everywhere he goes, even when he is on TV. Brings tears to my eyes really.
Osama of GreenWhite.org tagged me on FaceBook to describe a metaphor that I would use for ‘hope’. I would have shied away from such an invitation, but since Osama’s objective is to “get people talking” (and hopefully, thinking and doing as a consequence), so I’ll bite and dump my thoughts on ‘hope’ here, but first, the disclaimer.
Seriously though, while Google can not be forced to cater to each segment of their customer base, especially since doodling is the secondary responsibility of the guy who creates them, but given that 
