Leenah Nasir blog

In the last few months, life has taken a toll on my time and I don't blog regularly (though many times I really want to). Meanwhile, I browse various 'desi' blogs while waiting for my flights or in between my other work. I came across this beautiful blog of a Pakistani lady. As I love real-life stories, her blog attracted me as a mirror image of my blog, but she is more refined and has a gift of writing skills. I was in ave after reading her stories: Survival and "Rahat ke Intzar ka Rog".

http://leenahnasir.blogspot.com/

How To Do Arranged Marriage Wrong (Especially Girls)

This is a cross-post.

 Mezba is originally from Bangladesh but now a hardcore Canadian. When I started doing blog in 2005, we informally had a group of desi bloggers and Mezba was one of my must-reads. Over the time, we all moved out in different directions with our blogs and lives, but still, I on and off go back and read his blog. Frequently, I don't agree with him but without any doubt, I enjoy his writings and perspectives. Following is one of his post, which you may find controversial but well written.

Read the whole post at the link. Here is just a gist.

"More and more it seems arranged marriages in the South Asian diaspora are becoming a type of "last resort". The boy has played the field and now wants some "domesticated girl" so turns to his mother for help. The girl has been with a boyfriend for so long but suddenly the mother of the said boyfriend decided her "golden boy" would be better off with someone she chose, and the boyfriend is too spineless to say otherwise, so now the girl is left looking for a poor sucker who has no idea where she has been before.

Now these people are in the same 'market' as the boy and girl who has kept away from any physical relationships, kept themselves pure and looking to get married, but finding it extremely difficult to do so."

Link: http://mezba.blogspot.com/2018/01/how-to-do-arranged-marriage-wrong.html

Death by Scrabble (Khel)

I recently get introduced to blog of "Rafiullah Mian". It was a pleasure reading his poetry, musings and short stories.

His one short story is a pure masterpiece - and can make a super hit TV play. Outstanding. 5 stars. He reminded me of Agatha Christie. Story is titled "Khel" (Game). It is an interesting story of a husband and a wife who are playing scrabble. Husband hates his wife from all his guts. As they make words on the board of scrabble, events start occurring  in real life, like:

"Suddenly I thought of a word. I can make word EXPLODES from the rack, if I take advantage of letter X from previously made word JINXED. I made word and avail 72 points. As soon as I made word on the board, there was an explosion in the room, and air-conditioning unit of room stopped working".

Climax of the story is worth reading.

His story link is here and blog link is http://rafimian.wordpress.com/

Age 40

About 6 years ago I wrote a one line post titled: 40 years. "Ye koi ittifaq to nahi ke Islam ke Muhammad ko nabuwwat 40 baras ki umer main mili". I did pick this post after conventional wisdom absorbed from world literature that a human attain intellectual maturity at age 40.

Beauty of Internet is that you meet smarter people than yourself! On my last post (On Belief) 2 such people commented. One was Adnan, an extremely talented kid from Toronto. Other was Aasem Bakhshi. Aasem mentioned on his blog the reference of Qurani ayat for the significance of age 40. Let me put his words here;

"According to Al-Quran 46:15, man attains strength at the age of 40. A few might take it literally but it is an age when the perceptual experience of reality has to be expressed by humans".