Archive for February, 2008

Culture vs. Capitalism

February 23, 2008 · Filed under My Perfect World

Kuldeep Nair was in dad’s office a few weeks ago. Dad asked him about social changes in India. Among other things, he mentioned that “Sikh youth have stopped keeping kase* because girls don’t like them”.

This disturbed me. Why the hell would a guy stop following his culture and traditions because girls don’t like it? And why the hell wouldn’t girl accept a guy’s culture?

Social behavior of people living in different parts of the world is changing. Change is natural. I’m not against change. But I am against the changes being directed by evil powers with an agenda!

If you look closely, people around the world are now developing dreams similar to the so-called American dream: A lifestyle most suitable to corporate culture and capitalism. This transition is not natural. It is very strategically being forced upon people around the world!

Life is happy when people live it naturally. Since the change is not organic, life feels so artificial these days. I hate it!

I refuse to change because some mean people of the world want me to change. Revolution starts from this refusal.

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* Kase are beard and head hair which Sikh men grow as a part of their religious and cultural practices.

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The Way of Life

February 21, 2008 · Filed under About me, Intellectual Talk

How beautiful life has become… I could never have imagined it in the past four years.

People who follow logic think about everything in their life and reach conclusions. The scrutinize every move their make. They set down principles based on their philosophies.

Clergy people follow their respective theologies. At every step, they evaluate themselves in light of the path they chose in the light of the theology they follow.

Sufis follow their Peer. They perform practices or tareeqat of their order. They choose their ways based on the teachings of their spiritual order.

There is always a part of human who wants to break free. Break free from everything which is imposed on him, be it logic, shariah, or tareeqat. My standard of honesty forbids me to do anything which I’m not convinced of, or I simply don’t want to do. What is the way of life for me? I know the answer now. Let me explain…

Have you seen how small children live their lives. They don’t follow logic, they don’t follow any theology and they don’t follow any tareeqat. They just do what they feel like doing, and whatever they do fits in right away with the nature. They don’t do any evil. They do stuff they are not supposed to do. They would want to drink coke even if their mama doesn’t like it. When they do drink coke, does mama gets angry? Of course she does, but she forgives right away. Children simply don’t have the ability to commit evil. All a human needs to do is to realize what things enabled him to be evil, avoid those things, and everything would be beautiful. Every thing he will do will set in right away with the nature. He wouldn’t want any of logic, theology or tareeqat.

People will listen to his words, and derive logic and hikmat from it. People will look at his ways and derive shariah and tareeqat from it. And he would just be living along as a child. Crying when hurt, yearning for things he like, becoming happy for the simplest pleasures in life, being a source of comfort for those around him… and yes, following the nature. When you follow nature, there is no evil in the things you want.

These past few weeks have been the most miraculous. Truth saves all.

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Bitter

February 21, 2008 · Filed under About me, Forensic Psychology

I’ve lately realized how bitter I’ve become. After all I have been through, I have finally set down a few rules. Then I see people who are living their lives just like I want to live, only that they do it without following any rules. They just have it naturally. Somehow, I want to make them realize how lucky and blessed they are by showing them more piercing and mind breaking sides of the picture. May be I’m just jealous of all those people.

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Nothing Else Matters

February 21, 2008 · Filed under About me, Intellectual Talk

The cold breeze is blowing outside, rattling through the trees, asking me the question: “Does it really matter?”

Having friends, or having no friends, celebrated goodbye, or a lonely death… Does it really matter? The only meaning to this world can be given by…

My sorrows, my regrets, things I’ve lost…

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Telecom: A Vision

February 19, 2008 · Filed under Technical Jargon

I work in core networks, and I am a rider of a sinking ship. Simply put, with advancing capabilities of the access network equipment, core network will very soon become obsolete.

Decentralization is a keyword in telecom trend. Core network, even by its name defies this trend. We now have BSCs which support local switching. We have femto cells, with heterogeneous handovers.

In heterogeneous handovers with IP networks, a voice call from a GSM/UMTS/WCDMA network seamlessly shifts to an IP network provider which is connected to the GSM/UMTS/WCDMA core network. Just think of the case when the second party mobile station is also hooked up to an IP network. If our network is intelligent enough to recognize that, the call can be routed from one IP provider to the other IP provider, totally bypassing the conventional core network. Does that remind you of Skype? It does, only that you loose the ability to roam wherever you want.

This is where metropolitan wireless technologies come in. Current WiMAX services feature their exclusive voice services. In future, they will be nothing more than a wireless ISP. Users will be free to choose a voice provider of their liking. This trend is exactly why GSM operators shouldn’t wait for LTE. Its time to take action and plan transition to a true IP network.

Currently, telecom networks provide the end user network connectivity as well as the voice/data services. We are moving to a world where there would be an IP network provider & a voice provider, two would be totally differentiable entities. Operators can either choose to confine themselves to a big hall full of routers, or they can go out and provide mobility services to the users. Voice providers wouldn’t have to worry about mobility anymore. With protocols like SIP, you don’t need to worry about mobility, all you need is an IP address.

Vendors today have started producing MSC servers, media gateways which support variety of VoIP protocols and transmission layers, including SIP and RTP. VoIP is a whole different ball game than SS7/SIGTRAN. Current operators who own these nodes can easily convert their MSCs to voice servers. But will they be able to hold their ground? Open source VoIP solutions such as Asterisk IP PBX have revolutionized the concept of internet telephony. With IAX, an Asterisk voice server is expandable without any theoretical limit. With such strong competition, with a voice operator working in every next street, how can even the largest of operators keep standing? All one would need to start hosting voice services would be a big internet trunk, and an Asterisk box connected to a regulatory defining the number levels and routing decisions. And like the way internet works, one day all the hundred of thousands of Asterisk boxes will form a giant mesh, with extremely smart routing strategies. Knock knock big operators?

Lets take the dream to another level. This is what even the internet hasn’t achieved yet. I dream of the day when even the voice providers would fade away. Every thing would be absolutely peer-to-peer. All the serving wireless towers would be connected to each other in a mesh. Remember decentralization being the keyword? All routing decisions for the far end user would take place at your serving site/router. Who needs a voice provider when you have peer to peer?

I believe I am talking about the telecom world as it would be no more than 10 years from now. One day, not very far away, I will sit down and tell my children of how once there used to be a core network, that we so fondly worked for. :)

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Ecstasy in Belief

February 14, 2008 · Filed under About me, Forensic Psychology

This is in continuation to Ego.

My ego made me ask the question “How could I?”. Why did I ask this question? I asked this question because I had believed that I would never deviate. That belief was an essential part of my entire belief system at that time. Since the belief was now gone, I needed a way to explain the situation. Logic came in handy. Once I had logically determined “how could I”, I started finding reasons for other parts of my shaken belief system. Of course, even after my strict questions and scientific ways, the logic slowly but surely came to be in harmony with the belief system. Next part was putting back together the mirror which was broken. Wasif Ali Wasif says that once that mirror is broken,it is impossible to put it back together. Leaving my logical ways was hence a tough transition. It needed a miracle, and sarcastically, that miracle came with the completion of my logical arguments: The fine line between ego and guilt.

One finds peace in belief, the marvelous mirror. After such a long and tiresome journey, I’m back to the basics. But there is of course a change in my belief system: I am a human, and humans make mistakes.

There is nothing to be find in logic. The real secrets lay where belief goes. Oh man… There are some really strange blessings on me… Blessings, something which cannot be found with logic. This feels so good! Ecstasy all over! There is no perfectness like happiness. I said it when I was sad, but back then, I had no idea how it could be like.

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Logic to Emotions

February 13, 2008 · Filed under About me

The things I logically figured out in past three to four years, though washed me out emotionally, never actually took over me at an emotional level. That reminds me of a sentence by Muhammad Ali Rodolvi, while he was quoting Prophet Abraham: “Qail tu tu ne kar dia magar dil ki tasalli nahin hoi“. A loose translation would be: “You have convinced me, but I’m still not satisfied.”

Last few months were the time when my logic finally met my emotions, to the level of heart’s content. From gham-e-agahi to aqal-e-saleem? :P

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Ego

February 13, 2008 · Filed under About me, Forensic Psychology

“Expose yourself to situations where you ego hurts”, he said.

“Errr….”, I mumbled, surprised and confused.

He smiled, took a long breath, and closed his eyes for a while. I knew he was going to say something more. Then he said, “My father was in Bombay. He came out in a bazaar, and all the merchants and people in the bazaar stood up in his respect. It was as if a king had come out to his people. While he walked down the bazaar, he saw a vendor with a small stall. He went up to the stall, and toppled the stall upside down! The vendor got enraged and started to say disgraceful words. As the vendor continued with the verbal abuses, the disciples of my father, also started fuming. They tried to stop the vendor, but my father stopped them, and allowed the vendor to say whatever he wanted to say. When vendor stopped, my father asked for the amount of his financial loss, and payed double the amount.”

I looked at him in disbelief. Why would people who are custodians of the divine system do anything like that.

He continued: “When he got back to the place he was staying at, his disciples asked him why he did something like that. And he replied, “When I came out in the bazaar and everyone stood up, I had a shred of pride. That pride had to be eliminated.”"

That was eight years ago, when I was 16. I didn’t understand why he told the story to me, and why did I have to expose myself to situations like that. Honestly, I never understood it even after. Today, I realized it all in a flash.

Normal people either take joy in their deviant acts without guilt, or they feel guilty and try to change themselves. I still remember my disbelief after the bigb. “How could I?” “How can someone like me…” It was a hurt ego. For many months I stayed in that disbelief. All three things mixed up in one giant confusion, and I was lead to follow the path of logic… Today I discovered the fine line between guilt and ego. What I’d been calling guilt was more of a hurt ego.

I was honest to the level of cruelty. You know, you lie to people just to make them feel good. I never lied to myself even when I felt like shit. This reminds me of a sentence I say a lot, “Even if I’m not honest to people, I’m honest to myself”. That blade of truth ripped my ego apart like anything. My ego springs from a lots of things. Other than the way I was brought up, my socially aloof childhood was also another reason.

Today marks a very important milestone, the end of an era… And there is a lesson learned quite the hard way: Humans make mistakes.

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What the …?

February 11, 2008 · Filed under A Day Flashes By...

I want to want things again. I’m forcing myself to write these words. I want that feeling back when I wanted to be heard. There is a pounding in my head. And I’m sad. And there is nothing I want in this life. When every god damned thing about me is ordinary, why can’t I feel like an ordinary person? I’m tired of living like this. I want to be happy, and I want to want life again. I want my feelings back.

Note: This was the last major breaking point. Once I got over that phase, things started to become better and better. (November 5, 2008)

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The Story of Questions

February 9, 2008 · Filed under About me

When I first asked the question, “If God is from azal and will remain till abad, what’s that azal and what’s that abad?”, I was in class three. That would make me 8 years old at that time. I remember discussing this concept with Uncle Naqvi (late) and Uncle Iftikhar Hussain for hours. Uncle Naqvi, the mathematician he was, would give me logical reasonings. (appropriate for my age of course) Uncle Iftikhar, the poet he was, would try to explain it in terms of irfan and love.

My family is like religious royalty. I had a strong religious motivation and orientation while growing up. My parents, who happen to know religion, culture, psychology very well, kept an amazing balance. It wasn’t till I was on my own in GIKI, when I disturbed that balance. I was never told not to ask questions, or believe without reasons. That combined with the huge amounts of philosophical literature I used to read. Reading Quratulain Haider’s Aag ka Darya when I was 17, reading Initizar Hussain’s Zard Kutta when I was 18, reading Saadat Hasan Mantu, Isma Chughtai, and other taraqi pasand writers of pre-partion era when I was 15… You’ll ask about the famous titles like Qudratullah Shahab’s Shahab Nama and Alipur Ka Aili by Masud Mufti? Those I read when I was 12-13. Now I wouldn’t even mention the amount of religious literature I went through. That is how I grew up… and that is exactly why I questioned every damned thing in the world.

I found the answer to that azal and abad question in the due time. I explained that in my post titled n Dimensions.

But after you have found answers to all the questions in the world, you come back to the basics. That is why I wrote the post about Uncle Latif.

People who read my blog think I have a logic vs. emotions thing going on. That is not true. My questions and logic have come to be in harmony with the nature.

Let me explain emotions. A person might feel he’s in love when he looks at some girl, an easy example eh? Now his behavior can be totally defined by his biology. Does that make his emotions mechanical? Well, I wouldn’t go down that path. I would just say that his emotions are logical. Hence making humanly emotions a subset of human limitations, and logic.

When I say, “I’m in love”, I don’t refer to that “logical love”. I mean something which is beyond human limitations, something which is in harmony with nature, and hence God’s will.

My humanly emotions are nothing more than a subset of logic. :) The real thing is when He wants it. That is why I say that love is when it is free of all worldly factors. That is why I say love is when it is unconditional. People debate me on that. How can they? When they don’t even know what love is?

This post is also an explanation to the jargon I wrote in Logic Out/Emotions In.

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Logic Out/Emotions In…

February 6, 2008 · Filed under About me, I Do, My Perfect World

I have nothing to say anymore. I know how life is gonna be, how one should spend this life. Then there is logic, which I’m not relying on anymore, because when you have a way to go, you don’t need logic. And then there are humanly emotions… That is where I’m stuck.

I used to clear out my hormonal rushes with logical reasoning and well, with the bitter blinding way of dealing with life. Not to mention that I was a living dead for so much time that I stopped to get all emotional at all! Since I leave everything to be seen while following the “path”, there is no real way of dealing with my humanly emotions. I met certain people at a very strange time in my life, time when I was finally coming out of it after three and a half years. I come out of it, and woah! I deal with these emotions face on! And its something which I cannot do anything about. :/ I want to, but I’m afraid even to think about it. These are the kind of ideas which make people call me crazy… But I’m a man enough to think about those things and for once, actually try to find a way… I’ve been telling myself that its crazy and you shouldn’t even think about it… I even tried resorting to logic for once, to tell myself how this is just a hormonal rush… but logic really isn’t the way to go, remember? So if I say the emotions are not there, it would be denial.

And denial is something I wouldn’t do. By my standards of honesty, denial is being dishonest, even if denial solves the problem… How could I say the emotions aren’t there? Because they are there. But I cannot talk to anyone about it, and I can’t do anything about it.

I once said that of all the things about this world, time is the cruelest of all. I was yet to experience another meaning to that sentence.

So I’ll do what I have to. Leave it to Him. How do I know what He wants? Well, I can be sure about that. One, I’ll ask Him to do all the right things for me, and second I’m not telling here…

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Memory Lane I

February 5, 2008 · Filed under About me

A man should have a passion in life. If you ask me, I can count quite a few. But really, I don’t really have a passion anymore. There was a time when I would keep messing around with my Linux boxes for days and wouldn’t get bored. I used to be such a geek that I setup an Asterisk based IP PBX in my home. :/ But now, my Linux boxes just keep waiting… Then there used to be counter-strike. There were times back in GIKI days when I used to play counter-strike for sixteen hours in a row, and wouldn’t get bored. Good old GIKI days… When I think of them now, I’m awed.

It was just my second week in GIKI when I had this itch that my hostel didn’t have a LAN. Man, I was expecting a LAN to be there when I got to GIKI. To be honest, that was one reason why I chose GIKI at the first place. :P (Please don’t tell my parents that) So it was quite a disappointment… So in my second week in GIKI, I got a petition signed from everybody in the hostel and went to the rector’s office to get the LAN setup. He signed, sent me to another guy, he signed and sent me to yet another person, you know the typical official proceedings. I ended up with the hardware store guys. They were supposed to gimme everything required to setup a LAN. Now every time I would go to them, they would tell me stuff would be here next week. And that keep happening for quite sometime. And everybody from the hostel would bother me with questions… hey when it would be here? You aren’t doing anything… Why is this guy in charge of LAN anyway? :P You know, regular stuff… :P And then one bright morning, two of my hostel mates went to the rector’s office and asked for the LAN. Viola! The hardware guys showed up in the afternoon, with stuff in their hands! Man I was so excited!

Now came the real exciting part! Since we had to wire the whole hostel, I got the keys to everyone’s room. :D Now you do the math, lonely hostel rooms, GIKI in a jungle, bored lads… what would they do when they are all alone? And I’m not the kind who knocks and all… :P I had the keys! Why would I knock? :D Quite a few jokes that brilliant day…

Stuff kept happening… They made me the LAN administrator… Everybody called me LANman, a very unfortunate nick name, for it could be distorted in so many disgusting ways. :P My prime memories from the first year in GIKI were of that LAN. Many images come to my mind… Me standing in the corridors messing with the switches wondering how they worked… People waking me up at four in the morning because their LAN wasn’t working… People knocking at my door and me pretending that I never listened. :P Crofty used to live in Room 108, the room opposite to mine. He introduced me to the metal music. Watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S, listening to Iron Maiden, depriving everyone of internet so that I could check my mail… man those days were swell! I was so happy the day I was setup a DNS server with named for the first time…

Now if I wouldn’t mention the pranks I fell victim to, this memory lane would go incomplete… Two of them are most mentionable. Pappar threw down some rotten gajar ka halwa from his window, and instead of going down to the ground, it landed on my window slab. Yep, his room was right on the top of mine. Now I swear to God, that rotten halwa smelled like minced meat!!! That evening, I was wondering around the dhaba area with Abidi like usual. We came back to hostel. Abidi had to get something from my room, so he was with me. When we entered, we both smelled something funny. I said, “It smells like bakray ka qeema“. Abidi stood there for a while, trying to figure out what caused the smell… And then all of a sudden, he ran out to the corridor and started telling everybody that Jaffar thinks someone has put “dam wala qeema” in his room. Man… not exactly a prank, but Pappar idiot! Everything he does turns into a prank. :P Then there was this time when Crofty, Sakib, and Sheraz etc blew a cracker and switched off the corridor’s mains at the same time. I was messing around with the hostel’s server at that time. I thought I did something. :P When I came out, everybody came yelling at me at what I had done… I actually thought I saw something in the LAN cables going to the hostel server. And unfortunately, I mentioned it in front of everyone. :P That day in second semester, the story of Jaffar and LAN cable ki sparking came into being.

I cherish that first year so much. So many images which will go with me forever. Me going to Shirazi’s room for the first time and telling him who I was. :) Me threatening Abidi about being a shia and he actually lying to me that he was a sunni. Bechara! He was so scared of me… :P Crofty and me solving differential’s numerical… Man we were so studious in that summer semester… Going to Togik when the lights went out, me and Bhaloo sitting and listening to ghazals and pakka raags by Mehdi Hasan, going for the Sehri on first of Ramzan, irritating Baji in the PH102 lab, and so many other images which will always stay in my head. I was a child back then. And I’m so sad when I think that the child within me is no more.

I wanted to write something else. But then, I theorize everything and every experience in my life. I took an artist’s approach this time around, and instead of theorizing, I went on to just a humanly expression. My theories and philosophies put a blindfold on all my readers, who are then never able to get to the Jaffar Hussain as he is/was in the real life. I wrote about my first year in GIKI. I think I will continue this and write about different times in my life…

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Finish It!

February 4, 2008 · Filed under About me

Truth shall save us all!!! Behold…

New questions, new revelations… It takes a sheep good enough to face the horrifying events and still keep standing. I thought I drifted off… But I didn’t. I was right there all the time, just that I never realized. Loving the new revelations…

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Into thy hands…

February 3, 2008 · Filed under Intellectual Talk

I’ll just paste a few things I wrote at different places today…

You start finding meanings when you stop thinking that you give a meaning to this life.

Let me show you life’s funny aspect. You are a child today and your parents take care of you. Tomorrow, and just tomorrow, you will be a parent and you’ll take care of your children. One day, you will yearn for grandchildren… and then one day, they will say goodbye to you. You will be gone. But they will go on. Then one day they will be gone. But love you gave them will go on.

There will be a time when nobody will know me or remember even my name. The tombstone on my grave would be the only thing about me. Or maybe even that wouldn’t happen. What is a human on this planet? A skeleton disappearing in dirt?

Still, we have our desires, and we soooo want this world. When you are going to go away, why even think about this world? But then, a man has to live. What does he do? There is no meaning left when you think about your ultimate end… So you give in to Him, who knows the reality behind disappearing skeletons…

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