Tuesday 29 December 2009

Life in Transcription






Books are my passion, when I was at the 6th KIBF (Karachi International Book Fair) which concluded recently, it was just like finding oneself among friends, companions, teachers and guides.

It is often said that books change our perception, our way of thinking, our world view and hence the world around us. A book which is to be published in mid January 2010 “Promised Land: Thirteen Books” by Jay Parini is about those Thirteen Books that changed the way America is forever and helped to create the nation that it is.

Books are life and wisdom in transcription. The following passage from one of my favorite French Novelist Marcel Proust brilliantly describes what a Book means:

“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”

Sunday 6 December 2009

Life trilogy-Views of a Biologist, a Psychologist and a Sufi

A biologist says that Life is evolutionary exuberance; it is what happens when expanding populations of sensing, active organisms knock up against each other and work things out. Life is animals at play. It is a marvel of inventions for cooling and warming, collecting and dispersing, eating and evading, wooing and deceiving.

A psychologist says that Life means to contribute to the whole. Individuals are bound by a triple tie-to the earth on which one must live, to the human species with which one must interact, and to a sex. From these ties derive the three categories of problems of life.

A Sufi says that the point of Life is not to get anywhere; it is to notice that you are, in the moment of creation. The point of life is therefore to create-who and what you are and then to experience it.

When we look around we see Life much more according to the biologist’s view-eating, evading, wooing and deceiving and less according to Sufi's view of creating and procreating. Why?