To all the girls and women out there, may you be safe from men and patriarchal women

The latest murder of a Pakistan, in our very midst, in F-7 Islamabad,  has shocked and numbed me. The man was found kicking the severed head of the woman he murdered. So, here we have it: the cost of being a woman is torture, murder and decapitation. Furthermore, everyone there tried to cover it up. No one called the Police while she was being murdered and chopped. 

It's a coincidence she is a former Ambassador's daughter. (me , too)

Her face is everywhere on social media. There is even a photograph of her attending the Motorway Gang Rape protest from last year, not even a full 12 months ago. 

These past few days, several other women's murders have been protested against, including the abduction and torture of the Afghan Ambassador's daughter. 

I have to admit , I'm tired with the more activist/political framing of patriarchal violence now. I mean, my senses no longer seem to respond to the more intelligent analysis of how the system produces this violence. 

My senses tell me this is always there: the brutal massacre of a woman. 

The disturbing image of a woman's severed hit being kicked around by a male bastard boils my blood. And, I know from the longest time, since the age of 9 or 10, that women are not considered equal and violence against them has been around for thousands of years and is always justified. It's ingrained in the very teachings of our culture. I've always known it. 

Long before capitalism or any state, women have been slaughtered, burned, chopped, sold, bought, given as gifts, raped, domesticated and brainwashed into their own slavery. 

Women are idealised for their beauty but also cursed in the same breath as whores. Women give birth , give life but never made to feel their power as life givers. A woman is never allowed to realise her full power. Instead she is brainwashed and conditioned into the most regressive religious notions of her role in a patriarchal society. 

Instead she has to pray and accept her lot in life. She has to beg for her own life. 

A few years ago, I wept inconsolably thinking about a headline I had read about how a pregnant woman was beaten to death outside a court house in Pakistan by her own family for having run away with a man she loved. The image haunted me and still does. I kept weeping , the plight and suffering of a woman and, how she must have faced the death blows by her parents. 

Somehow, a Woman , the very life giver, the female who objectively has superior powers to a Man, has to somehow be fashioned into an inferior creature than a man, and then has to worship not only a Supernatural Entity but also the Man she gives birth to. And,  through her life, she is tortured, killed and violated.

The suffering of women is relentless in history. And, it is completely invisible. 

Of all the Tweets, righteous columns, headlines, cries, the line that struck me the most in the past couple of days was the one by Muhammad Hanif : 

Silence please, we are busy killing a girl. 

How true, for thousands of years, men have been busy killing girls. 

To all the girls and women out there, may you be safe from men and patriarchal women. 

Lovebirds and their nakhras

Welcoming pets into the family starts off with a lot of takaluf, politeness, extra care and attention. But it wears off. 

I'll explain. 

Kavita has been doing so many chores for Aboo in exchange for pocket money and, also collected piles of Eidee so I promised to get her 'approved pets.' This means, pets my father won't chuck out of the house. 

Now, the main reason she actually wants them is she is direly jealous of her friend who has many pets, including a cat and parakeets and I think some goats.  Aboo threatened to throw out any feline straight out of the house. So, that was a no no.  

To make matters worse, my brother in London has not one, but 2 Persian Cats who seem to be some kind of clones of Snarf from Thundercats. They are very cute. 

So, Kavita has really been pining for pets. I also keep reminding her that she never really cared much for our Bijlee back in Monrovia and, used to smack her on the head with her a pillow when Bijlee was only a few months old. This makes her cry.  And, wants to get pets. 

For all this, when we were at the Bird Shop (which also sold mountain bikes, bikes and, cycling gear in this cramped shop with screeching exotic parrots and budgies in F-10/4), we set our hearts on lovebirds instead of the generic budgie. Kavita nearly fainted because she couldn't believe she was finally getting a pet, or rather a couple of pets. 

She kept saying I was the best mother in the world. 

When we brought the beautiful green peach - faced lovebirds home, my father approved right away because they weren't dogs or cats. 

We picked a pair which had already laid eggs but somehow the fellow at the shop didn't want to give us the eggs. He said in this heat, the birds wouldn't sit on the eggs but I am not so sure. He said we should keep our birds out of the heat and in a month's time he would come and install a 'ghonsla' in our cage. 

The birds live with us in the very cool and well-lit basement, where we ourselves retreat in the hot summer months. It's practically another climate down here. I think the birds could have easily hatched the eggs given how cool it is down here. Also, all they do is hide in the 'ghonsla' when we go too near the cage or , when they get sick of our conversations. 

The beginning was very polite and careful. Kavita dutifully changed the water and fed the lovebirds their bajra. We have learned they are crazy about sunflower seeds so we bought extra and give it to them as a treat. Kavita talks to them at length. I have a specific, musical "Hello" I use for them and they turn their head sideways when they hear it. 

Oh, I nearly forgot. We named them Laila Majnu and, Kavita thinks the one with a white mark is Majnu. 

The early days were fun. To encourage them to chirp, we played YouTube videos of lovebirds chirping. And, you will not believe what song Laila Majnu sing when they hear those videos.  If it rains or even for a change of scenery we take them to the porch upstairs which they love. 

Now, the novelty has worn off and, Kavita doesn't spend as much time as before and I have to remind her that these are her pets. If I joke to Laila Majnu that Kavita has forgotten all about them, she bursts into tears. Even if I tease her and, tell stories about her to Laila Majnu, she takes me aside, bursts into tears and says I hurt her feelings. 

Similarly, I use the birds to tease Aboo. I once left them with him while he was watching TV and loudly asked them "Make sure Aboo doesn't watch fazool Urdu dramas". Then he retorts and says, that he in fact has trained them to spy on me. 

He loves talking about the 50 budgies that he once had in the garage and then, he just gave them away. He told Kavita a story of bravery where he smacked a cat who was terrorising his budgies with a walking stick. 

He shushed them once when we were all sitting on the porch, drinking tea, during a monsoon rain, and Kavita stomped her feet "Why is Aboo shushing my birds?" I told her, he was just making amiable sounds. 

Kavita consoles herself that she doesn't have a cat because otherwise they would eat her lovebirds. In fact, she herself shooed away Bilquis who was banging on Laila Majnu's cage when we brought them for a change of scenery in the balcony. Kavita had hardly looked away for 1 minute and there was our beloved neighbourhood cat who we often leave chicken bones for trying to eat our lovebirds. 

Laila Majnu must have been traumatised but I think they have forgotten about it. What really annoys me is that they are still so scared of us. They still show fear and flap about if we come too close. 

When we first got them, they wouldn't go near the food dish. I looked it up and read that feeding makes animals feel vulnerable so it could take a few days until they felt comfortable enough to start feeding. Thankfully, it took them about a day. Even then, they kept watching their back. So, we put one cage against side of a sofa and, let them face the light well in the basement. 

I recently tied up a clay ghonsla in the cage myself and they are so happy with it. But they just hide in it if they don't want to see our faces. 

I've noticed they chirp louder once we leave the room. That really annoys me. Like they are happy we left the room.

But maybe they are annoyed with us because we keep checking every 2 minutes whether they have laid any eggs or not. 

For now, we have to wait. And enjoy their birdsong from another room. 

COVID19 Pandemic: Difficult but important reads

From: Migrant worker wheels son sleeping on suitcase in heart-wrenching video

Below are some of the most interesting, complex and challenging Analysis pieces I read (or tried to read) during this Pandemic which really helped me understand the capitalist basis of a Pandemic which is ravaging our Planet. 

These articles (along with so much else that we have read, watched, witnessed) produce deeper understanding, learning and anger. We can't live in ignorance, in our bubbles. And, we have to sustain the anger because the Pandemic has exposed a rotten global system of exploitation, greed, and natural destruction and, with the vaccine hoarding by the Global South, the vaccine passports that Europe wants to instate, with how heatwaves are burning up parts of the world as we speak, we can't afford to be complacent. 

I'm reminded so much of the anger, injustice I felt at the time ebola ravaged West Africa: how the world closed its borders, flights to Liberia and our neighbours. How sensational news was played. How, local cultures were insulted because of the connection to bushmeat. How, the suffering was exacerbated by lack of medical infrastructure in countries where international organisations, in the name of aid and development, have laundered funds to their own pockets, R and Rs, mortgages, compounds, rents, and self-awarding stories of glory. 

So read! 

1) The Permanent Pandemic by Aseem Shrivastava and Rupert Read in Open Magazine, 2 Jul 2021. The main question they ask is Is a post-Covid world possible? 

I like how the authors state up front: 

This piece is about the profound danger we have exposed ourselves to by turning against nature, and by turning tech and economics into pseudo-gods. It concerns how our globalising civilisation systematically creates the kind of risk that we have suffered grievously from over the last year. Whether by the lack of humility implicit in constructing deadly viruses in labs, or by the lack of humility explicit in destroying ecosystems, artificialising much of the earth and wreaking climate-havoc, we are manifesting a mode of being that is incompatible with safety and with the richness of long species life.

And, this is a recurring commentary /analysis: that the reason viruses are jumping from animals to human is that we are encroaching on their habitats, that we have felled down millions of trees, destroyed forests to make commercial farms, that we have destroyed the earth mining it and, trade wild animals illegally, trade mass produced livestock in millions , that of course, viruses will jump from animals to humans.

It's very simple, rather than launching into attacks against China:

After all, every creature, even a virus that comes alive only in a living cellular environment, longs to thrive by reproducing itself. Removed forcibly from its customary habitat, it would surely look for a new home. The current pandemic may be part of the rapidly growing price of the unsparingly triumphalist modernisation of the world.

So, the authors say:

Our fundamental contention is that you have to choose: you can have a relatively secure, relocalised world, or you can have pandemics in a world of sporadic restless ‘growth’. What you can’t have is our growthist, technophilic, materialistic, economically globalised system and be relatively free of the risk of pandemics.

The article goes through these points:

1) "First, let us look at the destruction of habitats around the earth in the global age."

2) "Second, let us consider the rapid growth of movement of people and goods around the world in the global era."

3) "Third, there has been a tremendous growth of international animal trading with the advent of the latest phase of globalisation."

4) "Fourth, scarcely secondary is the public health danger posed by the industrial mass production of meat through animal farming and the slaughterhouses."

5) "Fifth, let us further consider dietary habits in a globalised world." 

2) The  Pandemic,  Southern Urbanisms  and  Collective  Life by Gautam Bhan, Teresa Caldeira, Kelly Gillespie, and AbdouMaliq Simone, August 3, 2020 in Society and Space. 

This piece really struck me: how is social distancing possible in slums? In tiny cramped apartments? How can you lockdown poor people? How would poor children take online classes? How do we enforce lockdowns in urban centres in the Global South? 

The authors say we have to imagine collective life in these urban spaces, not the neat individual units in the Global North when designing COVID19 policy/measures : 

What would this reading of collective life, of density as sociality, say about the lockdown? When read from this lens, any pandemic response capable of working in the context of southern urban conditions would have to search for a relevant scale of isolation and a notion of ‘distancing’ that retained the existing arrangements of the urban majority. Homes, offices, firms and enterprises would not then be the vocabulary of a response. Instead, a wider geography and social imaginary would be at play – the street, the community kitchen, the taxi rank, the landfill, the market, the neighborhood watch, the queue for the collection of cash transfers and water supply. New arrangements would become visible and become usable as practices that can travel. Community quarantines, acupunctured into these landscapes by the same hands that built them in the first place, neighborhood watches by residents, isolation of vulnerable residents, such as the elderly, in collective spaces are ideas that emerge from listening to the forms of collective life that already exist and offer lessons in shaping the “afterwards” of COVID-19. Local institutions such as schools, mosques, churches, and community centers are able to repurpose themselves under pandemic conditions because they hold the capacity to read a wide range of local needs and aspirations and thus act as multifaceted nodes of intervention. Additionally, in some neighborhoods, residents are so attuned to the details of household arrangements, occupations, and mobility, so immersed in always paying attention to what everyone is doing, that it seems to make possible an intricate choreography that allows them to adapt to new conditions without explicit organization or deliberation. These examples point to the capacity to be able to move ideas and planning, resources and responses, along the planes of life and arrangement of those most often unthought, disavowed, even as those worlds and experiences form the majority. The fact that Dharavi, one of the densest built forms in the world, is emerging as an example of resilience rather than vulnerability is precisely such a choreography. This is also a kind of density – of inter-connection, of joint histories and ways of coping, of the instincts of collective life – that is a resource perhaps more enduring than monumental responses, technological fixes or large scale institutional action.

3) COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital by Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace in  MONTHLY REVIEW AN INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST MAGAZINE.  (May 01, 2020)

This piece was written earlier in 2020. Much of the analysis is the same with The Permanent Pandemic in terms of tracing the devastation of wild habitats, industrial farming, global capital, transfer of viruses, etc. 

The authors up front say that healthcare has been commodified and, our preparedness cannot rely on crises but strong social and medical care systems. They recommended: 

We need to nationalize hospitals as Spain did in response to the outbreak. We need to supercharge testing in volume and turnaround as Senegal has. We need to socialize pharmaceuticals. We need to enforce maximum protections for medical staff to slow staff decay. We must secure the right to repair for ventilators and other medical machinery. We need to start mass-producing cocktails of antivirals such as remdesivir and old-school antimalarial chloroquine (and any other drugs that appear promising) while we conduct clinical trials testing whether they work beyond the laboratory. A planning system should be implemented to (1) force companies to produce the needed ventilators and personal protection equipment required by health care workers and (2) prioritize allocation to places with the greatest needs.

If only this was possible and had been done in India, in Brazil and other places where the Pandemic killed off hundreds of thousands if not more! 

And, they ask 

Other than describing the wild food market in the typical orientalism, little effort has been expended on the most obvious of questions. How did the exotic food sector arrive at a standing where it could sell its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market in Wuhan?  

Because: 

The overlapping economic geography extends back from the Wuhan market to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness. 

COVID19 is not the first virus to jump from animals to humans and, this point is made by The Permanent Pandemic , too. These are zoonotic viruses. Malaria , although it's been around for centuries, is one. Ebola is one. 

And, so: 

If by its global expansion alone, commodity agriculture serves as both propulsion for and nexus through which pathogens of diverse origins migrate from the most remote reservoirs to the most international of population centers. It is here, and along the way, where novel pathogens infiltrate agriculture’s gated communities. The lengthier the associated supply chains and the greater the extent of adjunct deforestation, the more diverse (and exotic) the zoonotic pathogens that enter the food chain. Among recent emergent and reemergent farm and foodborne pathogens, originating from across the anthropogenic domain, are African swine fever, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola Reston, E. coli O157:H7, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, and a variety of novel influenza variants, including H1N1 (2009), H1N2v, H3N2v, H5N1, H5N2, H5Nx, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2.

The conclusions are of course, radical. We have to re-order our economies and societies, our social relations. We have to go back to a less exploitative system. 

I love their last paragraph: 

The way out is nothing short of birthing a world (or perhaps more along the lines of returning back to Earth). It will also help solve—sleeves rolled up—many of our most pressing problems. None of us stuck in our living rooms from New York to Beijing, or, worse, mourning our dead, want to go through such an outbreak again. Yes, infectious diseases, for most of human history our greatest source of premature mortality, will remain a threat. But given the bestiary of pathogens now in circulation, the worst spilling over now almost annually, we are likely facing another deadly pandemic in far shorter time than the hundred-year lull since 1918. Can we fundamentally adjust the modes by which we appropriate nature and arrive at more of a truce with these infections?

Quellcrist Falconer and Michael Burnham

Kavita and I delve so deeply into our Netflix series that we both end up dreaming of spaceships, time travel, robots, ghosts, etc. That's how immersive we get. That's how obsessed we get. Or, how freely our imaginations run wild. 

The other day she told me she dreamt we were standing in line to test a new time traveling machine and, we tested it and, then she wanted to go back to the time she met her friend for the first time and then she met her younger self. And, I had the same type of dream. 

I recently watched Star Trek Discovery and, really enjoyed it. The story is set before the original series and, its biggest gift is that we get to meet Spock's big sister. (We also get to meet Sherlock Holme's little sis don't we in Enola Holmes. Can't wait to meet James Bond's sister.)

I can't get gush enough about her. Why? Because she's a beautiful, intelligent, brilliant, courageous black female character who takes centre stage. She totally dominates the screen, the story, and she is so breathtakingly compelling. 

I found myself thinking about Altered Carbon's Quellcrist Falconer : leader, visionary, fighter, beautiful and black. There are many many similarities between these protagonists. 

Why did I become so drawn to these characters? I think it's because for the first time we get to watch strong black women in action who have a strong moral compass, very clear path , and, aren't these annoying wishy-washy characters. Of course, the genre demands very strong capable women who aren't totally derailed by random issues but still, their overwhelming strength and focus and, moral leadership feel so good. The crafting of these characters, the performances and the stories are so good, satisfyingly good. 

I'm not sure which character I like more. Altered Carbon is a very dark, complex story that points to a highly depressing future, a way to think about our world right now, that is not much different in terms of mind blowing inequality and the excesses of the powerful and rich. Altered Carbon shows us a world where a handful enjoy life on the clouds, living forever, living their fantasies while the rest eek out their lives in a polluted, violent system. Quellcrist Falconer is a revolutionary in this world, she wants to wake people up, rebel against the injustice and undo the violence of the stack class system. 

Michael Burnham, on the other hand, is very much pro-status quo. Yes, sometimes she breaks a few Federation rules and bureaucracy but she isn't out to break up the system. She very much believes in the mission/vision of the Federation , of the stability it brings, its moral rightness , its moral leadership, in the idea that a united Galaxy under the right leadership is the only answer. And, Earth, particularly United States, is the centre of it all. It reeks of American Exceptionalism, that there is one true power to lead us. 

Still, these two characters are wonderful to watch, to be their kick-ass selves, standing tall, fighting, leading, taking charge, and, we love them for their clarity, their strength. It's just wonderful to watch them and dream about them.