Keynotes from Kandahar
TRANSFORMING TOGETHER
How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when they neither share our suffering nor we share their joys! When we know that we don’t belong to them. Our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with our Rulers. All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, and the dream of a cloister. This is how we define our stupid unwanted prevailing democracy in Pakistan. The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
There comes a time when one must take position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellion ferment in the masses of life which people earth. On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?
People in our country are since shouting that they want to create a better future. It is not true. Their future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. Our past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. By a certain age coincidences lose their magic and then in some grave times no longer surprise becomes a ladder to climb uphill. A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. Remember, remember always, that all of us, you and I especially, are descendants of the immigrants from our North West, of who all were Rebellions.
I began to ask each time: What is the worst that could happen to us if we tell the truth? Unlike people in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, disappeared or run off the road at night. Rather our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called idiots, jerks and junks or hypersensitive and at the most we may disrupt some dinner parties. But then our speaking out will permit other men and women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and our country is altered forever. And our outrightly speaking will get easier and easier. And we will find we have fallen in love with our own vision, which we may never have realized we had. And we may lose some friends. And new ones will find us and cherish us. And at last we will know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking our truth; And that is not speaking.
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy.
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There cannot be any large-scale reformation until there is a personal radical change on an individual level. It has got to happen inside first. Just remember that the greatest and most powerful overturn and outbreak often start very quietly, hidden in the shadows.
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is our own Government, and let us not be more silent about it.
We all shall die, sooner or later, whether or not we had even spoken of ourselves. Our silences would not protect us anyway. What are the words we do not yet have? What are the tyrannies we swallow day by day and attempt to make our own, until we will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language. This you call a free life?
There comes a time when silence is betrayal. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without any end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. We can only bring about a change when ordinary people do extraordinary things. We have seen in Afghanistan the heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself. And this was handed down to us by our neighbour from the East. And they are perpetually it's victims.
Do we ever know that in the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. That is the big mistake a lot of people make when they wonder how soldiers can put their lives on the line day after day or how they can fight for something they may not believe in. Not everyone does. I have worked with soldiers on all sides of the political spectrum; I have met some who hated army and others who wanted to make it a career. I met geniuses and idiots, but when all is said and done, we do what we do for one another, for friendship; not for country, not for patriotism, not because we are programmed killing machines, but because of the guy next to us. We fight for our friend, to keep him alive, and he fights for us, and everything about the fighting is built on this simple premise.
The greatest mistake of our fruitless effort was that we were trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. We have to wake them up first, then push them through the action. This change will not be a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. This will be an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
Our strategy should not be only to confront Politicians, Judges and Bureaucrats, but to lay siege to all of them. To deprive them of oxygen. To shame them. To mock them with our art, through our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we are being brainwashed to believe. Occasionally we must ensure that Pakistan is watered with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants. The Politicians' Power world will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, and their notion of inevitability.
And remember this: We may be many and they be few, but they need us more than we need them. Now are the times where the decades change must happen. And this change is not a bed of roses rather a struggle between our future and our past.
There is one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it is one word long— PEOPLE. No matter how big the idea they all stand under, people are small and weak and cheap and frightened. It is people that kill every transformation. This is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. You cannot buy this change. You cannot make this change. You can only be the change. It is either in your spirit, or it is nowhere. We much know this is a tearful transform, but we all shall survive through this "TRANSFORMING TOGETHER." (Bng)
20May20
TRANSFORMING TOGETHER
How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when they neither share our suffering nor we share their joys! When we know that we don’t belong to them. Our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with our Rulers. All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, and the dream of a cloister. This is how we define our stupid unwanted prevailing democracy in Pakistan. The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
There comes a time when one must take position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellion ferment in the masses of life which people earth. On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?
People in our country are since shouting that they want to create a better future. It is not true. Their future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. Our past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. By a certain age coincidences lose their magic and then in some grave times no longer surprise becomes a ladder to climb uphill. A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. Remember, remember always, that all of us, you and I especially, are descendants of the immigrants from our North West, of who all were Rebellions.
I began to ask each time: What is the worst that could happen to us if we tell the truth? Unlike people in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, disappeared or run off the road at night. Rather our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called idiots, jerks and junks or hypersensitive and at the most we may disrupt some dinner parties. But then our speaking out will permit other men and women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and our country is altered forever. And our outrightly speaking will get easier and easier. And we will find we have fallen in love with our own vision, which we may never have realized we had. And we may lose some friends. And new ones will find us and cherish us. And at last we will know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking our truth; And that is not speaking.
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy.
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There cannot be any large-scale reformation until there is a personal radical change on an individual level. It has got to happen inside first. Just remember that the greatest and most powerful overturn and outbreak often start very quietly, hidden in the shadows.
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is our own Government, and let us not be more silent about it.
We all shall die, sooner or later, whether or not we had even spoken of ourselves. Our silences would not protect us anyway. What are the words we do not yet have? What are the tyrannies we swallow day by day and attempt to make our own, until we will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language. This you call a free life?
There comes a time when silence is betrayal. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without any end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. We can only bring about a change when ordinary people do extraordinary things. We have seen in Afghanistan the heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself. And this was handed down to us by our neighbour from the East. And they are perpetually it's victims.
Do we ever know that in the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. That is the big mistake a lot of people make when they wonder how soldiers can put their lives on the line day after day or how they can fight for something they may not believe in. Not everyone does. I have worked with soldiers on all sides of the political spectrum; I have met some who hated army and others who wanted to make it a career. I met geniuses and idiots, but when all is said and done, we do what we do for one another, for friendship; not for country, not for patriotism, not because we are programmed killing machines, but because of the guy next to us. We fight for our friend, to keep him alive, and he fights for us, and everything about the fighting is built on this simple premise.
The greatest mistake of our fruitless effort was that we were trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. We have to wake them up first, then push them through the action. This change will not be a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. This will be an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
Our strategy should not be only to confront Politicians, Judges and Bureaucrats, but to lay siege to all of them. To deprive them of oxygen. To shame them. To mock them with our art, through our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we are being brainwashed to believe. Occasionally we must ensure that Pakistan is watered with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants. The Politicians' Power world will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, and their notion of inevitability.
And remember this: We may be many and they be few, but they need us more than we need them. Now are the times where the decades change must happen. And this change is not a bed of roses rather a struggle between our future and our past.
There is one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it is one word long— PEOPLE. No matter how big the idea they all stand under, people are small and weak and cheap and frightened. It is people that kill every transformation. This is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. You cannot buy this change. You cannot make this change. You can only be the change. It is either in your spirit, or it is nowhere. We much know this is a tearful transform, but we all shall survive through this "TRANSFORMING TOGETHER." (Bng)
20May20
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