Bizzare Fish, Conventional Pond

Brown Clown | Amateur Writer | (Rather awful) Med student | Doodle artist | Indie Folk Enthusiast | Serial Hugger | Lipstick Lover |

[pakistaniwriter]

[pakistaniwriter]

“I think the reason it is confusing to be both the girl in the red hair & the girl in leather jackets and the girl who loves the smell of books & the girl who is always partying is that we teach our children: What you see is what you get. That humans are two-dimensional. That you cannot love high heels & football. That you cannot love metal music & kittens. That you cannot be gentle and strong at the same moment. This hurts us all - even I find myself saying things like “I’m not the kind of person who could pull this outfit off.” but I am, and so are you, no matter what you look like.

There is no one who paints who you are except your own fingers. you are holding the brush. Do you not understand how silly these restrictions are?

Let me put it this way, you do not erase your sense of humor when you have to be serious, do you? And you do not lose your strength when you cry because humans are not a mundane sentence, we are ever-changing & complex beyond comprehension & we sure as hell are not confined"

[tenaciouskittennut-blog]

bookish days.

I think i finally understand why reading and writing feels peaceful.

With books, every character can be categorised: s/he is good, or bad or just a supporting character whose story will be written later. There are also some good characters that turn bad and vice versa. It’s all in our control but we can’t  change it. Even if the person turns out to be bad, we still get to know their story and know its not a lie, ofc.

But with life, every character can be good and bad; both even. And here, we dont always get to know their story, so we make assumptions on what we know. The fact is, here we can change everything. It can change as quickly as the favourite character dying. Which is, i guess, why we prefer books over life, because sometimes the fact that everything can change so easily and knowing we could have stopped it, is scary.

Sometimes we don’t even understand what’s happening but in the book, we know it’ll make sense sooner or later But with life, we can’t be sure but I guess that’s what makes it life.

I’m sorry if this feels like another pointless rant but i really wanted to post this okay so thanks.

[pakistaniwriter]

This is beautiful.

[pakistaniwriter]

I like reading more than some people and I will try to pet every dog I come across and I'm just really awful at crossing streets like for no reason my timing with that is actually horrifying and I like to touch every water feature around me even if it’s in some highclass place where they frown at you for running your fingers across their wall fountain & occasionally I spend like an embarrassing amount of time in my pajamas and I always procrastinate no matter what I have for homework and i also have this thing where 
I second-guess everything I do.

[pakistaniwriter]

When you have a viva/practical exam in two days & you’re regretting procrastinating the past 3 weeks. Where that Prayer mat at?

[pakistaniwriter]

‘If I’m raped people will say that she’s lost her honor. How did I lose my honor? Who put my honor in my vagina? It is a patriarchal idea that getting raped would ruin my community’s honor. If anyone loses their honor when a woman is raped, it’s the rapist & not the woman’ - Kamla Bhasin

Rape. I’ve always known Rape as a horrible thing. Most of us do. So horrible even, that I was conditioned by society to not say it out loud. I’d always feel the word get stuck around my throat & come out weak & embarrassed. I’d always see people around me discuss this ever-present heinous reality in hushed whispers & vague overtures. Like somehow the mere mention of 'Rape’ would make us any less of a woman, would somehow taint & scar us. How absurd? It has taken me almost twenty years to break free of the shackles the society put around my young & gullible mind, & yet I have a long way to go.

Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of young women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body & hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and your brother are dishonored. I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina, just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals. If we take honor out of the equation, rape will still be horrible, but it will be a personal, and not a societal, horror. We will be able to give women who have been assaulted what they truly need: not a load of rubbish about how they should feel guilty or ashamed, but empathy for going through a terrible trauma.

A few weeks ago, I heard the story of a woman who was raped in a nearby suburb. She came home, went into the kitchen, set herself on fire and died. The person who told me the story was full of admiration for her selflessness in preserving her husband’s honor. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up? The law has to provide real penalties for rapists and protection for victims, but only families and communities can provide this empathy and support. How will a teenager participate in the prosecution of her rapist if her family isn’t behind her? How will a wife charge her assailant if her husband thinks the attack was more of an affront to him than a violation of her? This is where our work lies, with those of us who are raising the next generation. It lies in teaching our sons and daughters to become liberated, respectful adults who know that men who hurt women are making a choice, and will be punished.

We have come a long way from where we initially started. And yet there is still work to be done. We have spent generations constructing elaborate systems of patriarchy, caste and social and sexual inequality that allow abuse to flourish. But rape is not inevitable, like the weather. We need to shelve all the gibberish about honor and virtue and 'did-she-lead-him-on’ and 'could-he-help-himself’. We need to put responsibility where it lies: on men who violate women, and on all of us who let them get away with it while we point accusing fingers at their victims.

[pakistaniwriter]

قاصد کے آتے آتے خط اک اور لکھ رکھوں میں جانتا ہوں جو وہ لکھیں گے جواب میں مرزا غالب

–

“qāsid ke aate aate ḳhat ik aur likh rakhūñ maiñ jāntā huuñ jo vo likheñge javāb meñ” - Mirza Ghalib

–

“Let me pen another letter before the envoy returns, For I know already, that which they’ll write in response.” - Mirza Ghalib.(On writing love letters)

[pakistaniwriter]

[thebluesqueen]

Critical Thinking

I may receive some crap for saying this, but many college degrees are quite ill-equipped for determing intelligence. There are some pursuits that are much better at training someone to actually think and problem solve, such as engineering, chemistry, mathematics and physics. When it comes to biology and medical training, these students focus more on memorization skills than actual critical thinking. It is not their fault that the higher education level chooses to focus on these matters, only a residual consequence of the inferior system that is the reality. I will not digress on liberal arts majors that are quite useless in the real world/marketplace. It is not that these degrees lack importance necessarily, just those majoring in them will be sorely disappointed when trying to find a good job upon exiting college graduation.

When one of my aunts, who is an M.D., but now retired from her field, learned I was pursuing a degree in engineering, she said to me, “ You know, there are few fields that actually train you how to think. Engineering is one of them and so is chemistry. I admire your pursuits in this. As a doctor myself I can say that the training involved doesn’t really teach one how to think properly, but your field does.”

[pakistaniwriter]

As a medical student, I second this opinion. Instead of challenging a persons intellect & mental capability, the educational panel in medical universities just tests your cramming skills & retention. I've been voicing this opinion time & again, especially when people find out I'm in med-school & admire me over how 'smart' a person I might be. Because I feel like a degree does not determine over-all intelligence. At the same time I do understand the need of 'sticking to the facts' in a field like medicine, when actual human lives are at stake, there hardly is any place for creativity or criticality. You just follow suit; cram, retain, colour in between the lines. So, if any of you are trying to choose what kind of career you want to pursue, make sure you don't get blindsided by everyone's misconception of what career pathways are for smart individuals. Because being stuck in any wrong field where you're not allowed to exert your best traits can be rather frustrating. Just assess which traits are the strongest aspect of your personality & then make sure you choose a field that compliments those traits.

[pakistaniwriter]

Ever since I was a child, I’d see a sadly poetic woman in my dreams. She’d be there every night I forced myself to sleep early, hoping that it’d improve the quality of my life. It didn’t make a difference. But every time I dreamt, there was a woman sitting somewhere outside, always on the same bench, always writing in the same book. There was a sort of romantically tragic thing about her, how her old eyes looked at the passing children or how she looked at the birds scattered around. I bet she was beautiful when she was younger. She had heavy laughter lines and a pair of those eyes, the kind that experienced life at its rawest states and loved many. I think I made stories of what she would be like, and she saw that in me because she was doing the same. I knew because one night she called me over. I came hesitantly. You like to observe people, she had told me. She showed me her little black book, ‘the book of life’, she called it. There were pages full of thousands of words, scribbles & sketches of strangers, children, the elderly, dogs even. Then she showed one she had just done of me. We exchanged conversation and she told me how every stranger had a story, how they are shaped by their pasts and you can read it on their face & in their actions, if you’re willing to look closely enough. Before she left, she gave me her book. She told me to write the stories of the people I see, that even the most mundane person needs a biography. When I dreamt the next day—she wasn’t there, and every day after that.

- Excerpt from the book of life. (~a.k)