FarQuest Fariha's Quest: Finding an answer to the question "Why can’t Utopia be a reality?" Wish to add some colors of Utopia to this world because I dare to dream and strive to turn my dreams into reality!

The immediate answer that anyone may come up with is “No, we aren’t” but the reality is quite different. We are all dead!! Though we breathe, eat, walk and talk but we are dead from inside. You must be thinking why am I saying all this. Actually, I just got to hear about an incident that has made me think this way. My maid told me that around a month ago, someone came and threw a big box in the community bin(kachra kundi) near Neelum Colony, which is a small colony adjacent to Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s Mazar. There was this guy who found this box and when he picked it up, he found it to be a little heavy. On opening it up, he found inside a newborn baby wrapped in a piece of cloth. The boy told others about this baby boy so that someone could take care of him or at least drop him at a nearby Edhi Center…NO! That’s what I thought he must have done…but he didn’t do nething like that..instead he took the box and the cloth that the baby was wrapped in probably because it was a shawl or sumthing and threw that baby there over the garbage. After sumtime that poor newborn started crying and that attracted people’s attention. They came over, picked up the baby, the police also came but after a little while the baby passed away. The police caught the guy who had taken the box and had thrown the baby but obviously he had no information about the baby’s parents and so the entire story ended then and there.

Earlier I had read about such incidents in the newspaper but listening to this one was like almost seeing it happening. I have just realized how apathetic we are…I doubt if we r really human beings…the Ashraf-ul-Makhluqaat….we are social beasts!! If it comes to saving ourselves from ne sort of trouble, we can go to ne extent…a mother can throw away her newborn who was a part of her body a little while ago knowing very well that her child would serve as a meal for cats, dogs and eagles. We just see what can benefit us and so a box and a piece of cloth seem to be more important to us then the life of a human being.

I just don’t understand what’s happening all around me….it’s either that I’m too sensitive or I still haven’t turned into a complete beast. It often becomes unbearable for me to accept the realities and so I’m afraid that I’m going to end up living in some mental asylum!!!

May Allah give me the courage to change or to challenge and may He save and guide us all. Ameen!

These days whenever I’m at my college, I can smell hypocrisy. I keep thinking that those who claim to be my friends…are they really my FRIENDS? Can I trust them or are they with me just for the sake of their own benefit?  I’m sincere with all my friends but why don’t I feel getting the same level of sincerity from the other side? I don’t know why, why ‘am I getting this feeling but the thing is…I’m and the more I think about it….the more I get disturbed.

Few years back in one of the social sciences class, our instructor asked us “Are you Fundamentalists?” Our instant reply was “No, Sir…no way”. Then he asked, “Do you believe that the Holy Quran is meant for all times and for all kinds of environments?” This time our instant reply was “Yes, Sir…Alhamdulilah being Muslims we do believe in this fact.” On that he showed us an excerpt from a book on sociology and the excerpt was as following:

In “Popular Conceptions of Fundamentalism”, anthropologist Lionel Caplan (1987) offers his readers one of the clearest overviews of a complex religious phenomenon – fundamentalism, a belief in the timeless nature of sacred writings and a belief that such writings apply to all kinds of environments”

After reading this from a book which was quite an authentic one and knowing that our instructor always checks the veracity of all the information he shares with us, all we could do was to say “Yes” when he asked his first question again.

Btw.. I would also like to ask the same question from all the readers of this post “ Are you a fundamentalist?”

Most of us believe that everyone needs to modernize in order to cope up with the dynamics of this world. We feel that its ok to change ourselves with changing times as long as we don’t compromise on our religious principles and so Mush came up with the concept of Enlightened Moderation. A huge number of Pakistanis except religious fanatics welcomed this notion since it seemed to lead to a neutral path…“deen aur duniya saath saath” I also supported it up until I began to formally study what “Enligtenment” is. Enlightenment in its real sense is an effort to humanize religion. Mr. M. J. Inwoods explains the leading doctrines of Enlightenment as shared by most of the spokesmen in the Oxford Companion (1995,236) and one of those doctrines goes on as ‘ Beliefs are accepted only on the basis of reason, not on the authority of priests, sacred texts or tradition. Thus Enlightenment thinkers tended to atheism, or at most to a purely natural deism, shorn of supernatural and miraculous elements and designed primarily to support an enlightened moral code and in some cases to account for the faith that the universe is a rational system wholly accessible to human reason.” This very clearly shows that Enlightenment leads to the replacement of religion by reason and rationality.

In order to modernize Pakistan, Mush also wanted to have this sort of "Enligtenment" but since it was too difficult to openly reject the supremacy of religion so he came up with a desi version of it giving it the name of "Enlightened Moderation". It is just a softer image of the original concept so we shouldn’t fall in the trap because initially this desi version may seem to be tolerant towards Islam but would ultimately lead to the rejection of it. In fact, even now we can see the repercussions all around in the form of the amendments being made to the curriculum and the demolition of Mosques in Islamabad which are just a few examples.

A very interesting African Proverb that i read in "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman…gr8 book and a must read for all those who want to know how quickly the world is changing and howz technology changing our lives.

Here’s the proverb.    

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running. 

I posted this on one of the orkut communities and got some really interesting replies so thought of posting it here as well. Let’s see what people have to say about it.

(My personal experience says) If u r honest…u’ll be given nasty looks…people will think u r stupid…they’ll think u r pretending to be honest and not really are because HONESTY IS SOMETHING VERY RARE these days but then if someone is really honest…..why does he/she has to face all this..why does he/she have to go through such pain just because he’s /she’s on the right path? Is HONESTY a sin?? 

I started blogging some time back on MSN live spaces because of a dedicated geek who happens to be my friend and the reason of my arrival to the world of blogging. I enjoyed blogging and created my own blog on blogspot but thanks to our Enlightened rather Moderately Enlightened government for banning the blogspot platform. Though I can still access my blog through proxy services like pkblogs but was having problems when I upgraded my blog to blogger beta. So, I decided to shift to Wordpress but since I wanted to play with the code and WP doesn’t allow access to the code, so I finally have moved to Blogsome. So far, blogsome seems to be really cool and it is known as a lighter version of WP. One other reason for choosing Blogsome over WP is that WP seems to be the next target for blog ban in Pakistan, in fact even now I can’t access any of the WP blogs using SuperNet though its accessible through almost all the other ISPs. Neway talking about this ban needs a separate post because there’s a lot of work being done about it by Pakistani bloggers; so for now I come back to introducing myself and my newly born blog. Well…. I’m almost a Software Engineer…will be graduating in May this year Inshallah. After that I plan to work and do my MS, then MS (Thesis) and finally Ph.D Inshallah. Ooops..do I sound like a nerd…khee khee Basically I’m a person with varied interests ranging from technology to psychology, poetry, homemaking etc. etc. Blogging seems to be one of my recent interests and FarQuest is an attempt to voice my feelings about different things that I come across in my day-to-day life. I hope that this blogy (baby blog) would become a source of both knowledge and entertainment for its visitors and would grow into a handsome blogster (a youngster blog) and finally a graceful blog baba (as in budha baba). I guess that’s all I can say about my blogy and myself at the moment because my future posts would be explaining more about what Fariha’s FarQuest is all about.