The Elephant

There is an old story from India that aptly illustrates how frame of reference affects an understanding of physical properties, and indeed of the larger setting in which those properties are manifested.

It is said that six blind men were presented with an elephant, a creature of which they had no previous knowledge, and each explained what he thought the elephant was.

The first felt of the elephant’s side, and told the others that the elephant was like a wall. The second, however, grabbed the elephant’s trunk, and concluded that an elephant was like a snake.

The third blind man touched the smooth surface of its tusk, and was impressed to discover that the elephant was a hard, spear-like creature. Fourth came a man who touched the elephant’s legs, and therefore decided that it was like a tree trunk. However, the fifth man, after feeling of its tail, disdainfully announced that the elephant was nothing but a frayed piece of rope. Last of all, the sixth blind man, standing beside the elephant’s slowly flapping ear, felt of the ear itself and determined that the elephant was a sort of living fan.

These six blind men went back to their city,and each acquired followers after the manner of religious teachers. Their devotees would then argue with one another, the snake school of thought competing with adherents of the fan doctrine, the rope philosophy in conflict with the tree trunk faction, and so on. The only person who did not join in these debates was a seventh blind man, much older than the others, who had visited the elephant after the other six.

While the others rushed off with their separate conclusions, the seventh blind man had taken the time to pet the elephant, to walk all around it, to smell it, to feed it, and to listen to the sounds it made.When he returned to the city and found the populace in a state of uproar between the six factions, the old man laughed to himself: he was the only person in the city who was not convinced he knew exactly what an elephant was like.

Excerpt from "Science of Everyday Things".

Burst Pipe

Dubai: An underground water pipe that burst on Shaikh Zayed Road on Monday morning caused traffic congestion and a number of minor accidents, Dubai Police said.

The Al Marabe'e exit on Shaikh Zayed Road in the Sharjah direction was blocked by police as a result, and traffic was diverted which caused the congestion along the road and at the following exit.

Dubai Municipality workers and equipment were seen trying to fix the problem, while deep excavations were made on the side of the road, under the metro track.

Meanwhile, the congestion and unexpected diversion caused a few minor accidents in which no injuries were reported.

That was on Monday. The work on the damaged pipe hasn't been finished. And Al Marabe'e exit is still blocked, which has lead to this:

Taken this morning: Motorists forge their own trail through the Municipality tended lawn under the metro-track.

Later in the morning: Troops deployed to prevent state of anarchy.

I remember that a pipe (probably the same one) had burst back in 2006-07. Which is five years ago. Five years construction warranttee on the pipe expired?

Self Defenestration

The father brought little Mohamed a trinket tied to a lanyard.

Little Mohamed loved it, he kept it slung around his neck all the time, getting on his mother's nerves.

The mother got fed up and took it from him and hung it on a window handle, where he couldn’t reach at his natural height.

The mother woke up the next morning, opened the window (which swings outward) to air the house.

She then got busy in the kitchen.

Little Mohamed woke up; saw his trinket hanging from a lanyard by the handle of the open window. It looked so beautiful in the sunlight, swaying with the soft morning breeze.

Mohamed brought a chair, climbed, and leaned out of the window frame to retrieve his trinket.

................................

..................

.........


The above is not how this went down, but it's one of the many possible scenarios.

You may blame the architects, the landowners and the authorities but, eventually, it's your responsibility as a parent to take care of your child. Cars of various brands have different safety features, but ultimately it's your driving that makes a difference, and it's true in the case of a hosue or an apartment: it's the way you run your house-hold and educate your child or spouse about safety that makes the difference.

I'm not saying architects and authorities aren't responsible, we are. But we can not guarantee prevention (except in the case of fixed, un-openable windows.) The code says window sill should be 110 CM above finished ground level, and that window handles should be beyond children's reach. But that's just a theory. Children are very inventive and creative when it comes to bypassing problems. What I'm trying to say is, height alone won't prevent your child from jumping (accidentally or by a delusion). You need to make sure he or she understands the dangers. You need to make him NOT want to open the window or lean out of it.

My mom tells me that she once caught me when I was two and a half years old standing on mid-section of your balcony's railing (we lived on the fourth floor), arms spread to the side and shouting "Jonkaaaar!". Jonkar, like Iron Man and Grendizer, were all cartoon characters with the supernatural ability to fly.

One more thing that may have been missed in the controversy: 50% of children still die due to jumps from 4 and 5 floors height. In other words, once you go above the fifth floor, the odds are more or less the same, whether you're on the seventeenth or the seventieth floor.

-----------------------------------

P.S.: The title refers to the act of defenestration, which apparently was a popular phenomenon in Europe centuries ago. Especially as an act of a political retribution (throwing a corrupt nobility or a feudal leader out of a window of a high palace, occasionally to be plucked and finished off by angry mobs surrounding the palace)........ I could think of a few acts of defenestration that I would like to see happening myself.

Under My Olive Tree

The olive harvest season falls on the months of October and November. The exact timing of harvest varies from one region to another, and from one kind of olive trees to another. And it also depends on the convictions and personal preferences of the farmer or the landowner. Generally speaking, it’s best to pick the olives right before they drop out of ripeness and boredom.

At any rate, when it is decided to relieve the tree of its consignment of green and darkish oval fruits, a tarpaulin sheet will be spread underneath it, and then you either swat the branches with sticks to hasten the fall, or climb on a step-ladder and pick at the olives one by one and fling them downward. Whether to use sticks or human hands is determined by the availability of manpower and the nature of the olives themselves (e.g. are they heavy and ripe and ready to drop at the tinniest flick?) When the tree finally parts company with its crop, the tarp will be sifted through to weed out the twigs and other undesirable objects. The load of olives will then be funneled into sacks or pails, and then it will either be sold raw or fermented for breakfast or processed into oil.

I never fully figured out why an olive branch has become a symbol of peace. It has indeed been a symbol of peace and glory for a long, long time (since the ancient Greek). But it is not clear to me why or how it’d become so. I suspect it’s because olive trees live long, and they age well. They age beautifully and gracefully. In fact, ‘old age’ of an olive tree as perceived by mortal humans is never its actual state of aging. The olive tree that my grandfather had planted when he was young feels old to me, but it might just be in its prime years. You'd think a tree that had witnessed WWII and survived the severe freeze of '72 and a partial fire in '82 would look old and withered. But no, that's not the case. That's not the case at all.

The best time to harvest olive is between sunrise and mid-day. Something that has to do with photosynthesis and other chemical ingredients that make the slow circular trip between the leaves, the roots and the fruits. And, obviously, you need good light to do the work since autumn skies are overcast and it gets dark early.

An owner of a land that has two to three hundred olive trees can never handle the harvest by himself and his family alone. So he or she will have to hire pickers from the nearest town. Or maybe from a far-away town. Whoever is cheaper, faster and more hard-working. Men and women of various ages and marital statuses will answer the call. And since it’s not always possible to commute back to where they come from, the pickers will occasionally stay in temporary tents or shacks or whatever available within the vicinity of the land.

For many young men and women, the harvest season is the chance to see and be seen. There’s something novel and fresh about the harvest, about the regenerative power of nature and the freshness of the crop. There’s anxiety and anticipation. Always a surprise lurking around the corner: a tree could yield more than it’s expected; the girl whom you had met the last season has now grown into a beautiful young woman. The harvest season is an opportunity for networking and a source of stories for generations to come. No wonder that many folk songs are rife with references to it and its festivities.

Who owns an olive tree? Or let us put the question this way: who is morally entitled to claim an olive tree? The man who owns the land or the man who grooms and prunes it? The man who plant the sapling or the man who applies the pesticides? The mule that twos the water tank to irrigate it, or the family that picks its fruits? The question is not even framed in economic terms, it's just as simple as this: who has the most intimate relationship with an olive tree?

The answer is: nobody.

Or everybody, equally.

Syria has the fifth largest number of olive trees worldwide. Syria is currently bleeding, but it will survive. It will survive and live to 'age' gracefully and gloriously. Syria is not owned by one man; under its branches of peace and glory, there is a place for everybody.

Well....?

Kindly leave your answer in the comments.

A Perspective From The Graveyard

We stood around with our eyes fixed on the slight bump in the dirt before us. My colleague was wearing a white dish-dash with blotches of mud on it, evidently from the burial process that took place a few minutes ago. We had lost our way from the mosque to the graveyard and were a bit late. The look of utter devastation on my colleague’s face was nevertheless unabated. He was an only son. His father was slightly older than fifty-four years when a brain stroke took his life the night before.

On the way to the graveyard, while we were still struggling with GPS and crude, shouted directions from passer-bys, my other colleague, who is also an only son, told me to imagine how difficult it would be. Being the only son, losing your father, your sole role-model and life-guide, and becoming a de-facto patriarch of the family yourself. How absolutely life-shattering. I thought about it for a minute. I told him if you keep thinking about it, you’re going to suffer twice. Once through the worry and another (probably) through the real event, God forbids. And it’s not going to make it any easier.

There’s no rehearsal for grief.

Or is there?

It takes a year for the soft tissues of a body buried underground to decompose*, while the dry remains may persist for a hundred years. A friend told me that psychological studies showed that a family could take up to five years to regain balance after the loss of the patriarch. My other colleague (the one who can’t read GPS) got philosophical and said that death puts life into perspective. That we live, work hard, marry, make babies, make them grow and then die on them. I said, well, that’s life. It’s a cycle. Decomposition and regeneration. And we, human beings, are making more babies than ever. There’s more life on earth than death than ever before…. None of that will give you comfort when the big one hits. But that’s the reality. We may have different beliefs about what happens in the unknowable strata beyond death, but we all agree that life- with its cycle, bio-degradability, and renewability- will go on.

______________________________________________________
*Interestingly, the prostrate gland in a male body is the last soft organ to go. I don’t know why this fact gives me comfort, but it does.

Writer's Block

Behold the writer's block, its cementitious make-up and rough surface. Its weight, the cuboidal shape and the volume it occupies. Just what makes this bloody block so damn heavy to move or to nudge, to smash with a head-butt like a true Korean warrior? Is it stationary? Does it move? Or does it just rotate acrobatically in silent space around a random axis?

Let's see, on one surface - and this object is versatile it doesn't know up from down or right from left- on that first observable surface play images of your daily concerns; the appointments you need to catch, the chores you need to attend to, the dreaded visit to the dentists, the degenerates on the road. They all play out on this surface, like a movie projector. Every time you turn away from the moving picture, it changes lights and color and forces you to look back at it again. Your jaw open wide as if by surgical claws, the dentist smiling ominously as he moves in to drill….

… on the next rectangular face, there stands your to-do list at work. Your career aspirations. The long queue of disgruntled clients. The visage of your unpleasant colleague stares at you from one corner, while the monotony of the three hours meeting plays hop-scotch on a grid roughly drawn by chalk on the other.

(Let's skip the next three faces. Lots of unsavory stuff in there.)

There's nothing but her on the last surface. She stands there, fully clothed and utterly unperturbed. The cuboid here seems to change structure; it's gelatinous, rubbery and its surfaces gain a three-dimensional vividness. The curves get moist and slippery … and the smell, an olfactory wonder. You try to avert your gaze, to shield your eyes, plug your ears and hold your breath. No avail. The holographic cocoon engulfs you like fate. It's not even an object or a part of an object anymore. This part of the block is the anti-matter. It's the black hole of your energies. If a writer's block is an idea block, as some suggest, then how could you write anything but the ideas that this image stirs in your mind? How could you fight a thought so compelling, so riveting and so damn dominant?

The answer is simple: you just can't.

You embrace it and move on.

Love in the eye of a wind turbine

Love in the eye of a wind turbine

The moments twirl
with a constant puzzle
waiting for the stars
to be aligned
Your hair is mussed
with the flow of time
and our gusts of passion
here, intertwined
Cartwheeling sundials
and their shadows on this
wall, of mine
The struggle for where
to draw the line
And the moment that I
drank your wine
from the grapes of your
finest vine

Love in the eye of a wind turbine

Flawed humans stand exposed
with their flawed logic,
erotic curiosity
To err is human
To err and enjoy it, is,
divine

To err is human
and humans we are
we love to err
and we err to love
we do it on impulse
and we do it by, design

I swear by the neatness
of your emotions
The regalia of innocence
and the tyranny of values,
sublime

I pledge allegiance to the aroma
that wafts from the poetry of your
rhymes
Your stunning bravado
and the shiver that runs
down your spine
All came tumbling
on a night of an earnest bonding
The night you told me
that your secret, is me
and it's mine
The night you taught me
Lip-reading for the blind

Love in the eye of a wind turbine

"...What actors know about emotions is that they come in pairs, often in direct opposition to each other. That's what it is to be conflicted. We want what we should not want and we know it. We desire that which is dangerous or forbidden and might cause us to suffer. We fear success, embrace failure. We strive to be independent, longing at the same time to surrender to a burning passion. We hold ourselves aloof from the people we need and seek the approval of those who have no use for us...."

- Valerie Martin, "The Confessions of Edward Day".

In the quest for a song...

There are places only books can take you. The same is true for music. Sometimes it happens in public, I'd be doing something mundane (like eating or smoking), or slightly intellectually stimulating (like reading fiction): and all of a sudden there approaches a feeling of coziness, warmth and even euphoria. And, invariably, I'd find it's a piece of music playing in the background.

The last time this happened, I leapt out of my seat, approached the cafe manager, who looked at my (unusually) excited approach with apprehension.

'What's that song? Do you know the name of that song?'

He moved across the counter to where his vaio laptop was pumping music into the sound system.

He shook the mouse and motioned for me to come around. I did, and we both looked on. The name of the tune as shown on the player was a generic 'Track no. X'. I thanked him and walked back to my seat, slightly annoyed that my out-of-character act didn't yield results.

I'd heard of Shazam before, rhe music recognition app (application). I wondered if it worked for Arabic songs as well (or non-English songs). I downloaded it anyway. My plan was to wait for the song to come up on the sound system again (I was too embarrassed to request the song specifically), and then hold the phone to the speakers (high on the ceiling), and wait for technology to do its wonders.

Out of sheer curiously, I'd tested Shazam a few times on the way to the cafe and found, to my pleasant surprise, that it could recognize Arabic songs. However, after a few trials, it asked me for a paid subscription to continue to enjoy the service bla bla bla. Upon which my immediate reaction was to delete it.

When I got back home, I was determined to find the song by hook or crook. I spent an hour online, during which I'd listened to not less than 30 songs on youtube and rummaged through countless lyrics and play-lists, relying on bits and pieces of words I could extricate, with difficulty, from memory. Lo and behold, it's there: