A few weeks ago was when a psychologist told me that I was exhibiting symptoms of a mood disorder. Less than a week ago I went to meet a psychiatrist. I was prescribed medicines for bipolar disorder and anxiety issues. At the time I had no idea what those medicines had been prescribed for- I had simply presumed that they were anti-depressants. That they would numb me. That I wouldn’t get all violent with my friends anymore. That things would be alright. Perhaps I would be the spicy tangy minx that I always have been but the storms inside me would calm down to a certain extent. That perhaps the fierce edges would smoothen out. Not realizing, that those fiery aspects are what make me who I am.
States released from colonial rule in the 20th century have by and large not done well. Today, most of them are either failing or failed states. Only a few have reached the finishing line of liberal democracy with a survivable economic model beyond the 21st century. Most of the Muslim states are included in the failing postcolonial model. Dictators with mental bipolar disorder — historically mistaken for charisma — who aimed to achieve romantic goals have crumbled, leaving in their wake equally romantic mobs of youths demanding what they presume is liberal democracy.
After Saddam Hussein, Iraq is in disarray; after Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is teetering; Libya promises nothing better. And after Musharraf, Pakistan’s democracy is dysfunctional. Among Muslims, only the market state in the Gulf may survive. In the Far East, too, it is the market state that looks like marching on. Muslim Indonesia and Malaysia may survive if they don’t exterminate their entrepreneur Chinese minorities under the spur of Islam. In Europe, when the dictator quits, civilisation takes over and the state survives. No such thing happens in the Muslim world. The premodern seduction of the Muslim mind prevents return to democracy. The blasphemy law is more powerful than any democratic constitution. …
Decades of misadventure have distorted and even corrupted the Pakistani mind. We do not live in the real world. Our foreign policy notions, our list of assets and threats, have but a remote relation to reality. We must look to first causes. How did we create these bonfires for ourselves? How did we become prisoners of our misconceptions? Liberating the Pakistani mind from the shackles of these self-imposed errors must be the first of our tasks if, with luck, we are to become a normal nation.
The army and its strategic adventures have brought Pakistan to its present pass. The footprints of the terrorism now haunting the country go back to the first Afghan ‘jihad’, the one army-inspired event which pushed Pakistan to the frontiers of insanity. The phoenix won’t rise from its ashes, and there will be no return to sanity, unless the army can bring itself to change its outlook and reinvent some of its mental apparatus.
Civilians have been poor administrators, in no position to escape their share of the blame for the mess the Fortress of Islam is in. But in the driving seat of Pakistan’s steady march to the brink have been our holy guardians. There is little room for quibbling on this point.
Even so, despite the mounting evidence of disorder, the army refuses to change, still obsessed with the threat from the east, still caught up with the quixotic notion of exercising influence in Afghanistan. God in heaven, why should it matter to us if a president of Afghanistan is a Tajik, an Uzbek or a Pathan? Can’t we keep our eyes focused on our own problems? The threat we face lies squarely within but our strategic grandmasters insist on being foreign policy specialists.
If a Stalin were around, although fat chance of that occurring, he would lay his hands first not on militants and assorted terrorists but on the foreign policy experts who infest our television studios.
Is Mossad pulling the strings of terrorism in Karachi? Was the CIA behind the attack on Shia pilgrims in Mastung? Was RAW behind the attempt on the life of the Karachi special investigator, Chaudhry Aslam?
By any reasonable computation we have enough of a nuclear arsenal. By any yardstick of common sense, a commodity often in short supply in the conference rooms of national security, we have as much of a deterrent as we need to counter the real or imagined threat from India. This being the case, we should be directing what energies we have to the threat from within: that posed by militancy marching under the banner of Islam.
As part of this undertaking, we need to advertise for a Hakim Luqman who could cure our general staff and the ISI of their preoccupation with the future of Afghanistan. We have been burnt by Afghanistan. We don’t need any further burning. For the sake of Pakistan’s future we need to distance ourselves from Afghanistan’s problems, dire as they are.
A viral video of Ameer Jamat-e-Islami (JI) Munawwar Hassan defending the silence over the rape of women and condoning imprisonment of female rape victims if they fail to produce four male witnesses in accordance with the Hudood Ordinance, has deeply outraged many sane people in Pakistan.
According to Hassan, if a woman cannot produce four male witnesses present at the time of her rape, she be imprisoned based on Hudood Ordinance and Shariah Law. This, he claims is in the best interest of women who are raped so if she fails to produce the witnesses she ought to refrain from filing an FIR altogether.
According to Hassan, somehow, it is in the best interest of the society for a woman to stay silent after being raped, while the perpetrator roams free.
I can’t help wonder if the leader would preach silence if a member of his family was attacked.
In the video, the Ameer inexplicably labels the Women’s Protection Bill as an effort to spread “vulgarity, nudity and shamelessness” in Pakistan, while demanding the seemingly intimidated anchor quote verses from the Holy Quran, who eventually has to descend into a monologue to prove his own Islamic credentials before being able to propose an argument to defend raped women. Interestingly, the Ameer himself fails to present any Quranic verse or Hadith to back his views.
The repugnant manner in which the host of the talk show is dismissed, and labeled an infidel for challenging the Holy Quran and Hadith, is a classic example of moral policing by self righteous Muslims in the country, who are masters at evading rationality.
I sincerely hope these morally, self righteous people read Maheen Usmani’s piece titled ‘Why the deafening silence after rape’ which cites horrific facts about rape in Pakistan including “Situation of Violence against Women in Pakistan 2010” by Aurat Foundation, according to which a total of 4,069 cases occurred in Pakistan last year.
Every two hours, a woman is raped in Pakistan and every eight hours, gang raped. And after all this, we are confronted with the reality that in this land, where the taste of justice for many is nothing but bland and vapid, 70 per cent of the crimes against women go unreported.
But how silly of those supporting the Women’s Protection Bill to seek greater freedom and protection of women in a society suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder regarding female sexuality, and the shame/honour dichotomy. The last thing then this country needs is rights for some 51 per cent of population. …
DIAGNOSING the mental health of a nation is just as tricky as diagnosing an individual with a personality disorder.
…. So much for the diagnosis. What`s the cure? The hallmark of an educated mind is the ability to analyse problems coolly and rationally. An emotional response is usually the wrong one. But our minds are conditioned by years of slogans and clichés, as well as historical baggage that is no longer relevant. The disconnect between reality and our twisted perceptions grows by the day. …
… So let`s open our eyes to reality and face the world as it really is, and not how our tortured dreams have made it out to be.
Pakistan remains a military-dominated rentier state, still committed to American and Gulf Arab alliances
By Omar Ali
A friend recently wrote to me that Pakistan reminded him of the Weimar republic; an anarchic and poorly managed democracy with some real freedoms and an explosion of artistic creativity, but also with a dangerous fascist ideology attracting more and more adherents as people tire of economic hardship and social disorder and yearn for a savior. Others (much more numerous than the single friend who suggested the Weimar comparison) insist that Pakistan is a failed state. So which is it? Is Pakistan the Weimar republic of the day or is it a failed state?
After Abdul Sattar Edhi, the biggest Boy Scout in Pakistan is Hakimullah Mehsud. He has protected Pakistan from enemies of the Ummah such as Col. Imam by shooting them in the head and making improving educational videos for patriotic Pakistanis.
All the chaos, disorder, terrorism, inflation, hailstorms and traffic congestion in Pakistan has been created by the CIA. It is interference on a massive scale from across the border. Karzai is in the hock of RAW which is a slave of CIA which in turn is a handmaiden of MOSSAD. All these leery wolves have turned upon the innocent citizens of Pakistan. They are attacking us with drones. They are attacking us with Glock handguns. They are attacking us with polio drops, so that we lose our manhood and our ghairat and the Ideology of Pakistan is defamed and degraded.
A foreign hand cannot be excluded in the murder of Shehbaz Bhatti. A foreign hand cannot be excluded in the Faisalabad blast. A foreign hand cannot be excluded in the Pacific tsunami. A foreign hand cannot be excluded in propping up Kamran Akmal. A foreign hand is squeezing the vital organs of the Ummah.
It all started when we decided to fight America’s war. Everything was going swimmingly before 9/11. We were living in a democratic and prosperous welfare state and taking great strides in economic development with the help of the IMF tranches. Now we had to kill our own people whose only fault was that they were killing our own people. Such blatant American interference will rarely be seen across the world. There are a thousand Raymond Davis’s running amok in the Land of the Pure looking for half a million trained Mujahideen whose only fault is that they want to explode bombs in city centres.
Who was it who trained these militants anyway? It was the Americans. They recruited them from across the world; trained and indoctrinated them in Darul Ulum Langley Sharif and let them loose in Afghanistan. At all this time, the Premier Sensitive Agency of the world watched with bemusement and filled its pockets with greenbacks and Ojhari Camp with explosives. They were quite distraught when the Americans left in a fit of pique, after 1989 and the Premier Agency had to mop up the mess left behind in Kabul and Jalalabad under the inspired leadership of General Bull who turned Afghanistan into a thriving, modern democracy.
Even now, as soon as the Americans leave, the half a million jihadis will instantaneously become tourist guides and divert their attention from suicide vests to the Chitrali Patti ….
Two days after millions of Egyptians won their revolution against the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the country’s army – led by Mubarak’s lifelong friend, General Mohamed el-Tantawi – further consolidated its power over Egypt yesterday, dissolving parliament and suspending the constitution. As they did so, the prime minister appointed by Mubarak, ex-General Ahmed Shafiq, told Egyptians that his first priorities were “peace and security” to prevent “chaos and disorder” – the very slogan uttered so often by the despised ex-president. Plus ça change?
In their desperation to honour the ‘military council’s’ promise of Cairo-back-to-normal, hundreds of Egyptian troops – many unarmed – appeared in Tahrir Square to urge the remaining protesters to leave the encampment they had occupied for 20 days. At first the crowd greeted them as friends, offering them food and water. Military policemen in red berets, again without weapons, emerged to control traffic. But then a young officer began lashing demonstrators with a cane – old habits die hard in young men wearing uniforms – and for a moment there was a miniature replay of the fury visited upon the state security police here on 28 January.
It reflected a growing concern among those who overthrew Mubarak that the fruits of their victory may be gobbled up by an army largely composed of generals who achieved their power and privilege under Mubarak himself. No-one objects to the dissolution of parliament since Mubarak’s assembly elections last year – and all other years — were so transparently fraudulent. But the ‘military council’ gave no indication of the date for the free and fair elections which Egyptians believed they had been promised. …
KARACHI: The doctors and professors of a medical institute in Karachi are struggling to understand the reasons behind a mysterious case in which seven members of a family, hailing from Tharparkar district, claim that metallic needles have penetrated their body parts for the last 14 years.
The ill-fated family members feel a sudden piercing feeling in certain organs, after which mysterious needles can be pushed out of the flesh. They have also brought with them hundreds of needles in matchboxes, while x-ray images have revealed that several needles were still lodged inside their bodies. …
Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality. Psychosis often involves delusions and seeing or hearing things that others can not see or hear (hallucinations.) People with psychosis often feel fearfulness or suspiciousness (paranoid). Psychosis may develop suddenly or gradually. Psychosis may occur as part of other mental health disorders. Some people with depression develop psychosis and some older people with dementia have psychosis. Drugs called anti psychotic can be effective in reducing the symptoms of psychosis.
Schizophrenia is a mysterious mental illness of delusions, hallucination disorder thought and feeling and a broken will. Some times the grip of schizophrenia calls “the cancer of mind”. Schizophrenia is a mysterious condition was first described in 1806, but no one is certain whether the illness – or more likely a group of illness – existed long before then but had escaped definition. Schizophrenia has a tendency to run in families, but hereditary alone apparently cannot explain why a specific individuals develops the full-blown illness. The term schizophrenia in 1908, describes a specific type of alteration of thinking, feeling, and relation to the external world. The term refers to a splitting of psychic function, a peculiar destruction of the inner cohesiveness of the psychic personality. The person experiencing early symptoms, there is a dislocation of every faculty of time, space, and body, hearing voices, bizarre delusions extreme apathy or agitation, coldness towards others – taken singly unique to the illness, symptoms vary so much between individuals & over time for the same individual that the notion of a “typical case” is virtually non-existent, even the degree of disability far more severe, on average varies wildly. The defining characteristic of the illness is the profound feeling of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility that suffers provoke n other people. Psychiatrists describe person’s sense of being separated by a gulf which defies description from individual who seems totally strange, puzzling, inconceivable and incapable of empathy, even to the point of being sinister and frightening the onset of the illness dramatically intensified a pre-existing feelings that essentially disconnect from them and deeply unknowable.
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