Just heard..

Marriage is now a euphemism for Dating...

Looking beyond the war...

A couple of months ago, I read this wonderful book "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana." It was a courageous tale of a woman (eventually a group of women) who survived in the most unreal circumstances by sheer determination, grit and tons of courage.

The book made me think about the life that real people live behind those rugged mountainous terrain shrouded by the smoke of war. In short, the book had piqued my interest in the subject of Afghanistan and its people and since then I have been trying to read, watch and see anything that talks to me about Afghanistan through its people, who still have needs and desires, dreams and hopes just like us.

And in the last one week itself, I have come across this wonderful FRONTLINE documentary "Opium Brides," which I think has drawn some inspiration from the book "Opium Nation" by Fariba Nawa and just today, while working on a story I found this incredible project by David Gill - "Kabul A City At Work."

And I am game for more. Any good suggestions?

Random thoughts..(2)

There was a time when happiness was measured in smiles and laughter, in togetherness and bonds, in moments of uninhibited joy...............

.......And then the times changed and the scales were weighed down by money...

Do we need these reasons to hate?

It is astonishing how man can find a reason to hate. There are so many boundaries, so many man-made barriers, so many differentials that you just get trapped into one of them somehow or the other and get lost in the maze.

As a kid growing up in the times of communal riots, I thought religion was perhaps a great divide and that men fight over religion, even though that is one of the most paradoxical things to do.

Then, as I was debating the idea of religious divide, I was confronted with a land where people's mistrust was rooted in race. So it was not religion, but color and race that became the tools. It took me back to the horrific World War that had the genesis of race-based annihilation.

Eventually, over the years I have realized that men always find ways to discriminate. If not on the basis of religion then color, if not that then language or petty things like caste, creed or the omnipresent status and class.

Are we humans designed to not like people who don't look, talk or feel like us? What breeds hatred? And does everything need to have a hierarchy? Can it not be that all religions, all race and all languages are equally best? (I say "Best" because good has not been good enough so far..)