My nani is one of the strongest, most amazing women I know. She was in the first matric girls class in South Africa and was one of the first female professor's in the country. She studied medicine in time when the norm was that muslim indian women wouldn't go past primary school.
And she got married. after completing her medicine, which was late, late 20's.
Oh what I'd give to see the looks on the faces of all the women who saidher father was mad for letting her study because she would never get married.
She's had many, many other achievements in her life, like highlighting issues that affected women in rural KZN and proposing and implementing the first ever village for independent living, which allows disabled people to live together and help each other out, relieving them of the need to be at the mercy of their families and the rest of society.
The thing is, if you look at this soft, quiet, 82 year old woman, you would never say that she is an intellectual at all. She goes from flying all over Africa and doing regulatory checks and reporting on the states of hospitals in this continent, to fetching sandals and carrying bags for her husband; from writing scholarly research papers, to doing the daily grocery rounds at pick n pay.
I used to wonder how she can be so humble and serve her family so tirelessly even though she has this whole other life where people call her "prof" and sing her praises. She seems never to get what she wants, because she's always putting her family's needs before her own. She doesn't even buy herself her own clothes, or spend her own money, ever. She always, always gets advice and permission from her husband and never does anything that would anger him.
But Nani is wise. There is wisdom in a woman being humble. In a woman stepping down and putting everyone else on a pedestal. When I think about my grandparents marriage of..I dunno, over 50 years, I wonder if it would've survived if my nani was a power hungry female who would want to "wear the pants" in the relationship.
Men need their ego's fed. They need a woman to make them feel intelligent. To give them ideas
and stand back and let them take the credit for it. To laugh at their jokes even if u don't really get them. (the ugly truth reference kinda)
The feminist movement has it all wrong. You don't fight with a man to get what u want, u stand down and tell him how wonderful he is.
If he shouts at you, you don't shout back. You stand down and take it and his heart will soften when he sees the pain on your face and realises that he's hurt u.
I know it's a strange stance to take. And I know that it doesn't always work. In some cases, you really need to fight for your rights, but in most cases, a woman can get what she wants, without fighting the fight a man's way. Also, it's good for your soul and breaking down your nafs.
It's a difficult thing to accept if you're brought up in a 21st century world, but it's something that's well understood by indian women of a certain age and calibre...and it works!
Lose the battle to win the war.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Happiness is..
Sunday, October 24, 2010
When letting go just isn't an option
People say that women who enter into abusive relationships and remain in them
have no-one but themselves to blame. I think this is a very narrow minded way to look at a situation .Especially if you're looking in from the outside.
I can absolutely relate to someone who would stick to something that is harmful to them. I do it all the time. Like the love affair I had with my beloved alfa.
Everyone told me not to buy her. Alfas are notorious for being unreliable and they cost an arm and a leg in repairs, but she was just so pretty so I had to have her.
I wanted her and I went and bought her. Didn't even tell my father I was buying her. In fact, specifically didn't tell my father I was buying her because he'd ranted about
the unreliability of alfa's when I just mentioned the car to him.
Within a day of buying her the problems started. Firstly, no-one wanted to insure me. A 21 year old female with less than 2 years of driving experience,
was way too high risk and no-one would take the chance.
I phoned around everywhere, asked for help online, tried to insure through my mother with me as a principal driver, but none of this helped.
Eventually I managed to get first for women to give me third party cover. And then I was happy :) I could finally get to drive her.
I took out her manual and read all about caring for her. Went and bought the right kinda selespeed transmission fluid and the right kinda oil put them in the boot.
(I'm quite partial to taking personal care of my cars and doing my own services if possible.) I tried to learn as much about her inner workings as possible.
The first 3 weeks were glorious. I loved her and was so proud of my new car. She was a "driving weapon" to say the least. But then one day, she beeped and that dreaded message,
selespeed system failure flashed across the screen. I read up about it and decided to ignore it, because it had just happened once. About a week later, it happened again.
I phoned alfa and immediately took her in to see what's what. They said the actuator wasn't working properly and quoted me R21 000 to fix it. Next, the boot of the cv joint went. Then,
the gearbox selectors and some pipe in the gearbox. Then, the fuel injection pipe. One after one, parts of my alfa (or romaana as nooj named her) gave up. Each time a part of her broke,
I'd be left stranded on the side or in the middle of the road. I was very lucky to have found a guy who used to work for alfa breakdown as a mechanic. I'd phone
him and he'd give me instructions on what to do to get her moving again. I used to keep oil and water and spanners and tow rope and jumper cables in my car at all times.
Even so, I still needed to be towed much. And spend hours waiting, stranded in the middle of the road, with cars hooting all round, for the AA to come and tow me away. At one point I needed to be towed four times in a single week.
I had no car more than I had a car. Every time I used to drive her I was in fear of seeing the selespeed system failure. She beeped continuously, complaining about every single part of her.
Eventually I took to cringing at the beeps, but ignoring them and dealing with the problem once I'd broken down, because replacing parts each time she complained dind't seem to help in any case.
I had her for just about a year when the crash happened. It was raining and he was drunk and he smashed the whole left side and some of the front. My heart lurched and the selespeed system failure message came up.
I didn't think I would ever be able to fix her, and I was right. She was declared a write off.
I didn't want to write her off. I had her towed home. I wanted to make a plan and I wanted to see if I can fix her. She lay their in my garage. I made many plans to call the panelbeater to ahve a look at her, but I didn't ahve the heart.
I knew if a panelbeater came and looked at her he'd say she was irreparable and I dind't want to hear that.
Now, a year later, she's being sold for spares. Her heart was removed and put into another alfa. Her radio, her tyres, her bumper and badges, every little part of her is being ripped and stripped and taken to different cars.
It hurts me so much to see her like that. When I enter the garage and see the remains a I feel a sense of sadness, like she's broken into pieces and nothingness.
She was bad for me. Very bad. SOme months my entire salary went into paying for repairs on her, but I still just could not let go. The accident was a huge blessing, because had it not happened,
I would probably still have had her. I'd still be paying so much money all the time and getting stuck all the time. I wouldn't sell her. There simply can be no price on something you love.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Judge me not
As we grow, we learn to be what the people in our environment expect us to be. For someone who is shy in school to stand out and be an achiever is really, really difficult because everyone around him/ her is expecting nothing to come out of the person's mouth.
For someone, who through the pressures of high school, became the village idiot in order to entertain everyone around him adn become popular, or someone who was forced into, excuse the language, the title of "bitch", it's something that's really hard to shake. So instead of shaking it, you'd rather just play into it and cement that thought.
Social media--and i mean of the twitter kind, not the fb kind, where u link to people other than those who knew u before,
is cool because it allows u to be whoever u want to be. Not who you're expected to be by the society u live in.
I deleted my first two blogs because I didn't follow this online media rule and told all the people I knew in real life about them. But then I felt
so restrained because there were a limited number of things I could say when I knew which people would be reading it.
I listened to a tedtalk video today that really spoke to me. It says, we don't become more creative as we grow, but we are born creative and as we grow we lose more and more of that creativity. The reason, Ken Robinson gave in his tedtalk, was that we are too scared of judgement as we grow older.
We don't just try things to see how they turn out and when we stop doing that, we inhibit ourselves. Instead of failing, we choose not to try.
Ken Robinson believes this is something we learn at school.
He's right, but it's more than just a problem with the 'syllabus'. I think it's a problem with humankind. We're all quick to judge each other and to stop anyone who strays from the pack.
We want them back to what is "normal" because "normal" is good and "different" is bad.
It's even entrenched in religion. Like Hamza Yusuf says in his book "purification of the heart", religions that propogate ancestral worship, propogate a sense of shame before man. Don't do this or that, because the elders will look down on it.
In Islam we don't have this kind of ancestral propogation, but as muslims we practice it anyway. Many of the things we do don't come from the quran and hadith, but rather, from the opinions of other muslims.
Modern cultures hold each other together in much the same way. Even if it's not a 'religious' thing, there's always a set of invisible rules governing the way u live.
The old IBM slogan really spoke to me because it was so simple and unconstrained. Think. That was the motto. No guidelines on how or when or why.
No guidelines/restrictions on what age u need to be to think and what kind of thinking would be acceptable.
Think*
For someone, who through the pressures of high school, became the village idiot in order to entertain everyone around him adn become popular, or someone who was forced into, excuse the language, the title of "bitch", it's something that's really hard to shake. So instead of shaking it, you'd rather just play into it and cement that thought.
Social media--and i mean of the twitter kind, not the fb kind, where u link to people other than those who knew u before,
is cool because it allows u to be whoever u want to be. Not who you're expected to be by the society u live in.
I deleted my first two blogs because I didn't follow this online media rule and told all the people I knew in real life about them. But then I felt
so restrained because there were a limited number of things I could say when I knew which people would be reading it.
I listened to a tedtalk video today that really spoke to me. It says, we don't become more creative as we grow, but we are born creative and as we grow we lose more and more of that creativity. The reason, Ken Robinson gave in his tedtalk, was that we are too scared of judgement as we grow older.
We don't just try things to see how they turn out and when we stop doing that, we inhibit ourselves. Instead of failing, we choose not to try.
Ken Robinson believes this is something we learn at school.
He's right, but it's more than just a problem with the 'syllabus'. I think it's a problem with humankind. We're all quick to judge each other and to stop anyone who strays from the pack.
We want them back to what is "normal" because "normal" is good and "different" is bad.
It's even entrenched in religion. Like Hamza Yusuf says in his book "purification of the heart", religions that propogate ancestral worship, propogate a sense of shame before man. Don't do this or that, because the elders will look down on it.
In Islam we don't have this kind of ancestral propogation, but as muslims we practice it anyway. Many of the things we do don't come from the quran and hadith, but rather, from the opinions of other muslims.
Modern cultures hold each other together in much the same way. Even if it's not a 'religious' thing, there's always a set of invisible rules governing the way u live.
The old IBM slogan really spoke to me because it was so simple and unconstrained. Think. That was the motto. No guidelines on how or when or why.
No guidelines/restrictions on what age u need to be to think and what kind of thinking would be acceptable.
Think*
Monday, September 27, 2010
define:stagnation
somewhere between the states of sabr and shukr
lies the state of stagnation
unhappiness about the current situation
but no energy or motivation to change it
just a drive to ignore it
by filling ur life with trivialities
to make it seem less encroaching.
but ignoring it
is the very fruit on which stagnation thrives
definitions for stagnation that speak to me from the web :
stagnate : idle: be idle; exist in a changeless situation; "The old man sat and stagnated on his porch"; "He slugged in bed all morning"
when there is little water movement and pollutants are trapped in the same area for a long period of time.
a blockage or buildup of qi or blood that prevents it from flowing freely. Is a precursor of illness and disease and is frequently accompanied by pain or tingling
A period when wind speeds of less than 0.5 m/s persist
dulling of the brain due to excessive use of a tool to carry out it's job. (e.g. using a calculator for simple maths or googling instead of thinking)
lies the state of stagnation
unhappiness about the current situation
but no energy or motivation to change it
just a drive to ignore it
by filling ur life with trivialities
to make it seem less encroaching.
but ignoring it
is the very fruit on which stagnation thrives
definitions for stagnation that speak to me from the web :
stagnate : idle: be idle; exist in a changeless situation; "The old man sat and stagnated on his porch"; "He slugged in bed all morning"
when there is little water movement and pollutants are trapped in the same area for a long period of time.
a blockage or buildup of qi or blood that prevents it from flowing freely. Is a precursor of illness and disease and is frequently accompanied by pain or tingling
A period when wind speeds of less than 0.5 m/s persist
dulling of the brain due to excessive use of a tool to carry out it's job. (e.g. using a calculator for simple maths or googling instead of thinking)
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Kaboom and Tippy
the adventures of kaboom and tippy
as created by sajida mitha in one of her bored but creative moments.
I intend on stealing more of her creative works and seeing what this cartoon develops into.
Monday, July 5, 2010
SouthAfrican-ism & WorldCup-ism
The world cup brought so much hope and togetherness to this country. Nelson Mandela was correct when he, as per the movie invictus, said that sports would bring people together and focused much on the 95 rugby world cup in uniting the country. The 180 000 strong crowd of diverse people that united in Sandton for the bafana parade, could not have been envisaged 15 years ago. It was beautiful to be a part of it and to say "I was there".
One thing that's special about our country, is the way we love and support our sportsmen no matter what. We always knew our soccer team wasn't the greatest in the world, but we stood behind them nonetheless and cheered heartily for them. Then, when they were kicked out, we were unhappy, but we got behind another team and continued attending matches and supporting the football. And we still love our bafana and we are proud of them for what they managed to achieve.
Normally, Fifa has to worry when the host team gets kicked out, but the morale in South Africa never dropped. I read an article by a lady from the U.S. who said that South Africa has taught her about the true meaning of 'ubuntu'. We welcome and accept anyone from any country and are genuinely interested in them as people. Countries like the U.S., on the other hand, are too focused on themselves and think of all other countries as outsiders. For all the xenophobia we've been accused of and the international media has harped upon, I think we truly are welcoming people and we really used the world cup as an opportunity to show the world first hand what we are. Also we got to show them that we don't wear animal skins and lions don't walk in the streets.
I'm so proud of us and of the world cup.
And we have a super awesome unique flag. Yes it's quite a bit similar to the flag of Vanuatu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Vanuatu) but it's still way more creativethan 3 horizontal or 3 vertical stripes and if anything, it's an improvement on the vanuatu one.
Here's to South Africa and it's uniqueness and it's freedom and just all round awesomeness :)
One thing that's special about our country, is the way we love and support our sportsmen no matter what. We always knew our soccer team wasn't the greatest in the world, but we stood behind them nonetheless and cheered heartily for them. Then, when they were kicked out, we were unhappy, but we got behind another team and continued attending matches and supporting the football. And we still love our bafana and we are proud of them for what they managed to achieve.
Normally, Fifa has to worry when the host team gets kicked out, but the morale in South Africa never dropped. I read an article by a lady from the U.S. who said that South Africa has taught her about the true meaning of 'ubuntu'. We welcome and accept anyone from any country and are genuinely interested in them as people. Countries like the U.S., on the other hand, are too focused on themselves and think of all other countries as outsiders. For all the xenophobia we've been accused of and the international media has harped upon, I think we truly are welcoming people and we really used the world cup as an opportunity to show the world first hand what we are. Also we got to show them that we don't wear animal skins and lions don't walk in the streets.
I'm so proud of us and of the world cup.
And we have a super awesome unique flag. Yes it's quite a bit similar to the flag of Vanuatu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Vanuatu) but it's still way more creativethan 3 horizontal or 3 vertical stripes and if anything, it's an improvement on the vanuatu one.
Here's to South Africa and it's uniqueness and it's freedom and just all round awesomeness :)
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