Type-writer-Girl

I’m in the writing mood now. I know it. I get into this calm state. I feel complete. I feel wise, and somewhat happy. The inspiration is welcomed in me, nothing to disturb it, nothing to stop it. It can come in and rush through me, come out through my hands into the keyboard, and then amaze my eyes with what I’m reading, to take me further into peaceful happiness. Writing can indeed be a magical experience.

Today while I was at work, I had a conversation with a photographer at the newspaper, his name is Joseph. We were talking about how digital photography changed the way people take pictures. He was saying that at those times when they were using films, they were more careful as to what pictures to take. “We used to go out to cover a football game, and then another event with only one film, so that gives you about 18 pictures per event,” he said.

Joseph says that now that he is using digital photography, he can shoot up to 200 pictures in a single event, and then choose one or two for the newspaper. He also said that the fact that digital cameras do everything (focus, shutter speed, iris .. etc) ‘made us stupid’ as he puts it.

Old-Camera

I told him that I’ve always been amazed at how wonderful were those pictures that were taken by the first photographers ever. When photography was just invented, and a shot costs probably more than a digital camera does now, if we will calculate the inflation. So anyway, I was saying that pictures back then were taken by artists, and these artists took so many things into consideration before clicking the shutter button. That’s why every old picture is beautiful. Not to mention the fact that people wasn’t faking simplicity in front of cameras.

By the way, even there you can tell who is who. Careful eye can figure out so many about a person from the way he fakes himself, whether in pictures or in real life.

Anyway, back to the point. We are talking about writing, not photography. So when I saw that writer typing on his typewriter, I thought about the way we are spoiled now. I now have the privilege of writing a word, going back, changing it, look at it, and then go back and change it back if I don’t like it. Typewriter-writers probably had to do more thinking about what to write before writing it in the first place. I wondered if this is good or bad? Or is it simply good for some people and bad for others? Or is it good sometimes and bad in others?!

If we will think about that for a moment, we will see the unregistered changes computers brought to our lives.

This is not a new concept by the way. I think I read somewhere about the effect of the slow pace that people used to write with when they had to use feather to write. They had to stop every few letters to get more ink, and some think it had huge impact on the way they write, and on the mood of their writing. But typewriters are not as ancient as feather pens, I mean the man in the movie was writing in 1988, twenty two years ago.

Maybe we are now wasting ‘pictures’ when we write too! Maybe the easiness with which we can publish our work makes us underestimate the beauty of writing! Makes us write without thinking it through. Maybe the overwhelming amount of written words made available by everyone on the internet is making it difficult for readers to absorb the real beauty of quality writings!

So many maybes I don’t even know anymore!

Few days ago I was watching a documentary about some birds, the way their lives go in circles. They move to a certain place to breed, and then they move somewhere else to die, then their ‘kids’ go to that first place to breed … etc. I started thinking that humans do the same, but the breeding in our case is not related to a certain place or season, but to a certain age. We all follow the same procedures that get us to that place in order for our ‘kind’ to survive.

We get born, and everything is already settled for us. “Go to school. Graduate. Work. Get married. Have kids. Raise them. Retire. Die.” It’s like a sequence that you can’t escape.

It’s like you are forced to live by these instincts. You study good to work good to make enough money to support your kids. You maintain your health to produce better sperm. You grow up to the peak of your youth, and then the ‘let’s have kids’ hormone kicks in, and you suddenly want to start breeding!

Cake

What if I don’t want to follow this rule?! Not that I don’t want. I want. Like any other human being I want to get married and have kids. But it’s just that I don’t want to want the things that I’m supposed to want. Or to be more precise, I don’t want to want these things simply because I’m supposed to want them at one point! I want to want them if I want them because I really want them, not because I’m obligated by my nature as a human, or by my instincts to want them at this particular time!

And also, I don’t want to want and not get, but at the same time, I don’t want to want for too long and then don’t want when I get what I wanted. I want to get what I want and still want it. I want to have the cake and eat it!

For me, marriage is like the climax of any relationship between man and woman. It’s like the orgasm in sex, it’s the happiest moment in the whole process, but it is the conclusion for all the fun. Not wanting to get married is like wanting to have sex for longer time. You want to orgasm, but the longer you delay getting to that point, the more you enjoy having sex, and the more you want to orgasm at the same time.

Marriage, in a sense, is the inevitable end of any relationship, just like death is the inevitable end to any life. When you get married, you move to another world. Just like when you die. As long as you are single, you don’t know what that life is, you don’t know what you will get, but you know what you will be missing. It’s pretty good analogy from where I’m standing! I mean maybe it will be better for me when I’ll die, than when I’m alive, but I don’t know about that. I just know that I love my life too much to take my chances dying, or getting married :)

On the other hand, I want to get married and know what I’m missing now! But then I will be missing what I have now! Why oh why we can’t have the cake and eat it?!!

A number of issues caught my attention this week. The fact that a WHO official finally admitted exaggerating the risk of H1N1 virus was one of them. This article, however, is not about that issue in particular, neither it is about the 'funny' way with which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to the latest HRW's report on Kuwait, -- we are doing everything we can to prove these allegations wrong!" It is not about the suggested amendments to the press law either.

It is perhaps more related to two global phenomena. The first one is anti-semitism, and the second is war on terrorism. A recent study done by a university of Bielefeld in Germany shows that 42 percent of Europeans think Jews are using the Holocaust to blackmail Europe for money.

In the meantime, the US congress is deliberating on a bill that will brand as terrorist any country that helps broadcast any channel that promotes or supports any group which the White House considers a terrorist organization!

First of all, and before any of that is implemented, world leaders should come to an agreed definition of the term terrorism, so that everyone can take part in fighting it. It will be a nice 'change' from the Bush administration's policy, which refused to agree on a single definition of the word in order to be able to apply it to whoever they choose.

I hope the change Obama was talking about is not the same of that adopted by the Bush administration's team. They were so smart, that their reasoning actually looks like this: "we will not change our policy; we will continue to bomb these people, and in the meantime, we will simply do more public relation tours to convince them that this is the right thing to do!

I don't know why, but this reminds me again of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' remarks on the HRW's report. "... Doing all that we can to 'PROVE THEM WRONG!'" instead of 'to stop human rights violations!'

Some people always assume that what is being said about something is more important than that 'something' itself!

The truth is, in order for things to improve, they need to actually improve themselves, not only the way they are viewed or believed to be! Telling everyone how pretty ugliness is does not make it pretty! Nor does preventing people from talking about it! It's that simple!

I think the Ministry of Information should also consider this concept.
Truth cannot be hidden. You can't create a lie and sell it to the whole world for too long. H1N1 was a good example of that. The Holocaust is a good example of that too. Even if the clued-up 42 percent of Europe are still too timid to publicly ask why those 'six millions Holocaust victims' should be more important than the rest of the 60 million people who died in WWII. And if the number "six millions" is correct why is it such a taboo to question it?!

You can't keep justifying injustice and discrimination against Muslims with 'war on terror.' You simply can't continue to terrorize the world with this bogus war! You can't continue to justify suppressing freedoms around the world with the excuse of 'protecting freedoms.'

You can't bend logic. Truth prevails eventually. Stop fooling yourselves people!
 

© Kuwait Times 2010

Just when everyone in Kuwait has begun believing that the government is being victimized in the power struggle with the National Assembly, the proposed amendments to the Press and Publication Law have ruined the picture. The government appears to be one of those sad characters from movies who are incapable of having friends. Think Jim Carey in 'The Cable Guy.'

Anyway, for old times' sake, I will try to explain why the proposed amendments to the law are wrong.

First of all, how can we be guaranteed that the new law will be implemented properly? I mean, the whole crisis occurred because the authorities did not use the legal procedures, that were already stipulated, to resolve the situation. Instead of the Ministry of Information bravely accepting the blame for failing to perform its duties properly, the suggested amendments imply that there are loopholes within the existing laws, not in the way they were implemented!
Secondly, the very fact that violations occur, do not necessarily mean there is a need to increase punishment. It will be like saying "it appears as if the death penalty is not enough to stop drug smuggling into the country, so we are going to increase punishment to - death penalty plus flogging the dead body 100 times!

Thirdly, even if the law is passed, people will still find other ways to express what they want to say. In practice, it will only be one more way to embarrass Kuwait internationally, especially if international organizations will start demanding the release of imprisoned journalists. It might also create a wave of Kuwaiti political asylum-seekers in the world, because they can't voice out their opinions in their homeland. Some of them may even launch media outlets in those countries, where the Kuwaiti government cannot reach or gag them.

So, the government better have other reasons to propose these amendments, because from what is apparent, they simply don't make any sense at all. As for the Parliament, it's an entirely different story. MPs need to consider few facts before voting on these amendments. First of all, they need to remember the oath they took when they started their duties. It reads "I swear ... to protect freedoms, interests, and the wealth of the nation." They should ask themselves why 'freedoms' comes first in the word order.

After doing so, MPs would probably want to look into the possibility of the entire crisis over the controversial TV show being 'staged.' Some 'hidden forces' could've used the man to say these offensive things and generate such angry reactions in order to use this momentum to impose censorship. If I know what your reaction will be like, then I can fool you into demanding what I really wanted to do in the first place. It will probably be much better for all of us if MPs stop being so predictable.

If these concepts are beyond our respected parliamentarians, then there will be a price for that. If they okay the amendments and then decide to practice their freedom (which is a hobby for some MPs) of criticizing the government, then no one will dare deliver their messages to the public. Journalists who do that will be risking a jail term.

Finally, if all this is completely meaningless to everyone and if the law is passed, then we will be the first, and probably the only country in the world, that managed to democratically suppress freedoms. We will be the one and only democratically-practiced dictatorship!

© Kuwait Times 2010

I often find myslef facing the same problem. It’s about my friends. I have plenty of friends, and I love them all, it’s just that I don’t have the time to keep in touch with all of them. Yesterday a friend of mine and I took a hike on the seaside, we walked for almost 10 kilometers. It was great exercise for me, I didn’t walk in a while. My legs are still recovering.

When I came back home I remembered that I was supposed to get in touch with a different group of my friends, those who studied with me in Ukraine. One of them called me during the week and we ended by agreeing to touch base on Friday to gather the group together.

I have so many groups of friends. Some of them from before university, relative-friends, I have friends from old jobs, people I’ve travelled with, people we have things in common, and I only have 6 days off every month.

In these six days I want to do things that I absolutely have to do, like change the car oil for example (which I finally did today after 6,000 kilometers, which is 3,000 kilometers late), then things that I need to do, then things that I love to do. I want to have the time to read, I want to have the time to write, to watch movies, to go buy a T-shirt or something, I want to set up a new word press based website, and I need to learn how to do that. I need to finish the documentary I’ve been working on for a while, and maybe even start planning for a new one, and I need to keep in touch with all my friends, and all the relatives, attend all weddings and funerals and even dinner parties. I need to have enough sleep, because in week days I can’t do that as well, and I want to manage to kick back, slack and relax also. All of that during the six days of the month! 78 days a year! That’ impossible!

What is wrong? Am I working too much? Is my interpretation of the word “friend” inflated? Or this is the problem with all of us? Do we collect more friends than we can manage? Or it’s simply the way things are done? I men that you can’t possibly keep in touch with all of your friends! And I mean ‘keep in touch’ as in real life, like doing things together, not ‘facebook style’ keep in touch, like knowing who are they marrying and when.

Should one try to mix his groups of friends together in order to connect with all of them whenever he has time? Is it even doable? What could happen?

I’m sure there will be few awkward situations if one is trying to do so. I mean if your dearest friends of all of your life get together with you in one room, each of them will have a different perception of who you are. Not only because relations, and common interest between each of you are unique. Not even because each one of them is a different person. But mainly, in my view, because you yourself have changed as you grew up, and each of them saw a phase of your development that leaded you to who you are right now.

Maybe we are not supposed to keep up with all our friends? Because if we will do, we will lose many of them as we change along the way. Maybe we are friends with them thanks only to the impressions they have about us and the ones we have about them. Maybe having the illusion of having too many friends is much better than not having any. Or, maybe this is just my mind's way of lying to me and making me feel better about myself :)

I had a blast of dreams this weekend, one of which made quite a sense. Those of you who already watched Avatar will understand what I’m talking about. I had this dream yesterday that people are living inside these biologically engineered bodies. Except that in the movie they just move them, but what I saw was that we were living inside them. It’s a good way to keep us safe. The extension can be used to reduce the risks of breathing polluted air, all the harm caused by the sun, radiation, and even accidents. When the extension you live in is injured or ill, you simply replace it, and the body that is needed to keep you alive remains brand new.

So that was yesterday’s dream. Today, I can’t quite remember all of the dreams I had, because the last one was very weird.

I woke up, and wanted to see what time it was. I was lying on my back, slightly to my left side. I reached to my mobile phone on the table to my left, clicked to the button to see the time, nothing happened, tried to unlock it to see the time, it didn’t respond. The phone was out of power, I forgot to plug the charger at night. Then I realized that this was a dream. I woke up (really this time), I was lying in the same way I saw in my dream, I reached to the mobile phone, pressed the button to see time, not working, tried to unlock it, and it didn’t work. The battery was empty!!!!!!! I swear to God exactly the same that just happened to me a moment ago! With the same sequence of events! I mean Gosh, what is this?

Do you see what I mean when I say that I love my dreams? My brain contains far more entertainment for me than anything else in the real world! And it is not without sense of humor :)

I've said before that democracy is a powerful tool, pretty much like the car; you are free to use it to go wherever you want, but before being allowed to drive it, you need to get a driver's license first. When I think about a number of policies adopted recently by the National Assembly, I see the image of a five-year-old kid having total control of a candy store. "I don't want to brush my teeth, I just want to eat chocolate" is the kind of reasoning that mimics the mentality behind the recent political activities in the country. Urgent and pressing matters are ignored while trivial and luxurious issues take center stage.

The majority of MPs have insisted on rushing through the process of passing laws without any rational justification. The recently-passed debt law is a good example. The legislation was repeatedly criticized for not treating all the citizens equally, with a number of economic experts, NGOs, MPs and the government all pointing out that it also includes legal and financial discrepancies and loopholes.

Most lawmakers rushed the bill through at the expense of its consistency. Maturely and actively listening to the viewpoints of the opposition could have gained more support for the legislation, and ultimately, could've resulted in the creation of a better one. The majority doesn't seem to care about other voices, simply because they have enough power to pass it.

On the other hand, a longstanding problem like the issue of bedoons (stateless people) was repeatedly neglected by the majority in the Assembly, even though further delaying of the problem will embarrass Kuwait before the UN Human Rights Council. It could also lead to subjecting Kuwait to sanctions next May. All of that doesn't seem to bother our respected majority.

Few months ago, MPs accused the government of trying to gag voices, and of not doing enough to protect freedom of expression when a writer was attacked. The same MPs threatened to grill the Prime Minister if he did not fire the minister of information for 'allowing' the owner of satellite station to criticize them on a TV show. A new audio-visual law is now in the making to place further restrictions on freedom of expression, and it is very likely to be passed by that same parliamentary majority.

It appears to me that Kuwait is witnessing a critical phase, standing on a thin line between an enlightened democracy that protects the rights, interests, well being and freedom of all, and a system where a majority, with no 'driver's license' practices dictatorship over the country at the expense of common sense and prosperity.
 © Kuwait Times 2010

Finally it’s the good weekend, this week was exhausting! I mean if people have the choice, why would they plan their events very early in the morning? I mean you can have that press conference or ceremony of yours as successful at 11 o’clock as it is at 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning, why would you chose to force all people to wake up early and not have enough sleep? Just ... WHY?

It is extremely important for me to have enough sleep, in fact, one of the things I love to do is to sleep until I wake up alone, without any alarm, because that’s the only way I can remember my dreams, and I do love my dreams, I love holidays for all the dreams I get to witness, my dream world is beautiful, I can't even begin to describe it!

Another thing that I love to do in weekends is to stay in my bed for a while after waking up, not rushing anywhere, pick up my mobile phone, check out the phone calls, SMSs and Emails quickly, and switching on the TV and watching the news bulletin or any other good show that's on for like 30 minutes or so before leaving the bed. That’s just one of the joys of life for me.

People's creativity in being irrational never stops amazing me! Something happened this week that caught my attention to a repeating pattern in my life, and could probably indicate a social habit, it’s just something for people to think about. Don’t you think that the most common misunderstanding in the world is when people misread kindness as stupidity or even weakness? I mean how many times do you give someone something that you think he needs because you feel sorry for him and then he thinks that he fooled you because you are stupid and he is smart?!

I was thinking about this thing few days ago. There are two kinds of people, those who always assume that people are always lying, unless there is a very strong evidence that says otherwise, and I’ve known quite a number of them. And there are other people, who always assume that people are telling the truth, unless there is a reason to assume otherwise, like me for example.

Now imagine this situation, two friends, one from each category, are standing together, and then a man comes and claims his name is … say … Tony.  So, one believes and one doesn’t. ‘Tony’ leaves, and then they start arguing about it, the believer thinks the other one is being over-skeptic. The other one thinks the believer is naïve and he is simply smarter. Factually, any one of them could be mistaken, this man’s name could be Tony, or could be any other name. Chances are 50/50. They will never meet him again, they will never know for sure.

The question is, does it worth it to be skeptic about what people say all the time? Does it always worth it to spend your time and your energy to find reasons not to believe people, and instead, trying to find alternative explanations for their actions? I mean even if believing will mean occasionally being disappointed by people here and there in your life, does it really worth it?!

Why can't people see things as they are? What's the problem? Or maybe even more importantly, whose problem it is? Is it their problem or ours?

The Kuwaiti government claims that Bedoon are not stateless, these people have citizenships from other countries, and they are hiding them, because they want to benefit from the Kuwaiti citizenship, even though most of them actually resides in the country even before its declaration of independence back in the year 1961.

However, according to the government, these people are not stateless, but they don’t have a legal status as expatriates in the country either, so the government decided to call them ‘illegal residents’! thus, the conventions that Kuwait signed regarding the rights of stateless people does not apply to these people!

(Note that the minister of interiors admitted recently that there are approximately 40,000 of them, that the specially designated government committee failed to ‘assign’ citizenships to them, making us wonder why don’t they give at least those guys citizenship?)

In order to emphasize its vision for these people as illegal residents, the government recently added the word “Temporary”, to driver’s license of Bedoons (for those of them who are lucky enough to have one to begin with), implying that they don’t have the right to have driver’s license, but the government is being kind to them, and allowing them to drive cars, even though they live illegally in the country!

Similarly, the US government, says that Gitmo detainees are not prisoner of the war, they are ‘enemy combatant’ in order to justify why the Geneva convention does not apply to them!

There is another similarity, although Kuwaiti government claims that Bedoon carry citizenships of other countries, they still cannot send them to courts because they know they cannot prove it in front of a judge. The US government is doing the same, it refuses to give Gitmo detainees a fair trial, because they also know they can't prove their accusations against these people.

We can detect a pattern here, if there is a rule that you disparately want to violate, you just need to change the definition of one word, or redefine one entity, and then claim that the rule does not apply to this particular case.

A question arises though: if the US is getting away with that because it’s a super power, why Kuwait is getting away with that?!