by B. R. GOWANI

The ghazal beautifully sung by Naheed Akhtar is from the 1988 Pakistani film Kalay Badal (Black Clouds). It is set to music by Rabbani. The titles of the film listed three poets: Saeed Gilani, Mahsoor, and Mansoor Gohar.

shab-e-gham mujh se mil kar aese royi

shab-e-gham mujh se mil kar aese royi
milA ho jese sadiyoN bAd koi

hameiN apni samajh Ati nahiN khud
hameiN kyA khAk samjhAyegA koi

qareeN manzil pe A ke dam hai TuTA
kahAN A kar meri taqdeer soyi

kuchh aese Aj un ki yAd Ayi
mili ho jese daulat aik khoi

sajA rakhA kafas hai khoonoN par se
ke ab to bijliyAN le Aye koi

shab-e-gham mujh se mil kar aese royi
milA ho jese sadiyoN bAd koi

Translation with notes by B. R. Gowani

The night of grief

meeting me, the night of grief wept
as if someone had met me after centuries <1>

I can’t understand my own self
how could anyone explain me

near my destination I breathed my last
what a place for my fate to fall asleep! <2>

the way he entered my memory today
it was as if I had found lost wealth

the cage is adorned with blood and feathers
now somebody should bring the lightning <3>

meeting me, the night of grief wept
as if someone had met me after centuries

Notes

<1> For the poet, grief is her prevalent state and hence the sarcasm. It’s like friends who met yesterday, are meeting again today in such a way as if yesterday was a long time ago.

<2> It is as if a person forced to leave his country, that was messed up by the IMF and US government, in hope of making his life better, reaches the US border but is killed by Border Patrol, or the case of the tens of thousands of lives lost at sea, before reaching shore. The person seemingly about to achieve his goal, and reach his destiny, departs this world, for the ultimate sleep of the dreamworld.

<3> The bird in the cage struggling to set itself free has bloodied itself with feathers scattered all over. The bird has strived so long for liberty that, now, it is tired. In other words, the poet is done with the world and wants lightning to electrocute his place, including himself, which has become a prison for him, because he couldn’t get from life what he had desired.

B. R. Gowani can be reached brgowani@hotmail.com

by MAHEEN AZMAT

Colonial travelogues and Hindu nationalist narratives have long cast Kashmiri Muslims as perpetual outsiders in their own land.

Kashmir has long occupied a curious space in the European imagination. For centuries, travellers, merchants, and colonial administrators produced narratives that constructed this Himalayan valley as a mythical ‘Paradise of the Indies’ — a land of extraordinary beauty whose inhabitants, strangely, were deemed unworthy of it.

This paradox, celebrating the land while denigrating its people, did not die with colonialism. It found new life in the ideological project of Hindu nationalism, which has weaponised these orientalist tropes to justify the ongoing colonisation of India-Kashmir and the systematic othering of its Muslim majority.

The question of who belongs in Kashmir, and who gets to define it, has never been merely academic. It is a question written in blood, displacement, and the language of competing nationalisms.

Annexed by India in 1947 through the contested Instrument of Accession, Jammu and Kashmir was granted ‘special status’ under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, a status effectively dismantled in 2019 amid heavily militarised conditions.

Today, as New Delhi strips Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and Bollywood produces films that either sanitise or demonise Kashmiri Muslims, tracing the genealogy of these representations becomes an urgent political task.

The colonial gaze and the ‘paradise’ myth

European fascination with Kashmir began with travellers like François Bernier, a French physician who accompanied Aurangzeb’s entourage to the valley in the 17th century. Bernier likened Kashmir’s mountains to Mount Olympus and its meadows to European gardens, “enamelled with our European flowers and plants, and covered with our apple, pear, plum”. The language of possession — ‘our’ fruits in ‘their’ land — reveals the European impulse to claim Kashmir as a distant reflection of itself, a space of familiarity amid the strangeness of the Orient.

This fascination with places and people perceived as similar to Europe created a substantial readership for travel writing as a genre. The European identity was affirmed through encounters with distant lands that could be made familiar, comprehensible, and available for appropriation.

Dawn for more

by ANANYA BHATTACHARYA

Nearly a year after launching a nationwide crypto payment system for tourists, merchants say hardly anyone is using it — raising questions about who the experiment really serves.

• Bhutan launched a nationwide crypto payment system for tourists in May 2024, allowing payments in 100+ cryptocurrencies via Binance.
• Over 1,000 merchants signed up initially, but actual usage has been minimal nearly a year later.
• Many merchants say no customers have paid in crypto and that tourists often don’t know it’s an option.

Nine months into its big push for cryptocurrency payments, Bhutan isn’t finding many takers for its plans.

Last May, Bhutan became the first country to launch a nationwide crypto payment network for tourists. Visitors to the Himalayan kingdom could pay for their visas, flights, hotels, and meals in more than 100 cryptocurrencies via Binance. Within the first month of its launch, over 1,000 merchants signed up to receive payments in crypto.

Almost a year on, though, nothing much has changed on the ground.

In Thimphu, the QR codes displayed by local businesses to receive crypto payments gather dust. Several merchants have never had any customers opt for them.

“It has been four to five months, but no customer has used it until now,” Sonam Dorji, who works at Lotus Peak Enterprise, a handicraft store on the premises of the Le Meridien hotel, told Rest of World. “No one knows that we accept cryptocurrency and Binance Pay.”

Experts and locals said the government’s push for cryptocurrency is driven by its own massive bitcoin reserves, and doesn’t account for structural hurdles like power shortage and low literacy, which make the transition unlikely.

“Mining bitcoin gives [Bhutan] a currency to purchase imports that it didn’t have before, so I understand why the political establishment in the country wants to go for digital payments,” Jay Zagorsky, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, told Rest of World. “However, just because the central bank is pushing Bhutan society toward digital payments does not make it sensible.”

Zagorsky is the author of The Power of Cash: Why Using Paper Money is Good For You and Society. The book argues that preserving physical money is essential to protect individual privacy, curb overspending, and prevent the economic exclusion of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Rest of world for more

by MACKENZIE SCOTT

Lately I’ve been thinking about murmurations of starlings. The direction of these flights of millions of birds is not determined by any single leader or delegation, but by the responses of each bird to the needs and movements of the birds around it. In this way, they are constantly creating their direction together, and no bird among them can know what shape it will take or where they will land.

There is a prophecy written by Hopi elders in the year 2000. It encourages us to recognize and celebrate our role as active participants in the co-creation of our communities.    

It’s easy to focus on the methods of civic participation that make news, and hard to imagine the importance of the things we do each day with our own minds and hearts. Who nurtured a child in the kitchen; who was kind to a stranger in line at a grocery store; who gave fifty dollars to a local food shelter: these are not news stories. But all of it matters.

Since my post last December, I’ve given $7,166,000,000 to organizations doing work all over the world. This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year. To use just one year in the United States as an example, the total donated to US charities of all kinds in 2020 was $471 billion, nearly a third of it in increments of less than $5,000. There was also $68 billion in reported financial support sent to family members living in other countries, tens of billions in crowdfunding, $200 billion in volunteer labor at service organizations, and nearly $700 billion in wages for the paid employees who chose to take jobs delivering those services over jobs where they might have earned more. Over 70% of Americans reported giving both labor and money to people they know, and half reported doing the same for strangers. That’s well over a trillion dollars worth of individual humanitarian action that we don’t read about online or hear about on the nightly news. To begin to imagine how much more there must be, just consider how many people take time out of their income-producing activities every day to listen with compassion, or to speak up for someone.  

And the multiplier effect on the social value of every one of these forms of benevolent contribution is huge.

Generosity and kindness engage the same pleasure centers in the brain as sex, food, and receiving gifts, and they improve our health and long-term happiness as well. The peace-fostering byproducts of one unexpected act of kindness toward a stranger of different background or beliefs might inspire a beneficial chain reaction that goes on for years. Respect, understanding, insight, empathy, forgiveness, inspiration – all of these are meaningful contributions to others.

It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible. Whose generosity did I think of every time I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give? It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college. It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year. And after she saw the difference she made in my life, what was she inspired to do, twenty years later? Start a company that offers loans to low-income students without a co-signer. And how quickly did I jump at the chance to be one of the people who supported her dream of supporting students just as she had once supported me? And to whom will each of the thousands of students thriving on those generosity- and gratitude-powered student loans go on to give? None of us has any idea.

The potential of peaceful, non-transactional contribution has long been underestimated, often on the basis that it is not financially self-sustaining, or that some of its benefits are hard to track. But what if these imagined liabilities are actually assets? What if these so-called weaknesses foster the strengths upon which the thriving (or even survival) of our civilization depends? What if the fact that some of our organizations are vulnerable can itself be a powerful engine for our generosity? What if acts of service that we can feel but can’t always measure expand our capacity for connection and trust? What if care is a way for all of us to make a difference in leading and shaping our countries? Votes are not the only way to show what we’d like to see more of in our societies. There are many ways to influence how we move through the world, and where we land.

 

Hopi Prophecy,

(The Hopi Prophecy translated from Hopi Elder Chief Dan Evehema, June 2000)

You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered…

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?

Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.

Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word ‘struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Yield Giving for more

by PETER LUKACS

The metaphor of rewiring offers an ideal of engineered precision. But the brain is more like a forest than a circuit board

Popular wisdom holds we can ‘rewire’ our brains: after a stroke, after trauma, after learning a new skill, even with 10 minutes a day on the right app. The phrase is everywhere, offering something most of us want to believe: that when the brain suffers an assault, it can be restored with mechanical precision. But ‘rewiring’ is a risky metaphor. It borrows its confidence from engineering, where a faulty system can be repaired by swapping out the right component; it also smuggles that confidence into biology, where change is slower, messier and often incomplete. The phrase has become a cultural mantra that is easier to comprehend than the scientific term, neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and form new neural connections throughout life.

But what does it really mean to ‘rewire’ the brain? Is it a helpful shorthand for describing the remarkable plasticity of our nervous system or has it become a misleading oversimplification that distorts our grasp of science?

After all, ‘rewiring your brain’ sounds like more than metaphor. It implies an engineering project: a system whose parts can be removed, replaced and optimised. The promise is both alluring and oddly mechanical. The metaphor actually did come from engineering. To an engineer, rewiring means replacing old and faulty circuits with new ones. As the vocabulary of technology crept into everyday life, it brought with it a new way of thinking about the human mind.

Medical roots of the phrase trace back to 1912, when the British surgeon W Deane Butcher compared the body’s neural system to a house’s electrical wiring, describing how nerves connect to muscles much like wires connect appliances to a power source. By the 1920s, the Harvard psychologist Leonard Troland was referring to the visual system as ‘an extremely intricate telegraphic system’, reinforcing the comparison between brain function and electrical networks.

The metaphor of rewiring also draws strength from changing theories in developmental neuroscience. The brain was thought to be largely static after childhood, becoming a fixed network of circuits, much like a hardwired radio. But beginning in the 1960s, researchers showed that the brain was far more adaptable. Stroke patients could regain function by recruiting new areas of the brain.

These findings revolutionised rehabilitation medicine. They also gave rise to an idea that would quickly leap beyond the clinic: if brains can rewire, then people can change.

Aeon for more

by GHADA AGEEL

The Canadian prime minister delivered a stirring speech in Davos on the failures of international law – yet he remains silent in the face of Israel’s ongoing slaughter

Seven people, spanning three generations of one family, were burned alive late last month after an Israeli missile struck a tent encampment where they were sleeping in Gaza’s al-Mawasi area.

The oldest was Rebhi Abu Hadayed, 69, and the youngest was his granddaughter, five-year-old Laya. Rebhi was preparing to go to the mosque for morning prayers, and his brother, Mohammed, was already at the mosque when he heard the explosion.

Mohammed rushed back to find carnage. Two of Rebhi’s sons and one of their spouses had also been killed, along with two other grandchildren, seven-year-old Sham and eight-year-old Jebreel. And this was just the latest tragedy for their family: several other relatives had been killed previously in an Israeli attack last July.

The slaughter of Rebhi and his family came on a bloody day in Israel’s ongoing genocide, with at least 31 Palestinians killed, despite the “ceasefire” that began months earlier, on 10 October.

The slaughter began around 4am on 31 January, when Israeli warplanes targeted a residential building housing the al-Atbash family in western Gaza City, killing three children, Zeina, Maryam, and Manah, aged seven, five and three, their aunt 24-years-old Islam and their 69-years-old grandmother Olfat.

Also among the dead on that fateful day were seven-year-old Mohammed Rezeq and his grandmother, who lived near an Unrwa clinic in Gaza City. Around the same time, Israeli forces attacked the nearby Sheikh Radwan police station, killing 15 people, including six visitors and nine staff.

Between 31 January and 4 February ( five days), about 60 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. This amounts to an average of approximately 12 people killed each day, meaning that a Palestinian life has been taken roughly every 2 hours during this period of supposingly ceasefire.

These figures do not humanise the loss, but they do expose the relentless pace of destruction of palestinian life that words alone often fail to capture.

Decisive moment

Less than two weeks earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had made global headlines after delivering a forceful speech on the “old” and “new” world order at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 

Speaking at a decisive moment to a global audience grappling with protracted wars, and amid a crisis in the systems designed to protect civilians – including the steady erosion of international legal norms – Carney articulated a diagnosis that seemed to offer analytical clarity and moral resolve. 

When Palestinian lives were at stake, Carney looked away – not once, but at least 1,450 times

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient … And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” Carney said.

While Canada is not a great power, he said it has something just as important: “the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together”. 

“That is Canada’s path,” he declared. “We choose it openly and confidently.”

Carney followed his Davos speech with a statement days later, marking the occasion of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945. 

“Looking away,” he said, “is not a passive act, but an active betrayal.”

On 31 January, these noble words were tested in Gaza – and Canada failed utterly. When Palestinian lives were at stake, Carney looked away – not once, but at least 1,450 times. That is the reported number of ceasefire violations committed by Israel between 10 October and 31 January.

MEE for more

by NICK DOWSON

Nick Dowson imagines a different world of online communities that puts our needs first.

My first interaction with online social platforms – other than email – was on MSN Messenger. My memories of it sit alongside the unforgettable tones of dial-up internet and the bonsai kittens hoax.

The program had an unadorned interface and text-based, mostly one-on-one, chats. There was no public posting, or algorithms (mathematical rulesets) determining who read what.

When MySpace, and later Facebook, came along we mistook their novelty for fun. But, fast forward not so many years and the love affair with social media has quickly soured – save for a brief interlude where, having copied from tools developed by social movements, Twitter took credit for a swathe of revolutions and protests.

It shouldn’t have taken Elon Musk’s ego to prove that having the world’s digital public spheres – core sites for democracy and social life in our age – controlled by a handful of rich men was untenable.

From service providers to the fibre optic cables, the internet has been handed over wholesale to corporations.

Its ills flow from that: social media’s monetization through the attention economy means data mining and the nurturing of users’ insecurities; advertising fuels consumerism; and platforms are incentivized to favour the spreading of far right messages – after all, outrage is seductive.

So, what would it look like if we called time on Big Tech’s failed experiment?

A better social media would need to be decentralized – away from the US stock markets and men like Mark Zuckerberg, on whose watch images of breastfeeding have been banned as misogyny spreads. As well as avoiding a single point of failure (or censorship), this would help with other goals: community ownership, and democratic control, would be facilitated by having many smaller, perhaps more local, sites.

Existing social media giants must be brought into public (and transnational) ownership – in a way that hands power to citizens, not governments. But they should also be broken up, using existing anti-monopoly rules.

New Internationalist for more

by INGRID CHAHINE

The Israeli occupation army set a precedent on Thursday as it struck the Lebanese University’s Hadath campus, killing Dr. Hussein Bazzi, director of the Faculty of Sciences, and professor Mortada Srour, while injuring at least thirteen others who were in the faculty’s courtyard. Previous Israeli operations in Lebanon have targeted residential areas, medical personnel, and civilian infrastructure, but this is the first confirmed strike on academics inside university grounds during the ongoing war, following the killing of Mr. Mohammad Reda Fadlallah, director of USAL University in Haret Hreik.

Condemnations quickly followed. Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) reported statements from colleagues, faculty associations, the Dean of the Faculty of Education, the Ministry of Education, and the Lebanese University administration, mourning martyrs Bazzi and Srour and thanking them for their remarkable contribution to science. There was no official statement, however, highlighting that the Israeli strike damaged a university already suffering from chronic underfunding, or rather systematic institutional weakening.

Parallel to these official responses, a coordinated strategy unfolded on social media, where users circulated a photograph claiming to show Dr. Hussein Bazzi standing alongside martyred Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Akil. The image was first published by Avichai Adraei, the Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israeli occupation army. Shortly after, the Lebanese University’s presidency issued a statement addressing the photograph, explaining that the claim that the person in the photo is the martyr Dr. Hussein Bazzi is incorrect. The statement noted that the image originated from enemy sources and that the identification remained unconfirmed speculation.

The occupation framed the targeting of academic and civilian infrastructure as an expanding campaign to “pressure the Lebanese government” who is reportedly “unable to disarm Hezbollah”.

Still, the bombing of academic institutions and the killing of faculty members, theorists, professors and students, follows a pattern established long before the recent zionist genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in 2023. The [ongoing] genocide, however, consolidated it further during that period, particularly with the level of impunity exhibited by the occupation and the international community vis-à-vis live streamed violations of all laws and morals. According to a January 2024 article by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has killed more than 94 university professors in Gaza since October 2023 along with teachers, and thousands of students. That figure has since increased of course, particularly when IOF attacks on the Strip deliberately continued to target academic, scientific, and intellectual figures as well as institutions. Before their demolition, some universities and schools were also converted to detention facilities and military barracks according to the article.

The Georgetown Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine documented the Palestinian scholars who were killed by Israel during the recent genocide. Martyrs were presidents of universities like Professor Sufian Tayeh, who was a renowned physicist and president of the Islamic University of Gaza and Dr. Said Al-Zubda, president of the University College of applied Sciences in Gaza since 2021, and Director of the Technology Incubator there since 2011. Others were deans, like martyr Dr. Ibrahim Hussein Al-Astal, who has a PhD in Curriculum and Mathematics Teaching Methods and was the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the Islamic University of Gaza, and Dr. Abo Absa, Dean of the College of Media and Internet Technology at the University of Palestine. Israel also killed professors like martyr Nesma Abu Shaira and Islam Suleiman Haboush. Professor Abu Shaira was a visual artist and an educator, and a lecturer at the department of Fine Arts at Al Aqsa University, and Professor Haboush was a researcher at the Islamic University of Gaza. She was the author of the book Popular Resistance During the First Intifada in the Gaza Strip. She was also known for her lectures on the history of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa in particular. Professor Haboush was killed in Gaza, along with most of her family members, in an Israeli airstrike on October 19, 2023. Among the scholars who also struck public opinion was professor Refaat al-Areer, a prominent Palestinian writer, poet, professor, and activist. He taught literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and co-founded the organization We Are Not Numbers, which matched experienced authors with young writers in the Strip, promoting the power of storytelling as a means of resistance. On December 6, 2023, Al-Areer was killed along with his brother, sister, and her three children in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza. Al-Areer had previously received death threats from Israeli accounts.

Israel also killed professor Khalil Abu Yahia in the recent genocidal war. He was a writer and researcher in Postcolonial, Literary and Cultural Studies and an English teacher at the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education. Abu Yahia had participated in international events worldwide and had written and co-written various articles, the last one was about climate justice in Palestine. He was also involved in community oral history and the integration of drama into education. On October 30, 2023, Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike, along with his mother, his two brothers, his wife Tasnim, and his two young daughters, Elaf and Rital.

Al Akhbar for more

by KATHERINE WEAVER & JOSH WILSON

In the remote Nukus Museum of Uzbekistan, a vast collection of banned Russian avant-garde art has been preserved for decades. The museum and its collection were founded by Igor Savitsky, a Soviet artist who defied censors to rescue and safeguard these works. His success was also made possible by the unique geography and history of Karakalpakstan, the region where the museum is located. After the fall of the USSR, Savitsky’s hand-picked successor Marinika Babanazarova had to continue to fight for the collection’s survival and international recognition. Today, Uzbekistan is going through a new period of political reform, economic growth, and opening to the outside world. Nukus could finally have a chance for a stable collection and its own growth and development.

Who was Savitsky?

About half a century ago, near the dusty shores of the retreating Aral Sea, Communist Party officials visited the Museum of Igor Savitsky. Savitsky, affectionately called “Junkman” by his friends and associates, was an artist. Under the nose of State officials (and sometimes with their funds), he was amassing a collection of over eighty thousand banned Russian avant-garde artifacts. He owned but one suit, which he wore only during inspections. When the officials saw The Bull (Fascism Advances), a painting by Vladimir Lysenko, hanging in the museum, they immediately declared the painting anti-Soviet and ordered its removal. As founder, director, and protector of the museum, Savitsky instantly complied.

Once the inspectors left, the director returned both his suit and The Bull to their rightful places. For now, his collection was safe: Nukus, the capital city of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic located inside western Uzbekistan, was far away from the Party nucleus. Inspections were rare.

Savitsky traveled the USSR, visiting the homes of deceased or disappeared artists to relieve their spouses of any forbidden art, at once removing what might further incriminate the family from their home and yet safeguarding the legacy of their departed member. From the tens of thousands of artifacts Savitsky collected, Lysenko’s Bull prevailed as the museum’s unofficial mascot. The long-gone Party inspectors had not appreciated the painting in part because of the unrealistic presentation of the bull but also because the bull is so aggressive. It is known by a second name (which some historians believe that Savitsky actually made up), Facism Advances. However, art critics consider The Bull’s shotgun eyes symbolic–prophetic, even, of the Stalinist repression that branded the early 1930’s.

MSA for more