Qandeel Baloch was a beautiful and a spunky woman with a zest for life.  She was the darling of the social media in Pakistan.  Indeed, she was snidely but also admirably referred to as the Kim Kardashian of Pakistan depending on what you think of the American socialite.  But let me not digress.  In essence, Qandeel represented everything that is anathema to a deeply feudal and suffocating orthodox society that Pakistan can be.  To be comfortable in your sexuality, dressing the way you want to, living life on your own terms, in other words, acquiring a second skin of western mores.  Surely a price had to be paid, and pay she did.  Her own brother throttled her to death in the name of restoring the ‘family honor’.  This thing called ‘family honor’ is a very curious beast not just in Pakistan, but also in India.  It is quite fragile and vulnerable, and it’s basically used to control and make women conduct themselves in a certain way.  The more docile and submissive they are, the more this creature will find sustenance.

  This pious cant about honor and tradition has been effectively used to keep the patriarchal order intact.  A woman was saddled with the soul destroying burden of being the repository of the family’s shame and honor.  A kind of human receptacle where the clan would pour into all of their fears and anxieties.  As if how she lived or not lived validated their own identity.  Qandeel Baloch’s very existence tapped into this primal fear of the reversal of the established order.  Whether to kill somebody for the choice of her lifestyle, or to harass and hound someone because you didn’t agree with the choice of their life partner is the symptom of the same malaise that is corroding the soul of a large section of society.

  For every sister like Qandeel, there are many brothers like Waseem (that was his name), lurking in the shadow, marinating in their misogyny.  Consumed by their impotent rage to make sense of the modern world and its women, these hateful dregs of humanity will not hesitate to murder their own wife, mother and sister.  I mourn for you Qandeel.  We’ve failed you as a society in fact, we are as much complicit in your murder as the actual man who did it.  We, in our self-righteous notion as to how ‘good girls’ are supposed to lead their life, we in our insatiable appetite for gossip, we through our constant condemnation and judgment, have all contributed our bit in bringing about this horrible tragedy.  

So, after a lot of bumpy ride, the Republican Party’s convention finally came to its conclusion in Cleveland, Ohio with Donald Trump formally anointed as the nominee to take on Hillary Clinton come November in what’s going to be perhaps the most bitterly contested and brutal elections in our lifetime.  Add not least because of such high stakes involved considering the current the geopolitical and economic situation not only in the United States, but around the world.  What is also going to be unique about this election is the personalities of the two contenders on either side of the political divide, but particularly what Mr. Trump has brought to the table as an opponent to the quintessential establishment person and Democratic nominee Ms. Hillary Clinton.  In what is undoubtedly the longest acceptance speech in the history of campaign nomination, Donald Trump, while essentially preaching to the converted, tried to paint a dark vision for the people in the event of him not becoming the President.  His acrid rhetoric was based on grievance and contempt, old hurt and new.  There was no humor, only poisonous anger directed against his opponent.  It is mind boggling the way he is putting out and projecting himself as the panacea for all the ills affecting the American society.  Can one man really have all the answer to the very complex problems of our time? Mr. Trump seems to think so.  “Get me into the office and I will fix everything.  I know how to get things done.”  If the main purpose of the convention was to humanize Mr. Trump, it wasn’t too much of a success because if you don’t feel empathy or sympathy for that person, you can’t see the humane side of him.  And in that cauldron of paranoia and prejudice, it was very difficult to see the human dimension of Donald Trump.  Whatever may be happening in America right now, things are never as dire as they seem, they never are.  But judging by the oratory employed, you would think “after me, deluge.”  I am just thinking what will happen if Mr. Trump is not able to achieve his dream of becoming the President of the United States after  all.  Because make no mistake, until now, every six out of ten American voter has a very unfavorable view of Donald Trump.  So something will have to change drastically between now and November to install him in the Oval Office.  He has staked so much on this like a maniac, really put himself out there, on the line.  I don’t know how religious he is, but he must be fancying himself as Moses parting the red sea and leading the faithful to the Promised Land.  I shudder to think how will he deal with failure.  Only time will be the judge.

So much has already been written and spoken about ever since the news broke of the passing of Muhammad Ali two days ago, that there is hardly anything I could add more.  But I feel impelled by the force of my emotions to say something.  Muhammad Ali's life was a brilliant example of the fact that you don't have to be perfect to be great.  He was arguably the greatest sportsman is a given, but very few people in history have transcended their chosen profession in life and become something larger than the sum of their whole, and he was one of them.  It was as if the whole world was not big enough to contain his manic energy.  So much of our life is about direction, the relentless momentum, in fact, he said that if you are the same person at fifty as you were at twenty, then you have wasted thirty years of your life.  He was a fighter to the core when he refused to be drafted for Vietnam war which he considered to be unjust on the ground that the poor Vietnamese thousands of miles away posed no threat to the United States, and he was a conscientious objector.  He suffered a grave setback to his professional career when his licence was revoked for three years for dereliction of national duty, until his suspension was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.  If anyone else would say I am the greatest, you would think of him as a deluded braggart, but Ali had this immense self belief to walk the walk and talk the talk.  

   He had the choice to keep his head down, follow the straight and narrow, in other words, remain non-controversial, and he could have minted millions.  But not him,  instead he decided to become a tireless advocate for the rights of his people and an uncompromising critic of racial prejudice widely prevalent at the time.  The man was a true showman, he loved the theater of the boxing arena where he literally floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, at least during the first half of his career.  There was a time when a vast section of white America practically hated him, but he didn't care because what was more important was to stand by your conviction.  If Dr. King provided a peaceful resistance to the racial bigotry, then  Ali along with Malcolm X gave the whole thing a radical edge.   In the end, a grateful nation did make up and some more when he was given the highest honor of the land, The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.  It remains one of the most moving sight in sports history when Muhammad Ali, his body badly shaking due to the ravages of Parkinson, lighting up the Olympic torch at the Atlanta games in 1996 with so much dignity and solemnity.  We will not have another Muhammad Ali.       

The IPL got over last night, and thank God for that!  But something extraordinary happened as far as I am concerned.  Now, I yield to no one in my love and knowledge of the game.  But this was the first time that I didn't see even one minute or one ball of the telecast on TV, never mind one over.  I just don't recognize that this is the same cricket I fell in love with all those years ago.  I feel quite alienated in the furious white noise generated by T20 cricket.  It is all very well to say that you should move with the times and embrace the new, but this is nonsense!  This is an old game and I like it the old fashioned way.  For the life of me, I can't understand why everything has to be reduced to the lowest common denominator, those shallow dilettante who have the attention-span of a fruit fly?  Quite frankly, the IPL is the epitome in excess in everything.  The mind numbing number of games and days, it is also disconcerting to see 4s and 6s galore on mostly flat decks seriously devaluing the art of batting.  And what about bowlers, are they expected to wrought miracles in just four over?

    No matter how much I try, I don't think I like anything about whole thing.  The over the top and exaggerated hype of the commentators is really grating on my nerves.  The in your face spectators, the ceaseless assault of advertisements from every direction; why even the players themselves look like walking billboards in their garishly vulgar attire.  Don't you give me the BS about how the game needs to draw younger audience.  What is wrong with having more older audience?  Yes, perhaps the young people will bring in more money, but too much money can also corrupt.  In the final analysis, the IPL is a full bloodied assault on my sense of aesthetics about this sport and all my memories associated with it, and I don't want to have any part of it.  I had completely tuned out myself this year.  For me, the league might well have been taking place on Mars.  

Going through this eminently readable memoir by Padma Lakshmi has been a delightful experience.  The title 'Love, Loss And What we Ate' is quite apt in that it is a candidly given account of her life a dislocated immigrant to the United States in the 70s, to a very successful modeling career in Europe, and after that a complete reinvention as a renowned host of a multiple award winning food show on television.  In between all of this, she falls in love more than a couple of times, and then suffers the terrible loss of someone who meant so much in her life.  You get the impression that one thing that has always stood her in good stead is food and finding ever so novel ways of cooking them in fact, you can say that in almost all the important events in her life, food is somehow there as a reference point.  There is startling honesty in the pages.  Her heady romance, marriage and painful divorce with author Salman Rushdie have been handled with a lot of aplomb and self-possession.  I am completely taken in by the refreshing candor displayed when she either talks about her intimately personal nature of her medical condition or the paternity of her baby daughter.  I mean what beautiful woman would publicly discuss her horribly painful periods caused by this gynecological condition known as endometriosis, from which thousands of women suffer in silence out of their cultural conditioning, ignorance, embarrassment or all three combined.

  By successfully dealing with this illness, she has become an advocate to bring much needed awareness to this issue which is the very basis of womanhood.  The thing is, when you like somebody from a distance, you want to know the various facets of their life, and in that sense the book did not disappoint me.  It's been quite an appetizing joyride through the world of Padma Lakshmi.

This is not an easy undertaking, but I will try.  Reading this slim memoir 'When Breath Becomes Air' has been a revelation.  Dr. Paul Kalanithi was cut down in the prime of his life by lung cancer, he was only 38.  He was an accomplished neurosurgeon, a good son and husband and by all accounts a deeply caring human being who had a world of possibilities ahead of him, until the calamity strikes.

  To be visited upon by such a terrible misfortune as cancer can be and is tragic, but death itself is not tragedy, and the way Paul lived and boldly confronted his own demise is an object lesson in courage and fortitude for everyone of us.  Somehow, through the book I feel I have come to know him as a person.  I can almost sense a strong kinship with him.  He had a deep and abiding love for English literature, but like many sensitive souls, he was also fascinated by the idea of dying.  In fact, one of the chief reason why he went into neurosurgery was because he wanted to explore free will as represented by our minds.  If art and literature explain the human condition, then he believed that neuroscience could perhaps give him an insight as to what makes our life meaningful.  Being a neurosurgeon is the most demanding profession in medicine where even a millimeter of wrong manipulation can result in a catastrophic disaster for the patient. 

  Paul thought that merely literature is insufficient to gain full measure of the arc of human experience in all its forms and dimensions, nothing ever can be.  At the very least, or so he thought neurosurgery would provide him with the ringside view of this magnificent human theater that human mind is.  He imagined himself at the frontier of a unique place where there was a perfect synthesis between art and science, between idealized reality and lived reality.  By understanding death, the goal was to understand life and also the other way round, because ultimately life and death are the two sides of the same coin. 

  Now, the rapid decline has begun.  The normal human response in moments like these is a cry of anguish ''why me''?  Then you could also say ''why not me''?  No matter how much you delve into scriptures and literature or even modern science and ancient philosophy, you can never exactly understand death until you come across it face to face, and even then you have no idea what lies beyond that heavy curtain.  It was as if the grim reaper was showing his wacky sense of humor; it was mockingly telling Paul that fine, you were always obsessed and enchanted with death and dying, so now I am going to pay you a personal visit after all.  It so happens usually that when people learn about a terminal illness, they either shut themselves completely off the world around them and just passively wait for the inevitable; or they burn the candle at both ends and let themselves go the whole hog, in other words they indulge their every passion and desire before the time is up.  Paul chose neither.  They say that too much suffering also clarifies your thought, things are distilled to a point where only the very essential matters.  He accepted and came to terms with his mortality with a kind of grace and humility which is nothing short of monumental.  Going through the pages of his book was a surreal experience, knowing full well that every sentence was a race against time, every passage was goaded by the cock and the realization that you might not even live to see your labor bearing fruit.  Paul died on 9th march 2015 surrounded by his friends and family.  He can be justifiably proud of what he achieved and many more he influenced in his short life.  Whatever I write, the words are hollow and inadequate.  I am hopelessly unequal to the task of mapping out the true measure of the man.  All I can do is just spread the word about the man and his last will and testament that is this book WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR.          

The victory in the Indiana primary has almost sealed the deal for Mr. Donald Trump to get the Republican nomination in the US presidential elections in November where he will be taking on Hillary Clinton from the Democrat side.  When some ten months ago, Mr. Trump announced his intention to contest on the GOP ticket, many thought this to be yet another grandstanding of the billionaire egomaniac.  But as he stood near the escalator of his own property in mid-town Manhattan after he inflicted a crushing defeat to Ted Cruz in Indiana; you couldn't help thinking boy, has he made everyone eat their words or what!  It has been nothing short of a spectacularly hostile takeover of a party which is angry, confused and bitterly divided after eight years of Obama presidency which challenged every certitude held dear by a mass of hard-core conservative base.  This is a pivotal moment in American history.  Ever since the decline of the industrial manufacturing in the west, not just in America, to the low cost labor market in the developing countries in Asia and Africa, the advanced economies of the western world are really experiencing the low growth in gainful employment.  There are vast swathes of mainland America, the towns which ones were powerful industrial bases for most of the post-war economic prosperity of the United States, have a forlorn and hollow look about them, with income levels going down and cost of living going up for a lot of working class people.  Add to this despair the clear and present demographic possibility that for the first time in the history of the country, the WASP population is going to be in minority thanks ironically to sustained immigration over the years from poor under developed countries to the US in search of better life; and the picture looks quite grim. 

     In all this enter a dangerous reactionary and demagogue called Donald Trump, whose bluster and bullying of anyone who does not agree with his woolly headed solutions is drawing a lot of traction with a lot of bigoted and racist supporters of his.  Mr. Trump is appealing to the basest of the human instincts.  The paranoia, xenophobia and a complete distrust of the open, pluralistic and liberal values which most civilized people stand for.  It is a damming indictment of a one hundred and sixty year old party of Abraham Lincoln that they have allowed such a rot to set in their system that someone like Donald Trump could just come from nowhere and mesmerize them.  According to a poll conducted among the core base of the GOP, about twenty per cent believe that it was a grave mistake by their president Abraham Lincoln to have abolished slavery!  That's what it is coming to now?  Fortunately, only seven per cent of the primary voters have voted for Trump, and this is nowhere near enough to install him in the White House, not by a long shot.  He will have to by necessity build a large coalition of voters from every stratum of society, race, ethnicity not to mention gender and sexual orientation if he has any chance.  Russian President Vladimir Putin has described Mr. Trump as one of the most talented and intelligent person!  I don't know about that but if he somehow squeezes through to the White House (remember George W Bush in the year 2000?), he would be the most clownish looking president albeit a somewhat sinister one.