Naazish YarKhan: Shehzad Roy, Pakistani Pop Star and Humanitarian, Wins Chicago Council Award

Naazish YarKhan: Shehzad Roy, Pakistani Pop Star and Humanitarian, Wins Chicago Council Award

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Links to press release 10344478*

Links to press release 10344478*: "http://www.prlog.org/10344478-muslims-raise-more-than-1100-toys-for-chicago-refugees-of-all-faiths-as-islamic-holiday-nears.pdf"

Muslim-Americans answer the call to serve - Sacramento Living - Sacramento Food and Wine, Home, Health | Sacramento Bee

Muslim-Americans answer the call to serve - Sacramento Living - Sacramento Food and Wine, Home, Health | Sacramento Bee

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Speaking of Faith: Essay on Eid on NPR

SOF: Naazish Yarkhan - Your Voices, Your Stories | Revealing Ramadan

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SOF: Naazish Yarkhan - Your Voices, Your Stories | Revealing Ramadan

SOF: Naazish Yarkhan - Your Voices, Your Stories | Revealing Ramadan

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A HALAL SPIN ON ITALIAN AND MEXICAN FOOD AT WWW.MYHALALKITCHEN.COM

She was born to a Sicilian father and Puerto Rican mother, both Roman Catholic. Her ethnic heritage also meant growing up to enjoy culinary feasts for the senses and the soul - authentically delicious Sicilian style pizzas, lasagna, meatballs, Puerto Rican rice and beans, chicken, meat pies and custard desserts - just to name a few.
What becomes of those appetites and indulgences when one embraces Islam, which means also adopting its guidelines with regard to food which has no room for pork, pork-based products, alcohol and foods with alcohol as an ingredient?

I spoke to Yvonne M. Maffei, Editor, www.myhalalkitchen.com of DesPlaines, IL who embraced Islam and its dietary laws which include avoiding meats that aren’t slaughtered in the appropriate Islamic way. “Eating things like chicken, lamb and beef at most restaurants was a challenge,” says Yvonne. “Instead, I resorted to eating only vegetarian dishes, but quickly tired of that. I finally decided that I should learn how to make our favorite dishes, even the complicated ones. Although I had always known how to cook well, I really hadn't studied the techniques necessary to make such things as a roasted duck or homemade yogurt, for example. Once I did, I felt able to make really delicious food normally found only at restaurants.”
So what exactly are the special requirements people need to keep in mind when turning a non-halal recipe into a halal one? “As the best chefs say and do, you must "taste, taste, taste" your food as you cook. This allows one to know if a dish is turning out well. If a recipe calls for wine, I simply substitute it with a high quality 100% pure grape juice (white or grape depending on what type of wine the original recipe calls for). For most pork dishes, I will substitute any meat I think will go well in its place and then adjust cooking temperatures and times for the meat I've selected.”

Baking is a different story, however, because following directions exactly is critical to the success of the recipe. “However, I was told by Chef Sebastien Cannone, at the French Pastry School here in Chicago, that one could just leave out alcohol in baking because it is mostly used for flavor. So, for example if I choose a cookie recipe that calls for rum to be added for flavor, I simply leave it out and follow the recipe without that ingredient.”

Publishing a cookbook is one of her aspirations but Yvonne Maffei could very well be the next Rachel Ray. She’s interested in a TV show as a halal chef. “ I am passionate about all aspects of food- selecting, cooking and teaching about culinary arts, and of course all about the halal factor of food. I think Muslims today, especially those living in the U.S., are ready to explore dishes from areas of the world that are not traditionally related to Muslim lands, such as Italian or Mexican. They want to try new things but can't necessarily do that in restaurants because the food is not halal, so they're interested in learning how to substitute elements of these and other cuisines (for example French food where wine is heavily used) and make certain dishes halal.”

Statistics from the food industry in USA and Canada show that halal is slowly becoming a choice amongst Non-Muslims too. Myhalalkitchen.com bears testimony to that as well. “The non-Muslims who frequent my blog are very open-minded about other cultures and often times visit my site because they have seen a Middle Eastern recipe they've found to be interesting. For some of them, MyHalalKitchen.com, is the first time they've learned about what it means to cook and eat halal foods. The responses have all been so positive, making it very encouraging to know that foodies around the world have a common interest in quality food untouched by the chemicals, preservatives and processing techniques that are not good for us.”
“More and more people want to learn how to cook for themselves in order to feed their families on a budget as opposed to spending money for expensive, unhealthy meals at restaurants,” says Yvonne. “I hope that my blog offers some ideas for preparing one's kitchen for healthy and quick cooking as well as recipes that are tasty and well-explained so that anyone can make them.”

The interest in halal, according to a recent study by Packaged Foods, is also buoyed by the ever increasing appreciation of whole, organic and all natural foods. Not all halal meat comes from grass-fed, free range or antibiotic free animals. Still Crescent Chicken and Taqwa Eco Food are a beginning. “If meat is truly halal, then it is inherently organic, natural, humanely-treated and properly fed before showing up on one's dinner plate,” says Yvonne. “Once more and more people learn about halal and know they can buy products that are true to the term halal, they may buy halal meats not only for religious purposes but also out of a conscientious decision to eat healthier and more environmentally-sound products.”

ATLAS OF UNKNOWNS KEEPS READERS ENGROSSED UNTIL THE LAST PAGE

I had the pleasure of listening to Tania James read from her novel, Atlas of Unknowns, a few weeks ago. The few paragraphs she chose, had me hooked. The entire novel, now that I've completed it, didn't disappoint either. Set in New York and Kerela, India, it kept me engrossed to the very last page! Given my increasingly short attention span, that is saying alot! Here is a book I didn't skim through!

Tania James, 28, has degrees from Harvard and Columbia and this is her debut novel. Until recently, one of her grandmothers was under the impression that she was on her way to becoming a Supreme Court Justice. Instead, Tania found herself becoming a novelist! Not a bad detour, many of us would think!

I had some questions for Tania, some of them as a reader and others as a fellow writer working on a novel ! Enjoy!

Q. At the heart of Atlas are two sisters named Anju and Linno, and in a way, two close female friends, Gracie and Bird. Are your sisters the inspiration for the bond between Anju and Linno?

A. Yes, I have two sisters—one older and one younger—and we are very close. I wouldn’t say that any one sister directly correllates with Anju or Linno, but I do think that the depth and intensity of my sisterly relationships have influenced the relationship between Anju and Linno. I also have this (maybe erroneous) theory that the dynamic among 3 sisters is very different from the dynamic between 2, because in a trio, one sister can act as a safety valve. So when two out of three are fighting (Sister A refuses to hand over the TV remote to Sister B), Sister C can diffuse the situation by suggesting a game of UNO. Between Anju and Linno, there is no such safety valve (nor is there UNO), and so there arises a silence between them, a tension more difficult to surmount.


Q: Was there alot of research you had to do for the book?

A: I once went to Jackson Heights, in Queens, to interview a group of threaders at an Indian beauty salon for the New York Times. The newspaper ultimately took a very compressed version of our conversation, but the pages and pages of transcripts kept me wondering about those women, the salon, their neighborhood. I began looking through archived articles on Jackson Heights, ones that mentioned South Asian immigration in particular. One of the first articles I read involved the abuse of the legal system by fraudulent lawyers, who offered illegal aliens a fantastically swift path to citizenship, basically in exchange for the client’s life savings. Of course those clients ended up broke and unable, as non-citizens, to report their grievances. And it seemed to me that this was exactly the kind of thing that might befall one of my characters.

Probably the most complicated world to navigate was that of the American immigration system, despite all the time I spent scouring official websites that purported to make things clear. In the end, what saved me was a conversation or two with an immigration law expert named Arlene Lyons who set me straight on the messy ins and outs of the system. And in retrospect, questioning her was probably a safer route than emailing Homeland Security to see just what an illegal alien can get away with these days.

Q) With the publishing business folding in on itself these days, what advice do you have for aspring authors? Would you suggest self-publishing?

It seems to me that the pursuit of writing a beautiful thing shouldn't be a fairweather pursuit, and as you mentioned, the publishing industry is currently undergoing some ungodly weather. I think it helps to be working on something while you're waiting to hear back from an agent or a publisher or a literary magazine. It keeps your mind focused on evaluating your writing, rather than evaluating your rejection letters, which may sometimes be based on economic factors, rather than the merit of the writing. (That said, as a former slush pile reader, I can't stress enough the importance of taking your time with the writing process, and sending out work that is as good as it can be.) I don't know too much about self-publishing, but have heard of success stories, though each of those success stories involved a massive amount of work on the part of the writer to get their work and their name out there, a more grassroots effort.

Q) What is the hardest part about getting a book into print?

For me, it was acquiring an agent, only because it seemed the scariest part. Suddenly, I was no longer in a workshop, receiving single-spaced letters of critique about my work. I was sending my work out to strangers, for the most part, and it seemed a make-or-break moment. Somehow I ended up with my dream agent, Nicole Aragi, and it's meant everything to have her in my corner.

Q) Besides the eloquent writing, what were the qualities that helped sell your book to an agent and then publishing house?

I think that in literary fiction, it all comes down to the writing. I guess I can't speak for my agent or my editor, but I do know that they are utterly passionate about the books they love and about bringing those books into the world, so I can't imagine them making judgments based on anything else. That said, certain elements in a cover letter to an agent/publisher can help, like having publications in literary magazines. Sometimes an agent may contact you based on something they've seen in a literary magazine. But ultimately, the book you're trying to sell to an agent/publisher has to stand on its own merit.

Curry Is Thicker Than H20 says author, Jasmine D'Costa

Summer is just around the corner and, just in time for Kirti, the South Asian Literary Festival to be held in Chicago this June, I'm getting up to speed on my reading of South Asian North American writers. I'll be interviewing them and doing reviews of their books all summer long, so stay tuned!

I began Jasmine D'Costa's collection of short stories Curry Is Thicker Than Water(sold on Amazon.ca but not yet on Amazon.com), expecting to read fare that's now oh-so-typical about the sub-continent and those of us from it. It tends to be realistic fiction set in India, tales about "immigrant angst" or about growing up brown in a white world.

D'Costa, a recent immigrant to Canada, however, surprised me. Her stories are set in India, but also have an element of the fantastical, reminding me of Salman Rushdie (who, too, is of South Asian extract) and his novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Costa's writing is pithy and her characters stay with you long after you're done reading, but don't say I didn't warn you -- a suspension of disbelief maybe a prerequisite.

Readers have said her writing is evocative of R.K Narayan's work. "That is an immense compliment, though a bit of a stretch I would think," says D'Costa.

An excerpt:

In the meantime, no one knew what to do with the elephant sprawled on the highway. It was about 8 p.m. Finally, when word went round that the road was blocked, the traffic was diverted. The police summoned a vet from a nearby veterinary clinic. A very reluctant man who had only treated little Pomeranian dogs in his career arrived on the spot. He looked at the animal from a distance, bobbing his head in all directions puzzled. All governmental offices were closed and they did not know under whose jurisdiction the elephant fell. The municipal offices were closed and the forest officers could not be located. "Tomorrow," they thought, "tomorrow someone will decide how to go ahead. Maybe the elephant will just wake up and walk away." Meanwhile, unconcerned with their dilemma, the elephant lay like dead. Meanwhile, unconcerned with their dilemma, the elephant lay like dead. That night, Anand, who slept on the sidewalk nearby, walked up to the elephant. He sat on his haunches, curious to see an elephant at such close quarters.

"Sit down with me," the elephant said. Anand was afraid for his sanity. He had been hearing voices in his head for several weeks now and thought he was going insane. He looked at the elephant and thought he imagined a wink.

1) The stories are very different from each other and from what one has begun to expect of tales set in India. How did you decide to write this particular selection? Are they rooted in reality? Were you going for fantastical? For instance, the story about the elephant?

Jasmine: I have written a novel in very advanced stages of completion but felt that it should not be the first book I put out there. I keep writing small stories in between my work, and I thought perhaps a book of short stories would be more appropriate for my first book. It allows for variety, completion in short bursts of creativity and also captures my thoughts between times of writing a novel. I come from Bombay, where a writer will never dry up for want of stories.

I think all the stories have at least one element of truth and even the fantastical stories have the settings and cultural ethos that is very real and authentic. That makes the fantasy more real in a way. In the instance of the elephant, I had no story when I put the title, "Elephant on the Highway," on the paper and stared at it. All I knew at the time is the elephant in Kandivali in Bombay excited me so much that whenever I saw it I believed my day would go well. So he did merit a story. But the story itself just flowed without thought or planning and once they assumed a character, I was the elephant and the beggar in turns, having very enjoyable long streetcar rides, talking to each other in my head.

2) Was the elephant in Kandivali real?

Jasmine: Yes the elephant is real but, of course, the scenarios are all hypotheses in the event the elephant had really decided to sit it out on the highway.

3) What were the most challenging parts of putting this collection together?

Jasmine: I think some stories were more of a challenge and took longer to write because they had very many elements to them. "Eggs" and "Cobras and Pigs, Holy Cow!" were more complex and contain more complex ideas and structure. They also have sensitive areas that I had to wonder if it may arouse animosity. However, I am more at peace now that the feedback has not been negative. While controversies sell, they also hurt, and I feel I would like to get across ideas, entertain, etc. without hurting.

Many readers have got back to me saying they enjoyed it and one reviewer out of Halifax said he loved it and gave it to his mother, who loved it, so he thinks it deserves the highest praise and tells me that it will be in the Essential Summer Reading Guide of Halifax magazine. Most of them said that it was such an easy read and yet so philosophical. I think that as writers we are only as good as our readers, for they take the work beyond us.

4) What advice do you have for other aspiring writers?

Jasmine: Keep writing was the advice Austin Clarke gave and I think that is about the smartest thing I could say, too, to other writers.

5) The keep writing advice is easier said than done! How did you structure your day to make the time?

Jasmine: I write in the streetcar on little cards, I write in my head, I write in notebooks at events, I type into idea files that I store in my computer and when I am ready I sit and type continuously, sometimes even as much as 5,000 to 6,000 words a day. Passion and joy is important.

What can keep you going in hard times and motivate one to continue is one's faith and passion in what they are doing. So you need to be passionate and take joy from the writing.

6) Any details about getting a publisher or agent? What was involved in that, and it's an uphill battle so what are some tips to keep others going?

Jasmine: Once I decided I would be writing and acting, I set out about researching the two industries and acquiring skills, networking and meeting the industry and taking courses in acting. I joined writing groups, and am now the president of the Writers and Editors Network. I had taken creative writing courses in India and was always in touch with writing, though it was economics, banking and corporate finance, it still disciplined me on how to organize my mind and thoughts and put them on paper.

I would say it is very important to know the industry very well, understand that there is no glamor about what most people think is "creation." It is about the product and the marketing of the product that is the issue here and the major gains go to the person who invests the money. If the publisher puts in funds, then he takes more than the writer, and stores who invest in infrastructure make the money. So to writers who are looking at this being their main income will have to be more realistic and be willing to do a lot of marketing of their product or have a plan B to fall back on.

I approached the publisher directly without an agent, because I felt that at my age I want every thing as of yesterday rather than languish, waiting for things to happen with publishers and agents taking their own time. I did not want to hand over my life to the pace of the industry. I was, of course, lucky to get a publisher to take me on. But I am never one to curl up and die.

5) Do you have another novel or collection of stories in the works?

Jasmine: I am completing my book "Saving Ali" (working title, of course) and will hope to have it out next spring. The narrator is the 16-year-old Catholic girl Anna in my story "The Guest in my Grandfather's House." The story is set in the 1992 Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay.

6) And what's your life's story?

Jasmine: I left India and moved to Canada in 2004, not for a better life but for life itself. I did it for adventure I do know that moving at 46 and starting life is an adventure itself. But I decided when I came here to do all that I am passionate about. Here I am an actor and a writer. In India, I was a banker and also guest faculty in one of India's top management schools. I have a Ph.D., and a post-graduate degree in banking and finance. I have moved from a comfortable life to one of hardship, but it's very gratifying to be able to follow your passion.

Our lives' narratives are neither singular nor linear and, like everyone else, I have multiple biographies. Through my childhood and growing up in India, any pursuit that did not put food on the table was considered a hobby. So of course, the more urgent need to earn a living suppressed my deeper desire to write. I earned a doctoral degree, and spent several years as a banker; but through it all, I felt trapped in a secure world that made me push the things I really wanted to do for "later." Moving to Canada was the best thing I could do, for this dream -- I am now a writer.

This is my "later."

Title: Curry Is Thicker Than Water
ISBN: 978-0-9783793-9-1
Publisher:Bookland Press Inc.

GHOST STORY TOOK A LONG TIME COMING OUT OF INDIA

Released just a month ago, the reviews for Haunting Bombay , so far, have been pretty. Written by Shilpa Agarwal, Haunting Bombay is the winner of the First Words Literary Prize for South Asian Writers, and parallels are being drawn to the mysticism of Isabelle Allende and the spirituality of Toni Morrison as they are to the writings of other authors of South Asian heritage. "Agarwal's work will definitely appeal to fans of Monica Ali and Jhumpa Lahiri...but it retains a fresh, original feel that will draw in new readers with its own literary merit," says Library Journal.

Personally, I am surprised it took so long for a ghost story to be set in India. After all, it's a country teeming with belief in the supernatural, ghosts and witches. As kids we grew up hearing that we'd be taken away by them if we didn't behave, and there's always a family or two who've had prayers done to ward off the evil eye.

Set in post-colonial India, Agarwal weaves together literary fiction, a mystery, and haunting supernatural spirits in a story of power and powerlessness, voice and silence. The novel is a tale of three generations of the wealthy Mittal ( no relation to the Mittal Steel Multi-Billionaires!) family who have buried a tragic history and the ghosts of the past who rise up to haunt them, illuminating their deepest fears and desires and underscoring the singular power of utterance.

I had a tete-a-tete with the author:

Q: HAUNTING BOMBAY breaks with the tradition of the South Asian-American novel. How did you decide to go in that direction?

Shilpa: My book is an exploration of how the privileged can hear the voices of the dispossessed - about what sacrifices and risks must be taken in order to actually hear. The ghosts are metaphors for the dispossessed, those who have little or no power in a family, community, or nation. The novel has very suspenseful and eerie moments but it is also full of humor and lightness, especially in the interaction between the members of the Mittal household. I would say that it expands the boundaries of the Indian or South Asian novel. When I was researching ghost stories, I discovered fairy legends, mystical traditions, references to ghosts in the ancient religious texts, and a 115-year old English translation of Sanskrit Vampire stories which I've woven into my novel. There is such a rich tradition of the supernatural in India yet I didn't find any other English-language South Asian authors who were writing about it. Readers instead have connected my writing to the mystical and magical literary traditions of South American writers Isabelle Allende and Gabriel García Márquez.

Q: Without giving it away completely, can you tell us more about the novel?

Shilpa: Yes - the story opens with the drowning but as it unfolds and the ghost begins to haunt the household, the Mittal family's tangled memories of that drowning day - of where and what theywere doing when the child died - are revealed. The family and the servants all have secret desires and motivations - the ayah who was dismissed was in love with someone in the household, the father illicitly visits drinking dens while his children sleep, the driver maintains a relationship with an aging prostitute in the red-light district, one of the housemaids despised the ayah and so forth. There are a number of characters who could have been involved in the child's death. My protagonist's journey is about finding the truth of what happened but also finding the courage to face that truth because often times truth itself can be terrifying.

Q: Why did you set the story in 1960?

Shilpa: At the moment of India's Independence in 1947, Prime Minister Nehru had talked about how the nation, suppressed by centuries of invasion and colonialism, at long last finding utterance. I wanted to set my novel thirteen years after this moment, as the nation moved into its adolescence to explore this idea of finding utterance - of a national consciousness informed by the voices of the underclass. I also set it in the 60s because I wanted to weave in my parents' stories of their youth. My mom's family were refugees during the partitioning of India and I wanted to show both the loss and sense of hope at that time.

Q: As a mom of elementary school age kids with aspirations to get a novel published myself, I'm in awe of how you pulled it off. You have such young children yourself and still managed to get the words out each day.

Shilpa: I started writing the novel when I was pregnant with my first child. After that, I had to write in snatches of time - when my child napped, when I didn't feel utterly exhausted by sleepless nights and changing diapers and newborn colic. After my children began to sleep through the night, I began to write early in the mornings before dawn because that was the only time of day I could lose myself in my writing without fear of distraction. That time of day also lent itself to expanding my imagination especially in the supernatural realm - it was pitch black outside and eerily quiet in my office except for the clicking of my fingers on the keyboard. The most important thing for me was having a disciplined schedule, writing every day even if I didn't feel like it.

Q: The supernatural nature of your book lends itself to film. Have you thought about HAUNTING BOMBAY, the movie?

Shilpa: Yes, I'm very interested in developing a screenplay. One friend described the 'movie version' of my book as a "cross between Mira Nair and M. Night"!

Q: Are you working on your next book?

Shilpa: Yes I am. I am intrigued by the idea of crossings and in HAUNTING BOMBAY, I explore the crossing of the centers of powers with the peripheries and the intersection of the living and the dead. My second book also brings in mystical and magical elements but explores the crossing ofthe realms of heaven and earth.

Readers can reach the author via www.hauntingbombay.com, hauntingbombay.com/facebook and twitter.com/authorshilpa

BEING MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

Last week, I was both humbled and honored to have received the “Inspiring Woman Award”, given by the Muslim Women’s Alliance in Chicago, for volunteering with the refugee population, and mobilizing my community to join me with their time and money. As elated as I was, I believe being my brother's keeper is a reward in itself. It has given my life meaning and purpose. My volunteering is also about knowing that, as a Muslim and a human being, Allah expects no less of me.
As I spoke to a room of 250 women, I recalled Sura Rahman of the Quran where Allah mentions his signs--the food we eat, our days and nights- and then asks, "Which of the favors of your Lord will you deny?" The question is repeated 31 times. Yes. Which are His favors can we deny?

There is no doubt in my mind that we will be asked to account for how we showed our thanks for His blessings. Volunteering is my way of trying to be answerable to God.

He will ask us to account for how we used the peace and prosperity he has blessed us with, He will ask us what we did with our good health, He will ask us how we put our ability to read and write towards making His earth a better place to live in. Or how we thanked Him for the hot water that runs through our taps. All these are luxuries for most people in the world.

He will ask us how we thanked Him for the fact that our children don't cower in fright when they hear a plane go by or that they go to bed each night, without crying themselves to sleep because they're hungry and there's no food to eat.
Giving back, for my children, is becoming second nature as well. One November night they slept outdoors in Chicago’s cold winter as part of “Sleep Out Saturday”, to raise awareness and funds for the homeless. My ten year old, Taskeen, had asked for donations, as she went trick or treating, that year. The kids have raked yards for senior citizens and they’ve helped deliver Meals-on-Wheels. In school, for an assignment titled “What would you do if you were given $100?” My first grader Yousuf wrote, “I’d give it to the kids in Palestine because they’re injured and dying and have no medicines.” As a parent I know I must be doing something right.

Through our choices with time and money, I’ve shown my children, that nobody can do everything but everyone can do something. As they say, Action Springs Not From Thought, but from Readiness for Responsibility. If each of us made a commitment to one or two instances of volunteering a month, how much lighter the world’s burdens would be. And to make that a reality, volunteering cannot be viewed as a choice. Rather it is a responsibility and bearing it well, that is what will make all the difference.

Author Examines The Lives of Muslims Post 9/11

Award-winning author, Shaila Abdullah's new novel Saffron Dreams offers readers a chance to explore the tragedy of 2001 from an uncommon viewpoint.

"I looked on as day after day the media tried, sentenced, and hung my faith," writes Shaila Abdullah in her brand new book, Saffron Dreams, being released online today. "I witnessed the lynching of a religion and race again and again. What proof did I have of the innocence of the rest of us?" I couldn't have expressed it better myself ! As Muslims, we've watched helplessly as all things Muslim and Islam have come under fire. The treatment meted to Barack Hussein Obama, for being born to a Muslim father, made us cringe. Shaila Abdullah awakens us to a story of a culture in shock. An award-winning Pakistani-American author, her writing focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of Pakistani women and their often unconventional choices in life.

Set in New York, the novel leads the readers through a soul-searching and at times gut-wrenching journey of its protagonist. Arissa Illahi, a Muslim artist and writer has everything going for her -- a devoted husband and a much-anticipated child on the way. After her husband's death in the collapse of the World Trade Center, the discovery of his manuscript marks Arissa's reconnection to life. Her unborn son and the unfinished novel fuse in her mind into one life-defining project that becomes, at once, the struggle for her emotional survival and the redemption of her race.

The geopolitical concerns that have drawn Islam and the West into many conflicts since 2001 have also generated a thirst for multicultural literature -- fiction and nonfiction, with a Muslim angle. At a time when much of the world associates Islamic culture with oppression and terror, the new genre is tackling such universal themes as love, hope, and women's issues. In Saffron Dreams, Abdullah captures the essence of ordinary Muslims who create nothing newsworthy and power no conflicts to be of any value to the media.

Her first book, Beyond the Cayenne Wall, is a collection of stories about Pakistani women struggling to find their individualities despite the barriers imposed by society.The book received the Norumbega Jury Prize for Outstanding Fiction and the DIY Award among other accolades. Abdullah also received a Hobson Foundation grant for Saffron Dreams. She has published several short stories, articles, and essays for various publications, including Women's Own, She, Fashion Collection, Sulekha, and Dallas Child. She is a seasoned print, web, and multimedia designer as well. Abdullah lives with her family in Austin, Texas and is a member of the Texas Writers' League.

If you liked the movie Khuda Key Liye aka In the Name of God, you'll love this book!

LITERATI HALL: Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea

LIThttp://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=1290355472820327334&postID=3512452849959655794#ERATI HALL: Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea

ON AASIYA HASSAN'S MURDER

By Naazish YarKhan

When I was deciding on a husband, one of my criteria was that my spouse be the kind of guy who'd never hit me. A calm temperament was absolutely essential. My husband claims I had low standards. Wouldn't I expect personal safety in any marriage, he teased? Growing up in India in the 90's, news reports of brides being torched to death by their in-laws for bringing an insufficient dowry, and hearing of maids being slapped around by their drunken spouses, was commonplace. Alas, no, marital violence really wasn't something unheard of.

This week, with Aasiya Hassan's frightful beheading at the hands of her husband, Founder and CEO of Bridges TV, my fear didn't seem out of place. My South Asian community is in shock. Blogs are abuzz claiming that this is yet another of example of how barbaric Muslims are and how my kind shouldn't be allowed into the USA - Their venomous rantings leap off the screen.

Anger rises in my chest. Aasiya Hassan's murder is not about Muslims or Pakistanis or South Asians. It's about Domestic Violence. Each day, more than 600 families call the National Domestic Violence Hotline in America. They all can't possibly be Muslim, can they? Why don't people focus on the issue, instead of making this about ethnicity and religion? I want to scream.

Domestic violence happens amongst American Christians, American Jews, American Atheists, as much as it happens in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or amongst American Muslims. I could roll statistics off my tongue but, even as I recall those numbers, I know I harbor a dirty secret. Aasiya Hassan's murder is not about the teachings of our faiths but it is about how many, in both the Muslim and Hindu communities, treat domestic violence.

Yes it's true that domestic violence cuts across all barriers. But we, as a community, are guilty of averting our eyes, labeling domestic violence a "personal" problem, advising our girls to be "patient", coaxing them to "work it out". Leaders in the community, especially women leaders, lecture women ad nauseum on the values of covering up one's husbands faults. We teach our daughters that some marriage is better than no marriage. Muzzamil Hassan had been divorced twice before, both times on grounds of domestic violence. Was there no one in the community who could have spoken up to warn Aasiya ? Or, like some parents, were Asiya's folks just eager to get a daughter off their hands, just as they would a burden?

When South Asian women do muster the courage to complain of abuse, they are not always believed, or they find they don't have their family's support. Some learn that they are bringing shame to their parents and families, that they will become pariahs. Even educated, earning women are taught to fear what society will say, and are told to worry that their children will be seen as off-springs of a broken home. Self-sacrifice and martyrdom are glorified.

Watching the “Changeling”, I couldn't help but think how one mother's heartbreak eventually led to so many positive changes. Asiya's murder is horrific, but perhaps her story will give our community reason for pause and hasten countless other womens' journey's out of violence.

Witty, Quick, UnStoppable - The Man and His Novel. Presenting Laugh Riot "The Poison Pen" www.thepoisonpen.net

One-on-One with Mr. Laugh Riot, Greg Beesch (www.thepoisonpen.net), author of The Poison Pen, self-described man of "twisted steel and sex appeal", dis-ser of all things 'traditional publishing model', and creator of a most 'impeccable' ;) role model for boys ( and girls ) ages 15 to 115. And a holler to all you kids in the UK! Swap your Enid Blyton's and your Mallory Towers and dig into some Americana Boarding School lore instead! Buy it at Amazon.com, Booksurge.com, and Alibris.com.

Questions for the author? Email: Info@writersstudioworkshops.com

Q: Could you give us something in the way of a bio?
A: Born a Taurus. I’m 42, 5’10”, 175 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal, my eyes are blue and of such a vivid intensity that women swoon. I have curly brown hair which is a little long right now, not of Kramer-esque or manfro levels but getting into the Mike Brady of Brady Bunch fame season 3 level. I live in Arizona, I’m married to a spectacular woman and I have two daughters.

Q: Is your first book?
A: First book, yes. First piece of fiction I’ve written since I had to write an essay for a college admissions application back in high school.

Q: How would you describe it?
A: The single greatest book about teen sedition ever written, absolutely a classic among any genre that includes the descriptor ‘boarding school’, most definitely highly entertaining, of a certainty a total laugh riot, highly probably a vacation or beach reading essential, really just an infinitely enjoyable escapist faerie tale.

Q: Sedition and subversive behavior are main themes in your book, why?
A: They go part and parcel of the teen experience, especially for a boy, especially coming of age in America. Sedition and subversive behavior are key human traits when confronted by tyranny of any kind, that is, not just governmentally sponsored tyranny. The United States has a fine tradition, both before and especially after its creation, of its citizenry writing for the purpose of good old fashion mayhem.

Q: Is your book appropriate for, let’s say, a 15 or 16 year old?
A: I would say yes. It does have some profanity, but let’s face it, nothing that a 13 or 14 year old hasn’t heard at school. There is no sex, though there is a lot of teen romance, and almost no violence although the main character breaks just about every school and social rule there is, but, of course, in a very funny way.

Q: Alright, since it was your first novel, was it a difficult process writing it?
A: No, not at all, like falling off a bike when you’re bombed out of your gourd on home vinted strawberry wine. One of the funniest and easiest endeavors I’ve ever attempted and it made me a much much better typist, which is always a bonus.

Q: Let’s continue on. What qualifications do you have as a writer?
A: Qualifications? I have a B.A. in Political Science and an MBA from Arizona State University and 20 years of work experience writing some of the most sublime memos, proposals, business plans, emails, and miscellaneous missives since the invention of the written word, kid you NOT.

Q: Yes, well, most people who are writers have a degree in literature, maybe and MFA, a list of previous writing.
A: Oh, so by qualifications you mean an arbitrary set of criteria determined by as small group of lower order life forms?

Q: No, I mean-
A: I’ll put my MBA against anyone’s MFA anytime.

Q: Most people would not put an MBA as a criteria for qualification for writing a novel.
A: Of course, because analytical rigor is as foreign to the publishing industry as . . . well, an analogy of appropriate magnitude eludes me at the moment. The publishing industry mystifies the process, you know, ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’, to the detriment of book sales and reading in general in the United States.

Q: What writers have been influential?
A: P.G. Wodehouse, first and foremost. I think that despite the sheer volume of his works he is almost completely unknown in the mainstream US, which is kind of funny since he invented the character of Jeeves, the butler, and that reference is known but not Wodehouse himself.

Q: Others?
A: Old school influences would be Evelyn Waugh, Ambrose Bierce, and Mark Twain. More modern would be Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Philip Caputo off the top of my pointy head.

Q: No Bukowski?
A: Oh sure.

Q: Let’s talk about the nascent prep/boarding school genre, as you refer to it, you have mentioned Tobias Wolff’s Old School and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. When did you read those and were they an inspiration or an influence when writing The Poison Pen of Aberdeen Prep.
A: I read Old School about the time I was finishing up The Poison Pen and really loved it, but Old School is literary, The Poison Pen is fun, the tone in The Poison Pen is definitely more Wodehouse than Wolff.

Q: When you first describe The Poison Pen to me you said, ‘If Wodehouse rewrote Prep and made sedition the theme, that would be The Poison Pen’. So Prep was an influence also?

A: Oh yeah, I read Prep about nine months after reading Old School. I was in the Newark airport and saw it at a book kiosk, I bought it and spent the entire plane ride (four hours) reading it. When I landed back in Phoenix I wanted to sit in the car in the parking garage and finish it.

Q: What about it-

A: I related to the setting, that is, boarding school. I related to the emotional travails of the main character, Lee Fiora, that is, the self consciousness, the doubt, you know, all the teen turmoil, but as much as I loved the character I hated the plot, well, really the last 30 pages. I mean, I was depressed when I finished it, I wanted more for her, I wanted some triumph

Q: You decided to self-publish, why?

A: Going about the process of getting the book publish, that is, researching agents and publishing houses, reviewing submission procedures and forms, writing and submitting query letters, I came to realize that from a business process perspective the publishing industry was broken. To put it quite simply, there was an enormous entrenched bureaucracy in between me, as the author of a book, and the buying consumer. I saw no reason why I should buy into what I recognized as a broken business model (see my website www.thepoisonpen.net). SoI tossed out any idea of going through an agent or publishing house and once freed of that artificial constraint and then examining the numerous technological options I decided I would self publish.

Q: Where is the book available?
A: Through Amazon.com, Booksurge.com, and Alibris.com

Q: And what is your website again?
A: Absolutely, http://www.thepoisonpen.net/, the greatest book website in existence. Questions for the author? Email: Info@writersstudioworkshops.com

"Happiness and Other Disorders" - Honestly!

“The author’s stunning prose and subtle sense of the symbolic allow the tales to transcend their conventions. . .the author of Happiness and Other Disorders possesses an entirely singular form of ominous and lovely second sight; he also has the literary chops to give it voice. Saidullah is a tale-spinner of the first order, and this collection is both a mystery and a treasure.” —Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Saidullah’s stories are clearly the work of a painstaking and meticulous craftsperson. This is a skilled literary engineer.” —Toronto Star “Saidullah’s book is . . . studded with powerful images.” —The Globe and Mail

“Saidullah has thought seriously about what he wants to achieve. . . his decisiveness and descriptions are beyond those of most first — or even second — efforts.” — EYE Weekly

“Ahmad Saidullah is a storyteller with an engaging and original voice and a surfeit of talent.” —Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Cracking India and Water “These remarkable stories are propelled by a quiet but purposeful insight. They twist and turn in delightful ways. Where you would expect anger, there is compassion; where you might anticipate grimness, there is humour. An accomplished first collection.” —Rabindranath Maharaj, author of A Perfect Pledge


“Reading Ahmad Saidullah’s stories is like slipping on a pair of glasses that distort the world in fabulous ways. The dreamlike rubs shoulders with the real, the mythic with the contemporary, the riotous with the mysterious, assassins with Indian women who madly whistle Scottish tunes. Obsession and desperate attempts at escape propel these interconnected lives. This is a startling and memorable debut.” —Catherine Bush, author of Claire’s Head and The Rules of Engagement

“The short stories in Ahmad Saidullah’s Happiness and Other Disorders surprise and enchant long after the book has been set aside for future savouring and pleasure. Not only is his imagination unique, but his singular voice stands out from the myriad forms of expression in modern writing and deserves to be heard. Brimming with unexpected humour and poignancy, and rich in sub-text, Saidullah’s stories never disappear. They haunt you!” —Deepa Mehta, Director of the Academy Award–nominated film Water

“Saidullah's love of language is evident within the first three pages. . . [he] has done a great job of using various devices to keep things interesting. All in all, this book will appeal to anyone interested in South Asian culture.”— Desi Life Magazine

AHMAD SAIDULLAH was born in Ottawa, Ontario, grew up in India, and now lives in Toronto. His writings have been published in Academic Matters, Altar Magazine, Blackbird, EnRoute, L Magazine, Gowanus, The Quarterly Conversation, The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, and on CBC Radio One. Although he began writing fiction in 2004, his short stories have already garnered many honours. CBC Literary Awards jurors Catherine Bush, Anne Collins, and Eden Robinson praised his award-winning short story, “Happiness and Other Disorders,” for its “idiosyncrasy, humour, and empathetic breadth.” The short story, “Flight to Egypt,” was a finalist in Drunken Boat’s Pan Literary Awards, and “The Sadness of Snakes” was longlisted for the Fish International short Story Prize. He was also named a New Voice in Fiction by New York’s L Magazine.

A Requiem for the Lost

As I read through the works of fellow writer Sandhya Nankani on her blog www.literarysafari.com, some of her writings posted as early as 5:00 a.m., I wonder what’s happened to my own writing. I realize, with much clarity, that it has gone the way of hacks. I just write. Write without feeling, without thought to whether I or the reader will learn anything worthwhile from my writing, or whether it will give me or the reader reason to pause and question life, or wonder at its ways.

In the beginning, in the very beginning, all I wrote was a conversation. There was a story to tell, a matter to discuss and I wrote in order that I and the reader could reach new vistas in understanding. It wasn’t about meeting deadlines. It wasn’t about throwing words across a page just to get the job done. It was about writing to find myself and invite another into my world. Reading http://www.literarysafari.com/, I realized how far I’d wandered from being that person.

Do I suddenly know all the answers and hence have no need for ruminations? Or am I just not sitting still long enough to have those thoughts? Most recently, however, there has been a reason to pause and ponder. My grand-mother’s house, the one where all my pre-wedding day festivities were held, the house that became my home each summer for years on end, that home is to be sold this coming week. The house brought us all from across the globe to one place, a place all of us considered 'home'. My grandparents, without question, extended their roof to every short-term and long-term visiting child, sibling, niece, nephew, grand-child, friend. That symbol, that house is soon to become another’s. Another’s only to be demolished.

I remember the tall eucalyptus tree in the courtyard, it’s branches swaying dangerously, threatening to fall on the roof, each monsoon. I remember the rooms in that house – my aunt’s paintings dotting the wall. I remember the curtains long and limp at each wooden door, the high, curved ceiling, white paint, peeling limestone walls. I remember the monkeys that descended to devour our guavas that were ripe for the picking and my grandfather taking aim with his rifle, from behind the iron gated door in the inner courtyard, intending to frighten them off.

In that same house, I also remember my great-grandmother being ill and bed ridden for eight years. The same great grand-mother who hid chocolate in the mouth-piece of her phone to keep it safe!!! The great grand-mother whose love for After-Eight chocolates inspired my own love for them. Even with bent fingers, for old age and frail bones had taken their toll, she wrote letters to each of her grand-children and children who lived in countries flung across the globe. That’s what I remember of Nanna. She was Nanna to our father and that’s what we learned to call her too.

My own paternal grand-parents, though, are a more vivid recollection and that house is taking with it the most vital, non-living symbol tied to two people I loved so very much. In fact, the last time I visited India was to say good-bye to my grand-mother, five years ago. It’s strange that I still call that house my grand-mother’s house rather than my grand-parents house.

As my aunts and uncles and dad divvy up my deceased grand-parents belongings, I’ve asked for some of them for myself as well. There are black and white photos of my grandparents and myself. In one dada is holding a two-year-old me as I point at the love-birds he had as pets. He had a cage as huge as a room for them. I can’t recall how many love-birds lived in there but I remember small earthen pots being their nests. I’m wearing a short dress. My thighs are fat and chubby and I believe have stayed the same in honor of that picture. There’s another picture of dada and me eating ice-cream, another of me with my aunts watching over me…. I don’t remember all of them but I’ve asked my aunts to give those pictures to my parents who’ll keep them for me. My mom is an ace pack-rat and never loses a thing. For safekeeping, hers are the best of hands.

I’ve asked for those pictures and for a piece from a wall that was a lattice. It is cement but has a pattern that lets the sun through. I want one square I said to my aunt Mahnoor, in jagged broken sobs. I had already taken my grand-mother’s hair curlers and her night-gown as a memento in the days following her death. Everyone seemed surprised. My grand-mother, who was always immaculately dressed, wouldn’t I want one of her sari’s instead? Yes, she was immaculately dressed but no one sari seemed to leave the imprint that the black-and-white print nightgown did.

I remember that night-gown all too well. The lights would have been dimmed, mosquito coils smoking and my grand-ma in that nightgown, glasses on her nose, would sit in the spray of lamp-light, figuring out a crossword puzzle. Or she’d be wearing that nightgown to attend to Wimbledon. Or, that nightgown and the curlers, those were a frequent pairing. She was as stylish as she was well-dressed, and put more time into looking great than I’ve ever mustered the patience to do. My cousin Huma asked for my maternal grandpa’s dentures when he had passed. Considering that, my request for the hair-curlers, nightgown and lattice don’t seem so odd, even if Huma was all of ten when she requested the dentures. It’s strange what we remember about our adults.

“You have good in-laws and a good husband. Look after them well,” was the advice both my dada and dadi gave me. I think that was the only time they weren’t patting me on my back and instead seeing that I needed to be set on the right track. When my grand-mother died, and people spoke about her, they all seemed to say one thing. She took such an interest in each of their lives. I saw that she had cared to be involved in their lives just as she had been in ours. Listening well is another way of saying I love you, after all.

My maternal grand-mother, I believe, went to heaven the day she died. I don’t think she had to wait for the Day of Judgment and her record to be read. As Muslims we believe that the graves of those who are pious are filled with light and are roomier. I believe my nani’s grave has a forest for shade, the song of nightingale, light from God’s throne filling its insides and cats for company because she loved them so much. She hated to smoke out bee hives, even when they clung just beyond her room doors, knowing that it could kill them. She had a temper but kept it within the walls of her home. Her life comprised reading novels and reading the Quran. My cousins too recall all the times she cajoled us to eat one more ice-cream when she took us out in the evenings after those hot, hot days. “Why do you all come at all when you have to leave?” she’d ask us as we bid goodbye for Bombay, happy to be done with boring old Hyderabad and its searing summers, each year. Children are lucky to have grandparents for the unconditional, unhurried love they receive. My nani, her brief if any tenure in the grave done, I bet is sitting in heaven.

The impending sale of my Grand-ma’s house has brought with it this storm of memories and it's not my feelings alone that are in tumult. "Even we feel we're becoming homeless," said my grandma's sister-in-law, Manglee Aunty. Nor are all these memories just sentimental longing or nostalgia. They are a reminder to me that relationships are precious and need involvement. Further, I see that time is a-shrinking. I need to spend more of it amongst my nearest and dearest. As I told my husband, the last thirteen years of our marriage have been spent in the shade of his parents love. It’s time now for me to reap the benefits of having my parents in close quarters. I’ve said this before, but this time I want actions to follow where words and unfulfilled desires have long been lingering. Maybe Muscat should become home for us soon.

As for our family home, my grand ma’s home, being lost, nature abhors vacuums, or so they say. A new one will need to be created; a place that connects all of us relatives with memories and feelings of kinship and belonging. Perhaps, its foundation stone will be laid by my grand-mother’s eldest child – my father. Perhaps my parents home will become the next family-home, the next family haven. I think the need to belong and to be part of one big picture will set the wheels in motion. After all, if anything at all, hasn’t life taught us that as one door closes, another one opens?

Shoban Bantwal explores controversial Gender-Based Abortions in her second novel The Forbidden Daughter

Ten years after a law was passed in India, banning doctors from discussing the gender of a fetus with the parents following an ultrasound test, some Indian doctors not only continue to break that law, but even perform abortions if the parents decide to get rid of a female fetus.

Now, Indian-American author, Shobhan Bantwal, takes us into a world where the corrupt and covert practice of gender-selective abortion still thrives, in her second novel, THE FORBIDDEN DAUGHTER, scheduled for release by Kensington Publishing on August 26, 2008. Her first novel, THE DOWRY BRIDE, dealt with the topic of dowry deaths in India.

THE FORBIDDEN DAUGHTER tells the story of Isha, a young mother who refuses to abort her second child, another girl, despite her in-laws’ dictate to have the abortion. When her husband suddenly becomes the victim of a mysterious murder, she is convinced that her rebellious decision has something to do with it. When Isha leaves her in-laws to raise her daughters on her own, she is faced with the most dangerous battle of her life.

To quote Bantwal about what inspired the book, “After being raised with love and care in India, amidst a family of five girls, it was difficult for me to comprehend that female children are disdained in my country of birth, so much so that female fetuses are aborted without regard for the law, moral values, or even the delicate balance of nature. I felt compelled to write an interesting tale about what could happen if an idealistic woman refused to abort a female child. But I also wanted the story to be one of hope and triumph and the resilience of the human spirit.” However, Bantwal maintains that gender-based abortion is not the norm. “The instances are quite rare when juxtaposed against India’s vast population, but the fact remains that gender-based abortions continue to occur.”

Bantwal weaves the universal themes of love, morality, and courage into a story set against a dramatic and rare backdrop. It brings to light the contradictions of a culture that is both modern and quaintly archaic, a society where women can aspire to the highest elected office and yet be plagued by the dark shadow of female fetus abortion and infanticide.

Many of the cultural elements come from the author’s observations and personal experiences from growing up in a small town in India.

Naazish: What motivates you to pick the topics you do?

Being passionate about women’s rights and women’s issues, I tend to veer towards topics that are dear to my heart. If I can weave a compelling story around a particular theme that has both emotional appeal as well as social/political implications, I feel it gives me an opportunity to both fulfill my creative urge and express my opinion on certain subjects.

Additionally, I find many of my American friends, neighbors, and coworkers have no idea about such issues. Some of them have never even heard of the term “dowry,” or come across a culture that is so male-centric that girls are considered a burden and can be aborted as fetuses and denied the chance to live.

Writing about such topics gives me the perfect opportunity to educate and entertain at the same time. Consequently, my first two books, THE DOWRY BRIDE and THE FORBIDDEN DAUGHTER, deal with hot-button social issues and yet have a romantic story of love, hope and the resilience of the human spirit.

Naazish: What kind of response have you gotten from readers. What's some of the best feedback you've gotten?

Feedback to date has been mixed, and it has been very typical—something that I expected long before my book was published. Most American readers of mainstream women’s fiction with romantic elements seem to love the book. Various book clubs across the country, Canada, and especially in my home state of New Jersey have read the book and continue to do so. I address many of them in person or by phone, and the overall feedback I get is very positive and encouraging. One instructor at a community college made THE DOWRY BRIDE required reading for her course on global cultures and I was thrilled to be invited to address the class.

However, South Asian readers, particularly my fellow Indians, feel that the book is too melodramatic and portrays dowry as an evil custom with no redeeming features. Personally, I find no good qualities in the system as it is practiced today. It probably started out with good intentions, as a way to assure inheritance equity between sons and daughters, but it has deteriorated into something destructive and redundant in a society where women have become economically independent to a large degree.

Some Indians also feel that I have denigrated a particular segment/caste of society by introducing a rape scene where a lower-class man attacks an upper-caste woman. In the book, this incident occurs nearly 60 years ago and the consequences are being felt by the families affected by the act to the present day. I have portrayed that segment from the point of view of an 80-year-old woman (the victim) and it is her prejudices and her bitterness at her attacker that I have put into words. Many readers are offended by this because they feel I have been politically incorrect in my portrayal of the dalit community and that I should be more responsible in my writing. Unfortunately, a writer can never please every reader and I accept that fact.

However, the best feedback has come from one or two e-mailers who have offered me balanced comments—what they liked and what they didn’t, and what they feel would have improved the book. I feel theirs are the most honest commentaries I’ve seen on my book, and perhaps the most useful.

Naazish: What would you say to a potential comment that you're washing dirty laundry in public?

I have read one man’s feedback expressing these exact sentiments. My answer is that the world has a right to know the good and the bad about every culture. It is the only way to make others aware of what goes on in certain cultures and how they could possibly help the innocent victims of certain social customs that continue to be practiced despite laws to ban them. Someone has to speak out on behalf of women who either cannot or do not have the means to request aid. No society is perfect and to write about the negatives or “dirty laundry” is one way of starting a meaningful dialogue on how to eradicate or at least diminish the negatives.

Naazish: Have you always wanted to be a writer or was this something you fell into accidentally?

Although I was a voracious reader all my life, I stumbled into writing at the age of 50. When my husband started working on a project that forced him to stay away from home during weekdays, as an empty-nester, I decided to take up creative writing as a hobby. I started by writing social interest articles for a number of Indian-American publications like India Abroad, Little India, India Currents, DesiJournal.com, and Kanara Saraswat. Then I moved on to short fiction. When my short stories won awards and/or honors in nationwide fiction contests, my ambitions gradually expanded to full-length fiction. I wrote my first novel and it got sold to Kensington Publishing in a two-book contract when I turned 54. I call it my menopausal epiphany.

Naazish: Can you describe the pitching process and how to land an agent?

I wrote very simple query letters to my top-tier of agents. During the first round I received a lot of rejections. So I wrote another book, one set in the U.S., which seemed to elicit plenty of interest from good agents. All of a sudden I got requests from seven agents wanting to see a partial manuscript and four that asked to see the whole book. Eventually three offered me representation and I picked the one that I felt was most suited for my needs. It was also the agency that represents Khaled Hosseini of “The Kite Runner” fame, so I felt the agency would be as asset for me. Sadly that particular manuscript never got sold, but when I asked my agent to look at THE DOWRY BRIDE, she did and she liked it. Luckily it got sold within a few weeks.

Naazish: What advice do you have for other writers?

Other than to keep plugging away and writing what they feel is the right genre for them, I have very little advice for aspiring writers. I took a calculated risk when I started writing Desi romances, which are what I call Bollywood-in-a-book. When I started writing them because I happen to enjoy mainstream fiction with romance as a theme, I never dreamt that a publisher would actually like them, let alone buy them, since most agents and publishers expect serious literary novels from South Asian writers. If a writer enjoys reading and writing a particular genre, they should stick with it. One never knows which publisher is looking for something different.

Naazish: How has life changed now that you're a published author?

Writing has taken over my entire life. I now have two full-time careers (one day job that pays the bills and the other my writing career that makes no money but consumes most of my time). I have no time for anything else lately. One of the risks of taking up writing seriously is the amount of time one needs to invest in it. Marketing the book consumes a very large part of a writer’s life. It is a time and money pit, where the more you pour in, the more it demands. Currently I’m working on a marketing plan for my second book, THE FORBIDDEN DAUGHTER, ready for release on August 26, 2008.

Naazish: Do you have other books in the making?

Yes. Kensington just offered me another two-book contract, so I expect my third book to be released in 2009 and a fourth in 2010, if all goes well and I can produce the stories they are looking for. I love the creative part of being a writer, but I don’t look forward to the marketing end. Overall, it has been a mixed experience—an exhausting yet exciting journey.

Aging Gracefully, Are We?

By Naazish YarKhan

It’s 16 years ago that I graduated from college. A newborn that year is now entering university. What a thought. When I visited a local community college for some classes recently, I realized that I was double the age of the kids there. Weird, especially since I’d caught myself thinking some of the guys on that campus were really cute. Jeepers, talk about robbing the cradle.. even if only in thought.

Worse, my age shows. There I was imagining myself as a youngish-thing when one of the above mentioned ‘cute guys’ addressed me as Ma’am. You have to understand this. I don’t think of myself as middle aged, even if I may already be there, if you think that most people live till they are 75 years old. But I’m not really, supposed to be middle-aged. It’s what other people are, like my parents and all those aunties and uncles. Then it dawns. I am now one of those aunties. But no, I really am not. I refuse to be. I insist I will make every effort to stick to ‘young at heart’, instead, even when I am inclined to be older and wiser.

“We don’t think we’ve changed, beside the weight we’ve put on over the years, but our faces, actually, have grown older too,” said Farah, a relative by marriage, and mom of three. Her observation came on the heels of a comment I made as to how my friends from college looked on Facebook. “And some of them don’t even have kids so what excuse do they have for belly fat?” I stressed. Note to self: When you notice how much older your contemporaries look, you probably look the same way too.

It was in the midst of all this attention to my ‘changing’ ( or was it deteriorating) physical self, that I made a very startling discovery. But first let me back up. I am the kind of person who often leaves the house without make-up on. I am the person who had a facial last when I was preparing to become a bride. Now more about my ‘startling discovery’. All those pretty women you see in the grocery store or at the bakery, well, they aren’t naturally pretty. It’s at least partly the make up, partly the facial, the manicure, the clothes and partly the eye of the beholder. Their hair has been curled or straightened or blow dried before they ventured out. It’s not gorgeous hair by birth. That has been my number one realization this year. And to think I actually used to think some women, my friends included, were just stunning naturally.

I also discovered quite by accident that friends are skinny because they are on a perpetual diet. I thought they exercised and watched what they ate. Somehow it didn’t translate in my mind to mean that they were either on the cabbage soup diet or the South Beach Diet or the Jenny Craig diet or on Weight Watchers. “There’s no way, anyone can be naturally skinny if you eat,” says my close buddy, Faryal, another mom of three. She revealed she too lost a lot of weight with Weight Watchers after her second child. “You grew up in India, so being skinny wasn’t the first and last thing on your mind,” she said. Grow up in the U.S.A and apparently it is the stuff of ones every thought, in addition to make-up and nice hair, I mean.

Well, my goal is to drop 7-10 kilo’s. But before I dole out my husbands’ hard earned money to Weight Watchers, I had a thought. How about I try and follow some free advice first. ‘Smaller portions’ – my husband’s vote. ‘Don’t eat after six p.m., cut down on meat, switch from rice to whole wheat chapatti and drink lots of water.’ – my cousin Huma’s voice. ‘Graze on healthy foods through the day so you’re never starving. Have six small meals instead of three big ones. Eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. Visualize yourself as slim and trim. You’ll attract what you think. Sleep early because people think they’re hungry when they’re actually tired or thirsty. Fuel up on fiber since it takes longer to digest. Take the saying ‘one-minute-on-the-lip-is-a-lifetime-on-the-hip’ to heart.’ This is some of the other how-to-lose-weight / be healthy advice I’ve heard here, there and everywhere. I have converted to whole grain, so that’s a beginning. Whole grain bread and whole grain cereal. (Incidentally, did I tell you I am the person who takes honey instead of sugar in her tea, but binges on chocolate and pie?) We don’t eat out often and fast food, including pizza, is a choice no more than once or twice a month. Only catch is I am awful when I’m hungry. Awful, Impatient, Snippy. What’s a gal to do? Seriously graze so I’m never starving?
So is there such a thing as aging gracefully? Well, I guess, for some, it will be a question of how much youth money can buy. For the rest of us, there’s the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The ‘Dove Evolution’ video is on You Tube and will shock you. It transforms an average girl into a stunner, with the stroke of a hair brush, the stroke of a eye liner pencil, the stroke of a computer key. And you must check out the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty online. Dove soap - long considered America's beauty bar, with its ad campaign, boldly challenges us to revise our view of what is considered beautiful, shapely and young. “Dissatisfaction with body image increases as girls move into adolescence, according to a 2000 study by the Girl Scout Research Institute. Although 75 percent of 8- and 9-year-old girls in the study said they like their looks, only 56 percent of those ages 12 and 13 did. And of the 33 percent of girls ages 14-17 who said they're too fat, two-thirds were dieting. Ninety percent of eating disorders are diagnosed in girls. The data prompted Dove to launch the Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004 to help women feel more beautiful by widening the definition of the word.” Older, non-blond and heavyset women have all been featured in the dove campaign.
I doubt those ads made it to billboards in Oman but they all have real women, with real curves as models. Dove soap is also promoting the idea that 50 is fabulous – even in the face of America’s youth-obsessed culture. You have to see it to believe it.
So where does that leave my battle of the bulge? I guess as long as I do make the effort to eat healthier and exercise more for the right reasons, I’ll be on the right side of the track. It will be an effort for me, and not so much an effort to impress other’s or manipulate what others think of me. And when I catch myself putting myself down if I’m not the ‘ideal’ image, I’m going to remind myself that I have a young daughter whose watching and listening to my every attitude. That I am responsible for the ideas I plant in my child’s head, even when I do so unconsciously. That it is young girls who are driven to anorexia and bulimia by the messages we bombard them with. That I have to be careful not to let her sense of self be governed by something as fleeting as physical appearances. And that bit about being ‘older and wiser’ versus ‘young at heart’. Why does it have to be either-or? Let me say it’s going to be and-and. I’m going to have both sets of attitudes and have the best of both worlds. Amen.

C’est La Vie… Such is Life

By Naazish YarKhan

I’d almost given up on being able to get my act together. Each day more or less resembled the other and procrastination had usurped the place of my shadow and followed me everywhere I went. My deadlines for this column came and were missed. Other target dates too arrived and were left to slip by. I saw, first hand, the truth to the saying, ‘if you want something done, ask a busy person.’ Ask someone with too much time on their hands, as I am these days, and apparently procrastination takes care of it. I don’t know what I do online, but I can spend hours on the net, reading into the late hours of the night. My husband, usually, will ask what task I’m avoiding when he sees me like this. How can I tell him I’m neglecting that scholarship for school I meant to apply for, that job I had my eye on, or even the vacuuming? Someone once called it ‘moving furniture’ when your activities don’t build towards a goal and make you feel like you’re simply drifting. My friends put it down to this lousy weather. Is it? I don’t quite know. The rare spot of activity is when I volunteer at Yousuf’s school. I don’t really care to except that Yousuf loves to have me there and it’s a blessing to be able to. As one little boy asked, ‘Why doesn’t my mom help in school? I always ask her but she doesn’t.”

Then my sister called saying she still needed some paperwork from me to submit to the American embassy. She had her interview for her tourist visa in two days. Well that compelled me to get on the ball and I swung into action with all the force of a Jane alongside Tarzan. A flurry of activity filled my day as I compiled and then faxed whatever missing information was needed. That push was all it took because while Naazneen, sadly, did not get her visa approved, I did get my groove back. Talk about spillover and ripple effects. Today, with just a little planning, I was able to bake and drop off a cake for a fund-raiser, attend a meeting, cook for us and my in-laws, make fresh carrot juice in a real juicer (5 minutes) and clean up (25 minutes!), and drop and pick Yousuf from school. I felt so good about these little accomplishments
(vs. dropping Yousuf at school and coming home and getting nothing done) that I even rewarded myself with a visit to my friend and neighbor Ruth’s house for a chat. Usually, if I haven’t been productive, doing anything fun seems less deserved, and therefore less enjoyable. This visit, I’d earned.

Ruth and I were catching up after ages. Winter does that to you. The freezing cold dissuades you from even venturing across the street and our hello’s are contained to when we spot each other pulling into our respective garages, or taking out the garbage. I knew that Ruth’s mother, Mrs. Barnes, had been hospitalized – for years she was taking larger doses of her prescription medication than her doctor had recommended for her Asthma. All those steroids in her system ended up giving her a heart problem and that was why she was hospitalized. Once there, reducing the medication, apparently all too abruptly, left her mother psychotic and hallucinating. After her almost three week stay, Mrs. Barnes has now been discharged from the hospital, the situation fairly under control.

The mental breach was supposed to have healed in five days, but Ruth suspects it may continue for months since there is a pre-disposition to mental ill-health in their family history. Her mother’s personality seemingly altered, “I don’t know who I was talking to,” said Ruth of her most recent, acerbic conversation with her mother. She’s not quite sure if the accusations Mrs. Barnes made comprised an episode of mental ill-health or if it was just her mother being angry and resentful due to the turn in events.

Ruth isn’t in tears but she is visibly distraught. Her sisters and she live in three separate states, and their parents in a fourth state. They aren’t quite prepared to handle this. But then again, how often does bad news come with advance notice? But Ruth agonizes that this was a train wreck she had seen coming for years. She related how often she and her siblings had advised their mother not to over-do the medicines, to stick to the prescribed dosage and how Mrs. Barnes dismissed them as ‘over-reacting’. Ruth’s words leave me thinking. How often have I myself brushed aside my husband’s advice that I exercise? How often has he asked me to have a check up because I run out of breath climbing ten steps or laughing too hard? I think what we don’t realize is this: Maintaining our health is the best gift we can give our loved ones. In this day and age, when we grow ill, we don’t usually die. We become a burden.

But it’s not like I’ve thrown caution to the winds. I bought the juicer specifically because the nutrients in juice are absorbed quicker by our bodies and is good for health. I even use the pulp that’s left behind as fiber and add it to my cooking. Celery, fennel (anise) and cucumbers are good choices to begin juicing since they’re easier to digest. Cabbage juice has one of the most healing nutrients for ulcer repair as it is a huge source of vitamin U.
(I didn’t know there was a vitamin U!) Dark green vegetables, such as spinach, are very nutrient rich. Other veggies worth juicing are asparagus, string beans and cauliflower (including the base), though I haven’t tried any of them. Key is to listen to your body. Make sure it’s not growling and grumbling after you’ve done drinking the juice. I bought a big bag of carrots but learned that carrot juice is full of sugar and adds to insulin levels, as do other fruits, so is better in small dozes, if at all. http://www.mercola.com/nutritionplan/juicing.htm has details.

Two nights ago, I also spent a good deal of time online researching the benefits of raw honey. It’s a panacea for almost every ill from asthma to aiding weight loss. It’s not pasteurized and so retains more of the nutrients than the honey that is processed and sold in bulk. I then called a place or two to find out if they sold raw honey and am going to pick some up. So how does one make sure one’s day is action packed and productive when there isn’t much going on? Does ‘research stuff online’ cut it?

“Why did you cut his hair?” I suddenly hear my husband yelling in the background. Er…he’s not quite thrilled with the trim I gave Yousuf. Well, that’s what you get when mama has time aplenty, (and no coupon in hand, that’ll gives two dollars off at the barber’s.) C’est la vie mon ami.

Room To Grow

By Naazish YarKhan

With the year slowly coming to an end, it’s always worth it to take stock of where one has been and where one wants to be financially, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally and yes, physically, in the year coming up ahead. Psychotherapists and self-help books encourage one to put it in writing, to visualize in your mind what you want to have and even create a visual image or picture of it. Cut pictures from magazines, pictures of and quotes from role models, create an image – a roadmap to the year ahead. As the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad put it, before the journey or even the planning for a journey comes the idea of one.

Here’s what I know about myself and know that I must change. Hope it gets you thinking about your list.

If it’s not on my to-do list, it doesn’t happen. In fact, not only does it not happen, it doesn’t even cross my mind that it’s a matter to be taken care. Imagine how much gets left undone! So have a to-do list at hand.

Misplaced To-Do Lists. Would that mean I make multiple copies of to-do lists or perhaps figure out how to use my cell phone to the fullest. My husband tells me my cell phone can easily double as a planner. I only have to figure out how. Hmmm….??

Mulling and mulling over a matter, getting increasingly anxious about it, instead of tackling it and getting it over and done with. Too much analysis leads to paralysis they say, and it’s true. Note to self : Stop self when descending into this unholy mess.

Dreading the enormity of a to-do list, instead of tackling it and chipping it down in size. This has to be one of my worst and most unproductive habits. Sometimes I forget Rome wasn’t build in a day.

Shock when I do actually do it and discover how simple it was all along. Next time fear stops me from getting on the ball, I promise to remind myself how easy it was to actually get done the previous thing I had similar sentiments about.

Being a people pleaser and allowing my sense of self to be based on others think of my accomplishments. Freedom comes when you realize you don’t need external validation of yourself.

Procrastination. I need to remember that half the issues on this list stem from procrastination. That it’s not a vice to take lightly.

Making excuses as to why some things aren’t on my to-do list. Remind self that where there is a will, there is a way.

Once in a while, giving myself permission, not to have a to-do list.

Dealing with criticism and difficult people. Reminding myself that it’s okay to be frustrated and it’s okay to give myself permission to vent about the person, but that everyone has a point of view from which I may learn something. There is no one reality. There are always two sides to a coin. In life, there are many perspectives of an issue.

Reminding myself to step outside my comfort zone. Comfort zones keep you small.

Life isn’t a spectator sport. Be a participant. Make decisions, take chances, grow be it as my role as a mom, wife, human being, daughter, daughter-n-law, or woman.

Mirror to the Soul

Stirrings

And so it happened that I began to write again.
Began to whisper onto paper thoughts that were my own.
Ribbons of light, rising from places deep.
Feelings uncoiling
Me so clueless they even lay within me
Now spilling onto the page before me before I could stem the tide.
I wondered about the strength of such things;
Acquiesced.

Words.
Thoughts.
Things so potent, so powerful.
And the more I wrote, the better I knew me,
And the clearer I could see that my life
as I knew it -
It was over.
I was on the brink of changing forever.

The View In the Mirror

By Naazish YarKhan

The Shema in the Torah, starts: (Deuteronomy 6:4) Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! Likewise, Jesus said: (Mark 12:29) “The first of all the commandments is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one”. Likewise, God says in the Holy Qur’an: Say: He, God, is One. / God, the Self-Sufficient Besought of all. (Al-Ikhlas, 112:1-2). The Unity of God, love of Him, and a love for his creation form a common ground upon which Islam and Christianity (and Judaism) are founded.

But that’s not what the media covers, nor is it the message anyone sees when they read the news related to Muslims or Islam, or when they read blogs on the topic, or when they learn of another suicide bombing.

According to Business Week, Jan 2007, “59% of Muslim adults in the U.S have college degrees, compared to 28 % of all American adults. Surveys show that the median family income amongst Muslims exceeds the national average of $ 55,800. A 2004 Zogby International Poll, reports that one in three Muslims earns more than $75,000 annually.”

But this too is not the stuff of most news reports. It’s just not juicy enough for sustained play in the papers. And that’s where a magazine like Muslim Girl steps in, (www.muslimgirlmagazine.com).

In Muslim Girl Magazine (MGM), Muslim girls see themselves – both hijabi and non-hijabi. We see ourselves portrayed as normal. We are portrayed as beautiful, as smart and as capable and it’s a breath of fresh air. It reflects the experience of teenage Muslim girls from all over the Muslim world – Bosnia, Africa, Palestine, Egypt, India. It shows Muslim girls a mirror to what they know exists in the Muslim world they live in.

And for a change, it’s not selling you bad news. It’s fashionable, it’s trendy. “Being able to find modest clothes and yet being trendy at the same time can be an uphill battle,” said one girl I spoke with. “ The magazine lets you see that you can be a fashionable yet modestly dressed Muslim,” she said. For many hijab wearing Muslim girls, MGM is a support group of sorts. For still others, it is a source of information to share with their non-Muslim friends. (Incidentally, my son, who is only five, is now hankering for a magazine for Muslim boys!)

Most importantly, a magazine like Muslim Girl, gives Muslim girls a voice. It reflects thoughts echoed by many teen girls in dorms and at dining tables across Muslim America and Canada. In it, Muslim girls see themselves and for once, find that they are no longer the invisible minority, or the minority which is visible only when another bomb falls. For parents too, it is many things. For starters, it’s a better alternative to Cosmo or YM magazine.

But it’s not just teenage girls who are reading the magazine from cover to cover. Yours truly here, does the same! I’ve also just finished reading another young adult novel – Does My Head Look Big In This. The writing is great, the pace never dulls, but I see and hear myself in it and that’s what keeps me turning the pages.

Another must read for Muslims and Non-Muslims alike is Being Muslim. I remember in college, having a friends’ dad say that Muslim women had no rights. At the time I didn't have a come-back because I didn't know much about Islam. But it was what pushed me to learn, so that I could defend my faith if I ever had to do it again. BEING MUSLIM allows teens and adults to do that. I talked to the author, Haroon Siddiqui, as to why he wrote the book. For one, the book talks facts about contemporary issues facing Islam and the West these days. Once readers have an understanding as to what's going on in Iraq or Afghanistan or in their backyard, they can argue their case with eloquence and facts instead of being tongue-tied or reacting defensively or being in denial. For instance, yes, in today's worlds, most terrorists are Muslim but that doesn't mean all Muslims are terrorists. In another age, and another era, Catholics and Protestants in Ireland were at it, and in another time Kamakazi's were the main terrorists.

Being Muslim is ammunition for every reader who has ever been put on the spot post 9/11, or anyone who has had to shoulder this collective guilt every time an act of terrorism occurs. It is the book for those with questions about the West and Islam.

Anne Frank in her diaries wrote that when a Jew is at fault, all Jews are held accountable and when a Christian is at fault, it's the fault of just that one Christian. Islam is going through that period now. Former Secretary General of the U.N. Mr. Kofi Annan, had the good sense to see through the smoke and mirrors and point out that acts of violence by Muslims were rooted in anger at U.S. policies and not because of the freedom’s enjoyed by America, as the current administration and the media have led the people to believe.

God willing, these negative times will pass and when they do, as they most certainly will and when society finds the next scapegoat, God willing Muslims will raise their voices against it. Having been at the receiving end of it, we know how unjust and far from God’s way it is.

White Space

By Naazish YarKhan

Blank space….I never look at the screen before me as white space needing to be filled. It’s much the opposite, most times. It’s too many thoughts whizzing around, needing to be downloaded, offloaded, shared. Summer is ending and school will be back in session next week. It’s all come to an end much too quickly. With me working, it wasn’t too many days that were free to do with as I pleased. That’s not to say the kids haven’t had a great summer. They’ve spent hours and hours playing or riding bikes. They had sleepovers with friends and spent time at their grand-parents. I had, however, wanted to drive down to nearby Wisconsin, have the kids experience the Dells – one big town, made up of water parks galore. But four years ago, we skipped all that and went further north into this state of cows and cheese to Door County. That was easily one of our best vacations and I wonder how the summer has slipped by without us making the time to visit there. Neither did we go camping. Still, there are 10 days or so left. Maybe fewer. I wonder if summer time is a microcosm of life. Blink and its gone.

But summer is far more relaxed that the school year. Although I do get a bunch of hours all to myself in the school year, with swimming, Arabic and homework, it does get very tight. Still, Taskeen who is nine, did take her first dives into the high end of the pool, on her last day of swimming lessons last month. I wouldn’t want to compromise her learning, just when she’s getting to be a stronger swimmer. This past year was the first time she took swimming lessons. They began in fall, and went on through bitter cold temperatures in winter. I didn’t think it was possible. It is an indoor pool but wouldn’t it be freezing when they stepped out to get to the car, I had wondered. But it wasn’t bad. In fact we did it and I don’t remember it being miserable. Another lesson learned about assumptions.

Talking of lessons, I’ve been reading two books that I loved. One is ‘Cracking the Millionaire Code’ (www.crackingthemillionairecode.com) and the other is ‘The Secret’
( www.thesecret.tv). Both tie financial success in this world, to success as a person of faith. Both emphasis consistent gratitude to God, regular charity from one’s earnings, asking God to show us the way, prayers and meditation first thing in the morning, exercise and working for a win-win situation for all those involved, as keys to material success. Both look at money as stepping stones to improving the lot of humanity, for example, as evident in the actions of Bill Gates.

‘The Secret’ is all about attracting more of that which you think of. For instance, why do we suddenly start seeing cars similar to the one we just bought, all over the place? It’s not like they didn’t exist. They did exist, but we are now more aware of them because our own new car is now on our own radar and we see more of what we think about. The book talks of putting up visuals and pictures of your dream objects and attracting those into your life. I don’t really know reading this book had anything to do with it, but we recently went looking at homes that cost half a million dollars. Let’s hope we attract one into our lives!

Both books say that generosity attracts wealth because we’re saying, “we have enough.” Stinginess, on the other hand, sends out a message to the universe, that says, “I don’t have enough” so the Universe delivers on that thought. One of the best part is when the authors say, give in charity but without expecting anything back from God. Don’t treat charity as an investment in God’s company, for dividends in this life. Instead, you’re your charity poor, by giving it as your way of saying thank you for each aspect of your life, including hardships, for those hardships are the kernel of great tomorrows. One of the exercises, in fact, involves listing down all the good things and all the bad things that happened to you in life, as a way to show how even the worst incidents in one’s life, opened the doors to better things. I guess in a way, it’s like the pangs of childbirth do eventually do lead to the joy of having children.

The Secret is all about visualizing what you want and asking for what you want, while being positive. The author asks to not to ask God to end famine but to provide everyone with food. A peace rally will bring peace, while an anti-war rally, attracts more negative emotions around it. They talk of asking the right questions, and allowing God to answer it for you. Isn’t of saying ‘Why Am I Fat?’, which in turn will give you only negative answers that endorse that self-perception, the authors recommend you ask, “How can I get slimmer?” I’ve heard this same advice at a Tony Robbins seminar. Instead of saying “Why am I not succeeding?” we should ask “How can I succeed even more?”

So backtracking to what I began writing about. Maybe if I visualize long, languid days filled with memories, I’ll attract those. If I say the days of summer are short lived, they will be short lived. If I say we didn’t do all we wanted, there’s no chance we will do those things.

So here, now I am going to say, the days of summer are long and full of everything I ever imagined them to be. We’re going to go down to the beach, visit a museum or two, travel perhaps, spend time as a family on vacation. The weather is going to be amazing, blue skies, cool breezes. When the school year starts despite all the activities and commitments, we are going to have time for prayer and time for each other and time to laugh and play a board game or two. I am going to be calm, collected, and gently encouraging. When school starts we’re going to wake up way early, we’ll always be on time for the bus, maybe even early. We’re always going to be organized with not a back pack out of place. Yousuf is starting a new school, God Willing, and he will love it there and want to go back for more each morning. He’ll learn a lot and enjoy the challenges and make lots of friends. Taskeen will too. She’ll love school and they’ll both excel. Homework will be a breeze. There will be laughter and sun shine each day of our lives. In the spring, we’ll visit India and my parents, God willing. And somewhere in there, I will find a full time position at a university or college. It will be the beginning of great new things. Amen. As I write this down, I see that what happens to be unfolding is a prayer. This is the stuff of prayers!

In the Quran, it says that when we make a prayer for others, Angles say ‘Unto you to’. So these are my prayers for your family too. As you begin the school year, or continue a year that has already begun, may all these wishes come true. Amen.

Reality is not what you see, but how you see it.

By Naazish YarKhan

One sure fire way to stay in vacation mode – or at least enjoy its last remnants, is to be afflicted with jet lag. The first two days or three days it was great. Here was our whole family waking up when it was still dark outside and getting a move on the day. It felt like being kids and reading under the covers past bed time. My children had never been so dressed and ready to go to school, so not ‘You’re getting late!! Go! Rush or the bus will leave’. By evening, we hit the covers by 7:00 p.m. because we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore. So it was fun, as I said,… initially. But today, the fifth day I’ve awoken in my own bed, but at the holy hour of 4:30 a.m. I tell you, I did try willing my body and mind to stay asleep. No such luck. My mind filled with thoughts re: the day’s doings and I just had to get cracking. I had a deadline for Oman Observer to meet so here I am.

I like to hit the road running so I sent the kids off to school the very next day after our return. They were up at 4:00 a.m. anyway so why not? Yousuf, my son, complains how everyone has some work to do ( his being school) and how mama does nothing. I am, of course, offended by this observation and ask who does the laundry and the cooking. “Baba and I do the laundry,” he shoots back, not batting an eye-lid. Jeezzzz!

Anyway, because I was feeling badly that I am not the best of house-keepers, nor best of cooks, I actually pulled out a Khana Khazana cook book and went and purchased all the ingredients to make some delicious food. I am not the best of cooks, but seeing my kids eat so well at my mother’s has given me food for thought. If I am a stay home mom, I better have something to show for it. Funny, though, how email creeps up and mislays your best plans. I have spent more time fiddling with email than cooking. But I have faith. I will make a better cook of myself. And if I fail, that is the only way one learns. Like biking or swimming, you know. So in the end, to all the hats I wear, I can don a Chef’s hat as well. Ha haa. Taskeen, especially, misses breakfast being ready on the table, which was how it was at my mother’s house. It made me sad to think that I don’t even have breakfast ready for the kids before hand and have them drink a meal replacement drink on many mornings. What kind of mom am I ??? But I’m glad she brought it up. It is a simple request and one, I hope, I can fulfill regularly ( and not just when I’m jet lagged).

Speaking of Muscat, it was heart-wrenching leaving my folks and siblings behind last week. And it isn’t like family is sugary-sweet all the time and yet I miss being surrounded by people who undoubtedly love me and care for my well being, and who want to help me out when they see I need it. Plus, I’m plagued by ‘Who knows how long we’re going to be on this planet’, and that kind of thinking. A Nigerian neighbor of mine read my mind apparently and said he’d pack his bags and move back, if it hadn’t been for his American wife, and now American kids. This realization struck him last year after he’d been to visit family in Nigeria after a 12 year gap. His mother, in fact, didn’t recognize him!

This trade-off, we immigrants make emotionally, has really been playing on my mind. And then to affirm my thoughts that here in the U.S, we have thin relationships as opposed to thick ones, one of my students mother, a German woman, commented on how, in America, we have oodles of acquaintances but few people we know really, really well. Americans are friendly and because of that, they end up sending the wrong signals that they want to be your friends, but they really just want to be friendly acquaintances, she was saying. So I was right. Here, rare are the people who have the time or want to make the effort to have a thick relationship...and having lived here 13 years, I can be that person, very often, too. What’s odder is that many Americans do think acquaintance = friends.

I asked my husband, who is born and raised here, if the paucity of inter-dependent relationships, where friends need to bond regularly, where they feel revived and reenergized in each others company, whether the paucity of that was something that bothered him. His answer was a no-brainer, simple sentence. ‘This is all I’ve ever known.” So he doesn’t know if there’s something he’s missing because he’s never had an alternative. I, on the other hand, have lived elsewhere and have a frame of reference where I can make comparisons and yes, the relationships we have here, don’t hold a flame to those that people have in India or elsewhere in the East.

Not only that, it’s not going to happen in the US, because individuals are raised to be independent and not inter-dependent. And if you don’t feel the need to have another person and can do it all by yourself, then having another person in the picture isn’t productive – it only slows things down. But how precious is a support system. A real support system which can be the wind beneath your wings, the oil that keeps your machine going.

They call FaceBook this great way to keep in touch. To me it’s just another way to fool yourself that you’re in touch, and have a relationship. Sending a nudge or a poke, as FaceBook allows you to do, replaces having to make that phone call or download your thoughts in an email. Sending a mass note instead of a personalized one which reveals who you are on the inside, creates emotional ties only to the extent that reading a columnist regularly gives you the feeling that you are friends with the writer.. when, in fact, that really isn’t the case.

I end with a quote from an editor of the New York Times who’s in charge of a section called Modern Love, where readers send in essays about love and not just romantic love. According to him, “in pursuing love, electronic communication allows us to be more reckless, fake, distracted and isolated than ever before. According to the personal accounts I've read, men and women today are apt to plunge into love affairs via text message, cut them off by PowerPoint, lie about who they are and what they want in forums and blogs and online dating sites, …ignore the people they're physically with for those who are a keystroke away, shoo their children off their laps to caress their BlackBerrys, and spend untold hours staring at pixilated … stars when they should be working, socializing, taking care of their children or sleeping.”

On that note, give your kids an extra hug, tell your spouse you love them and can’t imagine a world without them and call your parents and tell them how much you miss them. Take care. Au Revior. Adios.

The Darjeeling Limited Derailed

By NaazishYarKhan

This evening, as it so happened, Farhat was home from work early. Early meaning at 5:30 p.m. Plus it was a Friday night meaning no school tomorrow, so no homework, no making lunches for the next day and so on. He and the kids planned to hang out at his folks’ and I had plans to watch a movie with a gal pal. Now, somewhere between checking who all were available to join me and Melinda, and which movie to watch, Melinda got scuttled from the plan and I decided to ask Farhat if he wanted to watch a movie with me. Watch a movie with ones’ spouse. Ah… After 13 years of matrimony and two kids, it’s quite a rarity that you and beloved can actually get any down time alone! His brother agreed to watch the kids and we found ourselves buying tickets to ‘The Darjeeling Limited’, that American movie made in India.

Now how should I put it? It’s not like I didn’t like the movie. Sure, it moved me. Sure it was engaging but it just didn’t do it for me. Now I go to a movie, for I guess, an “out of mind” experience. To be engrossed, enthralled, blown away. Hindi movie style, larger than life, mega entertainment, lush landscapes, witty dialogue, beautiful characters traipsing across the screen. I don’t go to the movies, to a read a book. That’s actually hitting the nail on the head. ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ was equivalent to reading a book. It had substance, it had character development. No flash, bang, kick, shove.
Boy, the indigestion I got when I got home. I was irritable and grouchy. I hadn’t signed up for our rare, once in a blue moon, movie night to turn out so hum drum, so devoid of dishum, dishum. I felt cheated. And then I began to write, because I had to figure out how I could be so emotionally affected by disappointment in a movie of all things. How could I be so emotionally involved in what a movie does for me. How could a movie turn me into Grouchola, with a capital ‘G’.

I write to figure out stuff. So I began writing. And as I write, I’m wondering, was it really the movie, or was it the fact that I have an 8:30 am breakfast tomorrow with a friend, then a 2:30 p.m. babyshower in the city and then a 7:30 p.m. get together at a friends – are thoughts of those impending appointments the ‘background noise ’ responsible for my turn of mood. I was in fact in a great mood when we set out to the movie.

The more I typed, the clearer it became. I like things just so. I like them to go smoothly, as planned. I don’t like them to turn out differently than planned. Maybe most people are like this. But maybe the lesson for me ( that’s one thing about me – I always have to find a lesson to learn) is that I need to relax a little – take a deep breath and get on with life even if it doesn’t go as planned – esp. if it’s a movie of all things. And the more I thought about this being the crux of the issue, the truer it seemed to be the crux. After all, lightening up seems to be something all of us in our home need to do.

My son’s teacher at the recent parent teacher conference stated how diligent and earnest Yousuf is about school. How particular he is about not having fun, and obeying rules and doing just as he is told instead. They preferred it when he was able to get a little light hearted instead and play the fool a little. Taskeen came home one day complaining how chatty and un focused the kids at her table in school were, and that it kept her from focusing exclusively on her work. I asked her to ask the teacher to move her to quieter, more focused table. Maybe this uptightness is something both kids are inheriting from me. I am uptight. I am very ‘this has to go as planned’ and every item on the to-do list must be done. I’m used to being productive. I think that’s the bigger issue here. Learning to let go….Take a deep breath. Hold it for 2 secs. Let go. Take a deep breath. Hold it for 4 secs. Let go. Take a deep breath. Hold it for 6 secs. Let go. Ah… oxygen straight to the brain.

Well, so much for The Darjeeling Limited. At least I got to hash the issue out on paper. Atleast I got to get it out of my system. As those who have a regular sounding board will guess, I’m one of those who needs a regular sounding board. My friend, Faryal, who is all ears as needed, in fact, is missing in action this week. Tonight is too late to call but tomorrow’s another day. So all I need to do is take a deep breath and walk away from the computer once I’ve added the last period to this article. I’ve mulled it over, written about it, gotten it out of my system. The Darjeeling experience is now past. No more breath, time nor fonts are to be spent on it. Amen.

Public Apology

By Naazish YarKhan


As those who read this column regularly know, I’m working on arranging discussions and book signings for author Haroon Siddiqui, whose book ‘Being Muslim’ is a Canadian bestseller. But my! The wrath my email invites have evoked amongst a few! Outpourings of hate against Islam and its prophet. Outpourings of venom against the faith and its people. To all of that, I have only one thing to say. I am sorry your experiences with Muslims and Islam has been so negative. You speak based on your experiences and if those have been bad, it can be easy to react accordingly. To all those who haven’t had the best of experiences with those of my faith, a public apology. The prophet would be hurt that you met with Muslims who misrepresented the faith, and pushed you away from it. He was a gentle, soft hearted man, one of great patience, and capable of great love, one who would call on you in sickness and in health, even if you despised him. He would never have wanted for you to feel hurt nor made you feel unwelcome, even if you followed a faith other than his.

I acquired this manner of reacting from my daughter and a friend, Shaheen. Shaheen was at an inter-faith gathering at which an attendee spoke up in full-fledged opposition of Muslims and Islam, much to the chagrin of the Christian organizers of the event. Following the speeches, small groups came together for more intimate discussion and Q&A, and Shaheen found herself at the table with this angry woman. I am not sure I would have handled the situation as well as Shaheen did, but when selected to speak in this small group, Shaheen began by thanking Americans for being as gracious as they were to Muslims in response to 9/11. Shaheen narrated that area churches, in fact, wrote letters to her mosque, offering Muslims their support in this time of crisis. She added that had 9/11 happened in some other country, riots would have erupted. In America, this never happened. Here, many, many people responded with understanding and Shaheen acknowledged that. Shaheen’s words made an unexpected impression on the lady who had, until then, only hateful things to say about Islam and Muslims. This lady now turned gracious and carried on for the rest of the session, speaking only gracious words. What an about- turn. “Sometimes one needs to be gracious, in order to teach another to be gracious too,” said Shaheen, simply.

I also learned to react in this manner from my daughter, Taskeen. We try, as much as possible, to end our prayers with five things we are grateful to God for, and with five requests or prayers for ourselves, our community, the environment and the world at large. When I first read the hateful emails, I felt actual pain that my prophet, so beloved to me, was being abused so much. I hoped that God would punish these people. Then I recalled Taskeen’s prayer. “Make the bad people into good people.” She didn’t pray for them to be chucked into hell. She didn’t ask God to punish the bad people. It was an approach that was far better than mine. So when I read some more of the vitriolic emails being written in response to my email, I did two things. I emailed the moderator of this email list, and all the other readers, to keep tabs on when a discussion was becoming a hate fest. It is one thing to express contradictory thoughts, it is quite another to stoop to abuse and insults. I also wrote an email to all those on that list, recognizing that a bad experience or two, could paint ones whole perspective towards another. And I apologized for the experiences that may have pushed these people away.

It is common sense and yet not commonly remembered that human beings are not one monolithic group. We cannot all be painted with the same brush. Let not your grouse against an individual, become your filter when you view an entire community. I am as guilty of this myself, when I rush to judge a group of people based on past poor experiences, before getting to even know them. Also, let not the actions of those who misunderstand a rule, mar your perspective of the rules or laws themselves. Just because I bungle a recipe when I cook it doesn’t mean the recipe is lousy. I, the cook, alone am responsible for how the end result tastes, not the recipe. So also faith. Those who practice a faith, may or may not do it correctly. Just because someone has misinterpreted or misrepresents the faith, doesn’t mean the faith itself stinks.

Having grown up in an inter-faith community in India, and now as someone with friends of every faith in my adult life, I have one small request. Life is too short for hate. Do take the time to read and discover for yourself more about some of the questions you have. Do get to know others of a faith you have questions about, if those you have already met have been disappointing. Peace and harmony are so fragile. If we are to avoid wars like Iraq, we must make sure to nip smaller rivalries and hate mongering in the bud first.
As many a bumper sticker in the USA asks, ask yourself, “What Would Jesus Do?” Ask yourself always, “how can we build bridges instead of destroying them?”

Lost in Transition

By Naazish YarKhan


My mother noticed it first. All your articles are beginning to sound the same, she said to me. I thought little of her comment. Then she said it again… and then once again. That’s when it got me thinking. Yes, it’s true. Iraq and Islam and its related U.S. politics are all that seem to be on my mind. That’s what I read. That’s what I give talks on, those are the topics that I interview others on, those are the topics I give interviews on, that’s what interests me and that’s what I write about I guess. What goes in, must come out.

But what does that say about me? That I surround myself with nothing but this? What of the kids, my friends, my social life. There’s a line in the movie, Blood Diamond. I don’t remember the exact line but it goes along the lines of the journalist having become a drama junkie, because all she does is cover conflict zones. I guess, in a way, that’s what I am. A political drama junkie – save the world, stave off horrible Bush from taking the planet to hell in a hand basket and write about it till the readers beg you to stop. Eerrrr …. let’s stop with the drama shall we?

Firstly, there won’t be that many political stories from me.. hopefully… despite how much I love them. Ever since I dropped my job as Editor of Chicago Crescent we are all breathing a little easier. I miss the stories we did and I still keep track, diligently, of all the stories we can be doing, but I don’t miss the chaos and the last minute haphazard dash that went with running a paper. Luckily, before I phased out of that, I got into publicity for authors and arranging speaking engagements. That truly is setting my own hours and it’s spaced out between months so actually works better for me, rather than the mad dash to replace 50% of the Chicago Crescent newspaper, in two days time, just because my boss didn’t have time to go over it when he should have and now all the news is old. That was not fun. Nor was it fun hearing: “wehavetogetapressreleaseoutthisminutebecausesomeonewentandthreatenedtobombthe searstowerandwe’recondemningtheallegedplot.” Whoa.

On another side, 4th grade has new concepts introduced each week and I didn’t want to see Taskeen flailing under any circumstances. She cried last week that she hadn’t gotten a 100% on any spelling test, all of 3rd grade, last year. Had I spent more time on her and less on the Crescent, that wouldn’t have been the case. All the math foundations are being taught this year… if she doesn’t get them right it can have a life long impact. A whole difference between a career in the low paying humanities versus one in the decent paying sciences or commerce related fields.

That said, I miss someone to talk to.. even if it’s your boss whose hours you hate (I’m just plain sadistic, aren’t I). Farhat suggested I go get a job in telemarketing - selling over the phone, because I don’t want to work full time. I did it when I first got here 13 years ago. Apparently I so need someone to talk to that even that looks like a good idea, when fact is I had sworn off telemarketing. All those people hanging up on you. All those people saying ‘thank you, but no thank you’. But I like people and I like talking. I mean I need to talk. It doesn’t seem like an option, to securing my mental health, to be able to get things off my chest. The answer could be as simple as making the time to see my friends. I don’t. For some reason, I rather hide behind a schedule than sit still for 60 minutes (without a computer screen in my face) and actually have a heart-to-heart.

I still have my job as managing editor of a quarterly and to pass the hours, I volunteer in Yousuf’s Montessori. And yes, I do publicity for Haroon Siddiqui and am considering expanding that to other authors. But something tells me not to look for more work. Focus on the kids, says the voice. Focus on your column for the Observer, it says too (My mom notices all the issues I haven’t written for). Then another voice chimes in.. Shouldn’t I finish editing for the nth time that novel I once began? And when do I plan to begin studying for entrance exams to law school.

Should I even do law school at this point in our lives. Now is my time to focus on the kids. Hmmm..seems to me, a life that’s a little bit in transition. A life swinging between motherhood and a life that’s mine.

TAKING A CHILL(Y) PILL

By Naazish YarKhan

When all you’ve been is a busy bee, it takes some getting used to when you have down time. Surprise! Having been a worker bee for the longest, what’s ended up happening is that I’ve lost the ability to just chill. I feel compelled to be doing something, even if it’s aimlessly window shopping and that’s saying a lot considering I don’t really like shopping. But as duty-bound as I feel to do something, I really am not doing much. I’ve discovered that I need stress to function. The less time I have, the more I can get done. The more time I have, the less I am able to focus and the less I get done.

I’ve also discovered all the little lies I told myself when I was a busy worker bee. “If I had more time, I’d actually read the books on my shelves” is one of them. “If I had more time, I’d read more Quran,” is another. Add “work on my novel, exercise, clean the house, sort the closets, vacuum and so on” to that list. You get my drift. Truth is too much time, for me, translates into too little structure which translates into nothing gets accomplished. I’ve taken to setting a timer when I do household chores, so that I work against a deadline and get it done .

People used to ask me how I accomplished things when I was neck deep in multiple projects for multiple bosses. I guess the secret to my productivity was that I couldn’t let anything pile up, or I’d be in a royal mess. When there’s no time to spare there is no room for one of the seven deadly sins - sloth – nor its cousin, procrastination.

These winter days are garbed in gray clouds and it’s pitch dark by 5 p.m, so I can’t tell if it’s me, or the lack of light that’s robbing my brain of serotonin and with it, attentiveness and focus. Norman Rosenthal, a pioneer in Seasonal Affective Disorder ( SAD) research, has estimated that the prevalence of SAD in the adult United States population in winter is between about 1.5 percent (in Florida) and about 9 percent (in the northern US). Symptoms include feeling sluggish, muggish, snail-ish, sadder. To be on the safe side and since this is only the start of a long, dreary winter I have ordered a light therapy box, which promises to do wonders. The light box makes up for the absence of natural, God-given light, flittering across our horizons these days and sitting in front of it for 30 mins a day, apparently gets the serotonin humming in our brains. So we’ll see in a week or so, if I’m any sharper, smarter, focussed. Plan A incidentally is air plane tickets to Muscat for some real sun, in late December. Yummmm.

Now if our weather was better, we’d probably do more with our free time. We’re not at sub-zero temps as yet, but besides eating out, movies, reading and shopping, I can’t think of much else to keep myself occupied. (No, no, I am not thinking housework and cooking. That never gets done! ) Or so I thought. All that changed this weekend when my husband decided to drive us to Wisconsin, which is the state next door. We were off to a state park, two hours away, to roast marshmallows and some hot dogs. This is something I absolutely love about my husband. He has the ability to turn a-day-going-nowhere into an adventurous, back-to-nature scenario. He’ll pick a state park or town we haven’t visited, located within an hour or an hour and a half’s drive from us, get directions off the net, pack some apples and juice boxes, and off we’d go.

Chalk it up to the way my brain is wired, because memories of all the road trips my parents took us on kicked in and I thought driving down to Wisconsin was a great idea. So we got the kids into two layers of clothing, gloves, hats and scarves. If we were going to be outdoors, we had to be prepared for the cold. At the last minute we switched cars, because my car has issues and no one wants to be stuck in the cold, on some highway in boonieville.

Two hours later, we were there and it was beautiful. The kids romped down to the water’s edge and I followed them, trying in vain to not step in goose poop. One of the fall outs of global warming has been that the Canada Geese refuse to migrate South sooner, and it’s near impossible finding a single patch of unsullied ground. So there we are at the Lake’s edge. It was beautiful and picturesque, only more so from inside the car with the heat on. I shivered, missing my jacket, that lay forgotten in the car trunk when we’d switched cars. Farhat was braver. He stuck it out without gloves that he’d left in the back-seat of this car.

‘Don’t walk into the snow, or your shoes and then toes will get wet,” was my constant refrain. Just because we in Chicago didn’t have snow as yet, we’d forgotten that wasn’t necessarily the case in another state. So here were the four of us in sneakers instead of our insulated snow boots.

Then we tried building a fire. There are match sticks and then there are match sticks for campers which light a huge fire in a jiffy. Remember that car switch-a-roo? Yep, we’d left the campers matches in there. Anyway, twigs, papers, coal that the last campers had left behind and some match sticks did get a fire going. My family roasted maybe four marshmallows while I sat in the car, clicking pictures. After all, we had made it all the way, and there had to be proof! They braved the weather for a good hour before Taskeen scurried in, followed by Yousuf, runny nose et al. They peeled off their double layers of socks and warmed their toes against the heat vents in the car. “I am so happy we’re here,” said Yousuf, as I rubbed his toes. My heart sang as he said those words and I was so glad we’d made the trek.

Once we left the lake, we saw it was less of a state park and more of a clump of wooded area in the middle of wheat fields, cordoned off by busy highways. Still Farhat, didn’t want to miss spotting deer, nor scaling Powder Hill. So he and the kids took off, waiting to watch the sunset once they’d reached the top. It was still only 5 p.m. The day was still young, when we hopped back onto the highway, only to be thrust almost immediately into a bustling town. Why does everyone think of Wisconsin as the boonies, I wonder? Parts of it are, but where we were it looked as much of a suburb, though less dense and with more fields, as where I lived.

On the way back, we stopped at a huge outfitters store, with every kind of rifle and all possible equipment necessary for hunting, fishing, and boating being sold to customers in ‘Green Bay Packers’ T-Shirts, all indications that this was Wisconsin and not Illinois.

Wanting to show the kids the city, we looped through the town of Milwaukee, where the official baseball team is the Milwaukee Brewers, thus giving away the main trade of that city. Before long, we were back in Illinois, passing up the exit where Farhat’s company is located. We’d left behind fields, and now sped past houses and buildings. Gurnee Mills Mall was our next stop. Back to the stores we knew so well. Back to our world where winter past times are reading, movies, shopping and dining out. We hadn’t ventured too far from home, but far enough to treat ourselves to a refreshing change in scenery.

How Schools & Society Have Been Short-Changing Boys –

By Naazish YarKhan

Taskeen and I are part of a mom-daughter reading group with two other moms/ daughters. The girls pick a book by turns and we all read it, then discuss the lessons in it, what made us laugh, cry, think, or giggle. This group is yet one more indication of how Taskeen’s development, by default, has dominated much of my mothering.

What I heard recently, in a brief exchange with a 30 something, professional, single girl, however, set me thinking. Let’s call her Asma. Like many girls these days, she was raised to be strong, independent, educated… discerning too. She was given credit for her views and had been taught to express them with confidence. And now, there just weren’t enough single guys who she found intellectually compatible/ as financially stable/well-rounded enough… take your pick. As young people say these days, “We weren’t clicking”.

According to her, this was partly because over the past so many years we haven’t been giving boys what they need to be all they can be, while girls are getting plenty of special attention and are being groomed to be super girls.

Whenever you’re giving your girls what they need emotionally, intellectually or physically, make sure your sons are getting what they need too, or they grow up to be half the men they can be and really aren’t interesting or the kind of person we girls want to spend the rest of our lives with, Asma continued.

Asma’s words touched a chord in me, because that was the scenario playing out in my home. Taskeen has always been the star. Yousuf’s activities have taken a back seat - it’s sometimes been because I think that I still have time with him since he is just five, while Taskeen is mine to mould only for eight more years till she leaves home for college. But other times, it’s because I want Taskeen to be this incredible young woman, who will one day be President of the United States, or this fantastic world-famous artist, or a bright star on the horizon in whatever capacity. It’s not that I don’t want the same for Yousuf, but I just haven’t funneled all that energy into him as I have into Taskeen.

Asma, by her comment, showed me that if more mother’s weren’t fostering that same intellectual curiosity and a determination to live life loud and bold in boys AND girls, we were raising girls who could very well end up single because the men around them just wouldn’t measure up.

Around this same time, I happened to have another interesting conversation with a match-maker aunty. There were 250 boys on her list and 1000 girls. A majority of these girls were professionals and many were 30 and over. I listened, a little surprised that there were as many as 1000 single girls and just 250 men enlisted for her services.

All these conversations, of course, prompted me to go online and do some reading. My behavior patterns were reflected in trends in education in the US and world wide. So much attention had been paid to honing girls’ confidence and girls’ abilities that some of it had come, unintentionally, at the expense of boys and their development. “An 11th-grade boy now reads and writes at the level of an eighth-grade girl,” I read from a report. “According to the National Center for Educational Statistics: Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to flunk or drop out of school; When it comes to grades and homework, girls outperform boys in elementary, secondary, high school, college, and even graduate school.”

More single women were just the tip of the iceberg. Less educated men meant a host of other issues – men earning smaller paychecks do mean more dual income homes, more family stress, more crime by men due to higher rates of unemployment and so on.

From my reading I learned, it wasn’t that men weren’t smart. Nor did the research call for girls’ education to be put on the back burner. But a common theme was to first acknowledge that ‘yes there was a crisis’. Men were in trouble.

The Australian government, taking this problem seriously, had a committee work on addressing the issue in 2002. The result was Boys Getting It Right[1]. “Research has found that, in effect, boys’ capacity for hearing and processing verbal instructions is, in general, less than girls’, from the early years of schooling on. This is a remarkable finding, and one that was not well known prior to the inquiry. It has important implications for classroom instruction and pedagogy.”

According to many of these articles, boys became disengaged from school and homework, because of the manner in which school is conducted.[2] Boys need recess. They need play time to get rid of their energy. A huge trend has been cutting down recess or throwing it out altogether. Without that outlet, it’s but obvious that boys will fidget more and be distracted rather than sit and learn.

Another recommendation was teaching reading via phonics (rather than learning whole words by sight) was a better suited to boys since they have shorter attention spans. Still another recommendation was that boys learn by doing, rather than how most schools teach – taking notes. Also, girls are good at processing things so are apt to excel at essay type questions, for instance, whereas boys can come up with the right answer but can’t always explain how they got to it. So, in a way, the way schools work, can put your son at a disadvantage.

The less involved any child feels with school and studies or the more trouble they get into at school, the less likely they are to do well…When their inability or difficulty becomes their identity, over time boys are unlikely to find themselves motivated, possibly activating a downward spiral.

What I see as a related trend in the US is the ever increasing numbers of kids, especially boys, who are diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In fact, “four of every five children taking medications like Ritalin for behavioral disorders are boys.” For a while now, I’ve wondered how on earth there could be such an upswing of this. So yes, they perhaps didn’t know to label this behavior all those years ago when we were kids. But my more dominant feeling was, ‘people are expecting kids to act like little adults rather than expecting them to be kids.’ And boys, especially, aren’t girls, so they aren’t going to sit as long as girls do. Somewhere along the line, the expectation that boys would sit or learn just the way girls do, became commonplace. No wonder boys who are genetically programmed to be active, are getting stuck with the label ADHD.

I’m no expert but my guess is another reason for this upswing in ADHD diagnoses, is us parents who don’t have the time to be parents. When both parents are working, we don’t really have the time to put up with kids who don’t toe the line. We have little energy and get exasperated faster. End result? Boys are apt to express their genetic coding and we adults think the kid has an issue. (And if you live like us where winter keeps us indoors, you definitely think your son is hyperactive, what with having no outlet.) If we step back for a moment, it’s really pretty obvious. It’s us, the adults, who don’t have any bandwidth to spare, and need all our ducks in a row and the world to function just so, so that we can accomplish all we have to do, in whatever little time we have left over from our careers. Others call it a juggling act or a balancing act. I call it a tight rope walk. That is how life is when both parents have to work.

The long and short of it is this. I have a son who is still young, so I’m still on the right side of the clock. I also have a host of 20 something male relatives who haven’t quite kept up with their female cousins as ample proof that this, indeed, is a legitimate issue. While there will always be those who will look at this research as controversial, my job as a parent is to become aware of all the research out there on this topic and to use it. I need to do whatever it takes to meet the distinct needs of my son and my daughter, in order that Tomorrow, God Willing, brings out the best in both.
[1] http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=969
[2] http://www.pbs.org/parents/raisingboys

A Penny for your thoughts

By Naazish YarKhan

I’m folding laundry and picking stuff of the floor and such and my son, who is five, thinks that should be part of my job rather than a family chore, since I am home and don’t have a job, while the rest of them are busy going to school or work, including him.

So while I do intend to make him tackle his nonexistent list of chores, I do household work which I hate and find mind-numbing. Amidst it , I find myself match making, answering emails, watching for emails that haven’t arrived, flipping through websites, shifting things from one corner to the next on the counter, in other words, I’m wasting time.

In between wasting time, I chance upon a collection of my hand-written notes of advice gleaned from here, there and everywhere. Some writer called quotes the literary equivalent to popping some Vitamin C into your system.

Here I share some with you:

1) Every decision ever made has been destructive or constructive or it wasn’t really a decision at all. It was being passive. Making any decision is better than making no decision.
2) Every time you do ‘courage’, you get a reward – a boost of confidence. A feeling that you can tolerate risk or change or loss. That you can go out and make it happen. Courage is how you father/mother/parent yourself. ( My fav!)
3) Courage = Wisdom + Action. Motivation = Energy + Will
4) You can never lose by making a decision, even if it goes wrong. From mistakes we grow, and the more decisions we make, the better we get at it. The cure for feeling trapped, is making a decision.
5) The more decisions you make, the more leadership roles you get and the more freedom you have.
6) To be able to stand up for oneself, you have to have an identity. So it’s a very good idea to give kids preferences and choices so that they can develop an identity.
7) Friendship is enjoying each others positive, emotional energy.
8) Assertiveness is mothering yourself, without forcing others or manipulating others, to get your needs met. Finding out what your needs are and finding ways to meet those needs, without depending on others to fill the voids for you. ( very important advice for stay home moms).
9) Courage is to face the fear of ridicule. When we do courage or assertiveness, those are the loneliest times. You may be swimming against the tide, but that’s okay because it’s going to allow you to grow.
10) When we suffer over things we have no control over, that’s when our positive energy is being replaced by negative energy. So train yourself to listen to the word ‘no’more often and train yourself to say the word ‘no’ more often too.

Tid-Bits to Chew On

By Naazish YarKhan

Have a craving for Halal Quiche or Brownies? Check out Love and Quiches. Susan Axelrod set up shop in her small family kitchen thirty years ago. Today, her company Love and Quiches operates out of a 65,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art facility and is synonymous not only with quiche, but also with her carefully selected, handcrafted line of desserts. Her line of desserts began as a simple request from a loyal customer for pecan pie – one with that special home-baked taste her quiches were known for. Using all-natural ingredients, including real butter and Georgia pecans, Susan developed her now famous recipe, baked the pies and then froze them to capture the just-baked flavor her customers requested. She is a supplier to restaurants in USA, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Nigeria, Yemen, Mauritania, Sudan, Libya, Iran. Want her goodies at a store near you? Just ask the manager to get samples from her at : http://www.loveandquiches.com/store/index.asp

Corn. Is it the (Wise) Fuel of Choice?

With corn becoming the fuel of choice, it came as no surprise that corn prices more than doubled from their decade long average price of $2 a bushel, amongst ethanol producers. A ripple effect wasn’t long behind. The primary feed for cattle being corn, rising prices leave cattle owners with no choice but to hike up the price of milk.

Rising prices, however, don’t seem to impact sales of milk. Especially amongst families with young children, there really isn’t a choice. According to Cindy Haren, chief executive of the Thornton-based Western Dairyfarmers' Promotion Association, in an interview with The Denver Post, “when the average price of milk rose 19 percent in the spring of 2004, milk purchases declined less than 4 percent.” A gallon of whole milk at the supermarket is expected to cost almost $3.35 by October, vs. $3.07 in January, according to Ken Bailey, an agricultural economist at Penn State University who specializes in the dairy industry.

No doubt the international market will feel the burn, given the growing demand for skim-milk powder, dry whey and whey protein concentrates, all of which are exported for feeding programs in regions including the Middle East, Asia and Cuba.

Sugar Substitutes…. The Healthy Kind

Our recent vacation to Mammoth Cave National Park was restful… the times we weren’t hiking the trails, that is. “Wait up for me!” was my constant refrain as hubby and kids sailed up or down steep hillsides. I had no clue, I was that out of shape. As soon as I returned home, I made a mental note to myself. Either I get healthier now or pay the price as I get older. Maintaining health is easier and cheaper, than regaining it once it’s lost. First thing on my list was to kick the sugar the habit. I can avoid sweets but with 4 cups of tea, per day, on average, I consume close to 10 teaspoons of sugar.

That’s when I learned of Industrializadora Integral Del Agave’s Organic Agave Syrup 100% Blue Webber and Inulin Fiber, both available as retail products in health food stores.

But what is Agave syrup? Developed in the 1990’s, it’s a relatively new, 100% natural sweetener being imported by the U.S. It can be used as a substitute for sugar. Three-fourth of a cup of Agave can replace a cup of sugar in the original recipe. Agave syrup can be used in equal amounts when replacing honey. Some chefs also reduce the oven temperature by 25°F in recipes requiring baking when using Agave syrup.

Inulin Fiber is being called the ‘in’ fiber by Food Processing magazine. Comparable to sugar in taste, it too can also be used as a sugar replacement. It is considered a ‘prebiotic’, as it stimulates the growth of friendly and healthy intestinal bacteria, specifically bifidobacteria and lactobacilli, which inhibit the growth of harmful pathogens and support good colon health. Since Inulin fiber has a very low glycemic index, it is suitable for those on restricted diets.

Why not check your local health food store for supplies? Even if they don’t have Agave Syrup or Inulin Fiber, ask for Natural Sugar substitutes. It’s better than ingesting chemicals such as Nutrasweet and the like. And for those who are diabetic, throw in a small stick of cinnamon and see the difference in two weeks flat.

Take care, seriously !

Until later!

The War in Iraq Etc

2007

By Naazish YarKhan

Spring is in the air. How would I know if I were oblivious of the longer days, the warmer weather? Well, I’d know because I’d have allergies. Yes, tis’ the season for sneezing and wheezing, but I guess I take comfort in the fact that I’m not alone. Naw.. it’s not like everyone else I know is in the same boat… it’s just the multitude of commercials selling anti-allergy prescription medicines that are suddenly hitting the air waves, that tell me I am not alone.

This week hasn’t been impossible. I only have to finish up a few pages of proofreading the magazine I work for, Halal Consumer magazine, and send it to the designer. Anyone out there, who wants to advertise to Muslims in Chicago, give me a holler and I’ll send you the rates. Halal Consumer Magazine reaches 40,000 Muslim families and organizations in the US and abroad and according to Business Week,( Jan. 2007), "59% of Muslim adults in the U.S. have a college degree, compared with only 28% of all American adults. Surveys show that median family income among America's Muslims exceeds the national figure of $55,800. And four out of five eligible Muslims are registered to vote, slightly higher than the overall rate." So it’s a great audience, to market to.

This week I did get, and then lose, a contract to do some web content, leaving me feeling very dashed at the lost, potential income. The deflated hopes flitted around my head despite my telling myself that if I lost the project, I’d have more time to actually work on my novel and sell it. So this is the last time I am going to think of the loss. Split milk. No crying. After all, I do have other work, other income.

Last week wasn’t that bad either. The weekend however was choc-a-bloc. Attended a Peace Rally to Bring the Troops home from Iraq. About 50 people were in attendance that crisp, chilly, sunny Saturday morning. Bush’s ratings are at an all time low of 30 percent and he has nothing to lose since there’s no reelection on the horizon, so he continues to do as he pleases.

Talking of politics, Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton are already doing fundraisers for the 2008 presidential elections and their respective campaigns for the seat. Hillary hasn’t apologized for voting to invade Iraq when the idea was first presented to Congress, four years ago, so I won’t be voting for her next year. That aside, what kind of woman, stays with a husband given to extra-marital affairs? Monica Lewinsky made the most news, but there have always been women in former President Clinton’s life, and as much as I am impressed by his/her work ethic, I am not quite sure if I’d vote for a woman who stayed in a relationship for, what to me seems, like little more than political gain. Why wouldn’t you leave a man who constantly cheats on you? It’s not like Hillary didn’t know what Bill was up to. But then again, ask me if I would vote for Bill Clinton, and I’d say, “Yes. He makes a great president, why drag his personal life into the picture.” Go figure!

Barack Obama doesn’t have my vote for president, so far, either. I am not going to vote for someone, just because they happen to be a charismatic person of color. While President Carter is going blue in the face calling the situation in Palestine ‘Apartheid’, and while the media can’t stop hating his guts for doing that, Congressman Obama still comes out in favor of Israel ‘having the right to protect itself.’ Sure, let Israel protect itself I say, but then when the Palestinians ‘protect’ themselves, don’t call it ‘terrorism.’ I am disappointed that Obama choose to tout the party line instead of thinking for himself. My naivete annoys my husband. ‘He’s a democrat, representing the democratic party. Of course he’s going to spout the party line. That’s why it’s called a party line,” my husband reminds me. Well, yes. And in the end, everything is political, but I’d like someone who has the courage to stand up for the truth as well. To see things as they are. I guess the consequences are dire, for doing things like that when you’re a politician.

To those not in the US or not into following politics, all this talk of an election that’s going to take place in Nov. 2008, must seem so ludicrous. But really, it’s not. The main issue, is Iraq. The Democrats won both Houses of Congress in November 2006 because of Iraq. It was a mid term election with the largest turnout of voters, because of Iraq. Iraq continues to be a defining issue and hence, all this early interest in the 2008 presidential elections. On this the 4th anniversary of the Iraq War, 500,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Tens of thousands have escaped to Syria and Jordan. Only 500 were permitted entry into the US. 2000 plus U.S soldiers have died. Where does the candidate stand on this issue, is what’s on everyone’s mind. How soon will the troops be brought home? What is to become of the Iraqi people? Big Questions. How our presidential candidates answer them, could potentially make or break their bid for president.

Being an Immigrant - The emotional costs

By Naazish YarKhan

Twelve and a half years ago, I was 22 and a big city girl from India. I arrived here as a new bride, with stars in my eyes only to run, slam, bam into culture shock. Not the kind of culture shock you expect though. This was different. ( It did take time to wrap my mind around the fact that everything in the burbs closed by 11 p.m. Where did people go for a bite if they got hungry at midnight I mused. But that was merely a hiccup.) The hardest obstacles were emotional. The Indian immigrant community is large and yet small enough that everyone maintains their connections. New husband, new family, new social circle, not withstanding, the void came from not connecting with others at a deeper level, either intellectually or emotionally.

My husband and I attended at least two dinner gatherings given by one of our many family friends each weekend. Our hosts were the older generation of aunties and uncles, who had become my in-law’s extended family when they first arrived 30 years ago. I felt at ease and fit in seamlessly. Or, we’d hob nob with my husbands’ friends and their wives, many who’d married that same year as well. Again, it was almost effortless to become friends with the women. We were all in the same boat in many ways.

Come spring and summer, there was at least one wedding every two weeks that we were invited to. I was attending more weddings here and knew more people here than I ever did back in India. If not weddings, were we at a bridal shower, baby shower, engagement ceremony or a graduation party. And yet, there was that gnawing, emotional void. The need to connect at a deeper level, to be understood for who I was intellectually, a short hand to one’s heart and mind, were missing.

It wasn’t that the friends I was making in the immigrant community were too Americanized. Far from it, many of the ‘desi’ girls I befriended here, had lived far sheltered lives than I had ever. They cooked better Indian food than I ever did, and some even spoke better Urdu, than I. And yet, there is something to be said about the comfort of cultural short-hand, and shared histories, growing up watching the same TV shows, owning a similar sense of humor. As an immigrant, I didn’t have the same baggage. My loneliness perhaps was magnified by the fact that my husband’s elementary school was still a hop skip and jump away from where we lived. That his parents’ home was still very much his own home. That he didn’t have to make the adjustments or carve into existence relationships he wanted.

It often fell to him to play the role that my aunts and grand-parents had played, my siblings had played, my parents had played. My cheerleaders, my rock of Gibraltar, he had to be all those things and no one had prepared him to do any of it. How could one man do what an entire family, an extended one for that matter, had done?

Making and maintaining friendships really was what became very important in my life. I was committed to creating for myself the support I had before coming here, the security I had felt when I was back in India, the confidants and cheerleaders I could always depend on. It took a while to realize that I had to create the same for myself, off line too. Emails to school friends and college friends and my siblings weren’t enough to sustain me for life in America.

It meant pushing myself to be vulnerable and wholly present in every relationship…just as I had been when I was growing up in India. It meant realizing that I didn’t have to have the same interests, or even the same background, as some else to become close buddies. It meant realizing that age was no consideration when picking a friend. It meant being committed to friendship and being an accessible, good friend. And as I now see, it meant having patience. A garden grows slowly. The friends I made 12 years ago, are my inner circle, my emotional and intellectual sounding board today.
Lately, I tend to get too wrapped up in my professional pursuits and need to remind myself that friends are an integral part of my life and who I am. I need to remind myself that friends make my life richer and scheduling down time with them is vital to my existence.

I’ve been in a place where not many really cared to know who I was on the inside, or what I thought or what I had to say. When I remind myself to make time for friends, I guess I am also reminding myself, not to return to by gone times and with them, to that sad, lonely place.

A FAMILY REUNION

BY Naazish YarKhan

‘Time flies when you’re having fun’ is such a cliché and yet, there aren’t more appropriate words to describe my current stay in Muscat. For all the many times I’ve been here, none have been as charged with fun-filled activity as these last two weeks. I had siblings, cousins and relatives descend to this haven in the Middle East to celebrate my brother’s wedding reception. We spent a night out in the Wahiba Sands and ran the gamut of activities from dune-bashing to camel rides to counting stars in a bejeweled sky. That I couldn’t scale the sand dunes as quickly as my younger cousins or nieces or nephews was testimony to the fact that I’d well and truly graduated to ‘aunty’ status.
Then turning our attention from desert to sea, we hit Jussa beach and headed into the deep blue to look for dolphins. After that, in true ‘aunty’ fashion, I sat on the sea shore while the twenty-somethings and kids frolicked amongst the waves. I reasoned that the temperature of the water was the deterrent. But who was I fooling? I wasn’t interested in getting soaked and sandy.

Amidst all this, of course, was my brother’s wedding reception – the reason our family had assembled here. It was a nine year gap since I’d last met my brother, who now lives in Australia. Assembling as adults always brings with it the question of how the persons we have grown into, will all meld together. Will it be one well-oiled machine of a family or will there be more friction than not? Well, the chunks in our heart, as each of the cousins, and today my brother and his wife, left are better proof than what words can articulate. Our group of Charades playing, Tag playing goof-balls whittled down day- by-day until just my sister and her kids and one of my cousins and my own family are left here. The sound of laughter and shrieks of excitement still ring in my imagination but the people to accompany those sounds don’t come sauntering down the stairs, ready to pile into the car. The memory of us singing and telling jokes, as we drove all over the place from my parents home in Al-Hail, is still vivid. But those who came up with some of those brainwaves, are nestled once again, in their routines and daily agendas, in far away lands. Yep, there were some arguments but the ache for those mostly happy, laughing faces is a tell tale sign of what remains in our hearts.

As I prepare to leave this Friday, it’s a sad feeling, too: This notion of leaving your parents to their own doings, leaving them to an empty house, where the room doors don’t open and shut constantly because the grand-children have too much energy. Where the kids don’t run up and greet their nana, or ask him to watch them perform a play. It makes one question the notion of families and how it no longer means togetherness. In our romantic minds, sure, that’s the image conjured up when you say the word ‘family’ but how often, in our real lives, is it that? Mine isn’t the only family where the siblings each live in a separate country and/or continent. In fact, rare is the Indian family where families live in the same nation. This is as true of well-to-do families, where economics may not necessarily be the driving factor.

But I have nothing to complain of. Guest worker visas, with no family re-unification, ensure that families will be separated for years on end. A conversation with a Philipino friend revealed how she had raised her siblings, only a few years younger than herself, while her mother had worked overseas. South Asian laborers, too, live with this reality only too intimately. The emotional cost of missing your child’s first birthday, his first words, his graduation from high school. Children growing up without their father’s hand on their shoulder, or their mother’s kiss on their head. There was a documentary on the emotional and mental costs on immigration once about villages of women, left without their men folk, living with the uncertainty that their husbands would ever return from foreign shores or stay faithful while gone all those years. Thinking of those realities, rather than my own impending departure from my greatest cheerleaders, gives me goose bumps all over. A psychotherapist once said, adulthood is when you learn to be a parent to your own self. I guess I don’t want to be that adult for today. Good parents give their children both roots and wings. So how come we use those wings to further ourselves from our roots?

And then I slap my wrist. Am I, in my sadness, being ungrateful for God’s blessings? It’s a privilege, in a way, to be a writer and a writer with an audience, at that. I say this because, sitting here, compiling these thoughts has left me with one feeling. A feeling that I’d not necessarily begun writing the article with, and that is gratitude. Gratitude to God that my family and many of my cousins and relatives were able to come together for this occasion, from all parts of the world. Gratitude for the laughter we shared, the catching up, the getting to know each other better. Gratitude to my parents for being such incredible hosts to us, to their grand-kids and all our relatives who shared their roof recently. Thanks to them, we kids were able to renew ties, and no doubt, we’re all returning home richer for the love we’ve shared, the memories we’ve created together. In five days, God willing, I will be returning to a cold, far away city called home. As I prepare to leave, I pray that this short yet fully-lived vacation, will become one of many, many family reunions.

Merry Christmas!

BY Naazish YarKhan

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” goes the song and yes, with the snow and blustery temperatures finally here, I’m happy to report that we are truly and completely immersed in the holiday spirit. Christmastime is my favorite time of the year. My theory is that those living in these frigid climes make the most of Thanksgiving and Christmas so that we have something to be merry about. It gives us something cheerful to focus on instead of the short days, the lack of sun and the sub-zero temps.


Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. Warmer temperatures have given way to more frigid temperatures and I, for one, was taken by surprise. I had taken my car to have a puncture fixed – apparently I’d driven over a nail – and was asked to come get the car three hours later. Four hours later I arrive, only to see my car frozen within sheets of ice. It was raining … not water… but hard ice.


“I’m so surprised. All this happened so suddenly,” I sputtered to the car repairman who I’d called to my rescue when I discovered my Nissan caked in unbreakable ice.


He looked at me, weirdly. “They’ve been predicting this since Thursday, three days ago,” he said, jamming his ice scraper into the gaps between the car door and the chassis, to free it open.


Once inside, I turned the heat on. We still had to get the ice sheet off my windows and, most importantly, off the windscreen. I had my own ice scraper in the trunk but that too was frozen shut. It took 20 minutes for the heating to kick in, while we hacked the ice off the trunk where it had gotten sealed shut. Next, we attacked my windscreen, until sheets of ice, each at least a foot long and six inches wide, came crashing off.


My friends in India say we’re obsessed with the weather here and are paranoid because we make it a point to listen to the weather reports each and every day. They can’t understand it. Well, duh, if I’d listened to the weather man, I wouldn’t have ended up having to crack ice off my windscreen, now would I? I would have taken in my car a day earlier and avoided the issue altogether! But to stay true to the holiday spirit, let me give the sarcasm a rest.



Later that evening we were expected to go to Farhat’s office party. From my frozen car, I had called him, asking if he thought it wise to drive to this party when the roads were so slippery and driving conditions so nasty. The roads can be mean when icy. While highways get doused with salt to melt the ice, local roads stay slushy and frozen longer. Many times, brakes won’t grip fast enough, leaving your car skidding into whatever is in front of it. Ditto if you go a tad too fast when turning. “It’s winter in Chicago,” he said, unperturbed. “Just drive back safe.”


My fiasco at the store had well and truly set me back an hour. Needless to say, I was late getting dressed. Farhat wasn’t happy. “Look, no one’s going to be on time. The weather is a mess,” I said, sliding into the passenger’s seat, at length. How I could have kicked myself when we got there. Farhat, I saw, wasn’t the only one thinking, “It’s winter in Chicago. Deal with it.” The room was full and we were one of the last ones to arrive.


That was a week ago. Two days ago, we were inundated with our first bout of snow. Lots and lots of it. Last year, our backdoor and front doors had gotten jammed with snow and ice and weren’t opening. For days, we had to use our garage door to get in and out of our home. Taskeen gleefully wished this would happen again – but not to us. Instead she wished her Quran teacher would be snowed it and unable to come to our home.


“Or, maybe she’ll be too afraid to drive in this weather,” Taskeen added with a twinkle in her eye. With all due respect, I think Taskeen may be right. Our Quran teacher is very uncomfortable even driving in the dark be it as early as 4:45 p.m. or 5:30 p.m. Hmmm… and she lives in Chicago, where it’s dark by that time for half the year. ( But bad me, being a bit of a ‘Meow’ and forgetting all about the kinder, gentler disposition required of the holiday spirit.)


With my Muscat trip on the horizon, I’m even shopping all the sales and snapping up Christmas merchandise. A la Santa, there’s gifts to bring, after all. Yousuf has even created a wish list for things he wants from Santa, and I must take him to the local mall to meet the man in red. Yousuf is older but, without fail, all the babies and toddlers begin to cry the moment they have to sit on Mr. Claus’s lap and have their photos taken.


Also in the holiday spirit, Taskeen and Yousuf both had musical productions at their respective schools. Yousuf’s required some dancing and all I saw him do was stomp his feet down, one after the other, as if he were in the middle of a tantrum. He does not enjoy this singing, dancing routine.


Anything I write isn’t quite complete if I don’t focus on lessons I learned from the experience. So here goes. Farhat used to say that I wasn’t quite content with something until it happened exactly the way I pictured it in my head. For instance, my idea of family time together was never watching TV together. Rather, it was eating dinner together. Or, it was a scene where the father read a paper and the mother read a book, while the children happily played a board game on the floor. I’m pretty sure this was part of my own childhood, in some measure and I brought this scene to my marriage and tried to get all the pieces to fit. 13 years later, this newspaper reading scene has never happened in this marriage of mine, and rarely have I sat down to read a book. So I’ve settled for watching movies together, as family time. Once in a way, the kids and I’ll do board games too. What’s that saying about marriage being all about finding a middle ground?


But, apparently this fixation for the right picture isn’t just a fascination I have. That the song “White Christmas” is the most popular of Christmas songs, is testimony to that. It goes, “I'm dreaming of a white Christmas / With every Christmas card I write / May your days be merry and bright / And may all your Christmases be white. Christmas time was meant to be white, with snow caking roof tops and tree branches, while we slowly drove past in our warm toasty car, listening to Christmas songs on the radio. I doubt Christmas in Florida, or Muscat, really feels like Christmas. It’s just too darn warm and sunny. So now you have an open invitation. Come to Chicago in the winter! Until later, Merry Christmas everyone!

HOME IS A PLACE WITHIN ME BY NAAZISH YARKHAN

It's all so familiar to me. Yet, to my children, it's a world that's new and strange. I'm returning to Muscat, Oman, from my home in Chicago, after a gap of four years. And while a part of me feels as though time has stood still, another part sees it all with fresh eyes, too, because this time I see it as my children are seeing it. The last time I was here, my daughter was a baby, still not weaned. This time, I have an infant boy of about the same age. Strange and new as this place is to them, it's still home because my parents make it so.

If you were to pick a color to describe my parents' home in Muscat, it would be yellow. It is warm and inviting, suffused with love, affection and conversation—a treat for the mind and the soul. This is the first time my parents are meeting my son. My daughter knows them a little from two previous trips and phone calls from Chicago. Yet both children go to them without the least hesitation. Even across the miles the bond exists. My father talks to my daughter, Taskeen, explains passages he has read in the Quran, tells her jokes, explains to her what a desalination plant does, where Oman and Chicago are on the map; Chicago, which now seems so far away. The 5-year-old revels in the attention paid to her. My dad asks her to speak slower so he can understand her American accent. She discovers she enjoys experimenting with spoken Urdu. My mother dotes on the kids. The first day we are here, she takes Taskeen out to buy a pair of goldfish, paints, crayons, a drawing book and other art supplies. Adults can find ways to entertain themselves in a new place, but children need to be made to feel secure, my mother reasons. My mother also gently corrects me when I criticize the kids publicly. It's not good for their self-esteem, she teaches me. Over the next couple of days Taskeen eats better than ever. She is a calmer, better-behaved child than I knew she could be. Could it be this warm air or a dose of my parents' attitude?

I am excited to show Taskeen the country. The rugged mountains, the beaches, the mosques, Sultan Qaboos' palace. I want her to discover its nooks and crannies, its sights and smells, to make these her own, to make them a part of her memory and who she is. I want her to sense them not as a tourist but as someone who lives here. Am I asking for too much, given that we are here for barely two weeks? Am I hoping that a lifetime of memories and associations can be compressed into 14 days? We cope with the heat by staying indoors until daylight ceases around 6 p.m. We venture out for ice cream or coffee, barbecued squid and fish kebab.I've seen it all before. I used to live here, but I still love sightseeing. My daughter sees Sultan Qaboos' palace and thinks it's nothing like the castles she has seen in storybooks. It's like someone's home, she comments. I privately wonder whom she knows who has such a palatial home. At the beach minutes away from my parents' home, she collects shells and I try to explain how the sea is not the same as Lake Michigan back home. She admires Sultan Qaboos' ship and wonders whether we can go see Sinbad's boat too. My mother has told her about his many voyages.We curve up the roadways to Jussa Beach. Somewhere along the road, I discover that what began as an effort to give my children a sense of Muscat has become my personal homecoming, my rediscovery of Oman. A week later we're in India, my grandparents' home. It was mine too, for the first 20 years of my life. We're here to care for and spend time with my ailing, bedridden grandmother who helped my parents raise me when I was a child. She watches my hyper 9-month-old and jokes, "maybe he eats too many hot peppers." Taskeen picks up the language easily and has no problem conversing in Urdu. In America, I have to goad her to talk in our native tongue. We visit with my sister and her family every day. Taskeen and my sister's daughter are instant friends even though they have met after a gap of two years. Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but I would like them to grow as tight-knit as Taskeen is with her friends in America. I ask my American-born-and-raised husband repeatedly, "Do you think we can move here?" There are frequent visitors at my grand-parents home. They arrive unannounced. How inconsiderate these guests are, I often think. What if we wanted private, family time? What if we didn't want company or weren't home, when they decided to 'drop in', I wonder. Suddenly I realize how American I sound. A decade of living in the United States and in some small almost imperceptible way I had changed. Changed from the more "we" centered easterner, to the more individualistic westerner. How had this happened? I always thought of myself as so Indian. In America, we perhaps are too busy running ragged. I manage a home, raise children and earn an income without much of a support system. As I always say, I'm the queen of my home, as well as its cook, cleaner, gardener, plumber, chauffeur and carpenter. Need a fresh coat of paint? Fridge needs replenishing? No dinner ready? Need a wire mesh fixed? Guess who does it? Perhaps that's why we're so particular about how we divvy up our time. Maybe our American lifestyle necessitates that there be a time and place for everything. That each slot, each slice of life, have its own boundaries without one overflowing into the other. If we let the ball drop once too often, perhaps we'll set off chaos. In India, chores are divided between family and paid help. Since no single individual gets spread out too thin, there's time to invest in the lives of others, without it disrupting the smooth functioning of one's own. But aren't I a product of my homeland? Did it take all of ten years to undo everything I had learned and imbibed back home? We always had aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents around. When did having them participate in our life ever take away from it? Weren't those every day interactions responsible for making our lives richer, more meaningful in the cumulative sense of things? My sister and her husband take us to restaurants, shopping and sightseeing. Not once do they allow me to pick up the tab. They insist on it even though it makes me feel like I am imposing on them. And my children and I aren't the only ones towards whom they extended such hospitality. They have live-in guests who are visiting for a month. I wonder, would Americans be as gracious, or even consider playing hosts for an entire month? Would I? I see, now with eyes of an American, that in India we have relationships, and grow richer because of them, almost on auto-pilot. It's not about scheduling relationships in. Each person plays an active role in so many lives. And I mean all the time, not just on birthdays and holidays. If I lived here, and if extended family lived in the same city, I would have a chance to be and act like a daughter, mother, wife, niece to ones aunts, niece to the friends of ones aunts', grand-daughter to ones direct grand-parents as well as to their siblings and friends, almost all the time! By default, I suppose I'd be more sharing, caring, loving and giving so much so that being that way would become part and parcel of my personality. In India, these traits certainly appear to be a part of the national character! It seems like there is no other way to be. For me, it's not odd that this is how they are; it's odd that I am even noticing that there is such a difference in how people relate to each other. I'm sure there are arguments and misunderstanding in relationships here as well, but how enmeshed in each other's lives everyone is what really strikes me. It makes me see how my life is not quite the same as theirs, and in a way, lacking. 'Indianess', I begin to feel, apparently refers to a state of being helpful or hospitable as a norm. In the months I spend there I don't see actions governed by selfish motives or the 'You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' philosophy. I am suddenly more aware of the number of times I tell my daughter, "I want you to try to do it yourself," because I am short on time. I decide to change tactics. "Sure," is something I make a point to say more often when she asks for help. I'd rather she grow up to be inter-dependent and empathetic, than independent and self-absorbed. Reaching into my past, I arrive unannounced at my friend Sangita Fernandes' home and though she is away at work, her parents welcome my children and me. They make sure we have a good lunch. A couple I am introduced to and befriend, Mansi and Vikram Reddy, gift me with a Himru shawl that I'd liked but thought too expensive a purchase to make. Friends of my mother (whom I didn't even know) bring my children and me gifts. Time and money are scarce resources in India too, yet what made people here more generous with both? More generous than perhaps I would be? "Use it or lose it." You've probably heard the phrase used for the muscles in your body or your memory. I now speculate if the "use it or lose it" theory also applies to character traits. Maybe I lost some of the 'good' traits I originally had. Or at least lost them to some degree. America is a society segregated by sameness. We are segregated by economic status, so may not have the "instinctive desire" to share. Our neighbors' lives are filled, more or less, with just as many 'things' as ours. If they were much richer, they wouldn't be in this neighborhood. They'd move to a bigger house, in a fancier suburb and even better trimmed lawns. If they were much poorer, they would never be able to afford a house in my area. In America, when I have talked of giving to the poor, Taskeen asks me, "Where are the poor? We have to go and look for poor people." I, now, make a mental list of the places I can have the children volunteer. It could be old people's homes, it could be soup kitchens. The idea is to get my kids to recognize and work at resolving despair and misfortune in any small way. My intent is to consciously 'sow' these qualities into my children versus imagining they are simply going to pick it up from the air. I must carve into existence the experiences I want them to have, so they can have the character traits I'd ideally like them to possess. In America, this conscious effort is more necessary than in India where disparity hits you in the face. Someone once asked, "If God is all powerful why did He make suffering or poverty or disease?" I was reading some Taoist philosophy and chanced upon the answer there. It is only in contrast that we can know the intrinsic quality of the other. We know beauty because there is ugliness. We know ease and relish it because we know suffering. We seek love because we know the pain of rejection and loss.To know is one thing. Yes, we "know" poverty happens. Yes, we "know" being generous is a good thing. But to understand and internalize that knowledge through personal experience is what ultimately influences our subsequent actions and our behavior, I realize. Human faces will bring the lessons to life. We sign-up our children for extra-curricular art, music and sports, why not for volunteering too? It teaches a very valuable lifelong skill—compassion 101. I wonder whether as parents we are even conscious of how much we impact the way our kids think. I respect much that is America. It's efficiencies, its opportunities. But I tend to miss 'desi' values and the richness of relationships. I could speculate and analyze what makes Indians back home the way they are. At the end of the day it would perhaps leave me wiser but not any happier. What would make me feel richer was if I found a way to replicate the eastern values I so love, in my adopted home.For no reason, my grandmother blows me kisses or kisses my hand when I sit beside her. I wonder how I can ever duplicate, in my Chicago life, this same feeling of complete love, warmth and affection that surrounds me here. My grand-mother is loved so much and by so many because she takes an active interest in the lives of everyone she knows. Whenever an article of mine was published, her joy and pride equaled what she felt the first time she saw my name in print. When she was in better health she'd cut recipes out from magazines and newspapers and compile them for me. Another cousin of mine remembers how g'ma kept interesting articles from the youth section of various newspapers for her. My grand-mother remembered all our birthdays, anniversaries and achievements. She wrote us regular letters. She gently corrected our waywardness. She stayed abreast of the happenings in our lives, she cared to share our goings-on even as we married and went our own ways. That is what made her so well loved. Maybe that is one ingredient that makes for feelings of connectedness and love. Maybe that is one component I can duplicate in my relationships in my new homeland. In some small way, I have begun setting the foundation for relationships that will, I hope, last a lifetime in America. I've begun the work of chiseling into existence relationships as I remember them. Strong, supportive, invaluable, many hands making light work. Piece by piece, one friend at a time, I have created a larger extended family in Chicago. There are the Hammers, an elderly couple, whom my daughter loves to bits, and who shower me with much affection. There is Evelyn Skala, who is my grandmother's age and yet a very good friend to me. And of course, there are my best friends; my confidants, my group of stay-home moms. And if my parents, siblings and my grandparents were with us … ah, that would be heavenly. Still, there are days I struggle emotionally. No matter how good I have it, no matter how many close friends I've made since moving here, I still miss the comfort of immediacy, cultural-shorthand and shared history. When a ninth grade friend of mine started a blog for that batch of class-mates, I hungrily reached out for camaraderie. 'They knew me when I was a kid," I found myself saying as I tried to bridge the 20 year gap in our friendship. Ditto when I visit with relatives who've moved from the middle-east to Canada. "They remember me as a eleven year old. They mother me and I love it," I say. A college friend, Vaishalli, and I recently connected after more than a decade. I call her every week now. I once did a commentary for NPR about my summers as a child in India. I talked about the memory of my mother drawing the drapes shut, the fan on full, a radio softly churning out an old Hindi song as we lived in hot, humid Bombay by the Arabian Sea. But Hyderabad, where my parents lived, with its power outages and water-shortages always took the cake. I recalled how my grandfather would soak his garden, and the walls of their house, much to my grand-ma's dismay. There wouldn't be water left to cook with, she'd moan. Her protests fell on deaf ears ( literally). The intoxicating smell of wet earth on those hot days still lingers. I remember those details vividly, as if they'd happened yesterday. While visiting Fort Meyers Beach in Florida recently, it felt like a homecoming of sorts. I was reminded of the muggy days in Bombay. The sharpness of the sun, the clear blue skies and pedestrians all over the place, were all too familiar. It felt like home even though this was my first visit ever. That is when I realized that for me, home isn't about brick and mortar. It isn't about physical spaces or familiar streets, nooks and crannies. To me, home and homeland is a sense of belonging to strong, loving, supportive relationships. It's about feeling loved and valued. It's about living with the values I respect and want to adhere to. And it's also about smells, sounds, textures and feelings. To some re-creating home is about recreating meals. To me, it's about re-creating sensations. I miss home, but I can try to re-create home too. I guess at the end of the day, I have my work cut out for me. But it starts with just a few well-intentioned steps and then destiny takes over. I've begun the journey and will persist in its path. My intended destination will, no doubt, appear.

Attititude of Gratitude

By Naazish YarKhan

We have our four days of Thanksgiving vacation on right now and I don’t recall the last time I had so much time on my hands. But that’s not to say we haven’t been doing anything. Wednesday morning was spent at Yousuf’s school where his class put on a play about Thanksgiving. The line up of kindergarteners in their little Native American and Pilgrim outfits were just as endearing as songs they sang about loving the earth and one another. Native Americans, however, don’t necessarily think ‘love and happiness’ around Thanksgiving. For them, Thanksgiving marks days when the Europeans exchanged poison ( alcohol, opium) for food with the Native Americans. ( Not my words but those out of a speech given by one of the Native American Chiefs. ) When the generosity of the Native Americans was repaid with plans to exterminate their population. As my Taskeen says, in America we have a way of “whitewashing our history” so that it all looks glorious rather than pock-marked with racism and bigotry. That way we can all pat our selves on the back and go back to watching our basketball, baseball and football. Opiate of the masses, I call TV. In the days of the Romans, there were the gladiators to keep the public too preoccupied to question their leaders. In modern times, it’s sports and TV. But in the spirit of the holiday, my children and I would feel crushed not partaking of this annual, American tradition and so we do, with much enthusiasm.

Following the 30 min. performance that Yousuf and his classmates put together, we shared some ‘friendship soup’ that the kids had chopped veggies for and simmered in vegetable broth overnight, in slow cookers. It was warm and yummy – perfect for the cold, rainy day that it was. Parents had been assigned to bring in different kinds of bread too – corn bread and pumpkin bread and spinach bread - and after the performance we all helped ourselves to some. The rest of Wednesday was spent chilling with two sets of friends – one in the afternoon and another in the evening. All in all, a nice, unhurried way to spend our holidays.

Thursday was Thanksgiving Day. With dad at work (unexpectedly) and Yousuf at his grandparents ( also unexpectedly), Taskeen and I had the whole day to ourselves. We invariably share Thanksgiving Dinner with extended family at their home but dinner doesn’t always happen at dinner time – sometimes it’s at 2 p.m. But this time, with the invitation for Thanksgiving Dinner actually at dinner time, it just didn’t seem right not to spend the day in the Thanksgiving Spirit.

Hence our decision to whip up a last minute Thanksgiving lunch at our own home, without the turkey of course. (Turkeys usually are 13 pounds each at least, and take about 5 hours to cook and hence my hesitation but I do intend to do it next year). Now there exists what is called a Thanksgiving menu and that’s one of the reasons I love the holiday so much. It’s one of the few things in life that is ‘just the way it was last year and the year before and the year before that’. It truly is bizarre how completely comforting that predictability is. The main course is roasted turkey while the sides are always mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffing, turkey gravy, jello mould, dinner rolls, cranberry something or the other, and pumpkin pie. There’s feeling over-stuffed and then there’s feeling Thanksgiving over-stuffed. The latter is way too much food, in way too few hours. “Gobble, Gobble” is the sound they say a Turkey makes and if it’s thinking of Thanksgiving, you can bet what it’s thinking when it says ‘Gobble, Gobble’. It all sounds yummy, but all of it is an acquired taste. When I first moved here, I couldn’t bear to eat all this tasteless, non-spicy food! Now of course, I;m contemplating making at least some part of it from scratch, perhaps next year.

Getting back to my story. Courtesy the local grocery, where everything can be purchased and heated in the microwave, mother and daughter decided we’d have an impromptu thanksgiving lunch. So we bought some ready-to-eat side dishes. Once home, out came the fall colored table cloth and matching serving dishes, the plates and the glasses. My favorite colors are warm earth colors so my serving dishes inadvertently fit the Fall look. I baked some frozen dough into bread rolls, warmed up the ready-to-eat meals, brought out the forks and spoons. We had lights left up from the Eid party I had last month, so those added to the festive look. Then we called the neighbors to join us with whatever they were planning to have for dinner. The icing on the cake was having Farhat and Yousuf return in time to join our instant thanksgiving party !

One thing I realized over these holidays was how often we don’t eat together, both as a family and as friends. The kids and I usually have dinner together, but Farhat normally has a plate waiting for him in the microwave. I realized how little I entertain and how much fun it is to actually bring out the nice dinnerware and serve food in nice dishes versus just help ourselves from the stove, even if it means more dishes to clear up. It felt warm and wonderful to actually make the effort to make the day extra special – whether it was the nice dinner ware, or the baked bread rolls or having company over.

On the flip side, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, there is something that we have been doing right, and that’s trying to be thankful. Each night, or at least as often as we remember, my children and I thank God for five things in our lives. We thank him and then we ask for five blessings we want in our life. When I forget to go over this, Yousuf invariably reminds me. And when I complain about life, my friends remind me to switch my tune. Being thankful for His mercies and His Bounties, His trials and His tests, is one way to keep the doors to His generosity and His Mercy open.

Somali refugee, Bisharo Amir, finds a home in America

By Naazish YarKhan

It isn’t easy for soccer enthusiast and Wheaton, IL resident, Bisharo Amir, 17, to speak of her past. “My mother gave birth to my little brother under a tree, with the sound of bombs and machine guns blasting, and through it all my brothers and sisters who were small children were crying for her attention,” she shudders. “Can you imagine that?”

Bisharo is originally from Somalia. When war broke out with Ethiopia nearly two decades ago, her family and hundreds of thousands of others fled to Kenya. “It was very sudden. No one knew what was happening. For power and money, friends betrayed each other,” she says of the embattled nations. Bisharo, then three, spent her childhood in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, which was originally established in 1992 for the 20,000 refugees fleeing Sudan.
“My little niece there,” she points to a three-year-old, “children her age shouldn’t have to see so much killing, so much blood, but they have. That’s not good. I don’t think about it, otherwise I won’t be healthy mentally, physically, emotionally. I just don’t think about those days,” says Bisharo. “I can’t believe that a 7-year-old had a gun and wanted to kill people.”

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that at the height of the civil wars in Ethiopia and Somalia in 1991 and 1992, thousands of wounded and famished refugees arrived daily in Kenya's remote border regions. Fighting in neighboring Sudan prompted the flight of thousands more to Kenya, mostly boys escaping the conflict and/or forced military service. By 1992, UNHCR had established 17 refugee camps in Kenya to care for a refugee population of 420,000. 1

As Bisharo explains, refugee camps can be largely lawless. At Kakuma, not only were there diverse refugee populations from all over Africa, but there were also ethnic groupings from a single country who were in conflict with each other back home. “We look very different from Somali people,” says Bisharo, lifting her hijab. “Their hair is straight, ours is curly. We are from Somalia but we are Bantu and we were enemies,” she says.

Proximity to areas of civil strife further enabled easy access to weapons. “When they came for your money and you didn’t give it to them, they’d torture you and even kill you,” recalls Bisharo. She remembers one horrifying night when a neighbor whom she was staying over with was robbed, pulled out of her hutment and raped. “I curled up like a ball in the corner with her children, trying to keep them calm,” says Bisharo, who was no more than a child herself at the time. Rape continues to be a common crisis in refugee camps. Sometimes the police, too, take the liberty to harass refugees. “It was like a prison,” Bisharo observes.

Asked what the hardest thing for her was, Bisharo replies, “not having a father. He was running for his life because they were forcing boys and men into the army. He had also married again, which is very common in African culture. For 2 to 3 years there, I didn’t have a father and I’d see other fathers with their kids, hugging them, playing with them, buying them candy,” she says. “I was ten years old and used to wonder why I was alive? What purpose was I alive for? We needed him emotionally. Now he’s back with us and I don’t hold anything against him. He had to do what he had to do.”

Bisharo glances over at her niece again. “I feel happy for her,” she says. “She has what I didn’t have.”

Her elder sister, now 26, tried filling the void left by their father by working as domestic help in Kenya to help make ends meet.

“We owe her our life,” says Bisharo. “Most of her life she spent doing whatever she could to make us happy. When the food rations UNHCR gave us ran out, we had to work in other people’s homes without a break, without any rest. It was like being Cinderella. I wrote an essay about myself for school (in Wheaton) and I got 100 per cent. My teacher thought it was really good. I told her that wasn’t even half my story,” adds Bisharo, who is learning to play the piano.

To hear Bisharo speak in her English fluent and confident voice, her animated conversation punctuated with laughter, one can’t imagine she moved to the suburbs of Chicago only two years ago.

“My father was a teacher and he knew even girls should go to school,” she says, explaining why her English is so good. “In Africa, they say girls aren’t supposed to go to school. That’s pathetic! That’s lame! My friends’ parents used to say I’ve lost it because I used to go to school. My dad took me to school. Girls grow up early there and get married at 13 or 14.”

Does she plan to tie the knot soon, too? “I worked so hard for my education. I’m going to lose everything if I get married now because I’m going to have to be responsible for my husband. Then if you get pregnant, you’re responsible for the children too. I have to find where I am going first. I just have to go till I end up where I need to go,” she says, resolutely. “If I do get married, it’s not going to stop me because he married me when I was studying and I’m studying hard and you want me to stop? It’s not going to happen!” Is that her advice for her friends as well? Bisharo shakes her head. “They have to do what they want to do.”

A high-school student at Wheaton North High School, Bisharo started out as an ESL student. She topped that class and they bumped her up to the next level, where she came first again. “I didn’t even have to study for health. ‘This is going too far,’ they said, and the next semester I was in a regular class,” she laughs. “I get A’s and B’s but I barely passed history. I’m an average kid,” she says rolling her eyes, then swiftly adds, “but I’m a quick learner.”

Asked about her adjustment to life in America, Bisharo responds by describing her friends. “They are so fun! Americans don’t judge you before they know you. I am a mutt but I hate people calling me a half-breed. My mother speaks Kizigwa and my Dad speaks Mai Mai. I speak both those languages, Somali, Swahili and English! Africans ask me, ‘Who do you like better? Your mother or your father?’ or they ask me, ‘Why did you mother marry your father? Her culture is better.’ I tell them I don’t have to choose between my parents. And about why my parents married? Isn’t that a personal question? So be it, if you think I am a half-breed and don’t like me.”
What else does she like about her new homeland? “Boys and girls are treated equally. Here we can choose. In Africa, our choices are made for us depending on if we are a girl or a boy. It’s not fair! Also, in Africa you can’t be seen walking with a boy because people will gossip. Here, we can joke with boys.”

A tomboy, Bisharo loves that she can be one without it being a big deal like it would be in Africa. “My mother’s friends here tell her she is going to have such a problem with me. But my mum says as long as I am happy, that’s all that matters.”
Bisharo yearns for her aunts and grand-mother who are still in the refugee camps. She wants to become a doctor, loves Japanese Anime and dreams of learning to play the violin. “It would be an honor to learn music. I love Chinese music. It’s so harmonious and peaceful. People used to live in peace in Africa…a long time ago. It’s so much better here.”

Does she think allowing more refugees access to resettlement in other nations is the answer? Bisharo hesitates. “Some people there may threaten you into saying they are family and come with you.” In her answer, you can see ghosts of the past threatening her newfound sense of security. “The future is not written yet. You can only think about now,” she concludes.

1 UNHCR Publications; http://www.unhcr.org/publ/PUBL/3eaff43f16.html

GLEN ELLYN AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAM PUTS ON MEXICAN FOLK TALE

July 18, 2006, Published in the Chicago Tribune

RESOURCE CENTER OFFERS REFUGEES SECOND CHANCES

By Naazish YarKhan

“Ha,ha, ha. Now whose the fairest of us all?” the wicked Queen chortled, sauntering away from the unconscious Princess Blanca Flor. The audience cheered for the cast, which ranged from elementary school–goers to high schoolers. The actors, the majority of whom were African refugees, represented 12 countries and all attend the after-school program run by Glen Ellyn Community Resource Center (GECRC).

“I’m not really, actually evil, but I liked being evil to the princess,” 4^th grader, Nania Chol, says after the play. “Hey, I’m [sitting] right here you know,” retorts Elsita Alarcon, 9, who’d played Blanca Flor, just moments ago. “I always wanted to be a princess,” enthuses the 4^th grader, who adores Shirley Temple and Hannah Montana. “I was surprised I got the part. We had to practice a lot to get it all memorized. It was so much fun!” she says. “How did we get the part? Last year, we were in a play called Rabbit in the Well, so I think they had a sense that we’re good actors,” she says on behalf of herself and Chol.

However, their enactment of Blanca Flor, the Mexican version of ‘Snow White’, was more than a play. It was a means to learn English, proper pronunciation and grammar, said GECRC Director, Daniel Zagami, who has a Masters in Intercultural Studies and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), as does GECRC Assistant Director, Margaret Kraai. “They practiced for three months, thrice a week, 30 minutes a day,” said Zagami. “Many of our students are from cultures that are traditionally oral. I really believe we can teach English by teaching the students oral culture. Kids have a great ability to memorize a lot of information. Instead of written exercises, we used drama to teach grammar, including verbs and tenses.”

Students are divided into groups based on Teacher’s Evaluations indicating literacy levels, and Assessments he and Krai developed and conduct three times a year. GECRC volunteers also fill in a daily Competency Log tracking students’ progress. “Most of the students [in the program] are behind their grade levels. There are clear improvements and in the summer when school is out, we know those improvements are because of the program,” says Zagami.

Between 3:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. each day, “we’re trying to hit things that they don’t cover during school. We teach them to write their name, address and phone number, learn to use a ruler, weigh things, learn synonyms, antonyms...”

The organization was created five years ago when Kasey Sanders, a current GECRC Board member, saw the need for ESL help for some Hispanic families who attended Lincoln Elementary School, in Glen Ellyn, where her own children studied. Today, the program is housed at Lincoln Elementary School itself, since most of its attendees attend Lincoln during the school year. Much of its funding is from the County and Infant Welfare.

“ I liked how everyone had their costumes and looked like their characters and got to say their parts very well,” says Catherine Tarpeh, 11, who arrived from Liberia two years ago, and played the Mirror on the wall. It took her two days to have red extensions, befitting her character, put into her hair. She likes them enough to keep them in until school lets out. Would she ever go back home? “No thank you,” comes the prompt response. Not surprising for a child who has fled the murderous violence that claimed her grandparents and uncles.

“We have 12 or 13 cultural backgrounds, including different languages and religions, and it’s a K-12 program, so we have different age groups too. It’s great to have that cultural diversity but it’s also challenging to accomplish the literacy goals that we have, and have kids work together, because of that,” says Zagami. He is interested in having the children perform at other locations too, so that they can continue to build confidence and practice their English.

(630) 858-0100 ext. 239 or (630) 899-9919; dzagami@ryallymca.org

( This article originally appeared in the July 18th edition of the Chicago Tribune. )

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/access/1306028301.html?dids=1306028301:1306028301&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Jul+18%2C+2007&author=Naazish+YarKhan&pub=Chicago+Tribune&edition=&startpage=4&desc=Summer+play+helps+pupils+learn+English

Best-selling teen author Farah Ahmedi triumphs over Afghanistan’s tragedy

Skyward Bound

By Naazish YarKhan

At 17, she was the author of a New York Times bestseller, a visitor to First Lady Laura Bush, and a guest of Heather and Paul McCartney who presented her with a Humanitarian of the Year Award in 2005. At 19, she is a junior on a full scholarship at North Central College in Illinois. Excerpts of her memoir are currently being translated into 56 languages for the international edition of Readers Digest. Two publishers have purchased rights to use excerpts from her memoirs, including Hampton-Brown, a division of National Geographic. Meet Farah Ahmedi, author of The Other Side of the Sky; the same girl who took a short cut to school when she was seven and lost her leg to a landmine in the battlefield that is Kabul, Afghanistan.

When ABC News’ Good Morning America, in collaboration with Simon and Schuster, asked its viewers to write for “Story of My Life” describing their life experiences, the network was deluged with 6,000 entries and more than twenty thousand pages of inspiring stories. A panel of best-selling authors and editors chose three finalists, and viewers voted one from among these, to be published. . Farah Ahmedi’s story was that book.

Rarely does a book move one’s soul the way this one does, forcing us to reconsider our own good fortune and persuading us that we are on this earth to be our brother’s keepers.

In The Other Side of the Sky, we learn that after the landmine blast, seven-year-old Farah spent two lonely years hospitalized in Germany, away from her family. Her story is shaped by the context of decades of war in her home country. After the fall of the Soviet occupation, the Taliban took over war-torn Afghanistan and imposed their version of Islamic rule. With millions of men dead and women prohibited from working, countless families were reduced to poverty. The Taliban also conscripted young men and boys into their army; coercing many.Fearing for their sons, Farah’s well-to-do parents sent their sons to Pakistan. That was the last time Farah and her family saw the boys. Weeks later Farah and her mother returned from a shopping trip to find rubble and death where their home had once been. Farah’s father and sisters had been killed in a bomb blast.

Farah and her mother, Fatima, joined the thousands fleeing Afghanistan for Pakistan. Unlike Iran, which had closed its borders to Afghan refugees at the time, there were millions streaming into Pakistan. Achieving freedom from the constant gunfire and bombs was like finding heaven on earth, says Farah. “When we finally made it, we couldn’t stop laughing and praising God from sheer relief.”

Once there, Farah’s trials would include servitude to children her own age, where she and her mother lived as refugees, and becoming caretaker to her mother who suffered from asthma. But despite these setbacks, Farah was sustained by her faith in Allah.

Coming to America was not part of their initial plans, until news of the UN program to accept Afghani refugees spread like wild fire. Farah spent days trying to convince her mother to apply and when she heard the program was looking for widows and children with disabilities, she knew it was worth giving it a shot. “We’d been in Pakistan as refugees for four years. People tried to discourage us from applying for a UN program that was taking Afghan refugees to America. They said in America, we would be slaves. That’s what they had heard based on American history, but they didn’t know America had changed. My mother didn’t want to go. But I had been in Germany and I knew that America could be like Germany. It would be a place where someone with a handicap could still have dignity. I knew that wasn’t possible in Pakistan. I would have been a servant or beggar all my life in Pakistan,” says Farah.

She is not exaggerating. Landmines and cluster bombs continue to harm children like Farah in Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa and Palestine who, given the impoverished conditions of these nations, now live with few choices at ever having a normal life. These devices inflict damage long after wars are over. Further, according to recent estimates from the U.S. Committee for Refugees, there are 12 million refugees and asylum seekers throughout the world and 21 million internally displaced persons in need of protection and assistance. In 2005, more than three million people became newly uprooted from their homes and/or countries.

Injury, disability, internal displacement and then status as a refugee could certainly have led to the grim future Farah predicted for herself. Following interviews with the American Embassy in Pakistan, Farah and her mother were amongst the families choosen to be sent to America. At New York, some of the Afghani families were sent to California while Farah and her mother were put on a plane to Chicago. The resettlement agency receiving them in Chicago was World Relief. It turned out to be a bumpy, bewildering beginning, but also one that eventually connected Farah and Fatima with Alyce Litz.. A volunteer with Illinois-based World Relief, a refugee resettlement agency, Litz was to become Farah’s friend, mentor and guide in America, demonstrating that love can transcend boundaries of culture and faith. Alyce has been a mother-figure to Farah for the past five years and is also the founder of Helping Hands Inc., a refugee assistance organization for all faiths.

“As soon as I met Farah, I saw her determination,” says Alyce. She and her husband recognized the potential in Farah and decided to move Farah and her mother to a better school district where subsidized housing was available. “We knew if she attended Glenbard North, the school closest to where she lived, she’d go the refugee route. She’d be in school till sixteen and then be pulled out to go to work. I didn’t want that for her,” says Alyce.

“Alyce moved us to a subsidized apartment, and since we were still on a waiting list for it, she agreed to pay the $900 per month herself. She was that determined for me to go to a good school,” says Farah. As it happened, because they were in occupancy, under the regulations of the time, Farah and her mother were automatically moved to first position on the wait list. Their rent became affordable on their limited income from government aid.

When Farah arrived at school, she didn’t know her English alphabet and she was old enough to be placed in the ninth grade. The last time she had been at school was as a second grader, before she’d lost her leg and before she’d spent two years recovering in a German hospital.

Alyce found tutors to get Farah up to speed and with a few months of hard work, Farah was a high school freshman. “There are so many bright, deserving children out there. I really feel that all it takes is for someone to care enough to give them some support and allow them to realize their potential,” says Alyce.

With Alyce’s help, Farah’s potential was soon realized—when she graduated from high school and went on to college, she quickly made the Dean’s List.

“She happened to be very worried one day. She said the Dean had sent her a letter and that she was on the Dean’s List. In high school that meant a student was in trouble, but I explained to her that in college it was a good thing. She got all A’s and B’s and that’s why she was on the Dean’s List,” says Alyce with a smile.

The Other Side of the Sky is the story of a girl who has already lived several lifetimes, facing obstacles and setbacks most of us cannot imagine. Farah’s journey has led her to establish Farah’s Wings of Hope, a non-profit foundation that helps other amputees with their specific needs, a cause she remains devoted to.

Is she a millionaire off the sales of her book? Not quite. According to the rules of the Good Morning America contest, the winner would be paid $10,000 but royalties from the winning entry belong to the ABC producer who developed the idea for the contest. Farah is, however, entitled to proceeds from the books that she and Alyce sell themselves.

Today Farah Ahmedi is the Youth Ambassador of United Nations Group, Adopt-a-Minefield. She has been featured in Teen Magazine as one of “20 People Who Can Change the World.” She has also been called a modern day Anne Frank by the Weekly Reader. With all these achievements within her grasp, does she now have dreams or do the nightmares of the past remain?

This shy but accomplished young woman admits, “I am still a little afraid to dream but my message remains, ‘Never Give Up!’”

To make a contribution to Farah’s Wings of Hope or to order The Other Side of the Sky, visit http://www.farahsworld.com/. To learn more about Alyce Litz’ organization, Helping Hands Inc., write to Ajlitz@aol.com.

IRAQI REFUGEES HEADING TO THE US

One-on-One with Noah Merrill, In Jordan
By Naazish YarKhan

Terror and persecution force refugees to flee their homelands. Of the 2 million Iraqi’s whose homes and livelihoods have been lost since the Occupation, the US accepted less than 700, during the first three years. This February, that number changed to 7000, of which 2000 will be resettled in Michigan. These Iraqi’s either have family in the US, or have worked for the Americans while in Iraq.

I am unsure whether Oman has accepted any refugees from Iraq, but a large number of new refugee families are expected here through August, says Heidi Moll Schoedel, National Director, Exodus World Service in Bloomingdale, IL. A refugee resettlement agency, Exodus World Service recruits volunteers to receive the refugee families at the airport, along with a caseworker. Still others, can create ‘Welcome to America Packs’ comprising household goods, food staples, and the like and deliver them to the family, on their first day in the United States. For those interested in a long term relationship, there is the “New Neighbor” program, to help refugee families get acclimated to life in America. We would be interested in having a list of mosques and Qurans to give incoming Muslim families, says Schoedel.

I also spoke to Noah Merrill who is in Jordan at this time, where applications for refugee resettlement are being processed by UNHCR, (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). Merrill works with US based, Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society, as director of the project's Direct Aid Initiative, and with its news and analysis website Electronic Iraq ( http://www.electroniciraq.net/). He is also a consultant to the American Friends Service Committee's Middle East Peace Building Program and was in Chicago on a speaking engagement, recently.

According to the UNHCR Iraqi Refugee/IDP Standing Committee Update, as of June 26, 2007, there are a total of 185,000 registered Iraqi refugees in the region. 90,000 have registered in Syria, 30,000 in Jordan, 7,600 in Egypt (11,000-12,000 are expected to register by 2007 end). A total of 200,000-300,000 Iraqi refugees are expected to have been registered by the end of 2007. 2,000 refugees have been crossing into Syria daily. UNHCR has committed to 20,000 referrals for 2007 and has thus far referred 9,441 to a range of countries including the US. “But estimates place the numbers of Iraqis seeking refuge in Jordan at more than 750,000,” says Merrill.

“Depending on the size of the family, then, it's clear that there are tens of thousands of families, many of which have been broken or divided by the suffering of violence, displacement, and legal obstacles to travel, such as men who are not granted visas, while women and children are,” says Merrill. “Or people are separated based on perceived ethnic or religious identity, for example, in cases where the husband and wife come from different sects.” The vast majority of Iraqi families have had loved ones killed or injured by the violence in Iraq. Those made refugees represent close to 1 in 10 of all Iraqis.

Only a handful of these will make their way to Chicago. “Refugee arrival numbers are always unpredictable, but we received requests for help for more than 25 families that came to the greater Chicagoland area during the month of June alone, and we expect similar arrival numbers throughout the summer,” says Heidi. “Most refugees arrive in the United States with little more than the clothes they are wearing and a few personal possessions. They face the difficult challenge of starting over in a new land. It is important that refugees are welcomed when they arrive and receive support as they adjust to their new lives in our communities.” Besides Iraqi’s, new arrivals that Exodus will handle include Burmese refugees of the Chin and Karen ethnic groups, who fled a brutal military dictatorship and Burundian refugees, who have been housed in remote refugee camps for more than thirty years.

“Applicants for refugee status must pass through a complex series of interviews and documentation sessions describing the suffering they experienced and are required to provide whatever proof of persecution they can. If approved by UNHCR, they then must be approved by the country that would accept them for resettlement. “Often this means passing extreme security screenings, as well,” says Merrill. “One family, who are very good friends of mine here, have been waiting for six years to be resettled.”

While these families wait, never knowing if they will be selected for resettlement in another country, the situation in Jordan remains one of frustration, hopelessness, fear, and despair. “While for many the conditions here are of course better than what they fled in Iraq, they have few rights. They are barred from work, and are frequently subjected to raids and threats of deportation if they are caught working. The majority are without sufficient funds to maintain a decent standard of living, and so health problems, lack of good housing, and basic security are significant issues,” says Merrill, who has been involved in work opposing the sanctions in Iraq and then opposing the invasion.

Noah Merill and his wife, Natalie, are in Jordan, expanding on the work they did in the US. ‘I felt I needed to contribute in some small way to improving the conditions in which so many Iraqis found themselves as a result of the actions of the US government and others without the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart,” he says.

The duo make arrangements for medical care and other support for a small number of refugees they met in Jordan this Spring. “Donations to pay for this care came from Americans who want to provide some direct restitution to Iraqis who have suffered and lost so much as a result of the actions of the US government. We also hope to be able to bring the severity of the crisis and the voices of Iraqis to people in the United States through writing and advocacy while here, and on our return in mid-September,” he concludes.

The War in Iraq Etc

By Naazish YarKhan

Spring is in the air. How would I know if I were oblivious of the longer days, the warmer weather? Well, I’d know because I’d have allergies. Yes, tis’ the season for sneezing and wheezing, but I guess I take comfort in the fact that I’m not alone. Naw.. it’s not like everyone else I know is in the same boat… it’s just the multitude of commercials selling anti-allergy prescription medicines that are suddenly hitting the air waves, that tell me I am not alone.

This week hasn’t been impossible. I only have to finish up a few pages of proofreading the magazine I work for, Halal Consumer magazine, and send it to the designer. Anyone out there, who wants to advertise to Muslims in Chicago, give me a holler and I’ll send you the rates. Halal Consumer Magazine reaches 40,000 Muslim families and organizations in the US and abroad. According to Business Week,( Jan. 2007), "59% of Muslim adults in the U.S. have a college degree, compared with only 28% of all American adults. Surveys show that median family income among America's Muslims exceeds the national figure of $55,800. And four out of five eligible Muslims are registered to vote, slightly higher than the overall rate." So it’s a great audience, to market to.

This week I did get, and then lose, a contract to do some web content, leaving me feeling very dashed at the lost, potential income. Deflated hopes flitted around my head despite me telling myself that if I lost the project, I’d have more time to actually work on my novel and sell it. So this is the last time I am going to think of the loss. Split milk. No crying. After all, I do have other work, other income. And I can post my resume online, again.

Last week, wasn’t that bad either. The weekend however was choc-a-bloc. Attended a ‘Peace Rally to Bring the Troops Home from Iraq’. About 50 people were in attendance that crisp, chilly, sunny Saturday morning, as they shared information about why we need to end the war in Iraq.

I don’t know whether these rallies or these candlelight protests help. Bush’s ratings are at an all time low of 30 percent and he has nothing to lose since there’s no reelection on the horizon, so he continues to do as he pleases.

Talking of politics, Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton are already doing fundraisers for the 2008 presidential elections and their respective bids for the seat. Hillary hasn’t apologized for voting to invade Iraq when the idea was first presented to Congress, four years ago, so I won’t be voting for her next year. That aside, what kind of woman, stays with a husband given to extra-marital affairs? Monica Lewinsky made the most news, but there have always been women in former President Clinton’s life, and as much as I am impressed by his/her work ethic, I am not quite sure if I’d vote for a woman who stayed in a relationship for, what to me seems, like little more than political gain. Why wouldn’t you leave a man who constantly cheats on you? It’s not like Hillary didn’t know what Bill was up to. But then again, ask me if I would vote for Bill Clinton, and I’d say, “Yes. He makes a great president, why drag his personal life into the picture.” Go figure!

Barack Obama doesn’t have my vote for president, so far, either. I am not going to vote for someone, just because they happen to be a charismatic person of color. While President Carter is going blue in the face calling the situation in Palestine ‘Apartheid’, and while the media can’t stop hating his guts for doing that, Congressman Obama still comes out in favor of Israel ‘having the right to protect itself.’ Sure, let Israel protect itself I say, but then when the Palestinians ‘protect’ themselves, don’t call it ‘terrorism.’ I I am disappointed that Obama choose to tout the party line instead of thinking for himself. My naiveté annoys my husband. ‘He’s a democrat, representing the democratic party. Of course he’s going to spout the party line. That’s why it’s called a party line,” my husband reminds me. Well, yes. And in the end, everything is political, but I’d like a president who has the courage to stand up for the truth as well. To see things as they are. I guess the consequences are dire for doing that, when you’re a politician.

To those not in the US or not into following politics, all this talk of an election that’s going to take place in Nov. 2008, must seem so ludicrous. But really, it’s not. The main issue, is Iraq. The Democrats won both Houses of Congress in November 2006 because of Iraq. It was a mid term election with the largest turnout of voters, because of Iraq. Iraq continues to be a defining issue and hence, all this early interest in the 2008 presidential elections. On this the 4th anniversary of the Iraq War, 500,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Tens of thousands have escaped to Syria and Jordan. Only 500 were permitted entry into the US. 2000 plus U.S soldiers have died. Where does the candidate stand on this issue, is what’s on everyone’s mind. How soon will the troops be brought home? What is to become of the Iraqi people? Big Questions. How our presidential candidates answer them, could potentially make or break their bid for president. On that note…..Aachoooooo….Aachooooo…achooo…

Even Angels Ask

By Naazish YarKhan

The days are just sliding by. Fun-filled days though. Days filled with downtime and slow time and getting-to-play-with-the kids-time. But mostly summer is a very busy time, with less alone time, with the children being home and on our watch. Amidst it all though, I’ve actually been able to think.

I've been getting pretty uptight about the way some Muslims are so wrapped up in the minutiae of our faith as opposed to the spirit of Islam. Some can endlessly fixate on which foot to enter the washroom with, or how wearing nail polish leaves the ritual ablutions incomplete, hence rendering the prayers unacceptable. Others can get into a tizzy about women having even a strand of hair showing during prayer. That too, apparently, renders the prayer unacceptable. Covering one's hair in public, is the other issue. I don't see it as 'mandatory'.

My understanding of God, is a loving, kind God, as long as we follow the five pillars, avoid what is 'haram' and practice the spirit of the religion. After all, each prayer, begins with the words, “In the Name of the Most Beneficent, the Merciful”. This is my version of Islam. All the 'little' rules, were they really necessary? I couldn’t understand all that energy being spent on fixing others ‘shortcomings’ rather than being energy directed on improving the environment, eradicating child abuse, domestic violence or changing the ills in society, all of which are part and parcel of the spirit of our faith. To me, leaving this world better than I found it, is an Islamic responsibility. Doing it each day of my life, is an Islamic responsibility. A friend reasoned that attention to minutiae, didn’t mean lack of attention to other broader issues. But I disagreed. We most talk about things that we are most passionate about and when nitty-gritty stuff are top of the mind consistently, it’s fairly obvious what one’s most pressing concerns are.

My annoyance at such ‘small-minded’ Muslims began when a lady at the mosque said I should come to the mosque only in full sleeves, (I was in half-sleeves, that day). I had tried on several full-sleeves shirts that morning since I knew I’d be visiting the mosque, but none seemed to match my skirt and I’d given up rather than get late. But she didn’t know that part of the story.

Her comment irritated me. Of what business was my attire to her, since I was only listening to a lecture and was not at the mosque to pray, I thought? I had my extra long duppatta covering my arms and was decently dressed by most standards. “If I stop attending this mosque because I’m insulted by your comment, would that be better?” I asked her, to which she replied that it would be better for me since men were also present to pray and skin distracts men.

The men were on a whole other floor! If catching a glimpse of six inches of flesh on my lower arms is enough to distract them, surely they can’t be paying any attention to their relationship with God. My temper boiled. But not wanting to quarrel in the house of God, as this has been expressly forbidden by the Prophet Mohammad, may God’s blessings be Upon him, I didn’t take the argument further.

This session, for me, got worse during the lecture, when another sister went into how important it was for Muslims to correct other Muslims from wrongdoing, albeit do it in a loving way. While she may have been thinking of asking Muslims to adhere to the five pillars of Islam or something major, I translated it to mean comments like the other lady had just made. Comments, which to me, were extraneous, meddlesome and impolite.

Why weren’t people more worried about their own relationship with God, than how close or how far others, strangers especially, were from attaining heaven? Did I go into their homes and see how politely or rudely they spoke to their spouses, servants or kids? Did I follow them to shopping malls and see if they held doors open for those behind them? Did I sit beside them on a train and see if they politely kept cell phone calls short versus force all the passengers to hear the conversation. A Muslim’s character is, after all, judged by all his deeds and actions. If I wasn’t following them around and critiquing them, what business was it of theirs to comment on my choices? What did they feel they would achieve by making someone feel unwelcome and ill-suited for the mosque? My irritation with that woman, and my annoyance at what some Muslims deem important, from then on seeped into every conversation. I ranted loud and clear to anyone who would listen.

As much as I held fast to my annoyance, I also knew something, which I was willing to accept, and hence examine. I know, when things (or people) begin to irritate us a lot, it is not about them as much as it about us. There was something that was going on within me that was causing me to react so strongly. I had to begin with me, especially since I know from the Quran that God doesn’t change a man's situation, until he changes that which is in himself. Or herself, as the case maybe. There are no free lunches, as my daughter says. You have to sow the seed, to harvest the fruit.

Maybe I was reacting so much because these ideas challenged my comfort zone? Or maybe, I'd rather not see that those ideas have validity, just because they aren't ideas I have intentions of adopting? Or, was it just a matter of me learning to live and let live? Me accepting that God gave us personalities, so that we would be different. By virtue of that, each of us is allowed to lean towards whatever appeals to us about Islam the most. That all of our practices can be and/and, instead of either/ or?

I thought about it, but wasn’t any wiser. I can sort out my thoughts and feelings better when I write, so I began writing an email. An email which I didn’t eventually send. As I wrote, it started to get clearer why some people make such a fuss about nail polish and a single hair showing through the hijab. Prayers in Islam are mandatory. And if one were risking them, one could very well be risking heaven. Hence, these individuals’ concern and feelings of righteous duty, to point things out to all and sundry. Ditto with the sight of women’s skin negating a man’s prayer! To these individuals, everything they knew and had learned about prayer, pointed to its importance. So anything that could challenge the perfect execution of prayer, was to be nipped in the bud.

That was one possibility. But I also realized that it was time to do some reading. I personally feel we often choose the easier path - herd mentality versus intellectual curiosity. We rather do it because our father’s did it, versus seeking the knowledge to find out why such and such, or so and so, applies in religion. It reminds me of a joke. A woman always cut a slice of turkey off before baking it for Thanksgiving. Her daughter, one day, asked why. And the mom goes, “because my mother did it.” And the girl asks her grand-ma, who also says the same. So then the girl asks the great-grandma, who says, " I cut the turkey because I had a small oven and it wouldn't fit in otherwise." I believe a lot simply based on faith. There are no two ways about it. But some issues raise questions. And it would serve me well to know why something says what it does, to understand it with my heart and my mind.

So I've just begun reading up on Islam. I really liked "Being Muslim " by Haroon Siddiqui because it is a critical look at both Muslims and those who are anti-Muslim. I'm also interested in reading Morrocon feminist Fatema Mernissi (http://www.mernissi.net/) . Dr. Umar Farooq Abdulla of Nawawi Foundation (http://www.nawawi.org/) in the USA is an amazing resource as well. Tariq Ramadan’s words are worth their weight in gold, too. Yusuf Islam, Amina Assilmi are others. Their works are often online, many times as free downloadable audio files. If you plan to do something similar, do be aware of those who write about Islam, but hate it with all their hearts. There are many of these writers around too, and the most touted have Muslim heritages.

I want to find out more about Wahabi-ism and what its interpretations of Islam are. It seems to have infiltrated mosques in the USA over the past 10-20 years, and I’d like to see in what way it is impacting the understanding we have of Islam today. I also want to learn specifically about Ijtehad which means intellectual endeavor to seek the solutions of day-today, current matters based on the Quran and Sunnah. Scholars bemoan the fact that there is almost next to nothing of this going on, currently. Again, what’s the impact?

God forgive me if I am wrong, but there is nothing wrong in asking questions and learning more. When God made man, it says in the Quran, that even the angels asked Him, if He would make a creation that would cause bloodshed on earth? When the angels, the most subservient to God, can ask, why not us? But, for Muslims, our intentions need to be clear. We can’t be asking questions, when our only intent is to look for wiggle room, or if our only intent is to dismiss the answers. Even when the intent is noble, certain others may look down on our desire to research religion. But it must be remembered, Islam began with the command ‘Read’. The Quran has repeatedly been addressed to those who ponder, who think, those who use their intellect. And as, the Prophet, God bless and keep him, said: “Seek knowledge even if in China, for the seeking of knowledge is incumbent upon every Muslim.” His other injunctions were, "Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave", and "Verily the men of knowledge are the inheritors of the prophets". And the journey ahead begins with a single step.

LOVE AND LONGING IN CHICAGO

By Naazish YarKhan

With my husband working sixty hours a week or is that seventy, I’ve been feeling alone lately. Not that there is a lack of other people or relationships or anything. But more like there isn't someone to totally, totally just talk to, and feel like you've been heard inside- out. But our week long trip to Canada and relatives last week, did feel like that. As though you're wrapped in love, attentiveness and affection. 4 generations of love and relationships - so much history. Fehmida Aunty and Zahid Mamoo, who we stayed with, are siblings and cousins of my grandparents, and know and love my parents. This visit, we got to know their children and grandchildren.

Taskeen had won an international poetry competition and the award ceremony was held in Toronto. I sent a press release out to local papers about Taskeen's winning and she was interviewed by one paper, and featured in another. Feels good to be guiding one's child well. If I had won the event, I would have run when invited to read my poem at the awards, so why not do it for her, I reasoned. Hubby had to work so driving nine hours with the kids in tow was out of the question. No one else wanted to come for the ride, so we took the bus – 12 hours. Not a bad trip, but not one I’d want to repeat, especially the return journey which got more stinky with each passenger. What’s more, in twelve hours, I could be in Muscat!

From Toronto, we took a train to Montreal. I’ve always been a last minute planner and this time it cost us dearly. All the last minute tickets cost twice as much compared to what they did, had we booked them two, three weeks in advance. We stayed at cousins in Montreal and went sightseeing. The city is so small and compact that distances aren’t an issue so we saw tons of sights each day. Zahid Mamoo and his daughter Azra didn't let us spend a penny. I have rarely encountered that having lived here all these years and this family has been in the West almost 40 years! Their hospitality reminded me of home and India, and my parents and at the end of the trip, I wondered why I live here, away from my siblings and parents, when I could live in the shadow of their love and affection instead.

Arvind Sharma, a friend of mine, originally from Bombay, now in Tuscan, Arizona found out I was living here and called this evening. He is in business with Faisal, my cousin and one of my best buds. Long story short, he found out Faisal and I were cousins and got my number. I remembered who he was the moment I heard his voice on the machine, even though he left a message with a long reminder as to who he was. How could I forget them! Arvind used to teach me math when I was in high school and I used to live at their place when I had exams, once my parents had moved to Muscat. They've been family friends with my parents ever since our dads worked together as young men.

Talking felt sooo good. Like stepping into the past. I can't wait to meet Arvind again. Arvind already had a career when I'd barely finished college. His brother, Atul, and I used to hang out more though. Maybe he'll come visit sometime too. Atul is based in Singapore. I feel so impatient now. Like I want to go and see them now. I am so eager, just to be with them again. I am going to ask him and his wife to come visit or we'll go over and visit. I have tons of family in Tuscan so staying anywhere will not be a problem. And besides my parents have ‘paid it forward’ years and years ago when we used to live in Bombay, and our home was a hostel to every relative using Bombay VT or Sahar International Airport. I can call and stay just about anywhere, because my parents opened their home to others with their hospitality and large-heartedness.

Maybe summer is also hard because my girl friends and I don't bother to keep in touch anymore. When the kids were younger and in preschool and hanging around our necks all day, we were desperate. The moms-and-children weekly get together kept us sane. Now, the kids are older. We have a laundry list of activities for them to attend and a phone call a week, between us friends, is something big. Sad, especially since I know I need relationships and what they do for me emotionally, but I just don't make the effort. Even when my neighbors Sadiya and Tariq moved to another town 30 minutes away, I'd go over and spend the night at their home, because it just felt like home. But a year later, I've given up on consistency which really is key to a good relationship.

But all is not lost. We are going to Columbus, Ohio for a former neighbor's son's birthday. Five families will make the six hour drive and we're all going to stay at the birthday house. It will be so much fun. Like a wedding house. We had 40 people under one roof, for two weeks, for my wedding. God willing, my hubby and I will have been together 13 years in August. I’ve been looking at pictures from summer holidays a year ago and two years ago and boy the kids grow quickly. How the last few years have flown by, and Praise be to God, we've really been happy together these past few years. Taskeen going away to college is a mere nine years away, her wedding maybe 15 years away? God willing, Yousuf will be in kindergarten in the fall. It feels like yesterday when I brought him home and called him Hasmuk Raja because he smiled so much. Both children in school. Quasi empty nest. It’s time for another one, maybe?

OH ME! OH MY! OH NO! IT’S SUMMER TIME

By Naazish YarKhan

Oh Me! Oh My! Oh No! It’s summer time and the kids are home. Needless to say, everything was out of whack the first week. The kids weren’t listening to anything. I was yelling, I was swearing and I was turning blue. And they still weren’t listening. How obstinate. How argumentative. Whose children were these, or rather why on earth did they have to turn out just like their parents, I wanted to know! Then I decided. Enough was enough. Three strikes and you’re out, became the rule. Want to back talk, want to leave the dishes on the table, want to leave the room a mess? Get ready for the ruler, if those are the choices you want to make, I warned them. Now my kids have never been hit. Maybe Yousuf has been spanked a total of ten times in his entire life. They only know rewards, stars and stickers for delivering the goods. Did baba say this was okay, asked my Taskeen? She was positive her dad would never agree. It’s a deterrent, I said to the man who pays all our bills. And I will not use the ruler if I am livid and close to losing my sense of control, I reasoned with my kids. But won’t you be angry if we’re not listening? You get angry about every little thing, retorted Taskeen.

So the rules were absolutely no whining, no backtalk, no yelling, obeying promptly, finishing meals without reminders and without having to be nagged and without running around in between mouthfuls. Other rules were making the bed before they left their rooms, picking clothes off the floor and hanging them in the closet. If they goofed up thrice, out came the ruler, and across their hand once. The first time my son earned his swat, “it didn’t hurt”, he whispered to his sister. “Come, I’ll give you another one then,” I offered and he politely declined the invite.

I wasn’t the only mom in this state. So were my friends. We were all being subjected to having the kids home 24 x 7. Another friend sent her 4 year old to bed without dinner for his backtalk. I told my kids as much. “What’s happening to all the children? Why are they all getting in trouble?” my Yousuf wailed. “All the mothers use the teachers as babysitters and don’t know how to take care of us, when we are home all the time,” responded my nine year old, Taskeen. I had guessed as much, but since when did she know how to read my mind? I also imagined that our minds have been reconfigured by instant access and instant messaging and instant results, and nothing, absolutely nothing, about raising kids is instant. They don’t listen in an instant, and they certainly don’t follow instructions and do as they are bid, in an instant. Who knew summer meant putting my mind and my expectations in slow mo? But the idea of the ruler, as I saw, was one terrific one. I had control over the kids and really there’s no reason to yell anymore. If they err, they face the consequences… and now they know mom will follow through with the swat. Three strikes is all it takes, and they’re being careful.

EXCELLENT PRIMER ON ISLAM IN THE MODERN DAY CONTEXT OF WORLD POLITICS

Mr. Siddiqui is the award-winning editor and columnist of Canada's largest circulation newspaper, the Toronto Star and author of Canadian best seller, Being Muslim. He is a former president of the very prestigious PEN, Canada, as well as a Hafiz-ul-Quran, which means one who has memorized all 114 chapters of the Quran. Mr. Siddiqui has been awarded the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honor, for his journalistic contributions as well as for his volunteer work. His book Being Muslim is targeted at adults and youth, and his columns in the Toronto Star can be read online at http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/94618

Why do I think his work is so relevant? Well, we live in dangerous times. The decision to have him speak to an audience would have far reaching benefits, because it is an alternative, a pre-emptive move to appeal to Muslim youth and adults alike, with balanced, informed insights. Let there be no mistake, there are those in our very midst, who believe that violence is justified, and that distorting religion to fuel violence is justified. They exist and they recruit our vulnerable.

While American Muslims, by and large, have not indulged in the kind of terrorism that UK has witnessed, we need to make sure our communities have balanced perspectives made available to them. Views such as Mr. Siddiqui’s would counter-balance talk and opinions based on skewed observations, that can rile up passions to the detriment of Muslims at large. By God’s grace, we in the US, still have time to take a pro-active stance in educating the community, and the likes of Mr. Siddiqui, are the arrows in our quiver. He represents Muslims whose voices often go unheard amidst the Islamophobic ravings of the likes of Irshad Manji and the violent rhetoric and actions of extremists, both of whom have come to define Muslims and Islam in the public mind.

Being Muslim has been internationally recognized as a bridge to create a better understanding of Muslims and Islam amongst Non-Muslims. Amongst Muslims, it provides an overview of key contemporary political and social issues affecting us. A voice of moderation and wisdom in the post-9/11 world, Siddiqui has a readership that includes people from many cultures. According to the American Library Association review on Amazon.com:

“While clearly concerned about terrorism and other dangers, Siddiqui attacks the propaganda of collective guilt. Without preaching or political jargon …., he shows that the extremists are being challenged by a new generation of Muslims, and welcomes the current internal reformation.”

Based on Br. Siddiqui's interviews with scholars and other experts and his travels in Muslim lands and in the West, Being Muslim summarizes the impact of terrorism on Muslims; explains how Islam is interwoven into the daily lives of ordinary Muslims, regardless of where they live; dissects Western discourse, especially the media's, on Islam and Muslims; and tackles all the controversial topics, from terrorism to the treatment of women. It ends with the hope that, despite the current misunderstandings and anger, there are reasons to expect a future of mutual understanding.

On that note, I hope you shall buy the book. You can browse through it on Amazon and read excerpts, too. If you’re a distributor, I hope you’re thinking of purchasing the book and stocking your stores. And if you’re a university, or a school principal, I hope you’re thinking of booking Mr. Siddiqui for a lecture. Between his speaking engagements in Malaysia, Singapore and cities across the globe, I’m sure he’d love to visit your city, too. And if you think of doing any of the following, do remember to email me too, or tell his publicist that you read about his book in my column. Like my engineer husband says, it doesn’t matter how hard you tried, the only thing that matters are the results you can produce!

WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE A WRITER

One-on-One with Author, Rukhsana Khan

Meet Toronto based Rukhsana Khan, author of Bedtime Ba-a-a-lk, Ruler of the Courtyard, Muslim Child, The Roses in my Carpet, King of the Skies, Dahling If You Luv Me Please Smile and Silly Chicken. The woman is a cause for celebration! Not only is she a mainstream and immensely readable children’s writer but her stories are about Muslims and their causes. She provides young Muslims with characters they can identify with and at the same time offers non-Muslims a better understanding of their Ramadan observing, Jumaah praying, halal eating, hijab/ jilbab wearing neighbors! Her stories range from heartbreaking ( Roses…) to the wacky (Silly Chicken, Ruler of the Courtyard).

Rukhsana has wanted to be a writer since she was thirteen. And today that is what she does full-time. ( Did I hear someone just say ‘Never give up on a dream? )“ I write books about Muslims that are mainstream in nature. They're for everybody, not just Muslim. I've built up quite a following within the Canadian publishing industry,” she says.

“Basically being an author to me means thinking in non-linear terms. Most Muslims are very good at linear thinking, and learning, but my books are about non-linear thinking. There are definitely messages and morals in all my stories, but they tend to be interwoven into the plot.”

The response to Rukhsana’s books has been overwhelmingly positive. “I've had some pretty amazing experiences in the seven years I've been published. I've had a LOT of emails including one from a thirteen year old boy in Alabama who wanted to become Muslim after he read “Muslim Child” (thirteen times). When I asked him why, he said it just seemed like such a beautiful way to live. I sent him a book on how to pray and a prayer mat and a few other things. He was so cute!” Rukhsana has a treasure trove of stories like that one.

“Dahling, If You Luv Me, Will You Please, Please Smile,” her third book, was rated by one reader as a novel for every middle school and high schooler, growing up in the West. It’s a novel that captures the American/Canadian Muslim experience while portraying how each of us deal with problems that range from wanting to fit in to having to contend with friends with big breasts! And she manages it went resorting to School Marm mindset or manners. It’s the protagonist, Zainab’s, struggle that young adult readers will identify with. Her decisions are made within the framework of her values and that truly makes for a thought-provoking read, says another reader.

“When my third book came out, my novel, I was with my husband at his business booth at this festival called Word on the Street, when a black teen came by. She picked up my novel, “Dahling”, and said, ‘You know, I loved this book!’ I thanked her. Her mom was with her and she said, ‘No, you don't understand. She really loved that book. It's the first book nobody ever had to force her to finish.’ The black teen was nodding. I felt flabbergasted. I was so surprised. Then she asked me if I was working on other stuff. She'd gone to look for any other novels I'd written but couldn't find any. I told her I was working on another novel. I'm still working on it, but honestly, I was scared whether she'd find it disappointing.” Err.. Rukhsana..Chill girl. I’m sure it’ll rock!

Same book, different incident. “I was invited to a preppy private girl's school in a very well-to-do neighborhood. I was expecting the girls to be bored little snobs. But on the contrary, they were some of the nicest, most sincerely interested students I'd ever seen. The girls were in high school, and they were asking in depth questions about me, my writing and especially about the novel. One girl in particular… had obviously read the book and her questions were very well thought out. When I got home, she emailed me and told me that she'd actually pretty much given up on novels until she read mine. She found it to be 'true'.” Wow!

“I've been lots of different schools presenting. I went to one school in a posh suburb of Toronto where there was a real air of tension in the grade eight group I was presenting to. Then this black boy came in, wearing a bandana and baggy jeans tied low in that rapper style….”.

I was just about to begin when that black kid got up and left the room. I asked the preppy young girl who was … to introduce me, ‘Where is he going?’ She said, ‘I don't know. They probably asked him to leave. He's bad!’

I told her I hoped he'd come back. She just looked at me doubtfully. He did come back.

I started my presentation on my picture book “The Roses in My Carpets”, and when I began describing how I wanted to be white as a kid and the various things me and my sisters tried to lighten our skin, that black child … in the back yelled out, ‘YEAH! YEAH!’ All the kids whipped around and looked at him and he was still gesturing and shouting, ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ And I thought, ‘Subhanallah!’ He'd been through the same thing!” Awwww…sweeeet!

Many of Rukhsana’s books have nominated and/or won national and international awards. She even has one of the top agents in the North American writing field representing her work. That means that Rukhsana writes a story and her agent shows it to numerous publishers and eventually sells it to the one who offer Rukhsana the highest payment for her story.

Since she’s been published Ms. Khan has had some strange experiences too. “I've actually had Pakistanis email me asking me to match them up with a 'beautiful' girl so they can immigrate to Canada. I've also received numerous emails from people who can't write or spell, asking me to collaborate and write a bestseller, and split the profits. I told them: ‘Why don't you write it yourself? That way you can keep all the money.’ ” LOL.

What is it like being a hijabi author? “I felt a little self-conscious at first, wearing hijab, but I've actually found it to be an advantage. I attended numerous writing conferences and workshops, meeting editors and networking. As a result of the hijab, the editors always remembered me and were intrigued, wanting me to submit my work.”

“Editors tend to be on the liberal end of the spectrum. Very open-minded and tolerant people. I've experienced nothing but respect from all the various editors and publishers I've worked with. It was different with the Muslim publishers I initially approached. They wouldn't give me the time of day.” Hmm… I wonder what THAT’s about?

“I'm often invited to schools with significant Muslim populations because they see me as validating their experience. Especially in Canada there's a real drive to be inclusive and tolerant of other cultures, so I'm often brought in for that purpose. I'd often have the kids laughing and engaged for my whole presentation. Then the Muslim kids would come up to me afterwards and tentatively ask, ‘Are you Muslim?’

I used to get so surprised. I'd laugh and say, ‘Of course!’ The Muslim kids would grin, stand a little taller and say, ‘I'm Muslim too!’ But thinking on it later, I realized that they'd never really met a funny Muslim.” True, true.

Often, the teachers were changed by Rukhsana’s presentation even more than the children. “Because even though we've got such a multicultural drive in the educational field here, many teachers don't expect much from multicultural authors. I mean, they don't expect them to be entertaining and thought provoking. And I've often sensed a bit of hostility or sometimes apathy from some teachers who've invited me. It used to make me feel resentful, but I've learned not to write them off so quickly.”

“Often the same teachers will come up to me after the performance and say, ‘Wow. That was really good!’ I'm often tempted to say, ‘Well yeah!’ But I don't. I just say, ‘Thanks.’ It's often those very teachers who were so hostile and apathetic, who end up becoming some of my biggest advocates.

“I am a children's writer because I love children's books,” she says. And as a mother to three girls and a boy she has plenty of memories to cull from for stories for her books. Her oldest daughter is twenty-one, her twin daughters are eighteen and her son is eleven. She does have a novel geared towards adults in the works but plans to remain a predominantly children's writer. Is that a hurray I hear from Muslim children around the world?


To learn more visit: www.rukhsanakhan.com

Keep Housing Affordable In Naperville, Downers Grove, Say Residents

Together Each of us Achieves More
By Amy Lawless

"Action springs not from thought, but from readiness for responsibility."
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich German theologian (1906-1945)

The cost of housing is sky-rocketing and in effect, squeezing out the middle class – our teachers, policemen, taxi drivers and every day working people. What has been lacking, until recently, is organized political will to either pressure or support elected officials to take action. However, under the guidance of DuPage United, since June 2006, a team of residents from Naperville began to explore the issue of affordable housing specific to Naperville. A team of residents in Downers Grove did too. Lake County United and United Power for Action and Justice in Cook County are also working on the issue in their respective counties.

The Naperville and Downers Grove teams used a number of strategies after they had researched the issue. This included dozens of community meetings, many education sessions on housing, presenting the research at city council meetings, and requesting the city council to direct city staff to work with them on this issue. The Naperville team, for instance, met with each member on the city council to educate them and build support. The leaders also sought support from the Naperville Chamber of Commerce, who agree that affordable housing is a workforce development issue. The City of Naperville had never directed staff to spend time on this issue and did not see affordable housing as a priority. However, as a result of these efforts the mayor and council have voted to have affordable housing as a priority for their Strategic Initiative Plan for 2007, which means this issue is now a priority for the city.

As someone once said, the word Team could very well be an acronym for Together Each of us Achieves More Interested individuals, organizations and mosques are requested to join the effort. Please contact Don Derrow (donderrow@wideopenwest.com) in Naperville, and John Hazard (hazardj@comcast.net) in Downers Grove, Lake County United ( Kitty Cole 847-735-0418, ColeKitty@comcast.net) and United Power for Action and Justice in Cook County ( Stephen Roberson, (708) 386-6102).

About the Writer: Amy Lawless is a lead organizer with DuPage United.

Not Your Mothers Movie Review

I am a writer because I also happen to be an insomniac… at least the nights I do not fall asleep at 9 p.m. sharp. Tonight, is not one of those early nights, and I have actually had to pull myself out from under warm blankets to quite the thoughts running through my head. Downloading them in MS Word normally works better than a glass of hot milk or a shower.

My days, however, have been going well. They’ve been marked by some realizations that have had a positive impact. Sunday, March 4, 2007 I’d stepped out for brunch with some activists friends. (We’re calling ourselves American Muslimah Activists (AMA), or so I think.) “I’ll be back in an hour and a half,” I said to Farhat as I left him with the kids. No resistance, no questions. Same scenario at 4:00 p.m. that evening. I wanted to see ‘Blood Diamond’ before it left the cinemas, and needed my movie fix, as well. ( I am a movie junkie.) I knew the children had something to eat for dinner. With a quick good- bye, I left hubby with the kids. With no servant, rare is the day that he and I watch a movie together in the cinema. Squelching my guilt at leaving the kids again, I told myself I needed to seize the moment and actually do what I wanted to do. That bit of advice to myself is precious because I don’t know how to have ‘relaxed’ fun. I write for fun. I am an activist for fun. I email for fun. Plus, I am an expert at making myself miserable thinking of the really ‘fun’ stuff I want to do, without actually making the time or effort to get it done.

As for Blood Diamond…. Well, I went to watch a movie and I came away with new eyes. That $4.50 I spent on the ticket did more for me than a series of sessions with a therapist would do. It left me without even a fraction of a reason to complain about my life. How dare I…, I who have health, food, heat on cold winter nights, peace and security,… how dare I complain? The kind of terror chronicled in “Blood Diamond” is the everyday reality of millions, both in Africa and elsewhere.

Leaving the theatre, I realized how I’d become the person who notices only the black dot on a white piece of paper. I saw clearly, that no matter how good things were getting, my focus was on the one or two things that were less than perfect, and that colored my entire perspective of how my life was. I returned home, actually wishing I was more pleasant and happy like my husband, instead of the high-strung, grump that I am by default. Talk about paradigm shifts.

Finding fault with him and being dissatisfied in general, I saw, had become second nature. This when, MashaAllah, MashaAllah, things have never been better. Yes, he can be the kind to put himself first, but he is also the kind who doesn’t gripe and groan, if his wife wants to leave the kids with him and go to see friends, or a movie. He is also the kind who will do the laundry and take out the garbage. How had I forgotten to value the good things in my life, the good things about my spouse? How I had not seen that it would make me a happier person, if I could begin to truly appreciate all that met my needs in my relationship with him? How had I never, ever seen that it would do me good to learn a thing or two about attitude from him? And I told him as much, much to his shock. I sincerely apologized for being Mrs. Grumpy so regularly, instead of being Mrs. Farhat Ali Khan.

Haranguing the kids, I realized, had become another hobby. Instead of talking to them nicely, and asking of them politely, and punishing them in moderation if they didn’t listen, I nagged, nagged, nagged. That produced no results, leaving me the archetypal bitter, angry woman.

Blood Diamond mirrored many parts of the world, as they exist today. Darfur is not some far off concoction. It’s a living breathing people being made homeless, living in fear. Babies, women, kids, men are killed as a matter of fact, while others die of starvation and diseases, even as I write this minute. Bosnia, wasn’t some piece of fiction. Boys and men were slaughtered by the thousands. Palestine is littered with cluster bombs, just as Afghanistan is a bed of landmines. It’s no secret. “One of the most deadly legacies of the 20th century is the use of landmines in warfare. Anti-personnel landmines continue to have tragic, unintended consequences years after a battle and even the entire war has ended. As time passes, the location of landmines is often forgotten, even by those who planted them. These mines continue to be functional for many decades, causing further damage, injury and death.” Cluster bombs are no different. “These are bombs that contain many little bombs. When they are detonated, the bomblets explode, spraying shrapnel in many directions. The small pieces are not effective against armored personnel but are devastating to civilians. Many of the bomblets do not explode, however, and are left to lay on the ground until someone, often a child, comes along and sets them off accidentally, like landmines, litter the ground with the potential to explode years later. There are said to be thousands in Kosovo.”

These aren’t things that took place thousands of years ago. This is today, yesterday, the day before. How could I have lost perspective, so truly and completely, of the value of focusing on the positive instead of the negative in my life? I, who grew up in India, seeing shanty hunts in the shadows of skyscrapers and beggars at doors of restaurants asking for mere coins when the people inside splurged like there was no tomorrow? I, who see the challenges refugee families face, as the grapple to piece their lives together? How had I allowed myself to turn into an auto-pilot grump when life was so good to me, by God’s grace? Women need at least three daily glasses of milk, or its equivalent in calcium supplements, to keep mood swings at bay. Apparently, I was running way low on my quota.

Well, it’s better late than never and I hope my eyes stay wide open. My heart, too. I hope I will continue to have friends who will tell me to get a reality check, instead of fueling a pity party. I pray, too, for peace. I pray that I can donate to every cause that rallies against war, injustice and the killing of innocents. I pray that every person who is able, does the same whether in words or in monetary support. I pray that every parent can sleep at night, knowing that their children are safe and will have enough to eat.


In scripture, there are verses that speak of us being accountable for our gifts, be it talent, wealth, health….. I have come to see clearly, that we who have been gifted with peace and security, we will be questioned by God, as to how we used those gifts for those who suffered without. Watch ‘Blood Diamond’. You’ll see there is no way we won’t be held accountable, on the day of Judgment, as to what we did with peace and security when the rest of the world was aflame. .

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Seven refugees grateful for new home, worry about relatives in Lebanon

BY KATHRYN GRONDIN

Daily Herald Staff Writer, Posted Sunday, October 15, 2006

If Hassan and Iman Al Samurrai could get better TV reception with a basic antenna, they'd be glued to the small screen in their Glen Ellyn apartment. After years of waiting, the couple and their five children, ages 2 to 17, emigrated from Lebanon in late June, not a moment too soon.Just days later, the war between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah militants began, with Israel dropping missiles into Beirut, the Al Samurrais' former hometown. If they had cable or satellite TV, they would have been scouring news footage for a glimpse of one of their many friends and relatives caught in the skirmish. They'd agonize over their inability to bring some relatives here to safety. They left behind Iman's two brothers, several aunts, uncles and cousins - family and friends who lived in and around the bombed area of Beirut. Even now, as the violence has subsided, they still haven't accounted for all their loved ones.

Hassan Al Samurrai, endured a difficult odyssey to make it the U.S. in late June. A native of Iraq, he was persecuted under Saddam Hussein’s regime and eventually fled to Syria, where he was jailed. "The whole area has been destroyed," Hassan Al Samurrai said through an interpreter. After days of uncertainty, the couple learned that dozens of people they know in Lebanon had gone underground. But one brother suffers from mental disorders and panics every time bombs go off, and the other brother's health is precarious because he has artificial intestines. The latter is trying to care for his brother in addition to supporting his own wife and two children. "My brother was crying out of despair ... pleading for help," Iman said through an interpreter. "It's not livable underground." The Al Samurrais are relieved for their good fortune, leaving just before the airports shut down. But they are concerned over the continued turmoil in their homeland.

"I don't care who gets the land," Hassan Al Samurrai says. "I just want peace so people can live." Starting over - again Settling in the Western suburbs has been just another bittersweet chapter in the 48-year-old Hassan Al Samurrai's odyssey. He was born and raised in Iraq, where he counted himself fortunate to hold sergeant's rank in the police force. That was until one day in the early 1980s, when he found himself facing charges of political crimes because, he said, a friend was outspoken against Saddam Hussein's regime. Believing he'd never get a fair trial under Saddam's rule, Al Samurrai fled for Syria, leaving behind five brothers. It wasn't an ideal choice but the best he had: He knew Syria wouldn't deport him to Iraq because of the political climate between the two countries at the time. Jordan and Turkey likely would have sent him back, he said. But, without a passport or other travel documents, Al Samurrai had to explain to Syrian officials why he sought entrance to their county. He was promptly jailed.

During the yearlong incarceration that followed, he said he was repeatedly beaten with sticks, given electrical shocks and burned by cigarettes. He was kept in a box not much larger than a small filing cabinet with a hole for his head. All the prisoners were "packed in like sardines," he said. But at least he was alive. The Syrian government eventually recognized him as a refugee, released him and sent him to Lebanon. It was there he met his wife, Iman, now 39, whose own parents and their families had fled Palestine in 1939. The couple married in 1987, eventually having three sons, Koutaba, now 17, Hussein, 16; and Mohammad Ali, 2, who was named for the boxer, his parents said; and two daughters, Nahida, 15, and Isha, 12. As a refugee in Lebanon, though, Hassan lacked the same rights as legal citizens and was denied many opportunities.

The family most recently lived in a two-room, windowless basement apartment they often shared with rats. Hassan struggled to make ends meet. His work as a bodyguard and chauffeur paid barely enough to feed his family and provide other basics. "I had no future there," he said. 'Castle' in Glen Ellyn Hope blossomed anew in 1994 when Lebanon granted Hassan official refugee status, opening the door for him to apply to emigrate. Finding a country to accept the family proved difficult. Canada, Australia and Finland turned them down before the U.S. granted them entrance. Worrying about their relatives in Lebanon and Iraq has been the bittersweet flip-side to making a new life in Glen Ellyn. "This is a castle," Hassan said of their three-bedroom apartment with kitchen, dining area and family room near Roosevelt Road.

The family is trying to learn English through a program at nearby Faith Lutheran Church coordinated by DuPage United, the social service network. And life is still a struggle. Iman got a job cleaning hotel rooms but since had to give it up, partially because of health issues. Hassan, whose leg remains weak from an old bullet wound, still hasn't found work but remains optimistic. That positive attitude, common among the refugee students in the ESL program, impressed its organizers and tutors. "They've shown so much resilience," said a program organizer, Naazish YarKhan. "They're just happy to be alive."

By kgrondin@dailyherald.com dailyherald.com