Sunday, May 02, 2021

Jus Primae Noctis

 

I first heard about the law of Prima Noctis when watching a BBC television program in Manchester, UK around 1970. The TV presenter explained that it meant that the members of the house of lords had the legal right to commandeer any newly married woman in their respective realms and spend the first night after her marriage with her as they wished. He claimed that the law was, until then, on the English statute books.

Wikipedia has a lengthy article on the subject with 56 references that suggest the law had existed and been practiced in Europe and elsewhere from as early as the third century BC until abolished in certain countries as late as the 18th century CE and made covert or voluntarily abandoned in other places.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_du_seigneur.s

Recently, I came across the following passage from the King James version of the holy Bible:

Luke 1

 1.26 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto

a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,

1.27 to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house

of David ; and the virgin’s name was Mary.

1.28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly

favored, the Lord is with thee : blessed art thou among women.

1.29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in

her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

1.30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary : for thou hast found

favor with God.

1.31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a

son, and shalt call his name Jesus.

1.32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest ; and

the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David :

1.33 and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever ; and of his

kingdom there shall be no end.

1.34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know

not a man ?

1.35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall

come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow

thee : therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee

shall be called the Son of God.

 The passage must have been read millions of times by as many devout Christians who found nothing amiss in it. However, someone devoid of reverence for the Bible might see it differently. He might observe the Holy Ghost trying to seduce a married woman who is still a virgin offering the unlimited kingdom of the world – something that could be termed the divine exercise of Jus Primae Noctis.

Could it be that the incident was phrased by the scribes of King James intentionally in this way to provide religious justification for a practice that would seem immoral in the light of commonly understood Christian values?

 


Friday, April 16, 2021

A Tale of Two Abrahams

It was in the privileged region of Arabia, nearly four thousand years ago as per Biblical records and Islamic traditions, that a man named Ibrahim (Abram or Abraham) was born in a family of stone carvers who from his very early life, protested against man's worship of other men and stone objects.
 The story is narrated in the Holy Qur’an as in following Verses translated by M. H. Shakir: 

 [6.74] And when Ibrahim said to his sire, Azar1: Do you take idols for gods? Surely I see you and your people in manifest error. 
[6.75] And thus did We show Ibrahim the kingdom of the heavens and the earth and that he might be of those who are sure. 
 [6.76] So when the night over-shadowed him, he saw a star; said he: Is this my Lord? So when it set, he said: I do not love the setting ones. 
[6.77] Then when he saw the moon rising, he said: Is this my Lord? So when it set, he said: If my Lord had not guided me I should certainly be of the erring people. 
 [6.78] Then when he saw the sun rising, he said: Is this my Lord? Is this the greatest? So when it set, he said: O my people! surely I am clear of what you set up (with Allah). 
 [6.79] Surely I have turned myself, being upright, wholly to Him Who originated the heavens and the earth, and I am not of the polytheists. 
 [2.258] Have you not considered him (Namrud) who disputed with Ibrahim about his Lord, because Allah had given him the kingdom? When Ibrahim said: My Lord is He who gives life and causes to die, he said: I give life and cause death. Ibrahim said: So surely Allah causes the sun to rise from the east, then make it rise from the west; thus he who disbelieved was confounded; and Allah does not guide aright the unjust people. 
 [21.51] And certainly We gave to Ibrahim his rectitude before, and We knew him fully well. 
 [21.52] When he said to his father and his people: What are these images to whose worship you cleave? 
[21.53] They said: We found our fathers worshipping them. 
 [21.54] He said: Certainly you have been, (both) you and your fathers, in manifest error. 
 [21.55] They said: Have you brought to us the truth, or are you one of the triflers? 
[21.56] He said: Nay! your Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth, Who brought them into existence, and I am of those who bear witness to this: 
[21.57] And, by Allah! I will certainly do something against your idols after you go away, turning back. [21.58] So he broke them into pieces, except the chief of them, that haply they may return to it. 
 [21.59] They said: Who has done this to our gods? Most surely he is one of the unjust. 
 [21.60] They said: We heard a youth called Ibrahim speak of them. 
 [21.61] Said they: Then bring him before the eyes of the people, perhaps they may bear witness.
 [21.62] They said: Have you done this to our gods, O Ibrahim? 
 [21.63] He said: Surely (some doer) has done it; the chief of them is this, therefore ask them, if they can speak. 
 [21.64] Then they turned to themselves and said: Surely you yourselves are the unjust; 
[21.65] Then they were made to hang down their heads: Certainly you know that they do not speak.
 [21.66] He said: What! do you then serve besides Allah what brings you not any benefit at all, nor does it harm you? 
 [21.67] Fie on you and on what you serve besides Allah; what! do you not then understand? 
 [21.68] They said: Burn him and help your gods, if you are going to do (anything). 
 [21.69] We said: O fire! be a comfort and peace to Ibrahim; 
 [21.70] And they desired a war on him, but We made them the greatest losers. 
[21.71] And We delivered him as well as Lut (removing them) to the land which We had blessed for all people. 
[21.72] And We gave him Ishaq and Yaqoub, a son's son, and We made (them) all good. 

 1: According to Qur’an Abraham’s father was Azar, not Terah as in KJB Genesis 11:26 “And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran.” 

After considerable reflection and divine guidance on the commonly worshipped phenomena and the royal claims of divinity, he put forward the concept of a Supreme Being, omnipotent and omnipresent, who created the world and who alone deserved to be worshiped; that by comparison to that Being all humans are almost equal and ought to treat each other equally and that all human beings will have to account for all their actions on the day of judgment. The believers of Jewism, Christianity and Islam believe that the ideas were not his own but were the result of God’s guidance. 

As he became vocal in the expression of his ideas of human dignity, monotheistic religion and democratic attitudes, the imperial establishment unable to counter him by argument began to feel threatened and he was made the object of crude persecution. The refusal to worship political and religious rulers and their deities was really a negation of their domination, which deserved the most exemplary punishment. So much so, that he had to leave his homeland and migrate to a distant land.

 According to merged and rationalized Biblical and Muslim traditions he left Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and migrated to Egypt with his beautiful wife Sarah (or Serai). As per Islamic popular texts his reputation as a man of great new ideas earned him access to the court of the King or Pharaoh, but unfortunately the King was more impressed by Sarah's beauty than by Prophet Ibrahim's (PBUH) philosophy. (The Old Testament/Torah however says that Abram was forced to migrate from Canaan due to famine Genesis 13.10). 
According to generally accepted legends the Pharaoh promptly gave him one of his prettiest maids or daughter according to some traditions -- Hagar, hoping to make a fair exchange. But he was quite disappointed when he discovered Sarah's complete loyalty to Ibrahim. In the meantime, Hagar also started showing signs of having been influenced by Ibrahim's philosophy of dignity and fidelity. The King was shattered. Here was a man who possessed the ability to command absolute loyalty and unity of thought with individuals close to him; something he had always wanted but never achieved. He could not have Ibrahim (PBUH) killed. So, he simply asked him to leave Egypt and take both women with him. If the legends are true, then the original descendants of Ibrahim (pbuh) in Hijaz would also be of a mixed race. The holy Qur’an does mention the aborted sacrifice of Ibrahim’s son Ismail but does not corroborate the name or number of his wives. 

 Prophet Ibrahim (PBUH) on his part had learned the crucial lesson that it is futile to try to reform a corrupt establishment by joining it and working from within. He decided to create an institution of his own. By coincidence or design or divine guidance he ended up in the valley of Makkah situated in the middle of mountains and only a few meters above a great aquifer i.e., a natural underground water reservoir. Possibly as he stood on one of the mountains around Makkah and looked around and saw vegetation and wild animals in the mountain surrounded valley, he knew that occasionally it rained in the area. But there was no lake at the bottom of the valley, so where did the rainwater go? There had to be a great aquifer and cracks in the earth through which water seeped; the same cracks could serve as wells, or water could be stored by digging waterways and embankments. Ibrahim was not just a stone carver and philosopher; he was a good engineer too. There he settled with his wife who gave birth to a pious and obedient son Ismail with whom he built a cubic structure on whose walls he wrote his inspired thesis on human dignity proclaiming the unacceptability of man's worship of man or objects, the equality of all men in worldly matters and the inevitability of a day of final reckoning leading to heaven or hell. The message would have been in hieroglyphics running in seven lines spirally along the four walls -- perhaps the writing referred to in the Qur'an as "Sohhof Ibrahim....." (Verse 87:19). This was Ka'bah, the first monument to what we call Democracy. 

 The holy Qur’an describes the event as follows: 

 [2.127] And when Ibrahim and Ismail raised the foundations of the House: Our Lord! accept from us; surely Thou art the Hearing, the Knowing: 
 [2.128] Our Lord! and make us both submissive to Thee and (raise) from our offspring a nation submitting to Thee, and show us our ways of devotion and turn to us (mercifully), surely Thou art the Oft-returning (to mercy), the Merciful. 
 [2.129] Our Lord! and raise up in them an Apostle from among them who shall recite to them Thy communications and teach them the Book and the wisdom, and purify them; surely Thou art the Mighty, the Wise. 

 For hundreds of years to follow, men and women would come to walk around this Ka'bah, read the inscriptions and meditate and get inspiration to live with dignity, freedom and democracy. From the traditionally established direction of circumambulation (Tawaf) it is apparent that the inscriptions on the walls of the Ka'bah were in a language that was written and read from left to right. The kissing of the black stone fixed at the edge from where circumambulations start and end is exactly in line with the Arab custom of kissing a book after reading it. The black stone of Ka'bah may have been the world's first bookmark. Traditions indicate that with the passage of time, the Ka'bah gradually came to be known as a place where one could acquire great knowledge and wisdom -- even magic. The sanctity of the place would impart the visitor absolution from his sins; and the infirm could regain health by exercising between the hills of Safa and Marwa and drinking the mineral rich water of the nearby natural fountain of Zamzam. In those days it was believed that sickness was the punishment for one’s sins or was caused by evil spirits, and any place or person or object that helped people to be cured had to have divine significance and power of atonement. So much so that even trading caravans traveling between Northern Arabia and Yemen began to make a detour to stop by it. Makkah thus became, maybe, the world's first city to have simultaneously a university, a hospital, a church, an international trading center and no king. 

 The following extract from Wikipedia raises serious doubts about the credibility of the Biblical accounts. “In the early to mid-20th century leading scholars such as William F. Albright and Albrecht Alt believed the patriarchs and matriarchs to be either real individuals or believable composite people living in the "patriarchal age", the 2nd millennium BCE. In the 1970s, however, new conclusions about Israel's past and the biblical texts challenged this portrait. The two works largely responsible were Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), and John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition (1975). Thompson's argument, based on archaeology and ancient texts, was that no compelling evidence pointed to the patriarchs living in the 2nd millennium and that the biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions and concerns; Van Seters, basing himself on an examination of the patriarchal stories, agreed with Thompson that their names, social milieu and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations.[7] By the beginning of the 21st century, and despite sporadic attempts by more conservative scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen to save the patriarchal narratives as history, archaeologists had "given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac or Jacob credible 'historical figures'". 
 Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham#Historicity 

 However it seems that the western archeologists were looking for Abraham in the wrong place. The Bible suggests that Abraham travelled from Canaan to Egypt and back along the shores of the Mediterranean. If they had looked further south in those areas of Saudi Arabia close to Makkah and Madinah, they might have had better luck. Excavations at Tayma reported in 2010 CE have already revealed some hieroglyphic inscriptions dating back to 12th century BCE. 

It is strange that although Abraham is regarded as the founder of Jewish and Christian morality, the Old Testament depicts him as a liar who on occasion introduced his wife as his sister to save his own life and earn riches (Genesis 13:10-16) Genesis 13 
10 And there was a famine in the land : and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there ; for the famine was grievous in the land. 
11 And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon : 
 12 therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife : and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. 
13 Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister : that it may be well with me for thy sake ; and my soul shall live because of thee. 
 14 And it came to pass, that, when Abram was come into Egypt, the Egyptians beheld the woman that she was very fair. 
 15 The princes also of Pharaoh saw her, and commended her before Pharaoh : and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. 
 16 And he entreated Abram well for her sake : and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels. The end of the episode is equally instructive as to the virtues of courage and faith in God: 
 17. And the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues, because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. 18. And Pharaoh called Abram, and said, What is this that thou hast done unto me ? why didst thou not tell me that she was thy wife ? 
 19. Why saidst thou, She is my sister ? so I might have taken her to me to wife : now therefore behold thy wife, take her, and go thy way. 
 20. And Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him : and they sent him away, and his wife, and all that he had. 

 It is obvious that Pharaoh was a decent and kindhearted person who was conned by the fugitive from Canaan. Abram is also depicted in Bible/Torah as a heartless opportunist who banished his Egyptian wife and elder son to the desert after his old fair wife bore a son. The tradition seems to have survived to date as in Saudi Arabia I learnt that occasionally a Lebanese businessman visiting other countries would be accompanied by a lady whom he would introduce as his sister who would quickly and smartly establish intimate relation with the local official or businessman and obtain concessions for her ‘brother’. 

 It is also possible that Abram and Abraham were two separate individuals, the former from northern and the latter from southern Arabia and their legends were somehow merged somewhere in the middle. The following Verses of the Bible, Book of Genesis Chapter 17 might have a clue to the dramatic change: 
 17.1 And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God ; walk before me, and be thou perfect. 
 17.5 Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham ; for a father of many nations have I made thee. 
 17.15 And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be. 

 Having pondered the above two accounts, one is persuaded to wonder if the reported encounters of Mr. Abram were really with God or with Satan whose mission according to Qur’an is:

 [15:39] He said: My Lord! because Thou hast made life evil to me, I will certainly make (evil) fairseeming to them on earth, and I will certainly cause them all to deviate.

Monday, March 01, 2021

Truncated Sanitizer

When I was young, I was instructed to listen carefully and respectfully to the ravings of mad men as they might contain clues to wisdom not found elsewhere. I heeded the advice for the practical reason that annoying a mad person twice your size could bode trouble. (This is a simile, not a sarcasm) 

So when I heard about the controversy about putting sanitizer inside people to protect them from coronavirus disease my ears stood up, another simile, and I recalled my childhood mathematics tutor in Bengal who regularly put a drop of mustard oil in his nostrils to clear his sinus of bacteria and lubricate his mind. I could not bring myself to follow his example and convinced myself that I had oil-free bearings in my head. Without delving in semantics or philosophical psychology one can easily truncate sanitizer into sanity which, if introduced into people results in a healthy and prosperous society.

 Unfortunately, the real problem is not putting it in people, the real problem is finding it. (This is humor and not simile.) We often tend to forget that all future viruses were taken into account when the human genome was originally designed and we all have the thing called immune system that can besiege and render any virus harmless before it can damage any of the organs. So if you eat food that improves your immune system such as fruit, nuts and dairy products and have a zest for life you should be ok.

Although there are many antiviruses available for computers, I have not yet seen any for people. All the hand sanitizers I have seen have ‘antibacterial’ written on them. None mentions viruses. So, I assume that anything that is antibacterial may also be used to eliminate external viruses with faith in God or Allah as the case may be. Soap is good protection against viruses as according to medical people it dissolves the skin of the virus and kills it instantly. However, if a moron on the hill advises you to add a piece of soap to the chloroquine, don't do it. Eating, injecting or pouring soap solution in your nose will only irritate you and may be harmful. 

Ever since the non-Islamophobic French scientist Luis Pasteur, mankind has come to believe that vaccines are the only cure for communicable diseases. The original vaccine production technique was to infect a horse with a bacterium, draw his blood and separate the serum which contained the antibodies that fought the bacteria. If the antibody was introduced into a human body, it would multiply and lie in wait to hunt the specific bacteria for many years to come. Apparently, horse sense was able to decode the genetic profile of the bacterium and generate a code for a DNA that could identify and destroy the bacteria in the blood and flesh etc. 

Until a few years ago it was believed that there can be no vaccine for a viral affliction which normally gets naturally cured within a week or two. However, with the development of powerful computers and highly deft robots it is possible to sequence and molest the hypothetical double helix of the DNA and find an inverted sequence that can neutralize the original stuff. Some antivirus vaccines are made from castrated viruses that cannot grow but can attract the wrath of the immune system that results in the production of antibodies by a natural process that scientist cannot imitate. 

The million-dollar question now is whether it is possible to create a mental sanitizer that can bring about sanity.

Friday, February 12, 2021

The monotheistic God

The Jews according to Torah portray God (Yahweh) as a desert wandering shrewd businessman who made many deals with individuals he thought could build Empires for him and controlled his subjects by making them oppress each other and by causing disasters. 

 Christian concept of God as in Bible (New Testament) is of a Playboy in the Penthouse of heaven who briefly visited the earth to immaculately impregnate Virgin Mary and then left his loved woman and innocent son at the mercy of the Romans. 

 Allah is the Muslims' preferred name for God. It signifies a being that embodies attributes of as many as 99 adjectives. The word Allah carries a sense of purity and majesty not conveyed by the more common word God. After centuries of bickering on its semantics, Muslim scholars , decided that the word Allah is a proper noun, rather than a derivative of the word elah which means sustainer, and collectively represents all the 99 attributes mentioned in the Holy Quran.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

THE IMF QUAGMIRE

IMF is known to be the world's most powerful financial institution. Its board of trustees consists of representatives from various governments who have contributed its seed capital. Hence the IMF is not answerable to anybody except the largest shareholder. They are said to have the world's largest team of highest ranked economists and financial experts. They specialize in formulating mathematical models of a country's economy and analyze it. Probably they use Einstein’s tensors and supercomputers to execute their analyses. However, since my knowledge is limited to Newtonian mechanics, I would try to convey my observations in a language that my wife would understand. Blogging, in any case, is love’s labor. From close scrutiny of the terrific things that have happened in countries that sought assistance from IMF in their hour of peril, it seems that there exists an IMF dollar that makes the ordinary US dollar disappear. Wherever this august institution extends its helping hand, severe scarcity of US dollars takes place and its price in local currency inflates, often to determined levels. This inflation of the dollar or in other words the devaluation of the local currency creates contrasting scenarios when viewed from different perspectives. To the IMF actuaries who maintain accounts in US dollars, it results in the shrinking of the local debt in dollar terms dollars and the total debt in current dollars reduces. That is a good indicator. However, the local economists notes that whereas the local currency debt is constant the local currency equivalent of the dollar or other currency debts has increased in proportion of the devaluation and the total national debt in local currency has increased and a larger chunk of tax collected would go into debt servicing. It actually happens that way. The tale of woes does not end there. If the GDP in local currency remains the same or increases at a rate less than the devaluation, then the GDP in current dollars will register a hefty decline. That would be a bad indicator and cause embarrassment. Now, the local currency GDP can be increased in two ways; either by rapidly increasing the volume of indigenous production or by instantly inflating the costs of goods and services. The former requires dynamism, capital goods to expand industries, finding new markets, additional skilled labor, and increased supply of raw materials assuming that additional capital is available. The latter is extremely easy, it just requires mismanagement. So, the cost of local goods and services must inflate to bring the local currency GDP to such a level that current dollar GDP exceeds the previous year’s value. A simple numerical example should suffice to elucidate the complicated logic. Thanks to the IMF economic package USD parity grew from 100 to 160 PKR. Soon price of wheat flour rose from 40 to Rs. 64 per kg and sugar, rice, vegetables, meat, poultry, clothing, stationery, and everything else followed suit except salaries of civil servants; therefore, bribe rates and police extortion were upgraded accordingly. Now all indicators are good, and the IMF has done a great favor to this Godforsaken nation.

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Looking Back




Here is an excerpt from one of my old manuscripts which may seem pertinent in the present perspective:

This author’s thinking is based on the hypothesis that the universe has been objectively engineered with intended perfection, but in order to allow a certain freedom of action and eventual accountability there could be an intentional margin of deviation in God's creations. After all, the disobedience of Satan must have been documented in the Holy Qur’an with a purpose. True that God is perfect, but nowhere has He proclaimed that any of His creations is also perfect. The imperfection of His creations by no means diminishes His own greatness.

Scientists had surmised that the Earth and the Moon had condensed from hot gases that had spilled off the Sun, but recent discoveries haves shown that the compositions of the Earth and the Moon differ from the Sun suggesting that the two were formed at some remote spot in space and launched in orbit around the Sun as also hinted in Verses 5 to 10 of Chapter 55 in Qur’an.  It is possible that the Earth was targeted to be inclined at a quarter of a right angle to its orbital plane, but actually it turned out to be 23.5 degrees i.e. one degree more, or that the year was meant to be exactly 360 days and not 365 and a quarter as it actually is or that the lunar cycle was meant to be exactly thirty days but it strayed a little to twenty nine and a half or so. A 30 day lunar month and a 360 day year would seemingly have been a perfect combination; the phase of the moon would indicate the date and the constellation would show the month and if we looked keenly enough in the sky we might find a way to count the years as well. But since we cannot change it we have no choice but to accept it as God’s wisdom. However, we can change the course of rivers, harness the winds, seed clouds for rain and defy gravity by flying machines to our advantage as God has given us authority over the material universe – and we must advise and help others in finding the right way of life.

Similarly, disease, natural disasters and evils exist not because those were created by God as spontaneous expressions of His wrath but as a consequence of the imperfections of the creations; and God has set in motion a process of evolution and guidance of human beings for the rectification of these defects and for improvement in the quality of His creations. Adam failed the first test he was put to and Satan rebelled on the first command he did not like. The merciful God surely would not have built maladies, perversions and disasters into His perfect plan of creation. Reflection on the relevant texts of the holy Qur’an and the Bible suggests that the earth was originally planned to be a paradise and eventually after its destruction and the Day of Judgment it will be reconstructed as Paradise (Verse 36:81) for the pious and noble souls to live in absolute bliss forever free from all natural disasters, bacteria, viruses and diseases with plentiful supply of the most relished foods that will never become stale. The perfect world to be created then is destined to last forever.

Even more important is the fact that all the tangible knowledge of Physics, chemistry, biology, electronics, mechanics and much of mathematics that is or will ever be written in books is already at work in the human body and in the environment around us. Birds can fly because they are aerodynamically designed by God and they are born with the knowledge of aerodynamics so that they may glide or propel themselves in air and take off and land safely. Man is not discovering Science, but only learning to express what is already inherent in him, and so is woman who is born with the ability to form a baby inside her. The rest is speculation.

Saturday, May 02, 2020

Military and Religion


Military and religious forces have played very significant roles in the formation of history and shaping the political geography of the earth.

The military is based on the instinct of freedom and religion on the instinct of faith which are quite diverse but individually admirable. However, both have had in places much less admired consequences and have some common characteristics.

Points of similarity between military and religious establishments are:

1. Both have an autocratic top boss.

2. Both have well defined hierarchies.

3. Both have strict dicipline.

4. Both have special education and training.

5. Both have distinctive attire or uniforms.

6. Both demand absolute loyalty from rank and file.

7. Both work in the name of a supreme authority to whom people do not have direct access.

8. Both contribute naught their country's GNP.

9. Both exploit fear of the unknown, the enemy across the border or life after death.

10. Both are quite prosperous.

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Conversation in Heaven 4




Q: What has been done to give mankind a last chance?
A: A virus has been spread to persuade them to change their habits. They call it covid-19.

Q: How does it work?
A: Due to fear of infection they are staying home and refraining from immoral and promiscuous activities.

Q: How will ideological contamination be removed?
A: Congregations have been stopped and sectarian and religious brain washing has reduced considerably. Given a break, many will realize the futility of their superstitions and the absurdity of what they regard as scriptures.

Q: Is it more effective than AIDS?
A: Many times, as movement and contact is restricted.

Q: What areas are covered?
A: Entire world simultaneously.

Q: How will cognitive aberrations be removed.
A: They are taking food to strengthen immune system. This would improve chemical balance and clear confusions.

Q: How will the distorted knowledge base be rectified.
A: People with reformed intellect will produce literature to replace the old polluted and misleading syllabi and texts.

Q: Are people available to perform the above mission.
A: Yes, but they are not prominent.

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Man-made Epidemic


On 18 March 1915 Bill Gates gave Ted talk on possible next virus epidemic and its consequences. He is likely to have been helped by some conaciencious Indian born American senior executives of Microsoft.
Ebola virus was contained within 3 West African countries by effective isolation from the rest of the world.
On 5 August 2019 India embarked on an experiment of large scale lockdown involving 8 million people in Kashmir. The human tragedy in the denial of all fundamental human rights to 8 million people for no reason should have shaken the earth. But everyone except some nondescript busybodies chose to look the other way. India must have shared the data acquired in the first three months with its close allies.
It takes only a few hours to do a complete dna sequencing of a virus and there is adequate data on characteristics and influence of dna fragments to be able to splice them into new viruses of desired characteristics.
US, India and Israel formed a nexus to harm and eventually destroy the emerging international influence of China.
On 31 December 2019 WHO reported mysterious pneumonia sickening dozens in China which was later recognized as novel Corpnavirus and the outbreak was named Covid-19.
China imposed complete lockdown on Wuhan and Hubei the two affected areas and concentrated entire national resources on control and elimination of the virus desease.
On 18 March 2020 there were no fresh cases of Covid-19 infection in China and the virus came under sustantial control after over 81,000 infections and over 3,200 deaths.
The Klashmiris are still caged like guinea pigs and Covid-19 has spread to 199 countries on the last count.
The number of infected world population now about 700 thousand is rising by a compound rate of about 10% per day. The total number of dead is nearly 32 thousand and is growing at compound rate of about 12% per day.
Oddly enough USA is the current pack leader in infections while the Europeans seem to be competing in fatality.
In Asia, Iran is the only country after China with uniquely constant but alarming infection and fatallity. The virus has reached Pakistan through Iran probably taking the same route as Kubhushan Yadev.
The numbers are easily available on web and are changing so fast that quoting them seems futile.
Round the clock info can be obtained from the below URL:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
There is a string of reports about new test equipment, medicines, vaccines etc being developed to combat the epidemic. Let us hope that the losses and damages will be minimized.
The world may not be the same again after Covid-19. However, the most important question is 'what lessons will mankind learn from this misadventure?'

We can only wait and see.

.

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Covid-19 in Pakistan


There is a lot of talk about lockdown or curfew in Pakistan to restrict the spread of covid-19. No one is mentioning the constitutional or legal provision for it. 
Since the govetnment does not have a complete register of labour force, it may result in a disaster. Lockdown may work in urban areas with strong social service NGO networks such as Karachi. With quick surveys and logistic arrangements it may be implemented in many orher cities. It will be very difficult to implement in rural areas. If not overseen strictly it may give rise to malssive corruption and exoitation.
Moreover, so far there has been not a single report of infection in rural areas.  More staltitics are needed to develop a strategy for rural areas. But time is of essence.
PM Imran Khan's hesitation is understandable. CM Murad Shah's confidence is based on the resolve of Karachi NGOs. We shall see what happens in other parts of Sindh.