Lights Out!

Today is the 20th of Ramzan. And my city is facing some major power breakdown. Its hot and humid. Our UPS is using its whatever remaining charges (read: breaths) to power our place. There is a little pain behind my eyes and I need to sleep a littlle. The power outage has brought some people out of their homes to stand in their balconies. Its like somebody has smoked us out of our houses.

At least, it has caused us to come out and breathe. We are watching the sunrise of 20th Ramzan (aka 8th July, Wednesday).

We have slid our loose mattresses out into our thankfully airy balconey to snooze a bit under the blue sky. I can see its a bit cloudy up there. Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. :P

The good part about the outage is that I got to recite Durood a 100 times, which I had been meaning to do since this Islamic month began. I am glad I have done it. (Er, thanks to this lights-out?) 

And my cousin is hunched over her Quran text lit up in her mobile screen and is reciting it in a nice little melodious voice. She has been reciting for more than an hour now. 

The bad part is ofcourse, its hot. But thankfully, its not as hot as the heatwave that hit the cities a few days ago. That was something. So many people collapsed as a result of the heatstroke. It was aweful. I hear in my city alone, death toll reached a whopping 850! Call it the incompetency of the government,  the sick, corrupt minds of our people, or just Nature's way of ensuring the balance of things in this world. 

This morning air feels so fresh. Its sweet and soft in my lungs. 

Ouch! *smack!* you guessed it: mosquitoes! Sigh... -_-'

Its lights-out for 6 hours now, and counting.

I really hope they fix it up soon. I really do want to rest my eyes a little. 

Desensitized

I slumped down heavily in the bench, tired and weary because of the little sleep I had had the night before. As I waited for the lecture to start, I let my eyes sweep over all the students who were entering the lecture theatre, settling down; the guys goofing around, the girls whispering, and squealing at the top of their lungs over the pettiest of the things, attracting the boys' attention. In my irritable state, all I could do was judge and think how childish these "future doctors" acted. I sighed. I let me eyes droop a little, however, all the while keeping all my senses alert for the moment the teacher entered the classroom, for I did not want to miss anything the teacher explained. Except that the class I was attending was going be lectured by a teacher who was (as everybody said with big frowns on their foreheads as they tried to impose the importance of what they said, that he was a PhD) always droning on off-topic in a completely unoriginal, thunderous voice that flowed in disorganized clumps of extremely high-pitched and extremely low-pitched notes.

But that is going to be the subject of my subsequent posts.

In the few minutes before the class was to start, I could not help but notice how weird people had become. How desensitized...

I saw girls coming in through the glass doors into the lecture hall, eyes darting around in hopes of catching a student with lecture notes or a new a book, shooting fake smiles across the benches toward their colleagues, leaning in and whispering to their "best friends", shrill and unreasonably bold, speaking flaunty sentences in English as loud as they could to what... What were they trying to show? 

But lets face it. Shoot a few sentences in English to the people of my country and they are all over you. Best friends, howzzat? 

Actually no, its just a part of the whole system that runs here. But lets leave it at that for the moment.

I don't know. May be people were like this before I was born. Or may be they have turned into such desensitized monsters in the 21st century.

I may be getting a bit too emotional here. Probably making up something really big out of something extremely insignificant. But this just bothers me. 

Wait, let me give you an example. Not many days ago, we got our results for the annual examinations that we had given. This was blatantly announced on the all-girls' whatsapp group. The result was revealed in the form of a long white sheet with a printed list of only those roll numbers that had been successful in the exams, the people who had now been officially declared to have been passed and to move on and see the light of their subsequent year's education. 

While those that weren't were to face a tough and trying time ahead for they had to reappear for the subjects that had held them back from officially getting into their next year of education. 

As I observed, there were girls who flagrantly typed in "I have passed!!!" and  "Awwww yiiiiisssss!!" And "God be praised!!!" on the group. For me, these girls had no heart or had complete disregard for the feelings of the girls who had quieted down in the group, for they sat struggling with the storm of defeated feelings that had probably raided their hearts the moment they realised their roll numbers weren't on the list. 

Next came a text that otherwise would have been deemed normal, "could anybody send in pics of our Pathology lecture?" 

While people were still recovering from the shockwave the sudden revelation of the result had caused, this was the near immediate text that came from a (now I believe, an apparently ignorant) girl. 

My religion teaches that one must be careful in front of the person who is going through a hard time. One musn't boast about their wealth in front of the one who's less priviledged. One mustn't speak of their parents in front of an orphan. For such people already are sore and their wounds cannot bear anymore.