Food for thought

Lets suppose, there are three 20 years old guys namely Ali, Baber and Fahad who have never prayed regularly before, now decide to do so because they believe its better late than never. Irrespective of their reasons for praying, all three of them are determined and enthusiastic about praying. But each one of them decides a different approach to praying. Ali decides that he will try to pray all the obligatory rakat of the prayers, Baber decides to pray all the rakats of every prayer whilst Fahad decides to go easy on himself and take it slow and so decides to pray as many rakats of whichever namaz he can offer easily. All three of them begin together and do considerably well especially in the start, but as time passes, all of them find it difficult to follow through with their approaches, because it's hard to adapt to a new habit and predominately fight temptations. This is analogous to certain hijabis, some are like Ali who take it in all settings but sometimes keep it loose, some a...

I am one of those women who don't mind telling people their real age because I don't believe this age of mine is some dark secret that ought to remain hidden for some distorted reason. On the contrary, I believe in celebrating my real age rather than cherishing those moments when people assume me to be younger because age isn't just another unimportant number to me. It's so much more for it's a reminder of the fact that I survived so many years of my life whilst other weren't as lucky. A reality that I am proud of and grateful for because in all those years that I survived, I discovered different meanings of life. However, the most important or rather the primal meaning of life, is "survival of the fittest". As trite as it may sound, it really is the biggest reality of life, which I discovered through one of Allama Iqbal's poetry (shayari) during my adolescence. The couplet of Iqbal from Bal e Jibreel was: Taken from iqbalurdu.blogspot.com " T...

Disclaimer: This article is by no means written to urge people to love tawaifs or celebrate them nor written to bash people but to find out and to understand the answers to the many questions that have wreaked havoc in my mind. If any one of you can answer all these questions of mine logically and explain them thouroughly, I promise I'll change my views. So please hear me out with an open mind, try to persuade me than argue for as Rumi said and I quote: "Raise you words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers not thunder." If you can't provide me with concrete points and change my views and neither could I through this article change yours, then lets agree to disagree. Ever wondered why hearing or reading the word tawaif (courtesan) makes us uncomfortable? The first time I heard this word was in the drama "Mai Abdul Qadir hun" and at that time I didn't know what this word meant so I asked my family, who was watching the show along with me, the mea...

It doesn't matter whether you are someone who cares about the world or are emotionally detached, someone who  judges or is judged,  selfless or selfish,  smart or dumb,  beautiful or ugly, whatever and whoever you are, all you need to do is to accept yourself through and through, so that eventually you are able to accept those around you. The first step to accepting the world is through the acceptance of yourself - the hardest thing to do let me tell you. Accepting the pretty parts is quite easy compared to accepting the dark and the ugly parts of yours and especially those decisions that you think were never yours. Even though, I believe that every decision is ours whether we like to accept it or not because the only thing that is from others is their advices. Many would argue that they never had a choice nor were they given the liberty to decide from amongst those advices rather those decisions were imposed on them. Undoubtedly, that could be the case but at the en...