Give Me That Silly Thing

Dear readers:

Contrary to popular belief, I have not left Chowq (the yubb-site) for good; if I leave it, it will be for my own good. I have no real interest in posting my precious material at Chowq—not that I fear the abusers, whom I have always faced bravely and with style.

The real reason is that good readers and casual interacters need a place where they enjoy things without being assailed by Indusian show-offs and hopeless abusers. Most folks on Chowq are decent folks and wish to be left alone.

Chowq has never listened and it is doomed to being deaf and blind to just demands. It bans those who oppose its idiotic policies—thanks to the great American foreign policy. It promotes stupidity, idiocy and mediocrity.

Although my great experiment with Chowq has come to an expected end, I will use that  yubb-site in whatever way I deem fit. Chowq’s abusive supporters and its ed-eaters need not waste their time launching campaigns to malign my sincere intentions. But then again, they may do so in order to waste their time.

As for the good readers and my fans (our beloved C3 has become B3), they will get their fill of customary socio-political satire at my own blog:

www.writersblocktgh.blogspot.com

Here you may join as FOLLOWERS using your email accounts, and leave posts which will—as is my habit—be answered. If you have suggestions or questions, you may email me at:

writersblocktgh@gmail.com

Assuring you that I will always remain a man, I wish you happiness and success in whatever good you do.

Tahir

And now for the blog...

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Give Me That Silly Thing

How many bare necessities can one possibly own in a lifetime? As a wise man once pointed out, ‘If you could buy all the things in the world, where would you keep them?’ We too have our share of wise men in Pakistan. One of them may be (I said ‘maybe’) Chaudhry Abdul Ghafoor, the Punjab provincial minister for commerce, investment and prisons.

Last Wednesday he very generously allowed us to benefit from his faulty opinion (‘naakaara aur naakis rai’) through this ghastly suggestion: ‘Ban the use of mobile phones; only government officials and other privileged people should be allowed to use cell phones.’

This pearl of wisdom can emerge not from a mother of pearl but the mouth of a man unconnected with letters and one who is directly associated with our glorious prison system, where all kinds of creatures remain incarcerated and cut off from the real world.

I think it is the government officials who must not be allowed the privilege of using cell phones. On the contrary, all citizens must have these handy devices so that they may openly report to whoever they consider it necessary to report, the suspicious meetings of our politicians with foreign agents who often come to seal secret deals with their local cronies. This is the only way the crooks will stop selling Pakistan off for a song to foreign bidders.

Ghafoor said that ‘on one hand, Pakistan was considered to be a poverty-hit nation, yet on the other hand, even men on bicycles were using mobile phones’.

What does Ghafoor mean by that statement? Well, nothing at all—as is the case with all political statements. Riding a bicycle is infinitely better than going off to fly a kite. With or without cell phones, the poor remain connected and get on with their lives despite all the government interference. The influential bureaucrats, by contrast, zoom by common folks in unstoppable official cars and security escorts; why should they not be seen as wasting Pakistan’s resources? As Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him) said: ‘The poor are hungry because the rich are wasteful.’

Ghafoor said that ‘youngsters were giving billions of rupees to Christian and Jewish franchises through the mobile phone businesses’.

Hallelujah, now this is certainly news for poor young Pakistanis who abhor American intervention and double-dealing on behalf of Zionist Israel. The solution to this problem is to build an all-Islamic internet, launch communications satellites instead of launching bureaucratic careers and get all our money deposits out of foreign financial institutions—the last choice being the most painful for our corrupt elites.

Ghafoor further said that ‘mobile phones should only be with people of special status, primarily a select group of government officials. On Tuesday, the Punjab Assembly unanimously passed a resolution banning late night packages offered by mobile networks at cheap rates, in order to maintain moral and social values in the society and to prevent vice’.

Each painful day spent without sufficient electricity and food can only be forgotten if one spends the entire night happily talking to one’s beloved to benefit from cheap cell-phone ‘talk packages’.

I am glad that Ghafoor did not demand the ‘special status’ for people of his ilk who are, in any case, equipped with twelve horns on their forehead. And if he secretly did, then he certainly has more of the same on his own forehead and needs to be transferred, with immediate effect, from the prisons’ department to the one responsible for administering the Lahore zoo.

The Punjab Assembly has lost its vision—not that it had any of it to begin with. Nothing is shocking anymore, and it is pure comedy to hear the legislators ask for a ‘special status’ when they are unable to solve the problems assailing the common man. What our ‘special status’ people truly deserve in public is what George Warmonger Bush got from a brave Iraqi journalist in Baghdad.

That Wonderful Thing

"That awful thing, a woman's memory!"—Oscar Wilde

As if research done on singer Shania ‘shunno’ Twain’s (see: http://chowk.com/ilogs/75595/30139) perfect facial features was not enough—a study conducted at Stanford University in California has found that women use more parts of the brain than men to process jokes and have less expectation that they will find them funny. Probably this was what the famous wit meant when he wrote the aphorism in ‘A Picture Of Dorian Gray’ and which I have placed at the head of this article.

Even before I read Oscar Wilde, I always suspected there were more moving parts inside a female head than my own—science has now caught up with my suspiscions. A keen observor of both natural and supernatural phenomena, looking at women convinced me long ago that her active imagination never slept and that she could even recall in an instant—given half a chance—not the virtues but the sins committed by her man’s family, reaching back at least seven generations.

More moving parts mean more maintenance, spares related problems and factory recalls, just as fewer parts may result in greater forward momentum, and which explains why the minds of most men resemble a speeding steam engine heading in one direction on a narrow gauge railway track.

I certainly have no objection if women take whatever extra time it takes to understand my jokes but one thing is certain, they derive infinitely more pleasure of the prohinted bore from a decent punch line—or rather what is in between the lines—compared to their male counterparts. This has now been confirmed by the new study at Stanford.

The research, aimed at unravelling the mystery of how our sense of humour works, suggests that women prefer more sophisticated humour and use more complex brain functions to process it. In my most private moments I do rejoice in the fact that the authorities have not imposed a tax after declaring women baby production units that employ no staff to run their minds.

The Stanford research says that women participants of the study took slightly longer to react to jokes that were funny, but enjoyed the punchlines more—although the time difference was marginal.

Now how can one gauge the level of sophistication of female circuitry? I for one have neither measured the facial features of my female loved ones with a vernier caliper nor measured with a stopwatch how many extra nanoseconds they take to laugh either at me or with me.

Looking at any female loved one within the family, I always wonder why God put more wiring inside a head that appears physically smaller than my own—my own being well-proportioned and preganant with ideas. Of course, the most important women in my life tell me all the time—usually when I am asleep and can hear no more—that I am well-mannered and extremely witty.

“Men show more activation of nucleus accumbens (the part of the brain involved in reward and pleasure), indicating they expect to get the joke but when they don’t they get more depressed,” said one of the researchers.

Nucleus accumbens what?