It is not very often that I wander off to the Chowk unplugged and recently, when I drifted there, I noticed a thread on Stuka’s visit to Lahore and quotes attributed to Stuka. Stuka is presently in India, I think, and I have not been in touch with him, via email, and hence, I do not have his permission to reveal the nature of our conversation. Consequently, I am not in a position to either confirm or deny any of the statements made on unplugged.

My own interpretation of the dinner conversation was that it was of a private nature and not for consumption by the Chowk crowd and it was not supposed to be made a part of the public domain known as Chowk.

With this fact in mind, there is a lot of information, which I do not enter into my ilogs and even the ilogs I enter, are considered before hand and prior to posting them, I edit them to avoid unnessary hassles or possible misunderstandings. The rule of thumb being, that I ignore the personalization of my ilogs and keep them limited to recording just the tedium of my day and events, which I generally find interesting or annoying.

In my view, ilogs are not supposed to be used as interacts and I do not wish to use my ilogs as a forum, whereby I can make commments without risking the right of reply towards my comments. Ilogs comments, when directed personally, do not offer a chance of a rebuttal and thus, do not create a sense of a transparent or a fair discussion but one of unsupported allegations and insinuations.

I read other ilogs and I come across references to myself and whether they are good or bad is a moot point, because I strongly believe that person who is made a part of ilog, should have the right to reply and the ilogs should not be used to deny that right to people. Since ilogs do not provide this right, I do not comment in them about Chowk and keep them strictly of a non-Chowk nature.

In all honesty, I cannot claim a moral high ground here, because in the begining, I was also not charitable in my comments but experience has taught me to keep my silence. Lessons of past have instructed me that a word misplaced out of proper context can create a lot of undue complications of various kinds and is best avoided.

My own philosophy is that any conversation, between a Chowk person and myself has to considered as a confidential and sacrosant in the same manner as a doctor-client or an attorney-client conversations are considered.

It was for this reason, why I chose to ignore Chowk affairs in my ilogs. In hindsight, I think that my decision was a correct one. I hold this view even though in commenting on this issue, I have flexed that particular law myself.