I thick therefore I am

Ibrahim yaar, you should read more and write less. It seems that you are finally discovering the joy of reading while we have to sit through and read this reductive drivel called.."I thick therefore I am".

Re: # 4

Ally, what passes for "reality" is unreal-like sentencing a schoolteacher to lashes with a whip and imprisonment for naming a teddy bear Mohammad.

Art reflects the absurdity of life-complaining about that is missing the point, dont you think?

You thick man, real thick....

Chill out Neembu, i dont think he is saying we shouldn't have art and stuff, but he does have a point, have you ever been to the tate modern in London, i have to admit some of the stuff in their is just plain rubbish, the gand that passes for 'art' is unreal... in fact they actually had someones rubbish bin with its contents as some sort of artistic thing, come on that is taking the utter piss!!!

Ibrahim in Urdu A level we got to study short stories from the favourites like Manto and Prem Chand, but we also had to study that god awful dipty nazir ahmed and his book Taub'ut Nasuh couldn't stand the lesson our teacher was trying to instil in us, if anything it made me more of a kanjar, though reading Umrao Jaan was more fun, i couldn't finish either of the books!!!

It seems that the narrator of this piece expects sympathy for his anti intellectual laziness. Yes, pretension exists in the art world, but it clearly exists in this piece as well. Rather than talking to people who use art as status symbols and signifiers, the narrator should talk to people who create, live, find meaning and die for their work-and people who understand that life is not worth living without having art to add immeasurable imagination, dimension, clarity and perspective to the human experience.

This reminds me of an essay by Mark Edmundson entitled, "The Liberal Arts as a Means of Entertainment for Bored College Students" in which the author recalls a Harvard professor who assigned a final exam bearing this one question:

"What text studied in this course did you not like, and what moral and intellectual failing in yourself did it expose?"

Nuff said.

Deputy Nazir Ahmed wrote these books where there were two sisters Akbari (elder) and Asghari (younger). Akbari was not good at housekeeping (as they say in Urdu: umoor-e-khana dari mein mahir nahin thi) whereas Asghari was an expert housekeeper managing her husband's house efficiently, taking the dishonest maid to task, arranging sevings for uninvited guests in a few seconds.

The school textbook introduced us to this brand of Urdu literature.

Ibrahim

Ibrahim M Khalil: good article, I liked it.

Can you elaborate on "Akbari and Asghari" in peniltimate sentence: "We also had writers like Manto, Prem Chand, and Ismat Chugtai etc. but no, I had to read Akbari and Asghari"?