Discovering Ali Hasan

I hate to be the one to start of with the replies. However, here it goes. I loved your piece on love especially where it is attempted to translate love from feeling to verbal expressions.

Futhermore, I liked simplistic rules eg.Rule #1: Don`t fall in love with strangers. Get to know the person first. Its interesting suggestion that you can know the person in a short while. It presupposes that a person, once you discover him/her, will never change in his or her life. Finally, it presupposes that all possible faceuts of a person can be discovered in a short period, period.

Interesting the person you love can never be perfect and in order to have a sustained relationship it is important that you are completely devolved with one aspect and in the future when one has second thoughts he should refocus on the aspect that made you fall in love in the first instance.

And I loved the file closed ending as the head wins over heart. And race, culture and religion taking precedence over love at first sight.

Rehan Rizvi:

Here is my insta-evaluation.

``He was drunk, as I later found out, and I was amazed, not knowing, that he was talking funny more than one can expect of him.`` Not only one gets the impression that Dr. Green was drunk, but the narrator was somewhat inebriated as well. If this is intentional this is brilliant writing bordering on the genius. If not, perhaps you can modify the structure of the sentence.

First person narration is like walking on ice. Looking from the surface one cannot discern if the ice surface is 6 inches or 48 inches thick.
More times than not a person misjudges, and in this narration I`m afraid yaar Rehan.........!

``Is it possible to find someone who`d enjoy Jagjeet and Chitra, Shafiq-ur Rehman, Ghalib and Ibn-e-Safi as well as Mozart, Seinfeld, Shakespeare and Star Trek?`` YES, YES, YES, YES
-----ME! Sadly though, I `ll publicly give the two reasons it cannot work----(1) I prefer the company of the opposite sex and (2) am preoccupied with someone!

Rehan, yaar you show such promise, how can you let this slip by? More on this later if you insist.

regards

Re: Rehan

The article had different perspectives on the thought of love...

Dr. Green drunk...sounds familar. One of my professors would always have a coffee mug filled with whisky. We would go to his house for ``seminars`` and end up puking in his drive way! I remember having some interesting dicussions there.

Another one would hold his senior polisci classes in a pub during Happy Hour - that class killed my GPA! :)

Yaar, the glimpse into your journal was a painful and regretable trip down memory lane. There is always a ``Shannon`` and there is always the question, ``could things have been different?`` So many things, such different distractions and so few chances to amend past mistakes. The first blush of a love affair; a sweet fall into a swirling vortex of love`s confusion, the first shy kiss with fleeting nervous eyes sharing a smile; the smile electrified with a potential of what is about to happen!

Those breathless moments of anxious concern when you see her again, and hear your heart pounding your senses into a state of deafness, but you still hear her call out your name. The soothing delirum of her voice haunting the empty echos of your mind and that feeling of sheer delight just knowing that she is looking at you!

Yeah, Rehan, there is always a girl like that and there is always a time like that. A time which separtes innocence from reality in our lives and lingers on in our private thoughts like lazy days of summer filled with warm wafting breezes under cloudless topaz skies.

The only difference is that in my case her name was Nina, but I drifted away from her and yet, I still think of her, because she was my true love. A whiff of a perfumed air and joyous memories overwhem me and I smile at her memory. It was a time I cherish for the most selfish of all reasons: I was young and I was in love. I was in love with a girl who always dances in my dreams, to the silent music of my foolish hopes.

What can I say.....life still moves on endlessly....memories fade into dullness....but still the heart aches at the thought of her touch. O` my friend what thoughts have you revived...regrets....yes....even though the torns cut deep and their scars might last a life time, I am still glad I smelled the rose!

Enough said....need to regain my cynical indifference and pretend, falsely, that love is for fools!

I kinda went through the same thing except I was in high school.

But I did make the most beautiful mistake of my life by falling for a girl that I met at a wedding I attended in Pakistan. I was spending my vacation in karachi and attended a wedding where I ran into her. It was love at first sight, atleast for me. Didn`t care much about anything else about her, which is very dangerous. But, alhadulillah, everything worked out for the best.

Now we`re husband and wife!!

Love Rules!!

A very childish, immature and limited intellectual level journal. Of course this is what one expect from a college student who is still under the spell of traditions and is not ready to leave the flock to lead his life on his own. However, I must appreciate the flowing and interesting way of narrating a story. Keep writing. Good work.

Nicely written, but somehow, i find the ending is just not very satisfying. A good story would end up with the protagonist getting the damsel!

Here`s a piece of advice from practical experience. If you continue to dream without making an effort to fulfill the desires, the lust in your heart, shall we say, even if innocent, you will live an unfulfilled life. Shannon is not the first or last LOVE of your life. Enjoy your time in college. You dont have to think about issues like marriage, intercultural compability etc from the get go. Get to know her, if necessary as a friend first, and when the semester is over, ask her out. If you`re afraid of rejection, do it casually, and see what develops. Once you`ve spent some time with her solo, outside a school/classroom setting you`ll be in a better position to decide on whether she is worth dating at all. If she`s single, go for it.

We only live once Yaar, life is too short to be full of regrets and things that we wish we had done. (The Could have beens). If you don`t make an attempt at least, you`ll never know what might have been. And that will always remain an unanswered question for you. You cant make the kind of judgements you made on the basis on this minimal interaction with her, or for that matter anyone else, whether a desi chick looking to get married or otherwise.

Give it a shot! Hey, you never know! Good luck!

Let us know how it turned out.

OMAR1974

good and enjoyable read. Very real, could relate to parts in it. LOve is certainly a powerful emotion. I know of atleast 3 suicides related to it among my general circle of aquaintances.

Hope all turns out well for you. Good luck.

Feroze,

Is that you.

Man, its nice to know that you have a heart as well as a brain. Otherwise I always pictured you as this ``robot`` typing away facts about history and theories about political future.

oh dear...i`m not sure you should be in college :)

#1. falling for someone at first sight is not love, it`s lust. since you know absolutely nothing about that person the only thing that draws you is their physical appearance. attempting to lend it some kind of credibility by calling it `the higher emotion` is not very mature. you saw someone, your hormones liked her blah blah blah..it`s natural..dont confuse yourself by reading more into it than that.
perhaps its the `race , culture religion` equation itself that makes the narrator wrap himself in yards of denial. if you come from pakistan, you will have learnt (through both obvious and subtle ways) that being attracted to someone is considered..er...unattractive.so you decide you `love` her. coward.afraid to face the animal within :)
the rules for love were hysterical, though i`m not sure they were meant to be funny.
`rule 1 never fall in love with a stranger`. right. so you see a hot man (or woman) and want to meet/chat/etc but you cant because the rules said so.i`d like a clarification..when does a stranger become familiar? what info exactly must two people exchange before they can flip their love switches?

i`m not sure if this is fiction or fact.if it`s fiction..try to make your characters more appealing and three dimensional. mr green is drunk, shanon is beautiful, you`re neurotic etc..
if it`s fact...(i`m going to repeat myself)..oh dear.

my comments might seem rude but please note there is no reference to your writing ability so far. you can certainly string sentences with (relative) skill, whats missing is content compelling enough to warrant this readers attention.

according to my eighth graders love is when you miss someone you`re not related to.

shandana

What does being shia have to do with it, it would have been better if you left that out

Love Shmove!

Why do people feel inclined to share their boring lives with everyone who happens to stop by. Thats what I thought of the Journal....Boring. So what? A college kid falls for some goree bibi. Happens 50 times a day, from Brown to Yale. And its the same story. He sees her, falls instantantly in love and then happens to see the light. Tired of hearing about it. Naqvi,let me tell you a little secret....Shannon didnt take Poli Sci 400 because she wanted to......she took it because Underwater Basketweaving 101 was already full, and she was late for registration because she was nursing that hangover from the night before......penny drafts at the local bar...cant pass that up! Get a grip, son.

please please please tell me shafiq ur rehman is not a bengali man who had to leave his country after writing a book...please please please..i think hes in my yoga class and i really gave him a sharp put down when he tried to pick up a friend of mine...there was also the fact that i didn`t think he was making too much sense..technology versus the humanities in south asia..we had decidedly different opinions. i have a feeling its not the same man, but just in case it is.....

rehan, i love reading any kind of journal entries..it seems forbidden almost and makes you really feel like you are getting into the person`s mind and soul..an interesting experiance. (like finding old postcards in curio stores).

rizvi

Shandana:

``#1. falling for someone at first sight is not love, it`s lust.``

Now, now, now,..., lets not jump to conclusions here.

Please don`t rationalize love. Leave us hopeless romantics alone in our world of dreams.

Re: afrasiyab post # 9

Yeah, that was me! As I was saying, that article threw me a fast one and took me by suprise. The post was a rambling of emotions, incited by the article, and a side of me which I had no intentions to share on chwok. If I had taken some time and reconsidered, I would have not opted for that post. In fact, I was intending to ignore this discussion all together, but my emotions over came my rationality in this case.

Yaar, what an emotional exeperience reading that article was! Brought back vivid memories of a December morning a long time ago. Maybe, some day, I will talk about it, though someone already knows about it, on chowk. It was a different time and I was a different person. Lets leave it that yaar! One of these days, I will have a chat with Aliya and she will tell me to get over her and I will smile, get up and walk out of the door - still worshipping her, from far, as an evening star that magically appreared on the horizon of my life!

I like the image I`ve created of the ``historic robot``.....I love being dorky!

To All:

Please don`t be too critical of Rehan or others like him....there is always a girl, for Rehan it was Shannon, with whom we are more in love with the idea of being love than we are with the idea of being in love with them!

Rehan: What the hell have you done to me?!

I don`t like what is happening to me yaar! There was battle going on between my emotions and my rationality. I thought that my rational side was winning over my emotional side, but that article of yours routed the forces of reason and the armies of emotions are back on the attack!

this is not good, yar. so many typos, grammatical errors, but above all, awkward, overly simplistic sentences and ideas. i couldn`t get past the first quarter of the piece.

how could this have managed to arouse all those deep emotions, feroze? (a short, simple answer will do yar).

Re: slink # 7

Very well said, Shandana. I too have to add my voice and say, ``O dear !``

re: (the self-deluding) ``Rules``

ishq per zoor nahiN, hae yeh vo aatish Ghalib
kay lagaayah na lagay, aur bujhay na banay

re: The dil-phaink ishaq in the story

If you want to make any headway in your `ambitions` with the opposite sex, you need to be cool, which, of course, you think you are, but in fact she can tell you are not.

Next time you go to see someone like that, first, masturbate three times so that you can drain out the snake venom which roars inside and so you have half a chance of acting `cool`. Remember, women don`t get a hard-on. When a man`s dick gets harder than his head, he`s as good as dead.

Second, resist the temptation of revealing all about yourself. Ask question and LISTEN.

Third, be the first one to call it a night. Don`t linger on.

And, yes, maybe you should listen to waheed. Got to drain that toxin which clouds the mind.

Goodspeed.

...SR