The Magician and The Dreamer

Zeenat:

...enjoyed it the first time i read it...and now again...you are quite a magician yourself...weaving this allegory with words:)

...without Hope what good is an existence...any existence?

...and sadly there are places here where even dreaming, hoping is equated with sin...and yet others never fail to remind us we are born free...

love,

t

Zeejah !

That was just B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L- !! Felt like it was me ... i have a tendency to drift away too... only to be woken by the alarm clock !Darn it !

yes dreams can be so real .. so many of them stay with us .....

Thanks for such a simple, yet truthful piece!

sa:)

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Hmm another one to add to your looonnng list of articles on chowk .I wanna ask you interactors ...dontcha think Zeejah deserves some permanent column like hoodbhoy ?I mean look at her list of articles ..,it`s huge ! and all fo em are immensely readable !Oh yeah great article again ..left me with this eerie feeling at the end though ..

Love is addictive and the hope is the last resort. I think the hope was invoked when the dreamer met the magician the very first time. But it was only the desperation, later, that brought with it the revelation.

``itni si hay meri mohabbat ki daastaan
aik shakhs tha jo dard-e-judai day gaya``

Dear Zeejah:

Once again you have done it. But the pain of revelation, that came with the reading of ``The Puppet``, will always remain unparalleled. Very well penned; especially liked the following weave:

``Gently lifting it she saw it was Hope. The Magician had left Hope to keep her company. Hope is always the last to leave a Dreamer, for all dreams are woven on Hope`s loom.``

ouch, toothache.

rizvi

OHIO WESLEYAN GRADUATE ACCUSED OF STALKING PROFESSOR

Friday, January 19, 2001

NEWS 02D

By Robert Ruth

Dispatch Staff Reporter

A 25-year-old Ohio Wesleyan University graduate is charged with using the Internet to stalk her former professor, who is more than twice her age and with whom she once had a sexual affair.

Erum Ahmed, a native of Pakistan, was arrested Tuesday night in a motel room after trying to confront Conrad A. Kent, 58, outside his Delaware home.

Ahmed had flown to the United States the previous day from Karachi, Pakistan, according to testimony yesterday in U.S. District Court in Columbus.

At the end of the two-hour hearing, Magistrate Terence P. Kemp ordered Ahmed held in the Franklin County jail without bail. She is charged with one count each of using interstate communications to threaten someone and traveling across state lines to threaten someone.

Kent, who has been married for 34 years, is an award-winning professor of modern foreign languages and humanities at Ohio Wesleyan. Ohio Wesleyan Provost William Louthan yesterday described Kent as ``widely recognized as one (of) our best professors. He has been a spectacular professor here for a quarter-century.``

The university does not have a policy that bars sexual relations between students and faculty members, Louthan said. But any professor who engages in such conduct could be subject to sexual harassment allegations, he added.

No such complaint has been filed against Kent, he said.

Ahmed, dressed in a green jail uniform, glared at Kent as she was escorted in handcuffs into the courtroom yesterday. Kent did not look at her.

He testified that he and Ahmed met in spring 1998 when she took one of his classes and began an off-and-on sexual affair in August of that year. While he never promised to marry her, he told her he loved her.

In March 1999, Ahmed allegedly phoned Kent`s wife anonymously and accused him of having an affair with one of his students.

Kent said he broke off the affair May 14, 1999, the day Ahmed was leaving for Pakistan.

``She came to my office and I said, `Goodbye,` `` he said. ``I wanted to end the relationship. She did not accept that.``

Despite the breakup, the one-time lovers corresponded through e-mail. Some of Kent`s messages to Ahmed were ``of a sexual nature,`` he said.

Ahmed`s e-mails and phone calls took on a negative tone, he said. ``Her tenor was desperate,`` Kent testified.

In July 1999, Ahmed allegedly sent e- mails to Ohio Wesleyan officials accusing Kent of raping her three times. He then informed university officials that he was being stalked.

Additional e-mails from Ahmed urged Kent to convert to Islam and to marry her. She allegedly threatened to return to the United States, injure him and burn down his house if he rejected her pleas.

``Are you going to be a Muslim? Are you going to marry me?`` one message read. ``If I hear even one word of disagreement from you, I shall fight you until I die . . . expose you to the police. (I will) take off your glasses and break them, hit you, slap you and beat you.``

Kent testified that he was terrified of Ahmed and that in a long-distance phone conversation earlier this month told her, ``Please don`t hurt me.``

FBI agent Kevin Horan at yesterday`s hearing estimated that Ahmed is about 5 feet 2 and 110 pounds and that Kent is about 5 feet 10 and more than 200 pounds.

Horan said Kent alerted him earlier this month that Ahmed might soon return to the United States and confront him. Kent said that Tuesday night, as a colleague was driving him home, he saw Ahmed knocking on his front door.

His colleague drove him to a pay phone so he could call police, Kent said.

Kent`s wife, who was home alone, did not answer the door. Ahmed left before police arrived, but was arrested at a nearby motel.

Kemp yesterday said he would consider releasing Ahmed from jail if arrangements could be made to have her stay at a halfway house or with friends.

Ahmed did not testify yesterday, but as she was being led out of the courtroom she told a Dispatch reporter, ``I want to get back to Pakistan. I hate this country. He`s not a good guy at all. I don`t want to marry him anymore.``

Kent declined to comment after the hearing.

According to Ohio Wesleyan`s Web site, Kent received a bachelor`s degree from the University of the Americas in Mexico City and master and doctorate degrees in Spanish from Harvard University. Before joining Ohio Wesleyan`s faculty in 1976, he taught four years at Harvard and seven years at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

Kent has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York, held research fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, and has lectured at the Smithsonian Institute. In 1993, he received the Bishop Herbert Meritorious Teaching Award at Ohio Wesleyan.

bruth@dispatch.com

So sad to read that the dreamer depends solely on this magician for her `best` dreams. Is it always so?

A verse for ur dreamy article...

If we can`t hope or wish or dream,

Then wuts the use of being a human being?

Re Zeejah.

Beautiful piece of writing. Dreams are not as simple and for-granted as we take them to be.

I often think if God hadn`t given us the power to dream, we couldn`t live to face another day!

The dream serves as a substitute for a number of thoughts derived from our daily life, and which fit together with perfect logic. We cannot, therefore, doubt that these thoughts have their own origin in our normal mental life. All the qualities which we value in our thought-processes, and which mark them out as complicated performances of a high order, we shall find repeated in the dream-thoughts. There is, however, no need to assume that this mental work is performed during sleep; such an assumption would badly confuse the conception of the psychic state of sleep to which we have hitherto adhered. On the contrary, these thoughts may very well have their origin in the daytime, and, unremarked by our consciousness, may have gone on from their first stimulus until, at the onset of sleep, they have reached completion. If we are to conclude anything from this state of affairs, it can only be that it proves that the most complex mental operations are possible without the cooperation of consciousness- a truth which we have had to learn anyhow from every psycho-analysis of a patient suffering from hysteria or obsessions. These dream-thoughts are certainly not in themselves incapable of consciousness; if we have not become conscious of them during the day, this may have been due to various reasons. The act of becoming conscious depends upon a definite psychic function- attention- being brought to bear. This seems to be available only in a determinate quantity, which may have been diverted from the train of thought in question by other aims. Another way in which such trains of thought may be withheld from consciousness is the following: From our conscious reflection we know that, when applying our attention, we follow a particular course. But if that course leads us to an idea which cannot withstand criticism, we break off and allow the cathexis of attention to drop. Now, it would seem that the train of thought thus started and abandoned may continue to develop without our attention returning to it, unless at some point it attains a specially high intensity which compels attention. An initial conscious rejection by our judgment, on the ground of incorrectness or uselessness for the immediate purpose of the act of thought, may, therefore, be the cause of a thought-process going on unnoticed by consciousness until the onset of sleep.

But hope is indeed the last resort for a dreamer.

I myself am a dreamer, everyone is! Its hope that keeps us going. I dream of things that are out of my reach or places that i`ve never been to before. But its hope that teaches me to keep struggling.



regards

Irfan

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a very good article zeejah...i enjoyed reading it very much.i believe that these dreams of ours bring us hope.

Very nice fairytale - anytihng involving hope is just that ultimately. Reality conditions you for common sense which screams - get over it, get over it. But overall a very sweet story which has touched too many chords !!

aicha

actually, dreams r not just imagination, with enuf belief, u can make them come true...all it takes is belief and concentration... but that would make another article...;)

Beautiful!

But sometimes too much hope and too much dreaming makes one go for illusions, which when broken only lead to distress and sorrow and at that moment even hope leaves.

Mona

The magician needs the dreaming girl as much as the girl needs the magician. In real life the story ends when the magician runs away with the girl`s younger sister and the girl ends up with the man with the 3 carat (Hope) diamond!!

Ain`t life grand?

later

-sac