My Skeptical Thoughts by Suleman Nasir (book club suggestions .txt) 📕

Youth is wasted on the young when they let slip the purpose of their being and fritter away the opportunities they are provided with; they let their youthful energy to go down the drain by their engagement in frivolous activities. The latter-day youth has a yen for immediate pleasure. They procrastinate out of fright of getting out of their comfort zones, and give a wide berth to endeavors that are demanding and industrious. Minds of the young are blank canvases and can be dyed to any color; fictitious contents of the media have redefined the sum and substances of lives of the young ones, and have oriented them towards fruitless pursuits and chases. When compared to previous generations, our youth is more work-shy, and is consumed by escapism. In place of confronting the challenges and surmounting the hardships that life dispatches towards them, they seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities through entertainment or engaging in fantasy. The fads and vogues of today’s youth, the people they idolize and follow, and their indifferent outlook on life is doing more disservice than any favor, for it is impelling them to a meaningless existence. To every nation, it is an absolute imperative to take up the gauntlet of ridding its youth from all those tendencies that only spell doom.

Youth, to its nation is a mother lode of puissance and power. History is a witness that all the revolutions and metamorphosis of the world is made possible by the youthquake; many episodes that shook the core of the world were fomented by young activists.

A nation may pride itself on its military potency and economic stability, but an ineffective and inept youth may prove to be a chink in its armor and an ample reason to cause its tear down.

Chapter 32

Desperate Eyes, Empty Bellies, and Bare Pockets

“The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.”

-Eugene O’ Neile

The most painful and despairing feeling of all is the sense of deprivation. There is nothing sourer than witnessing the niceties withheld from one and bestowed upon others. Without a doubt, poverty is an aching infliction in any social context. A man who is incapable of catering to his household’s fundamental necessities, unable to keep his children aligned with the fast pace of the world through schooling, lives an existence soaked in agony. The poverty of an individual is most often chalked up to the strokes of fate; a man afflicted with the misery of poverty is lamented upon and then left to bear the heavy cross of his suffering on his own. The only things that such people incur in their bowls oft-times are pitiful glances and sympathetic lip-services.

Desperation manipulates and rouses the evil within a man’s soul. Poverty is indeed not an offense or something despicable worthy of abomination, but it does serve as a breeding ground for crimes like larceny and burglaries, and menaces like child labour, malnutrition, violence, lack of education, and maladies of all kind. A man whose mind is occupied only by the thoughts of his child moaning out of hunger, whose eyes envision his little ones laboring in the hot sun and chilly winters, is impervious to everything; he will go to any extent to fill the empty bellies of his ménage. When hunger goes beyond the bounds of endurance, one turns blind to religion, caste, creed, and honor; any food that is fed to such man is like manna from heaven for him. He does not bat an eyelash to whether such food came from the house of a Muslim, a Christian, an idol worshipper, or a Jew. To every man, honor is his treasured possession, but it is his arm-twisting lot that coerces his soliciting hands to spread before others. In the discriminating eyes of society, the ugliness of a man lies not in his appearance, but his empty pocket. A man who has nothing to offer is most often kept at an arm’s length. Poverty is an illegitimate child nourished in the womb of a nation; regardless of how much it is despised and shunned, the naked truth cannot be concealed that it is the recklessness of a nation and its societies that deliver poverty.

It is too obvious to ignore that poverty brings forth unevenness; where the rich feast, the poor shoulder famines; opportunities warranting a better life are confiscated from the poor and thrown in the laps of the rich. Inequality among the masses is ominous of governance failure. When poverty inexorably commences unfurling, a state begins to teeter between prosperity and failure.

Poverty is not analogous to an incurable disease or a destiny inevitable. It is the consequence of prudent policy choices that aid in poverty alleviation and the rise of the lower and the middle classes. When a nation ploughs money in the creation of more avenues of employment and policies to augment worker’s wage and families’ economic stability, improved outcomes in both the short terms and the long terms are bound to appear. Investment in free and quality schooling for all is the prophecy of a nation’s prosperity. We too, as individuals, are culpable, if an impoverished child somewhere sleeps with an empty belly. When we as penny pinchers do not pay taxes, we cripple our nation to its core to alleviate poverty. We must sink money in charities to help the cause of poverty reduction.

Most of our problems linger unsolved since we love to lay blames on others, instead of directing attention towards the solutions. As an alternative to holding the government or its big fishes guilty, we must brood over what we can do in order to gain riddance from poverty that encircles us. Merely praying for others, hollow sympathies, or hopes devoid of action will not suffice, for neither miracles nor a messiah are needed to liberate this world of its wretchedness; what really is required is compassion and warm-hearted actions aimed at enhancing the lives of others. Even if one poverty-stricken child smiles, by your altruism, then for you my friend, praises shall be sung on heaven’s gate.

Chapter 33

The Anatomy of an Emotional Fool

“This is the greatest paradox: the emotions cannot be trusted, yet it is they that tell us the greatest truths.”

-Don Herold

Emotions are inveterate features that we receive sewn to the fabric of our being. It is not amiss to call emotions a breath of life. Emotions are our responses to circumstances, moods, and relations with others. Our growth is two-fold; we grow physically, and second is our emotional growth and maturity. Emotions are inextricable halves of us, and cannot be plucked out. After all, emotions married with a conscience are what make us human. Emotions are the drivers of the chief proportion of our actions; national fervor, religious staunchness, fidelity in romantic love and marriage are founded on our strong emotions; romantic and platonic relationships, friendships, and matrimony are emotional agreements forged between those involved. But when one does not hold a dominating control over his emotions and is directed by his impulses is like an animal trying to be human. This treatise does not point to being emotionless, for a person without emotions is not dissimilar to a dead body, but rather it suggests gaining power over one’s emotions. The one who begins to conquer his feelings and emotions becomes a force unconquerable.

A wild stream of emotions perverts one’s judgments. A man whose emotions call all the shots for him is quite gullible, and is most often manipulated, used and abused by others; he trusts others blindly since he is blindfolded by his feelings and sentiments. A man, who is lorded over by his emotions, unwarily holds people as they appear to be; he makes his first impression of others a last and lasting impression. If the people were as saintly and honest as they appear to be, the world would have been free of all the evil and wicked people; there would not have been any crime, oppression, and carnage. People, including ourselves, wear masks to conceal our true selves. When it comes to trusting others, one must not pay heed to the stupidities of his heart, but rather be all ears to his conscience and judgmental prowess. We should be courteous towards others, but simultaneously, in place of putting blind faith in them, we must give them space to prove themselves whether they are worthy of being cascaded with our trust or not. We must be vigilant of who we trust, for even the Lucifer was once a reputable angel.

Emotions are the forces of nature dwelling inside us and are of great service to us. But if they go unhampered, they have the potential to wreak disasters. A man, whose emotions hold his strings, oscillates between ecstasy and melancholy. He remains mounted on an emotional rollercoaster, where fiddling events take him to the high nodes of excitement, and an insignificant and puny occurring plunges him into despair; emotional precariousness, to be more specific. Often in the stupor of our emotions and our feelings, we make commitments, resolves, and promises, that later leave us in an inescapable tangle of remorse, self-accusation, self-loathing, and woe. If my opinion serves me right, in many scenarios emotional instability and fragility ooze out from low self-esteem and low self-worth. When our emotions are unreasonably hinged at others, it depicts that we think of ourselves as incomplete and are of the view that others will complete us. So, in an attempt to make ourselves complete, we assign value to others in spades; as long as we relish in the attention bestowed by others we are content, but the moment its supply ceases, it manifests as a beginning of an end of our emotional stability.

It is our folly when we see our emotions as a reliable guide and look the world through a Panglossian pane of glass. The great many of our solid-seeming first impressions turn out to be all bluff and bluster. Everything that we see and encounter must be submitted to a process of judicious unraveling; one must not be cynical, but rationally skeptical. Our emotions are not clear transparent glass, but full of blemishes, scratches, and distortions, thus we have a proclivity for misinterpreting facts by blindly trusting our emotions and feelings. Emotions are like weathers advancing on our mental horizons that can have a conclusive impact on our thoughts and actions; we must not be a weather vane to the vagaries of our feelings. We would have gone a long way to prevail over our troubles if we sometimes do ourselves the good of not paying heed to our feelings. In crucial moments, we must let our emotions settle down, and accept that we are massive viscous bags of sentiments who glimpse at the world through a blemished glass that is tinted with illusions and misinterpretations. Prudence lies in exuding judgment and not being reliant on our caprices and impulses.

Chapter 34

The Soothing Magic of Letting Go

“Learn to let go of the things that you are afraid to lose.”

–Yoda

Verily, Man is the captain of the ship called “fate”. He, by his iron-clad determination, unbending conviction, and sedulous efforts scouts his ship in any direction he wills. But, sometimes the boat of fate begins to float on uncharted waters. Humans, owing to their sense of superiority, like to assert control over themselves and their circumstances, as it gives them an air of power and virility. We like to pull the strings of everything that transpires in our life thereby when some episodes do not pan out in the manner we had envisaged we do not let them take their fore-ordained course and stick to making futile attempts to sculpt them according to our own will. Fully aware