See with your Heart

See with your heart blog

What is Ramadan?

Leave a Comment / See with your Heart / By / December 12, 2019

Contrary to ignorantly romantic notions, fasting in Ramadan is not prescribed to teach the wealthy what it means to be poor. Poverty is about insecurity, lack of choice, lack of dignity, compulsion, fear and despair. Poverty is about living on the edge without any safety net. It is not about present hardship but of looking ahead at a life of unending and ever increasing deprivation. Anyone who thinks that he can know what poverty is by merely bringing breakfast forward and postponing lunch with a fridge full of goodies and special foods to break your fast with, is delusional. You will never know what it is to be poor until you are poor yourself. Ramadan is a month which Allahﷻ sends as a boot camp to reset our lifestyles to a way that leads to success in this world and the next. This is the beauty of Islam. Islam doesn’t demand renunciation of this life in order to attain success in the Hereafter. Islam shows us a way of life that guarantees us popularity, influence, love, harmony, peace and prosperity in this life and Jannah (Heaven) in the Aakhira (Hereafter). The key to that is the concept of Taqwa.

Rain forest days and nights

1 Comment / See with your Heart / By / April 18, 2019

On these excursions, if you shone your torch over the surface of the river, it would appear as if the water was sprinkled with diamonds. Shining stars, eyes of Caiman, young and old, out fishing, floating on the river with only their eyes and nostrils above the surface. Like alligators and crocodiles, the Caiman is a fish eater but not above taking the unwary to add variety to his diet. They also eat turtles and so their jaws are adapted to taking in broad prey and exerting tremendous biting pressure to crack their shells. You definitely wouldn’t want to go swimming with one especially as a big one can grow to 6 meters (20 feet) in length. Caiman are seen as a nuisance by riverside dwellers as they destroy fishing nets and sometimes attack cattle. I hate to think of little Amerindian children playing in the water all day jumping in and out of it – I expect when one did not show up at home at night is when you know that something had happened. But at night, the shining eyes used to be an amazing sight and I loved to shine our torch and look at it.

Lessons from the rain forest

Leave a Comment / See with your Heart / By / April 18, 2019

Lying in the hammock waiting for sleep to come, I would listen to the sounds of the forest and try to identify each one. The Amazonian rainforest is a rather silent place in the night, unlike Indian forests. The animals are less vocal and the forest itself muffles sound thanks to its density – you don’t hear much except insects. If you are near the river there are not many mosquitos but you do get vampire bats and so you need to cover up unless you wish to be bitten by one of them. That doesn’t turn you into a vampire or anything so romantic, but the wound can bleed for a long time as there is heparin in the bat’s saliva which prevents blood from clotting. In addition, I am sure vampire bites are not exactly what any doctor would order so it is better to stay off their menu.

Committing matrimony

5 Comments / See with your Heart / By / April 15, 2019

Truth, Caring, Mutual respect are what I call my three Cardinal Principles of happy marriages. Please notice that I am not using the word ‘love’. Love comes out of these three things. What is called love is usually physical desire. The shape or size of someone’s body is not the inspiration for love; it can be the inspiration for infatuation and lust but not love. For love to happen, the lasting kind that is, the kind that grows with age and the longer you spend time together, you need truthfulness, caring and concern for one another – putting the needs of the other before your own; and mutual respect. Without respect there can’t be any love.

Guyana, cross cultural boot camp

5 Comments / See with your Heart / By / April 18, 2019

“So, Comrade Baig, you have been living here for two years. What are your impressions about our country?” The interviewer was from Guyana Chronicle, the main English newspaper. I was being interviewed because I was there. Comrade was a gender-neutral term used to address anyone because Guyana was a socialist (communist) country ruled by an …

Guyana, cross cultural boot camp Read More »

Yala 2019

3 Comments / See with your Heart / By / July 27, 2019

Having finished our tea and loaded our camera equipment and ourselves into the Mahindra Bolero ‘Jeep’, we set off for our morning ‘safari’. Sri Lankan national parks use several different ‘safari’ vehicles. Toyota Hilux, Toyota Land Cruiser, Land Rover and Mahindra Bolero. Of these the Mahindra Bolero ‘Jeep’ is the most uncomfortable and potentially unsafe. To put it mildly, given the combination of the absolutely atrocious roads which have craters instead of potholes and the Mahindra Bolero’s short wheelbase and high cabin bed, you get to experience the term which used to be on all medicine bottles in the old days, ‘Shake well before use’. I know that there are six basic directions; forward, backward, right to left, left to right, upwards and since there is gravity, downwards. But I never knew that it was possible to experience all of them simultaneously until I rode in a Mahindra Bolero ‘Jeep’. What this obviously does to your spine and all your internal organs I can well imagine. It is a measure of my love for the wild and for Sri Lanka’s fabulous parks that I go there again and again and take painkillers to see me through the day. But a word of advice, if you are ever in a Sri Lankan national park, avoid the Mahindra Bolero ‘Jeep’ like the plague.

Language opens hearts

1 Comment / See with your Heart / By / February 8, 2019

The more I spent time with myself, clearer it became that it is important to be ‘friends’ with yourself. The more you are self-aware and comfortable internally, the more you can enjoy the world outside. When you are not aware of what is happening to you inside or are unhappy with decisions you have taken, or with your own internal processes, the unhappier you are likely to be with your surroundings. The normal tendency is to blame the outer world, but if one looks within, it is possible to find the solution. One rider however, that you will find only if you seek and only if you have the courage to recognize what you see. That is where sometimes the matter remains unresolved. Not because there is no solution. But because we are unwilling to accept the solution or to implement it.