On education

It transpired when I was in a café sipping my coffee waiting for a friend of mine to join me who was uncharacteristically late. So I was just sitting sipping coffee, having a look at people on the other tables. On most tables the conversation was in German so I didn’t pay much attention to that (This is such a euphemism since paying attention would have hardly helped improve comprehension). But there was one table where there were a couple of teenagers speaking English and I was naturally drawn to that. I was not so much interested in what they were talking about as I was in how the body language of the speakers changed and reacted to what they or the other person was saying. I could clearly see that in social contexts, one of the simplest way that people show their approval of what is being said to them or the group at large is to laugh or smile as a reaction. I could see that when people at the table laughed, the speaker got more energy to continue with whatever he or she was saying (because the person had clear approval to continue). It looked to me that the way social groups encourage certain types of behavior is by laughing at things.

Conversely when someone said something that did not make the group laugh or smile, the speaker is subtly discouraged to continue with his or her tirade. Such a speaker may often be considered boring or uninteresting.

Thereby there is at least a small causal relationship between social behavior (body language used, words used, the type of jokes told etc) and what people laugh at. This makes the reason as to what makes people giggle, laugh, grin, smile, and chuckle at the very heart of human behavior. Hence it is important to find what exactly what it is that people laugh at. As per my experience I feel that what people laugh at is associated with the amount and type of knowledge that they have acquired in their lives. That’s why people in Pakistan will laugh at things which people in Germany may consider lame and what people Germany may laugh about is what people in Pakistan can consider immoral. The difference is the amount of education that they have had. The knowledge they have received acquired or information that was generally disseminated to them. So in order to improve social behavior, educate people.

“So I didn’t get stood up after all” I tell him, as he finally shows up
“Da kann nicht seinJ” he says

Erkaltung

Ever since I have lived in Berlin, I have been going to this doctor (Aerztin). She does not speak English at all so its always a a lot of work in trying to tell her how I feel. I went to her when I had been in Berlin for 3 months, then 6 months and now yesteryday when I went to her, I have lived here for almost a year. Being able to talk to her is the litmus test for my German speaking abilities.

Every time that  I have been to a doctor in my life, I have come back with load full of medicinal drugs that I have had to take day in and day out to get well again. So yesterday when I went to the doctor I was wondering if she would give me Augmentin the anti biotic or some standard paracetamol. But what she did was to tell me a total of three German sayings which I feel I should translate here

“Erkaltung. 3 tage kommst es, 3 tage bleibt es, und 3 tage geht es”
“Cold. For 3 days it comes, for 3 days it stays and another 3 days it leaves”

“Manchmal weniger ist mehr als mehr”
“Sometime, less is more”

She told me that I have the common cold and since it’s a viral infection there is no medicine for it. And that I have to rest it away.So here I am sitting at home since yesterday, bored out of my wits and thinking that getting sick in a foreign country sucks really bad. Makes you miss your mom the most. 

Inside the mind of old people lies history

Apparently the old people in Berlin have something against urban rails and underground trains and have a thing for trams and buses. I say this with a reasonable amount of certainty after having watched a bus full of really old people, a countless number of times. Today was also one such day. The laziness that I personify, I was taking a bus to a place where I could have easily walked to. But this post is neither about the commuting habits of old people in Berlin nor of my laziness in general, but instead about what I think when I see so many old people in this city.

Germany in general and Berlin in particular is brimming with history, and here when I say history I don t mean something that happened thousands of years ago but of things that happened a few decades ago. Once the capital of Prussia, then the capital of the Third Reich, then the divided city (and capital of the eastern bloc) and finally becoming the capital of  unified Germany, Berlin is a gem for people who are even remotely interested in anything related to history. These old people are a living testimony to those times. So come to think of it, these people were actually there when Europe was  ravaged by the second world war. Some were IN BERLIN when the red army invaded Berlin and Germany unconditionally surrendered. Some of them might even be in Berlin when Hitler committed suicide. They might just be a few blocks away from where that happened. They must remember a lot that would be valuable to historians.

Then this city was divided and there was a wall, a real actual literal wall that separated the city. and passing to the other side was, for all practical purposes, impossible. All these old people must remember how it was to have family on the other side of the wall. and then how it must have felt when the wall came down. Some must have been happy, some must have been sad but it was a historic moment and all of these would remember it.

Consider a typical Berliner (person not doughnut),who was growing up in the 30s. This person is bombarded with the 2nd World War propaganda of the time and he/she believes in all the ideals held by the third Reich( I assume here that kids generally don t know or think much and are therefore extremely vulnerable to what they are fed to them in terms of information). Sadly for this person however, Germany would lose the war in 1945. For this person it would be catastrophic because that means that whatever s/he believed was wrong and Germany would not reach the world domination that it so desires to have.. Now consider again that this person lives in the eastern bloc under the communist regime and grows up with this propaganda. At this point s/he finds it difficult to cope with this new found ideals that are being fed to him/her, but does well to inculcate them into his framework of thought. but come the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and this person again has to change everything that s/he believed in and has to adopt a new system of thinking. I can only imagine what that sort of a person would feel. For most people who truly absolutely believe in something, they never change it, I cannot imagine what it would be like to do it twice. Almost sounds impossible.
This is a person I would like to meet and talk to. 

Describing a picture

There are many reasons as to why I like this picture. Top amongst them is the fact the people featured in the picture have made no superficial effort to give out the impression that they are close friends. However, if you look at the picture for 5 seconds you sense that the air between them is those of old friends, who have known each other so well and for so long that even silence between them is comforting. I also like how these two people have made no attempt to pose for the camera whereas both appear to be fully conscious that they are being snapped (assuming of course that the person on the left just stands with his legs crossed). Since we can see the blue sky as well, the impression is that of a relaxed sunny day by the river. This just adds to the overall ambience of peace and quiet where words are a mere stain on silence.

For both these people personally, the logo on top of the building on the right will always remain important, for it is/was their Alma Mater in Berlin. And because of the sadness that comes with getting only one life to live, this name is going to stay with them for the rest of their lives.

There is also a  river on one side, which to me always represents the flow, from one point in life, to another. It symbolizes the unending and quite unnerving constant metamorphosis that our lives are regularly undergoing. The river stretches as far as our eyes can see. Which is just perfect.

The only thing lacking however is that it is coloured, for I have noticed that for a picture to be considered of artistic value, it needs to be black and white. Sadly, this picture isn't.  

Words from everywhere

I have collected some knowledge about people from different countries and cultures over the time period that I have lived in Berlin. One thing that I find myself paying particular attention to these days is how words are constructed in different languages and how some words exist in one language and not in another. Following is a list of words (mostly English sadly) which I think are quite unique.


Weltschmerzen (German)

The beauty in German is that it combines words to form longer words (an "agglutinative" language since we are on the subject of words). So koepf in German means head and schmerzen means ache/pain. So Keopfschmerzen is headache. In much the same way, Welt is world and Weltschmerzen is "the pain of the world".
What it really means is that if you could imagine worrying about everythig in the world, say from hunger and politics to stars and insects to facebook to cars, if you could hypothetically worry about everything, and how temperoary everything is and how meangingful the persuit of happiness is, THEN you truely have Weltscherzen. In essence it the pain associated with just existing and just being alive.


Wanderlust (Loanword from German, now English)

Here we have, something that many young adolescents might associate themselves with. Wanderlust is the desire, the urge, the wish the hope and the lust for travelling to a place, somewhere, anywhere that one has never been to before. It symbolises breaking free from the hustle bustle of mundane life. It is for people who want to seek out "new life and new civilizations"


Alexithemia ( English)


I love words which have a sense of humour about them, and I think alexythemia is one such. This word ( which I am not sure even native speakers of English would even know. I am sure the Americans wouldnt know that , the Brits and others might:p) describes the condition one has when one cant describe emotions in a verbal manner. So they actually have a word, and quite a difficult one at that, for when you cant describe your emotions in a verbal manner. :(



Flaneur ( there is an umlaut on the letter "a" and yes it is a french word)

This word describes a person who wanders around aimlessly BUT enjoyably through life while observing everything that life has in store. All of us have it so some extent I suppose.

Baraye Meharbani ( Urdu)

What do we say when we want someone to do something for us? We say please. this is the Urdu word for please which is made up of two words Baraye ( meaning for the sake of / in order to ) and Meharbani( thankfulness)

So when you combine these two words you have something that would translate in English to "please do something after which I will thank you for doing it)

So if you meet a native speaker of Urdu (like myself) and he/she says please to you. You should picture in your head the following sentence "please do something after which I can thank you"

Adoxography ( English)

and finally I end this blog entry by mentioning a word that means "an elaborate writing on a subject of little or no use whatever" which is quite in itself the description of my blog and this post.

On Characters from Children's Books

Back when I was young ( not just by heart) I read books in which there was a clearly defined good guy character( who also looked good by the way) and a bad guy character( who of course looked bad). You could actually tell just by looking at the cover of the book as to who was the good guy or who wasn’t. Take the name of the story and the picture on the cover together, and there you have it, a working rough draft of the story. It made me feel happy and secure that I wouldn't have to read too much into the story myself. 

But when I grew up, I saw that things weren’t as simple as they seemed. For example sometimes good looking people were really absolutely nasty at heart (most of the times? nah) and really ugly (strong word lets change it) really reasonably okay looking people could be good people. I have to admit, that was a shocker. How was I now ever going to tell good people from the bad ones? My whole worldview had been changed. There was utterly no superficial way to know that anymore. Looks, apparently as it turned out, could be deceiving. Good guys didn’t just do random good things to strangers on the streets and bad guys weren’t always brooding over some evil plans to take over the world(preferably in a dark room at night) Actually all this was making me feel really sad up until again when it suddenly changed to what it used to be like before.

The Taliban are people who live in caves, mostly in Afghanistan and sometimes in Pakistan (that is if you actually know the distinction between the two countries and you don’t think one is a city within the other). Their weapon of choice is an AK47 rifle (mine too actually in the computer game counter strike). Their job is to blow things and people up. They have been doing it for years and as the architect of the Matrix says "have become increasingly efficient at it”. They sport beards and wear the traditional dress from the region which is "shalwar kameez". Most importantly they look and act DIFFERENT. Different than what I am. They are also generally seen on camera almost always carrying a rifle (even when the apparent purpose of the video is to talk to people from the media). They claim to follow the shariah law (at least their own version of it) and have sister organizations or daughter concerns virtually everywhere in the world. Literally anything wrong that happens anywhere in the world is carried out under the guileful command of the Taliban leaders, and only so that there is no confusion they are always quick to accept responsibility for things that happen in Iraq or South Sudan or Syria or well, unsurprisingly Afghanistan. 

So now once again I feel the same thing. I no longer have to think about the bad guys or the good guys. The news channels just do that for me. And then they just tell me what I have to think about. And I like a truly modern man of the 21st century, humbly always comply. So at the end of the day, I again know how/what the bad guys look like, smell touch taste feel say talk do. Yet again you name a news story containing that name and show me a picture simultaneously and I can tell what the story is going to be about. Ahh. It has made my life simpler once again.

Disclaimer: I detest and abhor to my very core the ideals that the Taliban hold and represent and wish that the world soon will be rid of people like them. The purpose of this blog however has only been to state that every time I hear something on the news, like this,  I feel there is more to the story than meets the eye. 

Its that thing you know

Invariably, all the people I have met in Berlin speak more than one language. The last sentence is a colossal understatement because most people speak three or more languages. And when you speak many languages, the most profound benefit that you have is having something else to talk about with strangers you meet for the first time, other than weather and world politics. You can talk about languages themselves.
More often than not, people will also tell you how they have a “thing” for languages. I don’t know what having a “thing” for languages means but it certainly means something cool or else people wouldn't be saying that so often. This reminds me I also used to say the same thing. And I don’t anymore because I speak only two languages and that’s a low number of languages to know if you want the claim of the “thing with languages” to be taken seriously by anyone.

So virtually everyone I have met here I have told this one thing. I generally tell it right after telling them how similar I think German and Urdu are (which happens when I tell them that “I AM learning German” (this happens when they ask me “ARE you learning German”?)). Anyway so when I tell them I think Urdu and German are similar, their response is always “really? How come” and then I pull up my sleeves and get into the nitty gritties. I have told the exact same thing to many people so many times that it almost seems like a script that I rehearse over and over again. Lately I have been thinking whether I have become so old that I do not remember I am repeating myself or not. I certainly do hope I haven’t. This similarity in these languages is telling people the word for “capital city” in Urdu. In my defence, if indeed you can come to your own defence, but in my defence, the word for “capital city” in Urdu IS really interesting and it DOES really remind me of how words are constructed in the German language. For the interest of the reader it is “dara-ul-hakoomat” and it means a region within which the government of a country is located. Wonderful isn’t it. There you go. Now when we meet for the first time, you would know what I will say.

 OHHHHHHHH Now I see why I am so pathetically sad and lonely here. It makes perfect sense now.