RAMADAN FOR A NON MUSLIM IN KUWAIT

Hello,

A few of my friends have been wondering how it is like to be a non - muslim in Kuwait during the holy month of Ramadan. Well frankly it has made no difference to me except for a few adjustments that we need to make in our daily routine.

The Ministry of Interior makes sure that the law which was formulated in 1968 is given wide publicity leading to Ramadan. The rule according to law No. 44 of 1968 says that anybody caught eating, drinking or smoking in public during the daytime in Ramadan, along with those who compelled or abetted them to do so, would be given a fine of up to KD 100 and/or a prison sentence of one month.
I have not heard of anyone personally known to me being caught but it is understood that the imprisonment ends on the last day of Ramadan. This law also gives the Ministry the powers to ask certain establishments to close during the fasting hours and Restaurants are not open during the day hours till the break of fast at sunset.
It depends on where you work and it is necessary that you respect the local customs as any unwanted exuberance is considered an insult to the tradition of fasting that is followed by most Kuwaitis.
In some organisations, the pantry is kept open for non - muslim expatriates to take their food, water, etc in seclusion. In most organisations the Kuwaiti colleagues do try to make it clear that they do not object to your taking food and water during office hours if it done in the pantry.
In an organisation I know of non - muslims had not paid heed to the sentiments of the fasting muslims and had gathered at the pantry, as if for a picnic. The action taken was that from the next day the pantry was closed.
I have not witnessed it but it is understood that if a muslim complains about your having taken food or water in public view, during the fasting hours, you can attract the penalty we have discussed above.
School children are allowed to bring their lunch and have it in their classrooms instead of the usual places like the playground or the auditorium. Sick and invalid people are exempted. I understand that even sportsmen are exempted but we do not take the risk and on Fridays when we play cricket we make sure that when we drink water we are not sighted by any muslim.

The arrangement of our water drinking place during our game is illustrated in the figure alongside. This is circulated to all players before Ramadan.

Ramadan is a holy month and the best time to ask for a raise. I am not sure anyone has actually done it or not. Kuwaitis give away 2.5% of their income as Zakat and try to be the most benevolent during the holy month.

Ramadan is the best time to relax. Office hours begin at 9.30 AM, two hours after the usual start and end at 2.30 PM, half an hour before the usual end. If your Boss is a Kuwaiti, then it is the best time of the year. No pressure & no irritation.

Muslims like to share during Ramadan and there are meals called the 'Ghabka' held at almost all big hotels in the evenings. Large AC tents are put up and a variety of food is spread for dinner. Non- muslims are invited and there is no restriction on the number of friends you take along with you. I am invited to one tomorrow.

The bad things about Ramadan is that traffic is really bad. Not as bad as in Delhi though, but bad by Kuwait standards. The reason is that people have not slept well and need to rush home to get sleep. Therefore some rash driving and some cat napping on the wheel. Ramadan sees a large number of accidents.

All in all it is month of rejoicing, meeting friends, having a lot of time for yourself for a non - muslim in Kuwait.

Be careful while driving, drinking and do some dieting, that's all.

Best wishes,

Manoj

THE ALCHEMIST - PAUL COELHO

Paul Coelho

Hello,

After finishing 'Unaccustomed Earth' I started reading 'The power of your Subconscious Mind' by Dr. Joseph Murphy.

This is a wonderful book but it gets tedious as the writer tries to drill in the message. While reading the book and after getting through the top seven chapters I was strongly reminded of 'The Alchemist' by Paul Coelho.

I took out the book once again and tried to go through the underlined messages. These were the best part of the book according to me, when I first read it and now when I was going through them again I realized how easily he had made us understand the power of the subconscious mind through a simple story of Santiago and his search for the treasure.

I tried to note down the top ten messages from the book. Of course these are my choices for the top ten and you may have your own selection. The messages are scattered around like gems in a treasure trove and I now strongly believe that if one goes through their own top ten from 'The Achemist' nothing in the world can stop them from achieving their goals.

THE TOP TEN:

• Whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth. And when you want something, the entire universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

This people who saw "Om Shanti Om' will remember as Shah Rukh Khan's appealing dialogue "Kisi cheez ko agar puri dil se chaho, toh saari kayanat use tumse milane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai."

• We have to take advantage when luck is on our side, and do as much to help it as it's doing to help us.


• No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.


• When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.


• “Every search begins with beginner’s luck. And every search ends with the victor’s being severely tested.”


• There is only one way to learn. It's through action.


• "You came so that you could learn about your dreams," said the old woman. "And dreams are the language of God. When he speaks in our language, I can interpret what he has said. But if he speaks in the language of the soul, it is only you who can understand."


• Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him.


• "But, above all, I learned that these things are all so simple that they could be written on the surface of an emerald."

and finally my current favorite

• The world's greatest lie: At a certain point in our lives we lose control of what's happening to us and our lives become controlled by fate.

If you have read 'The Alchemist' long time ago I would persuade you to go through it again.

Your dreams are yours to achieve and although the journey may be tough, there will be sacrifices to make, choices to be made, distractions to be ignored, price to be paid, but at the end, if you remain faithful to your dream, victory will always be your charming bride.

"Maktub" - it's written.

Read 'The Alchemist' and you will have lessons on life. The book originally sold only 900 prints and the publisher refused to reprint. Later it sold 65 million copies.

Keep it by your bedside and read it whenever this happens "At a certain point in our lives we lose control of what's happening to us and our lives become controlled by fate." and you will know how to fight the greatest lie on earth.

Best regards,

Manoj

Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri

Hello,

Finished reading "Unaccustomed Earth," a collection of short stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri. The lives of expatriate Bengalis and their first-generation American-born children are once again the theme of the stories as were her earlier highly successful, Pulitzer Prize- winning story collection "Interpreter of Maladies" and her novel "The Namesake, which then was also made into a very successful film.

In "Unaccustomed Earth" we see the second generation Bengali kids struggle with their identities as their elders start adopting the American way of life. The stories try to show to us a struggle to adapt by individuals and the conflict between the desire to remain close to the roots and the need to adapt to the American way of life.

In the opening story we have a daughter trying to get over the loss of her mother, trying to maintain the filial relationship with her father as he struggles to let her know that he has moved beyond the past. The inability of the daughter to be Indian and the struggle of the father to acknowledge his Americanism is well depicted.

Bringing them both under one roof, Jhumpa creates a tension that gets exciting to finally end in the daughter voicing her needs and then getting to know about her father's secret by accident.

Told in simple sentences, you identify with the characters' innermost feelings. Ruma's vulnerability and her father's rising panic is transformed into a compelling emotional landscape.
I really liked the way the father looks at his marriage "the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start." But this is of course hindsight and as he thinks somewhere else "He did not want to be part of another family, part of the mess, the feuds, the demands, the energy of it."

The second story "Hell Heaven" once again is a struggle between the 'have done' and 'could not do' the transition kind of American Bengalis. Pranab Chakraborty playing with the emotions of a simple housewife and then moving on to greener American pastures to finally in a very American manner cheat on his wife, leaving Aparna to long secretly for a moment of bliss, but not being able to gather the courage to take things in her hand. She is finally able to get over her burden when she narrates the story, to her daughter, who was then nursing a broken heart herself, of how she had almost ended her life after Pranab had decided to get married .

In "The choice of Accommodation" we have another Bengali, Amit, struggle to honour his marriage vows as he is haunted by the love of his childhood and youth. He is finally being able to do justice to his marriage after wedding of his affection takes place at the school where it all started. By bringing him back to the school dorm, Jhumpa gives his life a new beginning which is as open and uninhibited as the love making of Amit and Megan at the end of the story.

"Only Goodness" talks about the relationship between a brother and sister and ends up in a near disaster as the brother almost kills the child of his sister when he finds himself failing to kill his obsession for alcohol. The struggle of the brother is wonderfully depicted as he goes back to the source, her sister, her fight with her guilt, about having introduced him to it.

The stories about Sangeeta in "Nobody's business" and the next set of three stories about Hema and Kaushik are just fine. In fact the simplicity is missing as the situations turn contrived at the end.

All in all the stories are all well told but the length is something I have complains about. It has something of an Alice Munroe or John Updike kind of fixation for description of the landscape that at time turns boring. This is mostly in the last three stories as Jhumpa tries to convey meaning to the lonliness and solitude by taking the protagonist through several towns and events.

Love,

Manoj

John Updike - Rabbit Run

Hello,

John Updike is some kind of a legend and Rabbit, Run is the first story I have read. in fact it is his first novel as well.

It is story based in Brewer, Pennysylvania, USA.

It is a story unwinding itself in 1959.

It is a story of Harry Rabbit Angstrom, who has had his good days as a a legendary high school basketball star. He realizes suddenly, after a chance basketball outing with kids that he is tied down in a suburban marriage to a woman who is alcoholic and has an achingly prosaic career as a kitchen gadget salesman.

He gets out of his house to get back the car and his kid and ends up abandoning his pregant wife to drive off ambiguously toward Florida. After reaching West Virginia, he changes his mind and decides to return to Brewer, Pennsylvania.

He struggles with his thoughts and ends up falling into the lap of a prostitute through his old coach who himself is a good for nothing drunkard by then.

It turns out that Rabbit has been to war and has come back to see his childhood sweetheart married to someone else. These are just mentioned in the passing.

He wants no responsibility but is also a scared cat trying to be as close to an anchor as possible. He gets bored easily and after impregnating the prostitute gets back to his wife when she gives birth to their daughter.

The fact that his misdemenour is forgiven so easily emboldens him and he also eyes the wife of the priest who has tried to bring him back to his family. He vacillates between the whore and the wife as each outdoes the other in being nice to him for all his cruelty and finally runs again.

Rabbit Angstrom, despite his grotesque immaturity and narcissism, is a very real character and you tend to hate, like and laugh at him as he goes through his idiotic inexplicable ego trips and keeps getting away with it as people seem to be too willing to forgive.

The prose is sometimes laborious as we get to know the roads and surroundings of the area although they do not seem to impact the story in any particular way. John Updike also uses an endless streams of adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses and the exposition becomes compounded and bombastic when describing a small building, a backyard or a skyline. Such pages we turn to flip over quickly.

It was a revolutionary book at that time as the use of words like sex, penis, etc was taboo. It is reflected very well through Rabbit who wants oral sex with Ruth, the whore he stays with when he runs from his wife, but is not able to put it into words.

John Updike clearly brings to life the life of the 50's and 60's where frustration is growing, the white man is dominating relationships and women are turning into doormats as personal gratification becomes more important than family life and values.

It would have been a much much bettter book if the boring landscape descriptions had been edited.

Happy reading,

Manoj