AbsoluteSalman.com

Writing blogs on a new web address. All previous posts are moved. This site will not be updated.

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With regards,
Salman

Becoming a Master Perfumer's Apprentice

With D. Dubrana(A.Salam Attar)

I will teach you the meaning of perfume, he said. You have to start with a name. Name is everything. Will you smell this, he gave me a small brown bottle to tell him whats inside? Yes you are right, it is Cocoa , now will you try this second one. Something in me was telling me that I know this smell, it was pleasing to senses and homy, but I was not able to name it. It took me more than a little while to finally recall it was the smell of coffee (and for some reason it reminded me of my last morning coffee in a Geneva Cafe) . How can I forget such a basic thing, and yet how can i remember so much of my past with just a smell of coffee. He was affectionate. You cannot smell anything without a name. the meaning is in the name. Name is everything, he reiterated again with an understanding smile. It was his humble way of telling me that we smell not with our nose but more with our minds, our memories, our emotions, our past lives...). And this was how I initiated my few good days of apprenticeship with a Grandmaster perfumer, Dominique Dubrana aka Salaam Attar, an eccentric perfume composer, safely hidden from the rest of the world in a remote Italian town, content within his own composed world of fragrances and beliefs and happiness. A legend among his peers, an affectionate father among his family, a devout Sufi, and a generous teacher, planning to teach the world, what he loves the most in this transient world of ours. I can safely say for Dominique, "He is of the kind of people who are in this world but are not of this world" .


We were a group of seven odd seekers accepted by him. From as diverse background as Cuba, and Iran and Canada, and age groups from 22 to 57 years, with different upbringings and acquired knowledge and tastes. Very much lost in our own ways, floating somewhere a bit above the Maslov's pyramid,  but all having common passion to experience life in general and perfumery specifically.

Perfect first shot

 It was our first day. Dominique(our teacher) brought with him a nice good quality bow and arrow. He took his position, aimed his target and as if being sucked up by the target itself, the very first arrow flew effortlessly through space and time making its way towards the center and Bang... "Bulls eye". We all were silent for a while, mesmerized by the perfect shot. "One must have a clear idea in his mind to make perfumes", he said sometime after, "and never compromise on good quality materials...", and rest of perfume making is as easy as that arrow flying towards its target, we all understood. He had his ways of teaching us the craft. And with that we were introduced to our Perfumery Organ of  seventy-five bottles, all full of  natural essential oils except one last mysterious seemingly empty bottle(full of love i think).

My perfume Organ to play for few days

 And so began the magical journey of learning the art of perfumery and much more than that, perhaps the art of living a good life. "You have to make good perfumes and be happy with that, and not push yourself making it perfect", he told us multiple times during our learning sessions. "Only god can make perfect things. Do not exert your energies on something you cannot achieve. Good is good enough". But how do we make good perfumes, one lost soul asked, only to get a mystical smiling reply from him quoting Rumi, " Just like you can only learn to love by loving people, you can only make good perfumes by making them. Just adopt the Way of the scents".

His specialty was his knowledge of pure natural essences and his high standards of using only pure raw materials. Anything else was simply an insult to his craft. "Love is a world, either you are in the center of it or outside of it" he said. His love of natural and pure perfumes had taken him into multiple journeys around the world and I believe within himself as well. Just like his spoken words coming out of his pure experience, he generously shared with us scents from his unique collection, real Musk glands from Kashmiri Musk dear, personally collected 20 years back, thousands of years old fossilized Hyrecium, Ambergris, civet (his favorite animal scent) and some rare vintage perfumes with saffron and real musk and real damask roses and old Mysore sandalwood(non-existent now)....one after another, smells of profound purity and spirit, touching the deepest hidden corners of our minds , all that for me was like as if a peasant boy is given a glimpse of  a some mystical princess from the tale of thousand Arabian nights and he falling forever in love in her magic........

His teachings were humble yet powerful, mystical yet all making perfect sense, his examples and stories crisp and to the point. You have to make perfumes that other people like. A perfume becomes bad if you put your own ego in it. A good perfume should heal both the body and soul, and quoting Rumi again , Love is the bridge between you and everything. A natural perfume connects you with your primordial nature, connecting the profane with the sacred. Real perfumes are made for real people with real rose and real cinnamon....and the teaching continued beyond space and time and all of us students like thirsty travelers in a desert with open mouths and minds were soaking ourselves with his fragrant words and magical scents........



Sitting in a Kiev Cafe now, having my usual Sheesha full of rose and apple and mint fragrance... thinking of my days spent in his company... Joan Osborne just out of nowhere has started singing "What if god was ....."(link below).... destiny's hand as he told us whenever we had an accidental drop more, than what we wanted in our perfume formulas making our perfumes even better..... A smile just passed by my face, full of lavender and jasmine emotions and frankincense memories and I definitely am not feeling empty anymore, feeling more like in that garden full of long juniper and pine trees and roses and butterflies, we met for the very first time ......

Joan Osborne's Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn7rIarpQBk

Some of Dominque's worth reading blogs:
Distill yourself:
http://www.profumo.it/blog/index.php/2014/06/distill/
Musk deer 
http://profumo.it/cashmir/english/13_kashmiri_muskdeer_report_moschus.ht

Guatemala Diaries Part- II

The climb to Mount Pacaya was steep and I was sweating like hell, though this time it was not out of working my way up but because of the hot land of this volcanic mountain. The trek was hell black with volcanic rocks, where few months back the eruption destroyed seven hundred houses nearby. It was just 20minutes on the trek and one can already feel the heat around.

This was my second visit to Guatemala after two years. Nothing was changed. For some reason I was remembering my dialogues with her two years back.


Your theory of natural abundance and connectivity makes sense, i said, but what if people donot have that abundance in them and they feel empty and seek for more or better?
She replied, well I would say, its a state of mind, a state of greed and ingratitude and not a natural reality,  We humans are the children of the same god and the same energy is flowing through all of us. The first step to live a human experience is to forgo this sense of economizing that we feel in every thing now(thanks to capitalism) and start seeing abundance in all things around. Its around us, and its within us, we just need to feel it.  And besides,wasn't it what your patron poet Rumi who said that “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” 
I felt convinced as if some non-believer silences a non-believer by quoting a holy verse. 
 (link to diaries part-1 below)

Thinking of the abundance and seeing the grass coming out of this hot black land as well, I met a humble man along the way. An American of Guatemalan origin , interested in Mayan history and volunteering in the volcanic mountains. He asked me if I have read Carlos Barrios "the bookof destiny" and if not i should. He shared some information about Mayans. The Mayans were the true believers of nature. For them the trees were the link between the underworld and the heavens, the volcanoes were the temple of higher gods, the dragons, being the guardian serpents of those temples, the monkeys symbolizing abundance and frogs symbolizing fertility.And the concept of greater god was not idolized or have a symbol in any form, as it was so great, being present in every natural thing. Just knowing the concept was good enough for them.

He told me in the month of May , thousands of butterflies come out of nowhere to this mountain. For Mayans, the butterflies were seen as ancestors returning to earth for a visit to physicality, bringing all their wisdom and taking back all the new wisdom back to the heavens to keep harmony between both the worlds. Butterflies never leave me anywhere...
(Note to self: addition to bucket list. See the active red lava with my own eyes)

Baking Marshmallows on the way...

Antigua:
Next stop  was the the colonial city of Antigua, (Note to self: Someday, to spend at least a month in this beautiful city in the middle of nowhere)

The guide was full of stories, of Mayan capture by Spaniards, of convents, of sainthood, of forced conversions of Mayans and betrayals and book burnings of the priests, of love of the Mayan princess Luisa giving birth to the first inter-racial child , of st James, and even the order of masons in this small town.  Stories were everywhere in this small town of just thirty thousand people, waiting to be spoken out loud. Every street corner was a flashback in history, a lesson on human desires and a remembering of human goodness and humility. There was a combined laundry park in the middle of the city, where for centuries women of this town use to come, less to clean clothes,and more to gossip, and while the children were playing, the grown up kids getting their first thunder strikes from their first loves. Now with the age of tamed electricity and automatic washing machines, nobody comes to wash clothes anymore but one can still see happy couples lost in themselves and some gloomy singles in waiting.
We ended up the tour at a Franciscan church where Brother Peter is buried. Ten years ago Brother Peter was recognized as a saint by the pope John Paul. It will take me ages and pages and some more visits to this town again to write about Brother Peter, so I leave it for our imaginations on how Brother Peter changed people lives and became a legend in Fransisco catholic history, and how good man are found everywhere, and in every religion and corner of the world. 


Link to Guatemala Diaries Part-1
http://salmaninafrica.blogspot.com/2013/08/guatemala-diaries-part-1.html

Some pictures down the memory lane....

Church in Antigua with Mayan and catholic symbols

local market in Antigua

Local market in Antigua

Antigua streets

16th century university

Gratitudes for Brother Peter. One from 1947

Franciscan church, where brother peter is buried. The priest not so Franciscan

Trek to hell

Its the steam, and not clouds

Hammam... Human dirt, Wars

It was a hundred year old Hammam building, in the middle of a nowhere town in eastern turkey. Dirty, rusted, tiled up with old bricks, and like all Hammams had that distinguished smell of decades of dirt coming out of thousands of souls, scrubbed, massaged and cleaned to purity every day.
As per the owner of the hammam, business used to be good in old days but now people seldom come. But today was Baiyram Night (Muslim Eid festival) and alot of people , mostly living in big cities were here to re-cherish their roots and identity. The town itself is called  'Kangal' and as the name suggests have nothing much to brag about. So I came to clean my human dirt  in this rustic place , a foreigner, naked among many friendly Turks in the same Hammam.

Laying on the hot Hammam marble and waiting for the turk cleaner to come, for some reason I was thinking of Syria and Ukraine and Gaza.  Though calm and relaxingly sweating in this ancient building in this nowhere town, I could imagine fighting was happening all around me.

Some 300km down south is the city of Allepo near Syrian turkish border. No one knew this city until a year back, and now noone wants to go there . A mess, made out of inflated egos of monarchs and super powers and tribal affiliations and now  religious topping on top like a rotten cherry on a gone-wrong cake, which nobody wants to eat or own it anymore. A while back I was served tea by a Syrian child of age 10-12 who is forced to find work here, when all he cares about is football and games and petty jokes, and all there is left is that innocent smile of a 10 year old.

Further south few hundred kilometers, is the eternal war going on. As usual both sides blaming each-other and the world powers sending measured responses , measured enough to say they care and they don't care..... Children of god dying.....

And north, just accross the black sea. a proxy cold war has started again...  the MH17 travelers who were watching movies and eating boxed lunches in the comfort of their cozy airplane seats were reduced to ashes , all their desires and ideas of living gone, in an instant. The missile, god knows coming from east or west or may be from the sky this time....

At the Hammam, the turk cleaner man finally asked me to lay down on the floor and with all Turkish hospitality smashed and rubbed and cleaned all the dirt out of me like a dirty rag (all with good and honest intentions) and all I could do was just to swear at him and laugh at my own situation and hoping of no broken bone in this adventure. 

Long after, sitting at the town's Khavenesi(Tea shop) I was thinking, if from unknown a giant cleaner man can come and scrubs and clean us all from head to toe in pure Turkish style, so we all start seeing each other purely as humans again and not as Zionists or Palestinians or liberals or conservatives or western or oriental (and the list goes on). But is this dirt only skin-deep, which can still be scrubbed and cleaned? and has not gone down in our hearts and souls? and has not made its own hate colonies all inside us, to the level that we cannot call ourselves as humans anymore. I would like to believe in the former even if it is not true.... All than is needed is a just good Turkish cleaner...



And just heard now the news of few children and woman killed in my country by angry mob (the so called Namaloom afraad, which we all know) over some Facebook religious status update.... Certainly Strange times and no good humanly news coming from anywhere.

Anyways my rumbling will go on forever. Baiyram and Eid mubarak to all of you from this nowhere town.

Konya Flashbacks....

"But is it really possible to find beauty in the most imperfect of things" asked the novice Sufi to his Sufi Master. 

The Master smiled. In that smile, were images of years and years of memories, of joyful and sad experiences, of lost and re-found love, of hopeful desires and fearful reasons. The Master remembered his own time years back when he was young and asked the grandmaster a similar question on how to find true happiness when all things are so imperfect. He remembered his own disillusions and then the moments of epiphany where he finally realized, it’s not about finding happiness in life but creating it and often with most imperfect of things around. The Master wondered how long and far this new student of his, will travel and how easy or difficult his journey would be to understand and reach this simple conclusion. 

The day was long for me. The long bus ride to Konya from eastern part of turkey was tiring, but the mere thought of walking on the streets where Rumi once walked and talked and smiled and dreamed and got awakened by shams, was worth all that visit to this small city again. There was something thing holy in that city, it always brought an unusual calm to my heart beats.

Dumping my bags in a small cheap Pansyion (turkish hotel) , and coming back to the reception I found her, going through the translated poems of Rumi by Coleman Barks. Japanese, with rough hairs and dirt all over the clothes, but there was this undeniable shine in her eyes (the ones you find in the main characters of Murakami books). Usual formalities, introductions, trust building , taking our guards off, and there we were, sitting like old friends in the Chai Baghche (tea garden) of Konya discussing Sufism and how it relates to the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi (wikipedia link)
A bit away from us, were a group of people listening to an old man. I heard the words, beauty, and imperfections and life and was intrigued to hear more....


The Master, instead of answering, asked the young boy to do the same, what his grandmaster asked him to do years ago, asking to find and bring the most beautiful shoe from the shoemaker’s shop. All these years were passing by the master’s mind in those moments like a silent black and white old movie. He thought  if knowledge and enlightenment is also circular and karmic in nature and all that stories about evolution and technology and human progress is just an illusion, and if we humans are just reliving similar lives again and again, just with different colors. The old man continued with the story (We keep the story of the shoe and the shoemaker for a later time).

My thoughts were disrupted again… I found myself listening to the Japanese girl on phone talking to her mother in a strange language. I tried for sometime unsuccessfully, to decipher the emotions beneath these alien words… the stars were all over the sky... the Ramadan moon was about to disappear and  the ghosts of Konya’s past started to appear slowly to start the ‘Sema’ (sufi whirling ceremony). Ordering another chai for us both, I, after a very long time, smiled and kept smiling, for no apparent reason…

The tavern of my mind

The Sufi was the last person to enter the tavern.

There had been a fierce argument going on the table of wisdom. Feelings showing their emotions, passions seeking their ideals,  imagination was skyrocketing here and there with a total disregard of the achieved harmony and balance in life, and rationality speaking more with fears than with hope. All of them were trying to convince the self that they know better and that the self should follow their preferred way. For the owner of the tavern, it was one of those days when he had to worry about broken chairs and wounded faces, though he also knew in the deepest corners of his heart that these days come and go and without these, the tavern as well will loose its attained charm and Raison d'être .

The fight was as usual about the new girl in town. Was she beautiful or was the mere hope of her sudden availability was making everybody excited about her. Feelings were insisting to prove to the self that beauty was there, outside, existing on its own, and reachable like a ripen plum on a tree and it is not just the rosy water effect. Rationality on the other hand was putting all the blame to mere supply and demand curves and testosterone levels. And imagination was showing all sorts of hopes and fears with no certainty on any of the two.

"They all believe they are in hunting mode, although they are hunted themselves", Sufi thought to himself and smiled. He remembered his own past. He was a born idealist and a romantic, always seeking the perfection of his ideals in the girls around until he met the one who changed his whole way of thinking. Back in old days he used to think alot about his desires, where they come from, where they want to take him and what he should do with them. The desire to make others happy which he inherited from his own roots and traditions and the desire to find his own happiness which grew within him during his travels in the far off lands , the too and and fro from both of these equal and opposite desires haunted him long . It took him ages to reach the realization of creating beauty in all things he has been associated with when his beloved challenged him to experience and seek beauty in the most imperfect of things.

The Sufi ordered wine for all, finished his cup, climbed the roof and started dancing and whirling on the tunes of the local lute player. Feelings and passions and above all rationality, they all looked at him with surprised faces for an instant and than returned to their favorite past time of fighting......

Magnolia blossoms...

The season of yellow leaves and frightened trees is gone. Life is coming back to life. Luxembourg is blossoming...

You see Neruda today sitting on a bench in a park. He seems lost in looking at two teenage girls on the grass, reading perhaps a naive love novel together and giggling for no reason. Just nearby a big magnolia tree is shouting at each passerby, “It is spring, it is spring, see what spring has done to me”.
You take the seat with Neruda. Neruda looks at you and smiles, and you know what is buzzing in his mind and he too knows, what you are thinking.....

I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

You ask yourself what would Neruda have said if he has seen Magnolia flowers blossoming first and than you remind yourself you  still need to see the cherry tree blossoming.

It is relatively early summer here. You are seeing the season within the people changing here as well. You see more laughter and smiles on the faces than when you arrived here few months back. The season inside you is still cold and icy, but you are feeling the heat from outside and hearing the sounds of happiness from inside. You ask yourself if you should allow the two seasons, the inner one and the outer one, to influence each-other. You hope that this will do good to you, but you also fear of the not so far away autumn and winter coming.

Yesterday a friend called you from your home country. He spent some of his early years living in Europe  and having his own opinions and experiences. He was saying, one thing that you will learn from living in Europe is how to be completely at ease with your loneliness.  (You find it hard to translate the word he used, to describe the feeling of being completely-at-ease. It's something like a feeling of two people living together and have gone through all the dominance and passivity curves in their combined lives and dropping all the guards now, are completely at ease in living together. Like what Rumi was saying the other day about meeting someone out-beyond the concepts of right-doing  and wrongdoing.)
But this feeling of being at ease and dropping your guards takes time and specially when the beloved you seek is no other than 'loneliness' itself. You think how beautiful and simple your home language is to describe so complex concepts, and you think a bit more about how to be at ease with loneliness


A squirrel runs past by you. You come out of your thoughts. The two teenage girls in the park are now sleeping on the grass, perhaps dreaming some naive and innocent love affair with all the drama, sounds and fury.  A magnolia flower is falling slowly on the ground in slow motion, the ducks moving seamlessly in the nearby lake. Time stopping itself for good.....

You hear Neruda saying ...

Someday, somewhere — anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life

First meetup . Bookclub - Luxembourg

For some old and rather odd reasoning, I always thought of Europe as a place of lonely individuals with shallow relationships and similar views about the depth-ness of communal life, a place where all values and ethics revolves around the individual self and one has to feel that loneliness to become a European. Was this because of my time spent in middleast and Africa ? where people are expected of thinking of others as a part of their own extended selves? and life is not just a collection of dots but a one big existence; in Shakespearean term full of sounds and fury? My time in Europe this time is proving me wrong. Europe is opening herself to me little by little.

So it was with these thoughts and with a soul tired of stomach-affairs, I started searching for a group of like minded people to spend time with and that's when I came across a book club meeting planned nearby and the book to be discussed was "the reluctant fundamentalist" by Mohsin Hamid. I was pleasantly surprised and intrigued to find a perfect setting with a favourite book by a Pakistani author to be discussed and so, reluctantly made up my mind to attend the event.

She opened the door of her house with a big welcoming smile. It was an old house with high ceilings and with dull lights seen in old dutch paintings . There were already few people from all over the world sitting around the living room amid two friendly cats, and wine bottles and nibbles laying around. Most of the people were new, so the meeting started a bit formally but soon after started flowing naturally. We discussed identity, writing styles, culture, globalization, relationships, food and much more in that warm cozy living room of hers and for some brief moments forgot that we are sitting in someone's else house. It was one of those moments when we humans go through a collective de-individualization process and find peace and eternal bliss in forgetting our individual selves and biases and our thoughts starts to dream and dance with the group totally in natural sync and not until when our wrist watches and wallclocks reminds us of time to leave that we reluctantly and with an effort collect ourselves again.This was one of those evenings.... and after a while the two friendly cats were also moving their heads in affirmation as if they were listening and understood all that was said and experienced there.

So Europe is happening to me. Wishing to find and make more new friends and memories in this phase of my life which i can think of  long after when i am gone from here. 

Joberg.. Another story unfolded.....

All that time i was trying to realize if she was a good salesgirl or a good human being. I ended up buying couple of skin products apparently originating from the dead sea in Israel from her, even though i knew i was paying more money then i should. I think i figured out her to be a good human being in the end.

It was almost a small story unfolded there in that busy Sandton city mall in Johannesburg(S.Africa) where the big smiling statue of Mandela gives hope to all humanity. I was in Joberg on business and found few hours before the flight to buy some last minute gifts for the family, and that's where i saw her.

She got my attention asking if i have a special lady in my life. I was intimidated. I wanted to say yes but just to play the game i said no. She was smart or was it a textbook response for the people appearing to be flirting when she replied, if i had a mother and sisters, and if they are special to me. And there started the whole sales game and a whole new learning for me. I was intimidated and intrigued more and more of her way of establishing her presence.

God-dam it She was beautiful but more than her beauty she had that right compassion and humility and that inner glow which can make weary souls like me feel hopeful of life. She had beautiful grey eyes, not the ones that pierces you like the first rays of the sun but the ones that tempts you to look more and more deep down inside to understand the mystery  inside a living being. She told me she is from a small town in Ukraine. She asked if i believe in magic. I asked myself... do i?? .. and i still felt hearing Yes from some corners of my self. She said she learned skin therapy from Israel and she travels sometimes to do sales.I asked her in the end if she believed in magic and she said Yes and that it has happened to her, and i left her wishing her more magic. On my part I was already mesmerized, for what is magic, if not a feeling of discrete sudden changes against all laws of natural physics, be it in body, spirit or just moods and emotions.


Long after, sitting on the plane back, I was thinking, what strange times I am living in. Coming from the Indian sub-continent, and living in Africa for so many years  and now Europe, and being attracted to a girl in this far south corner of Africa, who for god knows what reasons of economic survival or intellectual curiosity or perhaps the love of her life happens to be there in that part of the world... away from her cold Ukraine and selling the sands of the holy land.... I wonder what stories she had inside her. I wonder what stories she sees or creates while talking to strangers like me in these strange far off lands. I wonder if i will ever meet her, though there is little hope and probability.... I wonder if magic still exists in my life...... I wonder....

And the mysterious Rodriguez started singing on the back of my mind... I wonder.....
Weblink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6bjqdll7DI (I wonder by Sixto Rodriguez)

The dancing girls of Dar...

Dear Ertyaas, 

I should have taken you to watch the dancing girls of Dar, when you were here. You can call it my inflamed sense of protectionism or may be i wanted to keep something for you and me to come to Dar in the distant future. You had your Pani Puris and Indian food tasting here but the subcontinent is not just exporting food. There is a thriving and not so underground culture of dancing bars here as well , kind of a mini Chandni Chowk or Rung-mehal in the heart of Africa... can you imagine that!!!

It was some months back when an office colleague told me about this new night club opened not so far from where i live, called 'SB' (greetings to old Bombay). I was a bit skeptic in going there, my past experience with these sort of night clubs was not so good. They were more of tone down Desi versions of strip clubs where Indian and Nepali girls were trying to show off and dance in slow motion on Desi beats. They had this melancholic feeling , and one always leaves with the guilt feeling of promoting a male-chauvinistic activity...But this one was different.

 

You enter and you find yourself in a different world, a world full of colors and smoke. you can feel the amount of money and effort spent on the level of details in creating that out of the world ambiance. Glittering lights, Disco balls hanging, laser and trance lights trying to play hide and seek on a wooden floor beaming with lights. And then there are these really good dancing girls showing their art of Indian dancing and hungry of appreciation. Nothing vulgar or obscene. All art..

 

You remember that Milonga party we went together, where I was dying to dance with that Argentinian girl, staring her as if i will eat her raw, and finally she relented only to let me go in 5 seconds because of my beginner's Tango steps. This place reminded me of those tango parties where the invitation goes with the eyes only. A connection between you and her that only you and her is feeling. The smoke coming from the smoke machine and the smoky drinks and the smoky eyes of these dancer, they all take you to this other world i am talking about. There are not just we men in the audience, there is a whole lot of couples and girls from wealthy families coming to appreciate them.

 

One can say due to the current oil boom of Tanzania economy it is the sellers of these entertainment industry trying to print some money, but if you think a bit deep it is the buyers, the very us humans, having some thing inherent or with a coded mystery hidden in our DNA perhaps, who are actually letting this whole business flourishing. For what is luxury, if not just a sugarcoated need for the wealthy and stomach filled people to explore the mysterious side of human existence and survive the ever increasing boredom.

And there is a bar now open with girls from my country as well...Can you believe that????

Guatemala Diaries Part-1

"The only way to really connect with someone is if you are willing to  connect to his/her dreams and reality" she said.

"But what about my own dreams and my reality"

"Why do you want to connect in the first place if you are so concerned about your own dreams and reality? "

I was visiting Guatemala City for business.

The hotel lobby

Having taken a long transatlantic flight I was feeling jet-lagged so I went to the hotel lobby. I found her there. She was there for some conference on Central American economy.I asked her if she knows English, and there we started, from basic small talk to politics and economy to everything, taking us talking long in the central-american night.

"Have u read Carlos Casteneda? ". She asked out of nowhere. I think by that time she was fad up of my questions.

I said no I haven't.

She said, I remind her of the character in Carlos Casteneda books, who was not able to believe the realities other then what he has been taught of over the years by the world around him. Anyways she said I should try reading it..

"But what is wrong with thinking about one's own dreams and reality"? I asked again. I was still lost on that point.

"Nothing is wrong" she looked at me with a peculiar gaze and said "but then you should rather go to a toy shop or a pet shop, to connect with someone who can do what you want them to do"

I felt a bit defenseless.

She continued, " You may find this ironic that such thoughts are coming from an economy expert. The whole world preaches of limited resources and economizing on those resources, to the extent that we even start economizing on our emotions and feelings as well. We have started seeing everything as our personal gains or loss, but it is very unnatural.
Every perfect natural system has an inherent quality and capacity to overflow with abundance, and it is that abundance which unites all natural things in an ecosystem. Its not just what an entity wants that makes it dependent on others in a system, its what an entity can give which connects it with others. The whole world tells us only one side of the story, of personal wants and needs, of storing and economizing of what we can have... paying no attention on what we have in abundance. You need to see the other side of the  reality as well"

I was trying to digest what she was trying to say. I asked, " how do you define then a physical attraction. Is it not our want or our need, a pure inherent desire to get something?  

"Physical attraction is nothing but an outside force of nature to let u offload all that is abundant in you. If you have abundant life in you, that life will feel the outside attraction" she smiled and continued. " Its all about what is your frame of reference shows you. Think about it this way, if you focus only about your short comings you will never be happy, because what is abundant in you will become heavier and heavier over time making you unhappy. If you focus instead,on what is abundant in you, you on the other hand will always feel happier and lighter. That is how a natural ecosystem works. Just see around, the river flowing with abundance, the trees producing oxygen in abundance, the animals having abundant food etc etc"

The next day I saw her in the hotel, delivering a speech on merits of free market economy. She winked at me, as if telling that she is trying to tell to the world what they want and like to hear and not what the truth is.


We met the following night and flew together with the moon once again.



To be continued...

Zanzibar Dreams....

I remember it happened to me some time back, I was traveling a lot back then, and one day I woke up unable to remember which country I am waking up into, the hotel rooms all look the same after a while. Took me some time to figure out I was in a west-african country with noisy Atlantic ocean. But that was nothing compared to what happened to me this time when i woke up.

 I was visiting Zanzibar islands and for a change stayed in the old town, in a 500 year old building converted into a hotel, with colored glasses and extended Jharokay (جھروکے balconies)  made of  wood, and all the preserved past.

Zanzibar dreams,,, zangi(زنگی ) rusty dreams...for how could it be possible dreaming of  Novalis's blue flower for long, one has to wake up but how about finding the flower right at my bedside in such a time worn old place like this. Was I really awake or was I dreaming. I must be dreaming in this land of rusted time, in this age old hotel, where time seems to be trapped in every thing...Perhaps the ghosts of the past 500 years were trying to remember the romance of their lives..... But the blue flower!!,, and talking to me you Ertyaas!,  appearing out of nowhere, like a blue flower... that cannot be true... Whatever it was, Zanzibari dreams or me waking up in another world, or me just being schizophrenic; i was pleasantly surprised and  happy to see her.  Throwing her bag on the side of my room she said,
"Acute sadness sometimes gives birth to extreme happiness, my dear " having his ussual sublime smile dancing on her lips, and eyes focused somewhere in the unknown.....

I had been to Zanzibar couple of times before but it was not at all the same island this time and from then onwards. It was glowing with her smells and smiles, her talks and laughter, her deep statements and her beautiful eyes.... We walked and walked and walked in the narrow alleys the first day, loosing our orientations in the narrow alleys, in between the people sitting on the stairs staring at the us travelers,leaving behind all our sadness of life in between these giggling school girls running through these alleys and making faces on us, in between these time broken windows, in between these old buildings still inhabited and still shouting of their age of authenticity.

I found myself playing with this hourglass in an antique shop when she asked, " do u think these people who made these sand filled hourglass thought of it as the most beautiful creation or the most cruel one"
I replied showing my taunting sadness for her," definitely cruel, imprisoning time in this little world , time was never free after that"
And she said, " well I found it very beautiful, and very symbolic, don't you see every object here is a time filled hour glass, these old buildings, these narrow alleys of the town, this you and me,  though we all moving towards our own deaths, yet living every moment, so humbling reminding everyone watching them of our existence and life, what a beautiful creation, an act of genius,  that can symbolize every goddammit thing in our lives. What a great symbolic simplicity of life.  Don't you see even these words i am saying for you are like time particles flying like butterflies from my part of the glass to your part of the hourglass, carrying so many stories, so many memories, all that I ever felt of or dreamed of or wished for, its all there in this hourglass, all in-front of me, and time seems to be never ending....don't you find this simplicity beautiful? "

She got me again..I wonder how she sees happiness and beauty in the most saddest of things. She was right. Everything here in this town was a sand-filled hourglass, where time was passing slowly and seems to be never ending.  She was sad though of seeing the cell phone tower on top of this 500 years old hotel we were living, and i was abit embarrassed of it, of me being a part of it being there remotely.


The next day we went to the beach in the north. She was excited of seeing such turquoise colored waters of Zanzibar. The hotel owner made perfect doodh patti chai(tea made with milk and local spices) for us without charging a penny, it was off season and very few people were visiting this remote beach in the middle of nowhere. Drinking Chai from her cup I told Ertyaas of the verses my mother used to tell us when we were young. It was something about a calm sea telling a noisy river about the meaning of silence, though i had hard time explaining her what is the meaning of 'ZARF'
 کہے رھا ہے شور دریا سے سمندر کا سکوت
 ، جتنا جسکا ظرف ہے اتنا ہی وہ خاموش ہے

So by that time, I had already accepted my altered state of existence of dreaming rusty in this old town where anything can happen. So i was not surprised of finding the beyond-perfect place for Dinner. Ertyaas was always interested in the traditional stuff, she had a liberal childhood in a capitalistic tradition free world which she despised now and wanted to enjoy all the traditions in the world as if they are hers own. She said once that traditions can be enjoyed only if you conform to them purely out of love and not out of obligation. She found out this place and got a reservation. So we were the paying guest in this Zanzibari house turned restaurant serving authentic Zanzibari food, and the owner was equally interested apart from the food about Zanzibar history, revolutions and changing times. The house turned restaurant was owned by an old guy named Saleem and which can itself be qualified as a museum in its own right. I was almost smiling with every bit of the multi-course dinner we had with all the intense flavors of Zanzibari spices. I was happy after a long time. We ate a lot, even stole some fennel/cardamon fused bread for later eating, and I ate alot of her brains out as well, we were after all meeting after alot of time and I felt it my right to grab each and every word she was saying, before she disappears . The dreamy world was still around and I did not wanted to come back to my solitary world of nuisance living.

But I had to wake up and she had to disappear like always... and always with hasty goodbyes, she left. She had to, like always, without promising anything... but silently giving the hint of of meeting again very soon in the most loveliest of places and in the most loveliest times and perhaps in the most lovely dreamy way.
  

Time to stop writing, its getting 2am in the morning. Am back in Dar-es Salam. Where the dreaming ended and reality started or where the reality ended and dreaming started, I cannot say. I hope somewhere someday she will read what I wrote in these lines and in between these lines and we will both laugh on our crazy way of living lives....

Worlds, thresholds, year ends.....

We all create worlds around us. Worlds with self given names, desired dynamics and associated predictability... be it a world of business or worldly relationships where we want ourselves to act in a chosen way for a desired outcome OR a personal world where like a painter's canvas we expose ourselves to the mercy of other beings who we think have all the rights to create us. This creating of worlds in the midst of controllable and uncontrollable predictability is sometimes i think what we call as living life.

I am seeing every day, people around me creating, non-stoppingly, different worlds of all sorts, dark and horny worlds where the only way to survive is trusting no one .... soft and harmonious worlds where the only intent to live is to live for others...apathetic and devoid-of-meaning worlds where life becomes just a stone rolling or an eighteenth century portrait staring in the dark....uncanny and spiritual worlds where the whole pursuit becomes finding more light and meanings...

Now the funny part is, the more we spend time in putting details to our created worlds, the more we become used to of living in it.Its like a love affair. The whole creation becomes the comfort zone, the only reality, the life for us, and we start thinking as if a movie is playing with all stereo and Dolby effects where we are just characters delightedly condemned to follow the storyline written by an outsider us....When this happens, we reach what i can call 'the yield point threshold of life', a point of un-seemingly no return... a point where any load applied to our seemingly elastic life provides no change to the pattern or color or state of our perceived self.

Most of us reach this threshold quite early in their lives, though appearing to think they have not...making the rest of the life just a comic or tragic following of a story. Some of us think of this threshold close to every end of the year, thinking of giving new colors to the already led sepia-scopic life and buying some more time before the yield point occurs.... Very few dare to create a world from scratch and exceptionally few do it every year.

So here I am... at the end of another year... a miraculously revealing year, a butterfly year, a year when so many things happened to me.... and yet here i am at the end of another year, with pretty much the same questions dancing around my head ...surely unsure of if i have crossed the yield point threshold of my life... here i am  again, still dreaming to create new worlds from scratch...New desires, new loves blossoming within my soul. So many new journeys to make, ever shrinking and ever expanding  butterfly moments to pass, and i am still half way to heaven and no way nearer....

I want to end this year's last blog with one of Neruda's poems..

Mientras escribo estoy ausente
y cuando vuelvo ya he partido:
voy a ver si a las otras gentes
les pasa lo que a mi me pasa,
si son tantos como soy yo,
si se parecen a si mismos
y cuando lo haya averiguado
voy a aprender tan bien las cosas
que para explicar mis problemas
le hablare de geografia....

(Translation) 

While i am writing, I'm far away;

And when i come back, I 've gone.

I would like to know if others

go through the same things that I do.

have as many selves as I have,

and see themselves similarly;

and when I 've exhausted this problem,

I'm going to study so hard

that when i explain myself,

I'll be talking geography......

Saffron Stockholm nights...

"We Swedish love saffron in our foods" she said.

It was my last days in the cold windy Stockholm and I was invited for dinner at her place... the apartment was kaleidoscopic in its own humble way... as if the  the colors of time and space were dancing all around her living room, sometimes beaming with oldness and the coziness that comes with old buildings , and then as you look on the other side the contemporary sofas and sitting tables and ipads and lcd screens  brings you to present times... seeing on one side the African handicrafts hanging around, takes you back to the continent of raw hope, and then you see the other side where the  wooden piano of western culture greets you with open arms, tempting you to dance ... and on top of this the boxes here and there full of books and  petty things and the bunker bed reaching the roof and the openly hanging clothes,  all of them adding their own bohemian touch to the whole ambiance of her apartment.

With the smell of cinnamon and spices from slowly simmering glogg spreading all over the place , and the shadows coming to dance from candles burning all over , we ate our two course dinner of fish soup and fried mushrooms while starting to discuss one of her favorite topics of man woman equality ..... and we discussed alot that night... about everything there was to discuss ... music, food, religion, consciousness, god , humans, children, life, hope, desire, emotions... I told her the mere feeling of self consciousness, of sitting right here feeling this self awareness pushes me to think of creating meanings in this seemingly organized chaotic world... She told me how she feel uneasy when it comes to emotions, as if it is some force totally uncontrollable and having its own life and breath taking you into unknown... i told her about my dreams of making and selling perfumes someday... she told me about the indigenous people of Sweden and there musical way of communicating long distances.
We finished our night sipping the hot glogg with ginger biscuits , and bit of playing of piano , a perfect dinner ending , much more satisfying then a happy ending.......

Long after that, walking on the pebbled streets of her Stockholm and moving between subway trains, i was thinking, how unlike us , the people of the west treat loneliness as one of their most prized possessions , loving and hating it at the same time.... I see loneliness everywhere here, in the eyes of people standing on sub way metro with their headphones plugged on , or with their little dogs, or even in the eyes of couples trying to hold each-other as if something unwanted is about to happen.... I was thinking the other day, is it really the objective reality I see here, or is it my own subjective loneliness that super-imposes on everything I see around me....

Saffron nights are over... am sitting on my plane heading towards my own land, having her own chaotic and beautiful colors, away from the cold windy Stockholm, away from the warm people I met and made friends with during  multiple dinners and parties and concerts and bar hopping and after-parties in cold Stockholm.... I think someday many years into the future, somewhere in this ever shrinking world, when I would be old and will have nothing else to do but just to think of the past, the cold winds and drizzling rains  will definitely be reminding me of these warm people of Sweden and the saffron filled nights cheering up my own cultivated loneliness....