(Not every woman is a prostitute, but every prostitute is a woman.)

~Saadat Hassan Manto

Would you like to be a prostitute?

There might be a hundred reasons for which you say ‘Yes’, but even if your answer is ‘No’, you may end up being one.

You’re a girl, your appearance is gorgeous, you’re full of energy, and you’re striving for your studies and career. But, one day, walking on a lonely street, a van passes by you. In the dim atmosphere of night, you notice a few masked men coming out of the van. One holds your hands, one presses your mouth with their chloroform handkerchief, and one picks you up, throws you inside the van, and drives you away from the city. And until you regain your consciousness you’re already sold to a brothel.

(what happens next, will be discussed in the second half of this paper).

This is what we imagine when we talk about human trafficking and kidnapping. While this form of kidnapping is the most famous among us, it doesn’t even make up to 10% of the total victims in CSE(commercial sex economy). The concept of ‘unknown masked men’ as kidnappers is a bead in the pile of sand, there are a hundred more ways a girl or a child is trafficked into CSE, such as Migrant fraud, Grooming, Debt bondage etc.

• Grooming

A major technique which comes out when we discuss particularly “sex trafficking” is Grooming. Grooming is a sequence of processes an agent (in the language of CSE known as ‘Pimp’) takes to persuade a victim into prostitution.

Grooming alone makes 39-81% of the total CSE victims. (42% gap is due to the uncertainty whether recruitment was done by an actual family member or pimps acting as family members)

Grooming consists of hundreds of steps but there are 6-8 major (Generalised) ones.

1. The identification of the victim. Pimps look for young girls and children (especially those with low self-esteem and financial issues)—those who are either new to the city or lonely by nature and are looking for friends.

2. Connection. They start connecting to the victim, forming bonds and gaining trust are some vital steps. Helping them in a few things (especially financial help and gifts) creates a soft spot in the heart of the victim for the pimp.

3. Manipulation. Their manipulation drags the victim’s mind to think the pimps are really trustworthy and in many cases, victims start thinking no one can understand them other than the pimp1. Pimps specifically target some of the traumatic and sensitive topics in a victim’s life to comfort them. Isolation from the parents and other friends is a crucial step in grooming.

4. Sexualisation of this relationship. Once pimps are inside the victim’s private space then sexualisation of the relationship doesn’t feel alien to them. Now they either gather the private images for blackmail, or take further steps in persuasion.

   Though sexualisation doesn’t work in many cases of children so the pimps plant doubts related to the children’s body (ie. “why does your clitoris/penis get triggered when you see certain things” or “have you ever touched yourself?” etc.) once these doubts are planted, the victim starts taking interest in the pimps ideas and works.

5. Control. They start controlling the relationship and the bond they create, they put the victim in a debt-bondage. Debt-bondage makes the victim feel they owe pimps something, either financially or favours. This later on leads the victim’s mind to agree with most of the things the pimp says as a way to show gratitude to the pimp.

6. Magic. The victim is now vulnerable and only needs one “magical thing”: alcohol. With the help of alcohol and some drugs, the victim can be easily convinced for the first night. With the effect of alcohol, the majority of the victims agrees for having sex with some other person. The manipulation and debt-bondage by the pimps prevent the victim from negating the effects of alcohol.

7. Normalisation. The pimps make sure that the victim doesn’t feel uncomfortable after her first night with a client. And makes the victim believe that it is all normal. Victim persuasion feels deliberate because pimps exploit needs such as affection and escape from poverty.23

• Debt-bondage

I believe poverty has a sister named debt.

In the nest of poverty debt also lays eggs. No matter if we look in either rural or urban areas, some families are buried beneath the mountains of debts, so much so that to relieve themselves from this mountain, they are ready to commit suicide. Pimps and brokers target these families, they offer them deals to trade their ‘youngest’ daughter in order to have their debt forgiven or paid. Many times this deal isn’t done openly to the family, rather pimps talk to one person (a direct family member or a relative) for this deal, who persuades them to agree to this price.4

Most families in rural areas don’t have much awareness regarding the exploitation of women, and the consequences women face due to these deals. And even if some of the family denies, the pimps use force and threats against the family (threats such as “murder of their children”). But apart from these circumstances there are many families who deliberately accept this deal in order to be free from the debt, they choose to sell or trade their daughter in order to pay their debt (mainly in high poverty areas).

Total victims recruited by families makes up to 42% of the total victims in CSE5. According to the reports6 economically deprived and marginalised groups (i.e. Dalits etc.) are major targets of these pimps. The data from 2008 says, “these young girls were either sold to direct brothels or smuggled for sex tourism” (about which you’ll get to read further in this article).

• Marriage

Marriage is something sacred in our societies, something pure, at least in India we take marriage as some divine bond. But in many cases, marriage turns out to be the most disastrous thing to ever happen in the life of a woman. Especially in the towns, villages or even in cities where poverty, debt and dowry coexist. In some of the rural areas many of the pimps portray themselves as some rich and educated partner, and with the help of several “matchmakers,” they propose to families a dowry-free marriage and promises to take the girl with him to some urban city.7 This sort of marital fraud is a common medium for the entry of a girl into sex work. Many NGOs like Kath Katha and Saheli have reported these cases where the victims admitted that they either were sold to the brothels by their ‘husbands’ within a few weeks of marriage (once the husband is satisfied by the girl and have used her in every manner) or they are having to prostitute while the “husband” is working like a broker (bringing the customers and keeping the money). Many of the “husbands” force their wives to prostitute whole day, and after a few years when the girl is a bit aged [in CSE ( commercial sex exploitation), a 25-29 year old girl is considered “old” and “unpleasing” prostitute for the clients] the “husband” resells the girl to some brothels and goes out to buy/marry a new victim.

In many of the interviews/papers8, I observed that the pimps/“husband” were either connected to the community members or were direct community members (neighbours, shopkeepers etc.). In some cases (such as Bedia and Nat communities) even the family members are engaged in these sorts of trafficking (will be discussed in the next to next point).

• Fraud Migrants

Whether we talk about higher studies, business expansion or just solo vacations, going abroad always seems the best option, to experience a new culture, new air and a new lifestyle. But sometimes our excitement drives our minds to a degree where we mistakenly choose the wrong service partner. Or dare I say, Pimps and brokers seek these opportunities, to plan a girl’s trip. They offer many discounts and tempting deals, which would convince anyone to accept the offer. In these cases, the travel agent is either a pimp or a contractor of a pimp. They deliberately pass the information about the trip to the pimp operating in the destination country. After the flight or train arrives at the XYZ station of XYZ country. Pimps and brokers act as taxi drivers (as the victim was told by the travel agent). Once you’re in the cab, you’re kidnapped. Pimps take victims to some unknown place, where they are drugged and sold to some faraway brothel for prostitution. The price of the girl gets distributed to all of the people engaged in this trafficking (i.e., your travel agent, taxi driver, broker etc.)

• Tribe profession/daughter of a prostitute.

There are a few tribes within India such as the Nat or Bedia, where prostitution is neither a source to fight poverty nor a consequence of coercion/trafficking but an honorable custom (pratha). In these communities, the major source of income is not provided by men but by women (sounds empowering right?, Just wait). The girls of these communities start prostitution when they get their first menstruation (or within 3 weeks of that time) at that time they do even some of the ceremony of ‘first night’ or ‘first client’ where the ‘lucky’ client gets a complete virgin girl. Many of the clients even bring some gifts in terms of money or clothing to the new “Devdasi”.9 Education is a far radical concept for them as their only teachings are about dance and prostitution, many of the elder women, teach their daughters how to get clients.10 Irrespective of the girl’s willing they have to attend to any client who chooses them, no matter if they are some young men or old drunk geezers.

They (the community heads) say that their girls choose this profession willingly.

Why?

Here. Not only in these communities but also in some rural areas of Karnataka, Bihar, Rajasthan etc. young girls are given the choice to pick between, A: Marry a man at the age of 13, 14 or 15, the man who’ll make her work all day, make her cook, clean, etc. And will beat her if she doesn’t listen to him. Or B: Be a prostitute where you’ll learn to dance and sing, you can play during daytime, you don’t have to study, you just have to let 10 to 20 men rape you at night time irrespective of your will to do it.

What do you think the girl who gets brainwashed since her birth will choose between them?

No matter if they are on their periods or the ovulation phase they have to do it, because in many of these communities, the ‘Gharwali’ head prostitute beats the girl who doesn’t earn sufficiently in a night.

Many girls from these tribes and communities either migrate to some other city for prostitution or get sold by the community members to some brothels (mostly the girls who try to run, or resist during sex with a client end up being sold to some brothels or brokers) (in most cases either the father or the brother is a Broker)

• General analysis of sex trafficking in India

Reports11 say “The alarming rise in human trafficking as reported by media, NGOs and police, therefore, poses A serious threat to our desired goal of basic human rights, social justice and dignified living.” Mostly these trafficked victims are sold domestically, but some percentage of victims are also sold in some Gulf and Southeast Asian countries. India (Indian pimps) not only sells or trades victims to other countries but also buys an ample number of girls from Nepal and Bangladesh. There is also some evidence of young boys being imported from Gulf countries into some southern Indian states and forced into prostitution12. These are the reasons India is in the Tier 2 watch list Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report 2025 released by the United States (India is in the tier two list of TIP for the 22 consecutive year!).

There was a clear and big leap in the number of trafficked people in India reported by ITPA (Immoral Traffic Prevention Act) from 2022 to 2023 [year 2022: 1497 → year 2023: 2166]. These are the cases that got registered during the trafficking and not the actual number of victims.

The majority of the victims are under 18 since in the work of CSE “the market value of a girl tends to fall after puberty”

You shouldn’t be shocked that many of the Indian government officials don’t stop prostitution and sex trafficking even after having the power to do so. Why? Because India generates 8.4 billion dollars just from sex trafficking and prostitution. 13838700+ active prostitutes are working in India (according to some other sources there are approximately 16 to 20 million prostitutes) . Obviously, when this large “business” is being operated under the nose of our government, there is something fishy. “Former Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) chief Swati Maliwal alleged that a union minister and a senior Delhi-based leader provided protection to a multi-crore prostitution racket at GB Road in Delhi, claiming that minors were being trafficked and forced into sexual acts under political patronage.”

In the whole market of CSE women and children are bartered at prices that vary based on physical beauty and virginity.

UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) reported that 2 million people become victims of trafficking each year, of whom 1.2 million are children. And if we look at the reports of UNODC 150000 people are trafficked every year within South Asia annually among which India & Pakistan are the highest-ranked countries. It is particularly argued that India has the world’s largest labor trafficking problems with hundreds of thousands of sex trafficking victims13.

And we can’t forget that when these children and women are being trafficked from one state to another the pimps, brokers and drivers also rape them on the way, just because they can.

HELL

You’re sold, now what?

A large portion of us have so little knowledge about CSE (commercial sex economy) that we presume only a brothel is an option for a trafficked individual. But surely there are layers of layers in hell so do in the variety of prostitution in India. Such as ST (sex tourism), CST (child sex tourism), highway prostitution, Private escort, comfort women (for military), Pornography, Bar/casino, etc. The only difference between Hell and CSE is of course, hell is a torture for sinners while CSE is a torture by sinners (to the victims).

We can’t move up to the final layer without exploring the first one, so first off we’ll start with the most famous one.

• The Brothels

After the last peaceful sleep of your life when you wake up from Anesthesia, you find yourself in a room or hall with tinted coloured lights, along with other victims. In a few minutes, you find out that you’re sold and someone has taken the money for your body. And now you and the other victims are present with two options.

Resist or Accept.

Resist. If a victim chooses to resist and refuses to prostitute, then the Bawd, procurer and procuress are assigned to “rectify” their “new investment”.

[NOTE: “Bawd” is an archaic and gender neutral term for a brothel keeper, whose work is to make prostitutes work properly. I’ll use this word frequently further in this whole paper.]

In order to “Rectify”, the first technique a bawd uses is to either drug her or dose her with alcohol. Initially, their doses are low, 2-3 bottles per day and if the intoxication doesn’t influence the victim to lose herself and indulge in prostitution then there have been cases in which the bawds use funnels to pour the alcohol in the stomach of a victim. Victims most of the time, get partially unconscious for days during which gharwali (brothel madam) charges people heavily to come and have sex with a virgin, unconscious girl. The victim eventually doesn’t even recall how many people raped her.

But it is no long-term solution. Bawds then use the food and starvation as their next weapon, especially with the cases of minors where they can’t use much alcohol (since it’ll endanger her life, i.e. Madam’s new investment.)

Bawds cut off the food for every victim who refuses to prostitute deliberately. No food, no water, until the victim agrees to attend clients (let herself be raped)

If starvation for 4-5 days doesn’t drive a girl to agree, then Bawds have no other option but to beat the child or woman (bawds initially hesitate to beat them, since the marks on their body would be an obstacle to attracting clients later in their market). According to the reports primarily an iron rod is used to hit the hips, thighs and belly of the victim, then they use whips on the hips and rear. Victims get their bare skin red and numb to a degree they couldn’t feel anything. After which most of the resisting girls agree to prostitute.

But at last for those 10-20% of yet resisting girls after all those drugs, alcohol, starvation, beating and torture. Bawds simply by themselves and with the help of other men rape those children and women. Not when victim is unconscious but sober, not by one or two men but by 10 or 20 men, not once not twice but 100s of times for weeks and months till that girl has lost all form of strength to resist, till that girl is no longer a girl but just a body.14

[Note: the strategies mentioned above are some general ones that are used to “rectify” the victim not only in brothels but in other forms of prostitution as well, for example if a girl is resisting in the agencies of sex tourism then again she’ll face all these consequences. And not only these, but many more since the torture mentioned above are some general ones. Some Indian brothels and agencies go far ahead in torturing the victim such as live skinning, mutilation, carving the body, disembowelment etc. and for the rape bawds do penetration by objects and even penetration by animals.]15

Later, most of these victims agree to do “deliberate” prostitution, and if even after all this, one or two victims try to run from the brothel, then they get murdered, to show the other prostitutes what happens to those “who don’t accept their fate”.16

Hyderabad, 2008: “Two women were found dead in a house being used for sex work; police described it as a murder case linked to trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation.”17

Acceptance. Intoxicate a flower so much so that its redolence starts stinking.

No matter if you accept through force or fear, you’ll be treated just as they expect you to be, a slave. Every brothel has its own minimum number of clients per prostitute, which, if not fulfilled by a certain girl, would make the food prohibited for her. Many of the girls in brothels hide their stale food from previous days in their rooms. Sometimes starvation leads women so much, that they agree to attend a client for just ₹30-₹40, from which an ample percentage of money is taken by the Gharwali.

Brothel owners tend to buy more young girls (of the age of 10-16) than older women (above the age of 17), In an interview18 a woman said that she was so young when she was brought to Budhwar Peth, Pune, that she never knew how to count. She used to keep a string or a rope and make a knot whenever she attended a client (attend a client = get raped).

Several brothels which are famous for their “service” get so much crowd that every girl/woman there gets to attend 40-50 men per day. Mental health issues such as extreme trauma and hyper anxiety rain down on their head every night. And you can’t imagine the condition of their body, STIs ( gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, and herpes) and blood-borne infections are just the surface of a mountain in terms of physical health issues.

Talking about the body, whenever a young girl (11 to 14 years old) is brought to a brothel, she gets to have hormonal pills and hormone injections to form their body( i.e. to enlarge the size of their breast and hips). These injections and pills hinder the complete natural hormone system inside the body of its victim, especially when given at such age. When these girls reach the age of 23-24, their bodies end up looking so overgrown that their appearance seems like that of a women who’s age is 40.

Despite your broken tooth, despite your aching back and despite your fucked up mental health, You Have To Look Happy. Because if you don’t then many of the men won’t pick you as their “night”, hence fewer clients, thus no food. Women in brothels use excessive makeup to hide their facial scars and to look a bit more pleasing to clients. Luring a client and persuading them is not a deliberate choice in the life of a prostitute but a sheer survival tactic.

Trafficked woman usually don’t have their official documents since no trafficker bothers taking the documents while kidnapping or grooming the victim. Resulting in an abduction of the identity of the victim. No matter who she was, what religion she belonged to, whether she was a daughter of a wealthy businesswoman or a poor farmer. She is a complete individual in the realm of sex workers.

Education is a completely alien concept for both, the trafficked girl and the daughter of a prostitute. Young girls from their birth get no exposure to careers other than prostitution, even by their mother (who with time gets completely brainwashed and forgets that she too was dragged into this profession as a victim) girls learn only to dance and techniques to lure clients. And a trafficked girl gets her brainwashing done by the other prostitutes working there who have accepted their fate as a prostitute.

Hygiene in brothels is like a pearl in mud. Women get their congested (big enough to just lie down straight on the ground) rooms to sleep, rest, attend clients, and eat. The obvious and largest risk in this profession is HIV/AIDS, while there are many healthcare NGOs near most of the red light areas, there are a large number of women who suffer from various diseases along with HIV/AIDS. Another reason for the high demand for young girls is the idiotic idea that “young girls are less likely to have HIV/AIDS”, though according to the study19,

“In the context of traditional sex work, anecdotal evidence suggests that gharwalis(brothel madams) purposely prevent new, young, brothel-based sex workers from accessing health services to hide the fact that minors are practising sex work in the Establishment and to avoid police raids. The ‘hidden’ nature in which young sex workers often practise sex work increases their vulnerability to HIV/STIs, and also poses significant Obstacles to outreach efforts of local HIV-prevention programmes attempting to identify and support new, young sex workers.”

Brothels always keep a tie-up with a medical Centre or a proper hospital. For health care service? No, for surgeries, women after a certain amount of time get to have surgeries of their reproductive organs to make them again like a virgin, these surgeries don’t actually make a woman “virgin” again. These surgeries don’t actually make a woman a virgin in the actual sense, but just bind and contract some of the tissues of women’s reproductive organs. These surgeries are not just for one time, a large portion of the sex workers get to have them time to time in frequent bases. These surgeries are often preferred for sex workers under the age of 25 because these girls are more convincing to the client to think they are actually a virgin.

We see these frequent cases of men brutally raping women. Rape in itself is a brutal and inhumane crime, but when a man rapes a girl, there comes a whole list of tortures a girl goes through during that assault. In such cases, cigarette burns, ripped out hair, swollen eyes, broken teeth, and whatnot are just normal. All this brutality when men target a stranger girl for their list, imagine the mentality of these people towards a girl they have paid to have a night. Imagine how big a master they assume themselves to be of that girl they paid for. With that ₹300-₹400 they believe they bought the complete body of that girl, they own that girl and they can surely do whatever they want.

Throughout the confessions and interviews sex workers shared that, generally an hour with a client is not just about quenching his thirst for sex, but to quench every form of his thirst. Among these is their anger. Sex workers said that several of the clients find pleasure in beating the sex workers, whether it is to slap her face, punch her ribs or to brutally hit their rear. It is often for a sex worker to get her breasts and nipples wildly bitten, to such an extent that they start bleeding. And it is way too often to have a client with his fetish to chew the lips (and labia) of the sex workers, especially when the sex worker is young. A few of the prostitutes admitted that they never had the job done without black eyes and bleeding lips.

[Again all of the above tortures are some common ones, there have been more severe cases in which the clients stapled the nipples, lips and labia of women20]

It happened in cases that after the assigned time of prostitution with a girl, the client leaves the brothel room and disappears into thin air, and later that night when the other sex workers went into the room, they found the dead body of that girl lying on her bed. Sometimes having a gagged mouth and sometimes having marks of strangulation. Who killed her? Why did it happen? Who was the last customer of that night? None of these gets investigated. Why waste money and time on these legal issues? When the Bawds and madams can buy a new virgin girl.

Another reason sex workers are not being involved in legal issues (for sexual abuse and harassment by clients) is the biasness of police to the side of clients and brothel owners, it is often observed that some police officers don’t even register the FIRs of sex workers3,6. (I do respect the just police officers and their work but when we are talking about this scandal happening at this large level it is self-understood that some of the official individuals are involved in these networks)

• Highway Prostitution

Highway prostitution, A form of prostitution in which you are forced to stand under the harsh summer sun, with your tight blouse soaking throughout the day, just waiting for customers. This specific genre of Prostitution has a smaller number of victims who are trafficked here from outside, rather girls here are either a victim of poverty/debt or a victim of custom (pratha). Most of the tribes Nat Purwa tends to engage more in highway prostitution than any other sort of sex work. Shacks and dhaba (roadside eatery) are among the places where the elders of the community prime the young girls for clients (they get better prices for young girls than for older women). Their major customers are the truck drivers, but they also serve tourists and travellers who pass through that route.

[Everything explained in the first half of the article related to tribal prostitution is directly connected to this form of sex work]

• Private Escort

By its name, you can understand its actual work. Private escort is a demand-driven service, where the clients have the “luxury” to call and have the sex workers come directly to their apartments.

These escort services highly rely on the middlemen. A middleman can be a hotel staff member, hotel manager, bartender, or any similar profession. These middlemen are directly connected to some of the brothels or separate prostitution agencies from where they according to the demand escort the girls or in many cases children for sex work to the customer.

If you were to be sold to a brothel which provides private escort service, then believe me you’d rather die than co-operate with this form of prostitution.

Take this, your gharwali receives a call from a customer and demands that you go to their place. You arrive at the client’s house or apartment only to discover that instead of a single client, there is a group of 6–7 men waiting there. They beat you either for their fetish or due to your resistance, you get brutally injured then they gang rape you in the worst possible way you can imagine.

There are not one or two but over thousands of cases of gang rape particularly of sex workers, many of the clients or all of the rapists don’t even consider these sex workers as human. The equality of sex workers in their eyes stands alongside a tissue paper, which they can use and just throw away.

After the gang rape, the rapists either kill the victim to hide the case of gang rape Or they leave this victim in that room and disappear into thin air. The survivors of this sort of gang rape develop several types of mental health issues along with Androphobia (phobia of men) and trauma, which destroys not only her career in the prostitution industry but also in every industry with male workers. These victims were then either sent to some mental asylum or deliberately handed over to the police. By a brothel madam.

Gurugram, 2021: “A woman described in reporting as a sex worker was stabbed to death in a hotel room; the case was lodged by police.”21

Kochi, 2025: “A report said police arrested a man after a woman identified as a sex worker was killed, and the accused was later found while trying to dispose of the body.”22

Surat 2012: “Five persons were detained on Thursday in connection with the alleged gang rape of a 22-year-old sex worker on Wednesday night.

The woman has accused 12 persons of raping her. She refrained from lodging a complaint till Wednesday evening, but the case was registered after she underwent a medical examination.”

• Comfort woman

Comfort woman is an old name given by the Japanese Military to trafficked Korean and other women for sex work during World War two.

Women being used for the pleasure of the military isn’t something new. Historically many of the nations have made a separate area or a whole town just for brothels and prostitution near the military deployed areas. So that their soldiers can go and release their stress.

During Japan’s militaristic period (1932 – 1945), Japan trafficked up to 200,000 women and children from all over Asia among which 80% were Korean, these women and children were systematically exploited by the Japanese soldiers and were given shelter near the army base, named “Comfort station”. These children and women were trafficked by using false employment promises, marriages and force by Japan’s military and agents. The army men used to go at night to these women and children to quench their thirst. The victims were subjected to continual rape, beatings and many among them were executed at the end of the war. Fewer than 50 survivors are still alive in the regions, demanding compensation and an apology.

It is not only the case of Japan, during the 1800s, the Britishers in Mumbai, made a whole town named Safed Gali near the British military camp. It was completely government-funded but the officials always falsely stated that Safed Gali is for civilians and not for the military. While the natively trafficked and exploited women used to prostitute for civilians, the young children aged 11 and 13 under coercion were exclusively for soldiers and generals, because there were fewer risks of HIV/AIDS in children(these children were trafficked from Karnataka, Bengal, Hyderabad, etc.). There were also some foreign girls and women imported from European countries to serve the soldiers. Safed Gali later came out to be known as Kamathipura and became the largest prostitution hub of Asia. And now in 2026, Kamathipura is still a hub and market of trafficked children and women, being the 2^nd largest prostitution station of Asia after Bangkok.23

It is not that we have only been victims of these military exploitation of women and children, many areas in India where army men are deployed for long-term seasons have a near brothel and street prostitution area. These brothels are hidden and are operated semi‑clandestinely.

The government has always denied that they have ever made a deliberate prostitution establishment for the army, while senior military officials have reported,

“It was impossible to prevent some of the Army personnel from visiting sex workers, particularly in areas like the northeast or Jammu and Kashmir, where troops are under high stress, constantly engaged in low-intensity or counter-insurgency conflicts and alienated from their families for long.”24

The same report also states that 33 of the army personnel were detected with HIV infections.

In one of the papers from late 2009, it was also stated that

“Demand for young girls has increased in Jammu and Kashmir due to the increasing concentration of military personnel in recent years.”25

• Sex Tourism

“Sex tourism” is a diluted (and sugar-coated) name for the crime which should actually be known as “Child Sex Tourism”. For you to be sold in this particular Form of prostitution you need to fulfil certain criteria, such as your age should be less than 18 (the younger you are the better price your pimp will get) your appearance should be relatively better than other victims and it’s a cherry on top if you’re a virgin. For child sex tourism thousands and thousands of victims are being trafficked to some of the major states/cities which attract tourist attention [The Golden Triangle (agra-jaipur-delhi), Goa, Kerala, Mumbai, etc.(fig.1)]

Tourist from foreign countries pays an ample amount of money to have sex (to rape) young/virgin girls. These girls are trafficked/groomed mostly from northeast India, West Bengal etc. with the false promises of employment or marriage.

As this report26 says

“The rapid growth of sex tourism and increasing demand for cheap Labour in the globalised world has contributed to the increase in trafficking of young women and girls. Women are bartered at prices that vary based on physical beauty and Virginity. In the sex industry, some clients prefer girl children who are perceived to be Unaffected by AIDS. Resultantly, there is a constant demand for girl children, sometimes as Young as ten, in the sex industry.”

Tourists don’t need to find places for prostitution services by themselves, since many of the travel agents, hotel staff, and tour guides deliberately propose these services, because they get their commission from both tourists and brothels/agencies.

A client can have a girl for a night at his hotel or there are special isolated places for sex tourism in which he can go and get a girl. For example: in Kerala, many houseboat owners arrange a girl before evening on the houseboat then persuade the tourists to come and have sex. Using a houseboat supposedly prevents police raids.

If a tourist is looking for a quick go with a girl or boy child then there are several beach shacks which provide young victims, under these shacks, the pimps. Every day there are hundreds of children getting raped by tourists on a large portion of the beaches of Goa, Kerala, Mumbai etc.

According to the study, Goa and Kerala were the places often visited by tourists in search of child sex and beach boys, shack owners and former victims of paedophiles were facilitating the procurement of boys and girls for sex.27

Also, the study quoted investigators as saying that many children mentioned that they had sex with a varied range of tourists for Rs. 50 to Rs. 200.28

• “One month wives”

Another form of sex tourism taking place in India often known as “One Month Wife” where tourists from some of the gulf and African countries forges a contract marriage to legalize this form of prostitution and rape of muslim girls (of the age of 10 to 18), while according to both Indian and Islamic laws, short term contract marriages where the End of marriage date is determined or intended is completely illegal (and haram) and is a punishable offense. According to Islamic law a contract marriage done against the will/permission of the “bride” is not even considered a marriage.

There have been several cases from Karnataka and Hyderabad where the victim after being rescued by the police admitted that their aunt/uncle (even parents in some cases) sold her to some Sudanese oil company executive for an ample amount of money (₹1 lakh in one case) along with several more victims. Then with the help of a “Qazi”, they made a marriage contract between the victim and the client. After that, the client rapes the victim and exploits her for as long as he wants, usually about a month. Then, if he chooses, he keeps her as a slave and takes her to his country, or he divorces her and abandons her where he purchased her.29

Arguments

(This segment isn’t formal, this segment may contain some vivid language, this segment is no article or essay, this segment is me talking not to the fucking audience but talking directly to you.)

Decriminalisation of prostitution.

There’s a difference between Decriminalisation of prostitution and de criminalisation of prostitutes, decriminalising the prostitutes means we are registering their cases, their FIRs, we are monitoring their health, we are taxing their income, we are providing them security, we are not shaming the prostitutes, we have a respect for them, we are preventing child prostitution, we are preventing sex trafficking and allowing only volunteering women to participate into prostitution. These are some basic rights we should provide to sex workers. But decriminalising the prostitution in our country would result into the exact opposite scenarios, the trafficking will increase, the customers would trade sex openly, the brothel agencies would make lakhs per day, which they won’t use for fair change but to buy more girls, underage rape with hormonal injection would rapidly grow, with the increasing hike in trend, security would 100% collapse, the violence against sex workers will increase. There will be ambiguity between consent and coercion.

Prostitution is a solution for escalating rape. And Deliberate prostitution.

“A person who has this urge to have sex would go to a brothel instead of raping a girl on the road” an idiotic form of excuse to allow prostitution under current circumstances. Psychologically, a person who frequently visits brothels has less control over his sexual urges than someone who exercises self-restraint. If someone who goes to brothels every day or every week suddenly becomes unable to visit (for example, due to work or travel), he may lose control during the day or night and could potentially commit rape.

And before that, of what prostitution are we talking about????? If we actually believe that prostitution is such an important profession in our society, then why do we shame prostitutes? And if rape is such a horrible crime in our eyes then why do we leave those children and women to be raped by just tagging them a name “prostitutes” on their heads? Don’t we consider the assault happening to those 10,13,17 or 31-year-old victims a rape, just because it’s happening inside the brothels?

Is that a deliberate form of income they consciously chose to do? Yes? Every one of them? 90% of those 13838700 or 16 million children and women are prostituting deliberately? Or 80%? 70? 50? 30? Are there even 20% of the women among those “prostitutes” working intentionally, by their own choice, without any brainwashing, financial issues, or lack of education? If the answer is no, which is surely “no”, then we are nothing but blind ignorant arseholes, who have accepted (it is no question) we have accepted that men’s violence and urge to rape is so strong and supreme that if we don’t give them a readymade victim they’ll make a victim out of us. We have dehumanised a prostitute irrespective of her age. It’s equivalent to believing that in order to save your sister my sister shall get raped. My sister should be trafficked to some other state and face all those consequences just to quench the thirst of a man, otherwise that man will go on the road and will rape a girl.

The data and analysis from National Herald India clearly state that out of 20 million estimated prostitutes, 16 million are trafficked.30

That’s 80% of the trafficked victims without including those nat/bedia minor girls who have been brainwashed into this profession and without including those debt-bondage women who prostitute out of poverty. After including these cases the percentage of non-clandestine prostitutes is less than 10%.

The report further states that 4 girls are being dragged into prostitution every hour, and among them, 3-4 are trafficked.

It’s just so clear that we can’t use this excuse of “deliberate prostitution” to justify the rape and torture of other 16Million+ victims.

Thread of trafficking

We bury these issues and blindfold ourselves in daily life, pretending this thread and chain of trafficking and corruption moves beyond the skies and is out of our reach.

It is a blatant and idiotic lie to ourselves. All these traffickers are living the same external life as us. They too travel from trains, they too buy cigarettes from the same shops and we do interact with them in one way or another. When we travel by train and see a girl sleeping through a 13-hour journey, don’t we suspect something is wrong? We do, but we mind our own business. When a fair-skinned man rides a bus with three dark-skinned children and no mother, don’t we pause and wonder if that’s normal? We do, but then we look away. At beaches or hill stations, we notice a local man approaching every male tourist with a pamphlet or a sales pitch; it feels suspicious, yet we won’t spoil our vacation over a possible misunderstanding. When a mosque or temple announces a missing child, we offer a silent prayer that the mother will be reunited with her child — but why can’t we, for heaven’s sake, pause our worship and help search? Not every lost child is merely lost; thousands are trafficked. All this trafficking is happening every day in front of our eyes. All these threads of trafficking make a web and we are all a part of it, every year hundreds of these threads pierce through us and we just let it go.

Why can’t we just take a few hours’ pause from our lives to make sure what we are suspecting is just a false impression. For example, we can just politely ask the suspect for a childhood picture, we can focus on the suspect’s and victim’s accent whether they match or not or we can just click a picture of them to ask the police about our suspicion later. There are a hundred means we can use just by being consciously active. We can make sure that whenever these threads of trafficking and corruption try to pass us, we will cut them down, can’t take the responsibility of the whole world but we can pledge that from us there won’t be one thread or chain of trafficking and corruption passing without question.

If only we the Gen-Z collectively decide that we would never be a client of prostitution then surely in future we’ll see a massive drop in the trafficking of children and women.

Yours truly

MD. Dilshad Ansari.

PS. I could’nt add footnotes on all of the quotations and citings since there were way too many, but whatever I have said in this paper is notes on all of these mentioned works.

Editor’s note:

Through this article, I tried to draw attention towards some of our responsibilities, which we (some of the time) take for granted. And obviously, there might be many of you who’d be acquainted with these matters from way before I tell you, maybe some of you have known it since the age of 15, where I came to learn them at 18. However, there may also be people who are still unaware of these worldly responsibilities, as I was.

How old are we? 20 years old? 19? 18? Some of us here are as young as 17 and 16 years old. We finish our assignments on time, we are mindful of our actions, we eat our breakfast, lunch and supper on perfect timings, we sleep early, wake up early, we pray, we study, we learn, we build, we are thriving in every manner we should, to make ourselves perfect. Right? We are Responsible people.

If I don’t talk about the whole audience, at least I thought I was doing very well for my age. Not perfecting all of the above categories but at least giving my best to achieve all of them. I was good in studies, my exams were going great, teacher’s favourite, parents’ hope, always praised, everything that was in my control I was handling them to the best of my ability. But then one day I failed.

In exams?

No, I scored well.

Then where did I fail?

I failed to lock the Front door of my flat. And on the same morning, I heard people talking about how some thieves were roaming near our streets.

How is it a big deal?

Well, here’s the background.

I was 18 years old, full of ATP (energy), giving my best in every space (as I explained earlier). Until one day my father caught a star-sized disease, which led him to go paralysed. Repercussions? He can’t talk, walk, or think properly. His body fell on the bed and his brain stopped working.

His condition transitioned from bad to terrible, just as the situation at home. The aftermath of this event led me to see many undone tasks and unsolved puzzles. Thankfully one of my relatives took care of our family business (alhamdulillah), and the financial burden never came on my head.

But what came to my head were the ‘responsibilities’ which I barely had taken any headache of. Often preferred as “silly” things by my old mind, such as checking weather LPG line is off during the night or not, locking the front door at night and stuff like that. Yes, I was an Arse to think it that way.

The morning I saw my front door open, I felt as if my heart had just drowned. The realisation hit me so hard I can’t articulate it in its whole volume, I realised that there’s no one looking after me from above, no one to lock the doors. If my house had been robbed that night it would entirely be my fault and I wouldn’t be able to compensate for that loss ever in my life.

Talking about my mother I can’t expect her to manage everything while I just sit at my table and study peacefully, she was already going through a lot, so the responsibility of having an eye on these security matters does come to my mind.

But, not only security matters.

What I did next was brilliant, according to me, I sat down at my table that morning and thought about everything that I was taking for granted till now. Thinking about every minor thing, for example ‘What if the fan stops working right now? Do I know the electrician that well? Yes, I do, I should be able to manage that’, but ‘what if the water tank gets grimy do I know how to clean it? Shit! I don’t, have to work that out’. Just by sitting there and counting the obstacles, I found many things of which I had a grey image in my mind. For example, A few weeks in and my water motor went off,

Did I call the plumber?

Yes

Did he come on time?

No

That whole day there was a water shortage at the house, and many of the work related to water like dishes, laundry, were postponed. Turned out that the motor wasn’t broken but its nozzle had sucked air. To tell you the truth, it’s like a bruise on your arm, and for that, I called the whole ambulance. Had I known that I just needed to open the nozzle fill in some water and it’s done, that whole day would have been saved.

So I did my research and learned through time and now here are the things I want you to understand and follow. You’re no God, no prophet, no time traveller, you know nothing about your future. Your parents are (masha allah) well and fit now, but (astaghfirullah) may not be tomorrow. No matter if you’re 15, 16, 17 years old or anything above that, there are things you need to pay attention to along with your studies. Here is how you can start with it.

• First. Observe.

Start noticing things inside your house, starting from the basics, do make sure the front door is locked at night, LPG lines are turned off, and there are no unnecessary lights, fans, or any machines on. When the bill is on your head you start minding the unnecessary uses of electricity, so even if it’s not on your head now do try to keep them under control. These things might sound silly to you but it’s important to build that responsible mindset in you. Next, keep your eyes on the monthly groceries at your home, and keep constantly checking whether rice, salt, wheat, onions, potatoes, and tomatoes are out of stock or not. They are the basic needs in our indian cooking. If you have any younger siblings, you should keep an eye on their studies. No matter how much you hate doing it, they need to complete their studies perfectly.

• Second. Learn.

Once you’re mindful of your surroundings, you should know how to manage them as well. By basic skills what I mean is things like how to change bulbs and tube lights, which are super easy to change. Do you know how to do Bargaining!!!!! If you’re an introvert or shy person it may be really tough for you, but what will be tougher for you is paying ₹100 for the thing you could have bought for ₹20, believe me there are vendors who hike their prices too damm high. You should not only have the phone numbers of electricians, plumbers and other community workers but also you should have a good (baat vichaar) acquaintance with them, you should know them, you should talk to them, say them namaste/salam if you see them on the road, it is a must. They are super helpful. (Again reminding all of these things are must for every gender, no matter if you’re a girl, boy, anything in between or beyond).

You have to know how to keep your identity proof updated, how to take appointments for an Aadhaar update (I-card update), and how the ATM and bank work. I legit had no idea my debit card had an expiry date after which I have to get to my original branch of the respective bank and get my new debit card. You should know how to service your vehicle and how to apply for a driving licence. There’s no chance you can skip the part of cooking, learn how to make roti, rice, daal, and some basic easy dishes, for example, anda bhurji (indian scrambled eggs) or if you’re vegetarian and aalu matar ki sabzi, or anything which is native to you and are easy. Later on your can surely learn how to cook different complex dishes as well. Believe me when your parents whether mom or dad are sick, it’ll give you a different level of pride when you cook food for them or for yourself. Half of their sickness will fall off their body when they see you being responsible. And if (na’uzubillah) they pass away, you’ll know how to at least feed yourself.

Do you know how to pay bills? Now it’s easy via online payments but many other things like complaints, service papers, and billing records are something you have to fill out forms at the service centre, you should know how to do that, you can find multiple videos on YouTube explaining how to fill out different forms/applications for different works.

One of the most important things is to know how to approach the police, how to file a FIR and how to fetch them at the scene, believe me, the police are here for our security and service, you can’t be afraid of them, instead, you should feel more comforted and safe when you see police near you.

The final thing, you have to know how to take care of yourself, whenever there’s some calamity on your head the most stupid thing you can do is stop caring about your health, because if your health gets fucked up, you’ll become a burden on your family (as rude as it sounds), obviously they won’t consider you as a burden but you know how much of an issue they’ll face due to your health during hard times, start by knowing facts about your body, how it works, what’s wrong for it, what’s important for it etc. I’ll recommend a book named ‘The Body’ by Bill Bryson. You’ll get to understand so many things related to diseases how they evolve in your body, how cancer spreads, what you should do and a lot more. Next, do know what are the basic medicines you should take during sickness (don’t ever try taking any new medicine without the doctor’s consultation), you should know how to articulate your disease to the doctor, many 14 and 15-year-olds lack that, but talk to your mother and get to understand how to articulate your disease.

• Third. Act.

The things that I told you to learn are not the things you can read only in books. You have to take molecular steps. From today start learning how your parents are doing certain things, do sit with your mother when she’s planning the whole month’s budget. Ask your father whom to call when there are some issues with the electricity or water pipelines. Ask your mother how she pays the bills for the house. Cook breakfast for one day, pay the bill for electricity, when your father is changing the bulb go and ask him to let you do it. Close the door at night, before your mother goes and lock it. Talk to your parents while they are completely fit (may they always be completely fit) trust me they have the level of knowledge you’re completely unaware of. Use Google and YouTube to learn how to fill out certain forms and how to update your ID cards. So when the time comes these concepts are not alien to you. You have to understand that there will be no dream in which you’ll learn these things. And when life hits you, it doesn’t see whether you’re ready or not.

And if you think that alhamdulillah your parents are all good and all well, then again these tips are helpful to you as it’ll make your parents’ life easier and they’ll feel really relieved seeing their child being a responsible kid. They’ll feel relieved that if in case they have to go somewhere (Or if anything happens to them) they can count on you. And in case your parents are no more (inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajiyoon) and your elder siblings are taking care of you, then there might come a time when they’ll be wanting to leave the city for better works and better opportunities, if you’ll be just focussing on your studies and will have no idea of these worldly responsibilities they might not be able to go and grab those opportunities which could have been better for the whole family. So all these skills are important, and you have to start learning them from today, it won’t cost you some lectures or something, you just need to keep your mind active to observe, open to learn, and ready to act.

• Conclusion

You have to understand you’re no Pokémon who’ll evolve one day and will have pre-learned moves in mind, you’re a human and you grow gradually, you can’t wait for that ‘one day when I’m grown’ time to learn something, you learn you grow, perhaps you grow only when you learn. And if you wait, you’ll never grow. I was late, I learnt it late, I was an idiot, but you’re not. So, Start today. Start being responsible.

Ps. For the first half of the introductory part, I shared some bits of my life, on which I would really be grateful not to have any ‘sympathetic’ or ‘pitty’ comments. I would LOVE to see your perspective, your criticism and your insights on this piece about its context, morals and my writing style. Thank you.

कुछ न कुछ

کچھ نا کچھ

Editor’s note: it’s best if you can read it in the hindi transliteration, then the English (Roman one) and then urdu transliteration. You may find some spelling mistakes in the transliterations, but I tried my best.

Also here’s some word meanings

Khanabadosh: homeless people, Nahl: honey bees

Gham-e-zaar: a higher level of sorrow Aabru: reputation

Arbon: millions

Kahin na kahin

kuch na kuch ho hi raha hai,

Roz koi shaam tale

Chaadar taane so hi raha hai

Kisi ki mashuka khafaan hain unse

Kisi ka aashiq ghum sa gaya hai

Kisi ki aabru bardaasht nahi unhe

Kisi ke hone se wakht tham sa gaya hai,

Shikayatein itni hai in nawjawano ko

Har koi nawjawani ke aansu ro hi raha hai

Is dil mein kuch na kuch ho hi raha hai,

Sab zamane ki ghalti jo

Dil zamane se oob sa gaya hai

Yun dil to sab hi ke toot te hain

Sar to sab hi ke phat tein hain

Ye tujhme naya sa kya hai

Jo tu gham me doob sa gaya hai

Zameen to ye ab banjar hai fir bhi

Zameer ke beej tu bo hi raha hai

Is zamane me kuch na kuch ho hi raha hai,

Yaha hazaar Khanabadosh hain,

Laakhon ghulaam,

Caroro aashiq, or

Ginti arbon me hai fakeeron ki

Tu ro, tera kya hai

Ghaltiyaan to thi tere lakeeron ki

Tera gham to gham-e-zaar hai

Tu apne dil ko patthar me piro hi raha hai

Is wehem me kuch na kuch ho hi raha hai.

Zindagi teri us darakht ki si hai

Jise na chidiya pooche na koi nahl

Na ho aashiyana kisi parinde ka

Na ho kisi makkhi ka mahal

Kyu tapke shehed teri daali se

Tune meetha aisa bola kya hai

Apne alfaazon me zeher ke siwa

Tune ghola kya hai

Apni zaban se tu apne daman ko

Dho hi raha hai

Iss saye me kuch na kuch ho hi raha hai

Tere paer salamat

Haath salamat

Ye bolti hui zabaan salamat

To rona kya hai?

Wakhr nahi

Jazbaat nahi

Na ishq hai na aashiq kahi

To khona kya hai?

Tu aina dekhta hai

Tu bazaar dekh

Teri aankhein

Teri neend

Tu sapne hazaar dekh

Tu sirf aankhon se nahi

Apne khyaalon se bhi ro hi raha hai

Ishq me haqiqat or

Ashqon me sapne kho hi raha hai,

Is jism me bhi kuch na kuch ho hi raha hai.

कहीं न कहीं

कुछ न कुछ हो ही रहा है

रोज़ कोई शाम तले

चादर ताने सो ही रहा है

किसी की माशूका ख़फ़ां हैं उनसे

किसी का आशिक ग़ुम सा गया है

किसी की आबरू बर्दाश नही उन्हे

किसी के होने से वख्त थम सा गया है

शिकायतें इतनी है इन नौजवानों को

हर कोई नौजवानि के आँसू रो ही रहा है

इस दिल मे कुछ न कुछ हो ही रहा है

सब ज़माने की गलती है

दिल इस ज़माने से ऊब सा गया है

युं दिल तो सब ही के टूटते हैं

सर सब ही के दुखते हैं

ये तुझमे नया सा कया है

जो तु ग़म मे डूब सा गया है?

ज़मीन तो ये अब बंजर है फिर भी

ज़मीर के बीज तु बो ही रहा है

इस ज़माने में कुछ न कुछ हो ही रहा है

यहाँ हज़ार खनाबादोष हैं

लाखों गुलाम

करोरो आशिक, और

गिनती अरबों मे है फकीरों की

तु रो, तेरा कया है

गलतियां तो थीं तेरे लकीरों की

तेरा गम तो ग़म-ए-ज़ार है

तु अपने दिल को पत्थर मे पिरो ही रहा है

इस वहम मे कुछ न कुछ हो ही रहा है

जिंदगी तेरी उस दरख़्त की सी है

जिसे न चिड़िया पूछे न की न्हल

न हो आशीयाना किसी परिंदे का

न हो किसी मक्खी का महल

क्यों टपके शहद तेरी डाली से

तूने मीठा ऐसा बोला कया है?

अपने अल्फ़ाज़ों मे ज़ैहर के सिवा

तूने घोला क्या है?

अपनी ज़बान से तु अपने दामन को धो ही रहा है

इस साये मे कुछ न कुछ हो ही रहा है

तेरे पैर सलामत

हाथ सलामत

ये बोलती ज़बान सलामत

तो रोना कया है?

वख्त नही

जज़्बात नही

न इश्क है न आशिक कहीं

तो खोना कया है?

तु ऐना देखता है

तु बाज़ार देख

तेरी आँखें

तेरी नींद

तु सपने हज़ार देख

तु सिर्फ आँखों से नही

अपने ख्यालों से भी रो ही रहा है

इश्क में हकीकत और

अश्कों में सपने खो ही रहा है

इस जिसम में कुछ न कुछ हो ही रहा है।

کہیں نا کہیں

کچھ نا کچھ ہو ہی رہا ہے ،

روز کوئی شام تلے

چادر تعنے سو ہی رہا ہے

کسی کی ماشوکا خافاں ہیں انسے

کسی کا عاشق غم سا گیا ہے

کسی کی اَبْرُو برداشت نہیں انہیں

کسی كے ہونے سے وخت تھم سا گیا ہے ،

شکایتں اتنی ہے ان ناوجاوانو کو

ہر کوئی ناوجاوانی كے آنسو رو ہی رہا ہے

اِس دِل میں کچھ نا کچھ ہو ہی رہا ہے ،

سب زمانے کی غلطی جو

دِل زمانے سے اب سا گیا ہے

یوں دِل تو سب ہی كے ٹوٹ تے ہیں

سَر تو سب ہی كے دخ تی ہیں

یہ تجھ میں نیا سا کیا ہے

جو تو غم میں ڈوب سا گیا ہے

زمین تو یہ اب بنجر ہے فر بھی

ضمیر كے بیج تو بو ہی رہا ہے

اِس زمانے میں کچھ نا کچھ ہو ہی رہا ہے ،

یہاں ہزار خانہ بدوش ہیں ،

لاکھوں غلام ،

کڑوڑوں عاشق ، اور

گنتی عربوں میں ہے فاکییروں کی

تو رو ، تیرا کیا ہے

گھالتیان تو تھی تیرے لکیروں کی

تیرا غم تو غم زار ہے

تو اپنے دِل کو پتھر میں پرو ہی رہا ہے

اِس وہم میں کچھ نا کچھ ہو ہی رہا ہے .

زندگی تیری اس درخت کی سی ہے

جسے نا چڑیا پوچھے نا کوئی ناحل

نا ہو آشیانہ کسی پرندے کا

نا ہو کسی مکھی کا محل

کیوں ٹپکے شہد تیری ڈالی سے

تونے میٹھا ایسا بولا کیا ہے

اپنے الفاازوں میں زہر كے سوا

تونے گھولہ کیا ہے

اپنی زبان سے تو اپنے دامن کو

دھو ہی رہا ہے

اِس سائے میں کچھ نا کچھ ہو ہی رہا ہے

تیرے پیڑ سلامت

ہاتھ سلامت

یہ بولتی ہوئی زباں سلامت

تو رونا کیا ہے ؟

واخت نہیں

جذبات نہیں

نا عشق ہے نا عاشق کہیں

تو کھونا کیا ہے ؟

تو آئینہ دیکھتا ہے

تو بازار دیکھ

تیری آنکھیں

تیری نیند

تو سپنے ہزار دیکھ

تو صرف آنكھوں سے نہیں

اپنے خیالوں سے بھی رو ہی رہا ہے

عشق میں حقیقت اور

اشکوں میں سپنے کھو ہی رہا ہے ،

اِس جسم میں بھی کچھ نا کچھ ہو ہی رہا ہے .

Editor’s note: For this essay I named my one heart Khair(well: often used to show gratitude) and the other Kaash(I wish), so whenever these two words show up, know I’m talking about my heart.

Indeed I possess two hearts. And what makes me say that? I don’t carry any extra love, kindness or strength for which I need this extra heart. It’s just a metaphor. This metaphor may justify the existence of two conflicting thoughts within me.

. قلبي يطفو على سطح المحيط، بينما يغرق الآخر.

“My one heart floats on the surface of the ocean, while the other sinks in.”

My one heart is at peace knowing whatever happens to me, happens for a great reason. Every mistake is a form of improvement and every failure is a lesson. Every act of gratefulness is a step towards savouring life and every success is a failure without its gratitude. I know no success or failure can hinder the peace of my heart.

. "لیکن یہ کمبخت اوسط پن"

(Lekin yeh kambakht ausat-pan) (but this fucking mediocracy). Neither this mediocrity lets me be truly satisfied, nor does it let me feel the hunger for improvement. There’s this peace in a failure, you at least get to realise where you stand among the world and gets to learn from mistakes, on the other side obviously there’s this satisfaction in a victory. But how do I express mediocrity? If I am grateful, this gratefulness will eventually glue my feet exactly where I stand now and I won’t be able to step up from my current situation, and if I regret my mediocrity then I’ll lose my peace, my mind will be thwarted and I won’t be able to work freely.

It’s like my heart is dangling between khair and Kaash. I’m all happy, I’m living my life, I’m grateful for the outcome which came to me, everything’s going fine then out of nowhere this shockwave of regret hits my mind

“Kaash, she was still with me” “Kaash, I had qualified last year” “Kaash, I had studied a bit more” “Kaash, I wasn’t rotting in this room all like the previous year” “Kaash, I had taken that risk” “Kaash, I had signed that deal”

And that’s it, the whole bloody Synaptic system of my brain has been hindered. My body is shaking. I can’t sleep at night. Now I’m just stuck. What should I think? Or should I stop thinking? It’ll be easy for you to say “brother, just ignore these thoughts” but these aren’t just thoughts and that’s the real issue, these are flipping facts, the very reality I was trying to escape through my 'optimism’.

This “Kaash” is the name of my one Heart. A heart which you may imagine as the container possessing storms and tsunamis all at once, you can find from Hamlet’s revenge to The Dreamer’s yearning, from Lata Mangeshkar’s hum tere pyar me sara alam to Jagjit Singh’s tujhko dariya dili ki kasam, all of these carved on its(my heart’s) wall. Every one of its chambers inhabits a beast: a Sabre-tooth, Human, Tyrannosaurus and a Megaladon, all fighting, screeching, scathing for their own blood. This Chaos. This Pandemonium. It all takes over me whenever Kaash invades my Khair.

I slit my skin, unscrew my rib cage, and find this (Kaash). I unravel all the veins and arteries and replace it with another (Khair).

I wish it were this easy.

However, for every Kaash there’s always a Khair.

“Khair, that we are being stable on our own” “Khair, I learnt so many new things this year which I surely had missed” “Khair, I studied the level which now is helping me to build more concepts” “Khair, I’m discovering myself and working on my self, instead of wasting time outside” “Khair, I didn’t took that risk, many people failed due to it” “Khair, I didn’t sign that deal, now I can have better ones”

I feel safe, I feel comforted. The storm within my heart starts calming, and the tsunami settles down. But what’s left is its aftermath.

Neither can I truly glide among the peace nor can I drown beneath my regrets.

My heart still dangles between “Kaash” and “Khair”.

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Your Author,

Muhammad Dilshad Ansari.

Jewel, Paper and Woman

زیور، کاغذ اور عورت

ज़ेवर, कागज और औरत

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Had gold ever belonged to women? Or has it always been an asset to help the financial condition of the house?

GOLD

There are countless aspects of gold, where one sees it as jewellery, a beautiful add-on to one’s beauty, the other takes its impression as an investment, a backup option for solvency.

Growing up in an Indian household gave me this duality of impressions towards gold. I have noticed this private intimacy between gold and women, this love towards that piece of metal every woman carries. This is no modern trend it is historical that women have always had a soft side for gold jewellery. Back in the Egyptian era women were buried with their gold in their graves. It shows the Depth of emotions gold acquires in the life of a woman. Maybe this love towards Gold is also among the reasons why Gold is so valuable. Obviously, gold is one of the rarest elements to find, really costly to extract and has high demand in the market, thus it gets really expensive. Gold is Mad expensive, till a degree, gold in many cases defines the status of a whole country, regarding its rates and availability. Maybe this high pricing and always increasing rate became a reason to make it an asset for financial conditions, it’s nothing new, even in history, most of the trades were done in gold, not gold as solid currency but as treasures. Empires, when they used to loot the civilians and militant camps they majorly sought weapons and gold (in any form whether as coins or jewelleries). Transitioning to our households, gold is being ‘looted’ but has a new name.

Gold Loan

A normal family like yours, lives a great life in stable financial conditions, but unfortunately when a calamity decrees on the source of income, whether a loss of a job or loss in business, the whole family struggles. During those times a very obvious option comes up, To Take Gold Loan. Taking a gold loan or selling it in order to regain stability seems a very fair option, ‘this metal was just sitting in our house, wasn’t it?’. Many, in fact most of the time people forget that it wasn’t just a piece of metal, it was a jewellery, that too of gold and that too of a woman. On top of that even if we succeed in understanding it, there’s an ocean full of emotions attached to it by a woman.

They(any lady of your house) without even showing a bit of hesitation bring their jewellery from their lockers and hand it to either bankers or jewellers. For us that jewel comes up to be a couple of thousand rupees (a few hundred dollars), we do feel remorse in our heart seeing our mother, sister, wife or even daughter giving their belongings. But we can’t feel that ache they get in the heart seeing the jewellers taking their ‘Zewar' (jewellery) away from their sight. The reason we can’t feel it might be because we have always perceived jewelleries as some beauty add-ons to a lady’s attire.

But for them,

That pair of earrings might be the first purchase she made for herself with her own earnings. A light of empowerment, a pedestal she stood on by her own sweat.

Maybe his father gave her those kangan (bangles) as a gift for her wedding. A departing present.

Maybe that necklace was the last memento of her mother, maybe she had grown up seeing her mother wearing that beautiful necklace all over the weddings and festivals. And now a person is taking that necklace away from her sight giving her a few paper notes.

Maybe her nanu (grandfather) had bought her that bracelet for which during her childhood, she fought her sisters/friends.

Her dadi (grandmother) might have gifted her that watch, which holds all the memories of her dadi after her death.

In many families a lineage, a tradition of passing on their inherited ring or any other jewellery follows, the new bride receives a jewellery piece from her mother-in-law which was given to her by her mother-in-law and so on.

There might be a thousand stories with a million emotions behind every piece of gold, all simultaneously bursting inside her mind at the bank handing over that piece. A whole series of conflicting thoughts she fights all the way from the house to the bank just for the sake of her family. she calms her aching heart and pulsing blood flow with obviously a hope that in future, one day, she’ll bring back that kangan, that earring, that bracelet, that necklace to herself. But under the escalating financial weakness and under the weight of interests on interests on interests that hope just dies, that hope gets crushed when the calls from the bank come to warn her about the bidding of her jewellery. The hope just dies there.

Gold Loan is a highly risky and sensitive step, just because you can’t sense that emotion behind a piece of metal doesn’t mean it does not exist. A gold loan can surely be helpful in many cases but not in all cases. See your options. Consider your emotions. there are only dreams of prosperity within the solvency of gold, but just dreams. Be aware of interest traps. Don’t sell your gold for Papers, unless it’s necessary.

Give me your feedback, and thoughts on this piece of mine.

Keep on remembering me,

Your author,

Muhammad Dilshad Ansari.

Are you a right-winger or a left-winger?

If you’re a right-winger then ask yourself do you emphasise strict hierarchy? Possess hyper-nationalism? Oppose liberal democracy? Or exhibit political narcissism? If not then according to what factor do you call yourself a right-winger? Because these characteristics are some of the major ideological pillars of the right wing. Oh, you believe that traditions should carry on and there should not be sudden ‘radical' changes in our policies. Then that’s something many of the left wings support, but that doesn’t make them a right wing.

If you picked ‘I’m a left wing’ as your answer for the above question then, again, interrogate within your heart do you support the radical changes hindering your traditions? , abolishment of your religious practices by the name of liberalisation? , Westernisation of your country’s ethics? Or to Top-down censorship suppressing the dissenting opinions and different views from yours? If not then in what accord are you a left-wing? And surely again these characteristics are a few of the fundamental ideologies of leftists.

And just in case you chose to show your tailbone-sized spine to say ‘I’m none' ‘I’m neutral’, then my answer would be ‘you’re not a human’. According to very basic neurology and cognitive research, it is not possible for a human to be completely neutral. A human being is inherently biased by nature. So, you’re lying.

But then what are you? If not right not left and not even none? The answer as many of you realized is that you lie somewhere in between. But how?

Thanks to Dr Robert Sapolsky a well-known primatologist, anthropologist, author of a widely loved book ‘Behaviour' and a professor at Stanford University, we know that the human mind is not built to think “Only” categorically. In the very first lecture of Human Behavioural Biology in fact, in the introductory lecture, Sapolsky explains the fallacy of categorical thinking. How it hides the wider picture and how humans developed this technique to divide complex structures of concepts into categories of simpler pieces.

• Spectrum of Nuances

The question I asked you above, I framed its options in categories of right wing and left wing just to divert you from the real answer, because when you highlight two or a few things from a frame you de-focus your brain from the wider picture.

Categorical thinking is a human-made way to understand a concept in pieces, which for sure makes the task easier but removes the wider picture. The fact that it’s easy to understand makes it the most used (99%) way to understand something, its popularity being so high that you may never even know there are other ways as well. From the very ancient scriptures to our modern ideas, they are all based on categorical thinking. For a proof ask either a seven-year-old or an adult the number of colours a Rainbow has. In the 93% of the time answer would come ‘seven' and 6% of the time ‘obviously seven’. So what’s wrong with this answer you may ask. Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange And Red are the seven colours right? Then what about pink? cyan? And magenta? “well those are shades, magenta is a shade between red and violet.” Why can’t I say that violet is a shade between magenta and purple?, Maybe I can, who made this 7 colour system? Why aren’t cyan and golden are real colours and green their shade? Just because the earlier generation developed this seven colour system it doesn’t mean a rainbow is a palette of seven colours. This division caused our minds to think categorically in this situation.

Well, we aren’t talking only about the rainbow of course. No matter what case you look at, you’ll see this categorical ‘sects' embedded in it, whether your political stance or your picky position between your favourites, in all cases you’re missing the wider picture.

If you ask me that left-wing or right-wing question, you won’t be getting a one-word answer. Because even in the political stances a whole spectrum exists and everyone lies where their opinion belongs. for me:

I lie right there on the left side but not so far from the right.

So you too can and obviously do, just because you support the right it is not necessary for you to support Trump and his demonic actions. The same goes for left wings, it is not necessary for you to justify atheism.

• The issues with categorical thinking

Nobody is on the extreme ends of any collective spectrum nor in the very middle of it, everyone lies in between. There is no Good person and there is no evil person, every humans have their qualities giving them a unique position in the continua of good and evil.

You can pick 5 ‘good' people from your life and think whether they are equally good. The answer will be absolutely No, there’s your brother in that same box you added a friend to whom you met 3 years ago, and obviously you know their status of being good and better than the other but the fact you shoved them in the same box veils the vision to differentiate among them for others , That’s the issue no. 1. “Once you are paying too much attention to categories you can’t differentiate two facts that fall within the same category” ~ Sir Robert Sapolsky

Now let’s say a guy score 25 out of 100 in his exam and you scored 26 and just because the passing marks was 26, that guy fails and you exhale a relief-full breeze of being able to pass, now you can sit In the new class among the students who scored 75 and 90 and that guy will be sitting on that same old class. But wait a second if there was no barricade of passing and failing, then 25 and 26 were the same thing, how much of a difference do these two numbers carry? In fact, 50 and 26 have a wider difference than 25 and 26 yet 50 and 26 are in the same class while 25 is not. Just because of the Barricade of the category. That’s the issue No. 2 “When you put up boundaries, you have trouble seeing how similar things are on either side of it” ~ Sir Robert Sapolsky

So How to think with this Continua way of thinking?

I don’t know what the accurate answer can be, but my way of thinking is by not thinking categorically.

Once a very beautiful woman told me that “there is no man who’s a green flag, every man is a red falg and every woman loves her favourite shade of red”. That line was a slap on my brown cheek and it’s still red (I don’t know if this quote has been said by any renowned person, for me she said that and for me it belongs to her). There is no such green flag and red flag categorisation of humans, we all share the same colour but different shades. We all have our Nuances and Barricades. We are all part of the same continua.

For a better understanding of this concept, I would highly suggest that you go and watch the introductory lecture of Human Behavioural Biology by Dr Robert Sapolsky.

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Yours Truly

Muhammad Dilshad Ansari.

“You are a Bihari??? Oh, you don’t look like one”

“And how do I suppose to look?” asked ‘I’ with my polite tone.

Isn’t it often that we judge people based on their looks and attire? Especially in India where your birthplace defines the stage of inferiority you carry. Where people are so consumed by themselves that they forget to know or understand their surroundings. “Hey, it’s Mary Kom on TV, she’s from Assam right?..... Oh, Manipur? Same thing isn’t it?”. Basic geography is what they lack, I asked him about his education and it’s hard to comprehend that he’s as educated as I am. So, education isn’t the criterion through which we can expect people to be mindful of their words. Then why this gap in mindset? Or is it about their upbringing? Well, he’s been raised by a family as well-mannered as mine but the thing is…. Racism is a trend now, whether you make fun of an individual based on their hometown or their face, this humorous culture provokes the idea to normalize racism.

“I was just kidding bro, you’re taking it too personal”

Yes I know you were just ‘kidding’ and you never intended to offend the other, it was just going through the conversation and you landed a joke, well timed and everyone laughed including the person you made fun of. But this laugh normalised the racial remark, you stigmatised that comment on the individual. Next time when you or anyone will crack the same joke, they won’t be laughing with you, then next to next time they’ll be offended but won’t let you know and when it’ll surpass 3 or 4 rows, you’ll be arguing with that person. Not forgetting how it’ll keep on expanding through the groups to groups and will be used to crack jokes on that racial object i.e. hometown, facial character or accent/dialect of language

Discrimination and stigmatisation on the topic of one’s home state is equally terrible as it is humorous, and these ‘silly’ jokes are the things that have escalated this normalisation of stigmatising people. Quite literally in my school it was a slang to be used to offend a person you dislike

“ ‘Bihari saala!’ oh it’s not that serious it’s just a…..”

Yes a slang.

Imagine yourself sitting in a room with people all around the India, having tags of their hometown on their foreheads, you would certainly know which duos and trios would be forming within the chat (which I like to address as molecular hierarchy), which handful of people would be a subject to racial conversation and It’s already in your mind on which side Stereotypical remarks “jokes” would be flowing. The normalisation of stereotypes is as much spread across our culture as your Nutella on your bread.

“well I don’t think so, I don’t know which jokes would be put on to Gujratis”

Alright you may not know what particular remarks would be put on to Gujratis but can’t you sense where the “fish” jokes would go? And where “Chinese, Momo, patthar(stone), kalua(black people), crime, katta (pistols), thieves, child marriage” Would go?

Obviously, you do.

But why this mindset? Why Bambaiya! Delhities! Bihari! And Mallu! Why not Indian? Wasn’t one nation, one people, the intention of our ancestors while bringing freedom to our India?

“Obviously a Bihari, would say that”

Am I saying this because I’m a Bihari? Maybe yes, had I raised my voice against these racial comments if I had not been subjugated through a few of these? Maybe not, maybe I too would be on the party of the offenders and would never have had an empathetic perspective towards us.

“Bhai I’m from Delhi, and I support every aspect of my city, its language, its diversity, you Bihari people are those who take ‘Bihari’ as an insult, be proud of it”

Proud of it when it has become a slang, when a phone gets stolen and everyone in the bus suspects a person in a red-white gamcha (cotton towel) as a thief? When people expect a peon is supposed to be from Bihar and not their boss? When while discussing the rape and child marriage cases one posts a straight example of Bihar and ignores the multiple examples from Maharashtra, Gujrat and Telangana? And frankly, it’s not about only Bihar, every city or state that doesn’t lie in the belly or chest area of india’s map has been subjugated through these racial discrimination(even a few from chest and belly areas of map as well, i.e. Rajasthan) . In my opinion, Bihar is the 2nd most victim of racism and at the top, it’s the north-eastern people. You sit here and see how every eye gives a second gaze to a woman from North-eastern India who walks nearby.

“These are not that big of an issue to delve as much as you’re making it, we have far more important subjects to raise a voice against”

Surely I would have thought exactly like you if I were not a part of this racism, or right now when stereotypes against Biharis are not as high as ‘dhandhe wali(prostitute), massage wali(spa worker) or Chinese terrorist’ what would you understand being called a prostitute just because of your facial character? How do you understand the psyche of these people who put their time into work, and work hard to earn, and just like that a couple stands on your door spitting these racial remarks on you, calling you a massage wali.

“Oh.. That neighbour couple case…”

Not only that. A student named Anjel Chakma died due to this racist slur where his last words were ‘I am Indian’. People called him a Chinese terrorist and provoked him till a degree he died. And guess the irony his father was in the Indian Army. Now no matter how much you protest the life of his will not come. And justice would be served to him via a candle march.

“hmmmm……. But..”

There will always be ‘buts’ and ‘perhapses’. It would have been far more productive to write an article on it than to persuade you to stand against Racism and stigmatization.

“Go write then”

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Muhammad Dilshad Ansari

An Indian Bihari Muslim.

تم جلا کر درختوں کو

ہوا تلاش کرتے ہو

تم دفنا کر مردوں کو

زندگی تلاش کرتے ہو

بھری ریت تمنے ہر کویں میں

اب اس بنجر زمین میں پانی تلاش کرتے ہو

بجھا کر ہر چراغ

راتوں کو روشنی تلاش کرتے ہو

بتا کر ہر شیام غربتو ز نا میں

صبح خدا تلاش کرتے

بنا کر لاکھوں کے پنجروں

آسمان میں پرندے تلاش کرتے ہو

سوے رات تو زمانے گزرے

ان گزرتے زمانوں میں صدیاں تلاش کرتے ہو۔

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Tum jala kar darakhto'n ko

Hawa talash karte ho

Tum dafna kar murdo'n ko

Zindagi talash karte ho

Bhari ret tumne har kue'n mein

Ab is banjar zameen me pani talash karte ho

Bujha kar har chiraagh

Raato'n ko roshni talash karte ho

Bita kar har shaam ghurbat-O-zana me

Subah khuda talash karte ho

Bana kar laakho'n ke pinjre

Aasmaan me parinde talash karte ho

Soye raat to zamaane guzre

In guzarte zamaano mein sadiyaan talash karte ho.

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You burnt all the trees

In search of fresh air

You buried all the deads

In search of life

You filled all the wells with sand

Now you seek water from this barren land

By extinguishing every lamp

You seek light during night

You spent all the evenings in exile and adultery

Now you seek God during dawn

You made cages worth of millions

Now you seek free birds in the sky

When you slept, you slept for ages

Now you seek Eternities between these ages.

In 1848, a foreman named Phineas Gage was working on a construction site. His task was to clear the rocks, and to clear the rocks, he used to fill explosives between rocks, cover it with sand, then detonate it with an Iron rod (more like a javelin). This day no body knows what went wrong, he filled the explosives, then without covering it with sand he stabbed the iron “javelin” In it, the explosion caused an impulse to the javelin which went through Gage’s face, entering through the jaw, piercing one of the eyes (mainly the retina) internally and damaging the front lobe of his brain, it came out from his upper skull and flew several meters away from him. Gage lost his consciousness but just for a few moments. So what happened then? He should have lost his vision if he hadn’t had died. Professor Paul Bloom mentions it further in his book (The Psych) that

“Gage lost consciousness—but just for a moment. His gang helped him onto an oxcart and took him to the Cavendish Inn, where he was renting a room.”

“Gage had an infection and required considerable treatment. But months later, he had seemingly recovered. He wasn’t blind; he wasn’t paralyzed; he retained the ability to speak and understand language; he didn’t lose his intellectual capacities in any obvious way. You might think he was very lucky indeed.”

But the cost that he paid for this “luck” was exceptionally weird.

“His doctor, John Martyn Harlow, wrote, Gage used to be: “the most efficient and capable man, a man of temperate habits, considerable energy of character, a sharp, shrewd businessman.” But afterward: “Gage was no longer Gage. He was fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity, manifesting but little deference for his fellows.””

What Professor Paul Bloom explained in his lectures was that Gage lost his ability to differentiate between Right and Wrong.

Not that his mind was now completely triggered to function negatively, but to function neutrally in accordance with his mind, thus doing what he wanted, thus doing as per his desires.

The point that I’m trying to make is that a human mind doesn’t know what actual neutrality is. Gage neither did what was wrong nor what was right; he did what he wanted to do, and according to the case, we found that there wasn’t 1% of his actions that could be classified as reasonably correct. From verbally abusing everyone around him to walking in front of museums with the iron javelin, telling everyone his story, he went completely mad.

So if, let’s say, we take you and remove your ability to differentiate between right and wrong (this state of mental disease is called Amoral). Would you do more Right things or more Wrong things?

Here’s my answer: WHATSOEVER YOU DO, IT WILL BE WRONG. What makes a decision/action relatively Right is the factor that we choose to do it. Even if you, in your Amoral state, donate $1000 to charity, that action will be classified as wrong. That money would surely not haven’t had been donated in your moral state and would have been invested or spent in some more reasonable way for your housing, which has now been disrupted because you gave that money away. If you were to donate not 1000$ but even 10000$ in your normal state, that would have been classified as correct, but in that state where you’ve lost your self-control control your actions will be wrong.

Any decision made without the knowledge or estimation of it’s outcome, apart from it’s outcome, is wrong.

The case of Phineas Gage was rare then, but now there are millions of Gage who believes that fulfilling their desires is the only morality scale they have.

An amoral state of mentality doesn’t only comes by damaging your frontal lobe by piercing an iron javelin through your skull, but also by being rich (and having power). No offense to the good rich people, I love how you donate and contribute to the lower society, but I can’t forget that 100% of the people who are in the Epstein files are millionaires and billionaires. And they are there not to do anything but to fulfil their filthy desires by forgetting what morality is. there’s no veil between right and wrong for them, there’s only “i want to”.

It also occurs at the molecular level.

On a molecular level, where now we’ve lost control of our own actions and desires, spending thousands of dollars just to be satisfied, especially on our phones, we’ve forgotten how to say no. We have started to feed our mind by satisfying our desires, and what it’s doing is not to satisfy it but grow its hunger more and more in a very vivid manner that now it has started to unravel the veil between right and wrong, hence making us Amoral. And we call ourselves free by being the slaves of our own desires. (In order to understand more of these desire and self-control concepts, I would suggest you read my article “You’re a Slave”)

One calls their desired actions and habits freedom until they try to leave it; only then do they realize how chained they are by their own “wants”.

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For those who died in silence, or died due to silence.

کچھ الفاز اور

कुछ शब्द और

There once lived a world peaceful and silent, perhaps peaceful because silent. This world was a country surrounded by unending oceans, big enough to inhabit a variety of creatures and small enough to be walked across the shore from one point till the same in 2 days, in that country/island lived a town. A fruitful town away from the eyes of capitalists, cherished by it’s inhabitants and led by an ancient scroll. It was said that the leaders of the town never engaged in any debates with other towns, not because they weren’t eloquent but because a notion more of a prophecy lingered in the town, “a leaf falls off your life whenever you utter a word” they named this verse “mabda allisan”(principle of tongue), many high men of that town had came to an agreement that it interpret that they lose a second, minute, hour, or a day of their life whenever they say something. It sounds horrifying to lose a day because you said something but after passing a history of long-lived people, they had believed that it’s surely a second they lose for a word. A rumour was very famous in that town, that some of the selected people get a warning dream, a dream which takes them into a different realm where time works differently and an angel warns them by telling how many words they are left with.

They either don’t talk or talk when it’s needed, a few of the high men ran an Institute contributing their words perhaps moment of life to teach youngsters how to speak effectively. Over the time people there had agreed to talk less and avoided any form of sign language, in their opinion it wasn’t needed very much. They never took it as some kind of curse, either it was a normal way of life according to them or they took it as a blessing, they had a very positive affect of this blessing to their town, since no one wasted their words to curse someone or to snitch about anyone, no useless argument occurred in households and no leader tried to manipulate with their words

.In the year 1947 a woman named Zuleikha was all over the newspapers and was highly discussed over the town. She had given birth to a girl, not that the girl was born with diamond eyes or golden skin but because she didn’t cry, not at all from birth till several days when the staff of the hospital concluded that the girl was born mute. Sure enough the priests visited the family and gave glad tidings of a gifted child, who’ll be the first in town to live and see a complete destined length of life. They named her Misbah. Misbah learned to walk as fast as a kitten learns to purr, soon enough she was famous for her gifted feature of not having a working vocal cord, children of her age were jealous and some fancied to cut their own tongue to live a full length life. Her mother according to her dad had spoiled her a little,

braiding her hair twice everyday was fair but plucking fresh figs every week just to treat her with fruit cake was too much, “kya faida is bagh ka jab phoolon ko hi fal na mile? (What’s the point having this garden when the flower can’t tastes the fruits)” Zuleikha used to say whenever asked about figs. Whenever Zubayr was not at home she used to sing poems for Misbah so she could sleep well. When Misbah joined the school she was the fastest to write and articulate phrases, as fast as one may utter. teachers and staffs adored her and was certainly sure she may one day lead this town as a leader, her favourite teacher sir Hamood who also once was the teacher of her mother, took a special pride in teaching her.

In the year 1959 her life took a pause, it was a starry night of winter, Misbah’s father was not at home he barely ever spent nights with family as he was a loco pilot of a train running across countries. Misbah was under her mother’s cuddling arm exactly how a bear cuddles her cub, under a blanket covered with a bedsheet. At mid of night Misbah noticed something, she felt a missing rhythm of breath from her mother’s stomach, her heart skipped a beat, she paused her breath in search of One inhale or exhale and when she couldn’t catch one she turned over, touched Zuleikha’s face, it was cold, her mother wasn’t breathing, she panicked her heart throbbing back and forth. She screamed a silent scream, tears poured and poured as she rushed to her neighbours for help, they soon enough confirmed that Zuleikha is no more, not something Misbah hadn’t known but something her ears were not ready to hear. The whole town gathered in the mourning that night Misbah was now half fainted, the lines of poem was ringing in her ears which her mother had recited for her, Her dad Zubayr arrived just before the burial next night.

That night passed along with days, weeks and dragging months with them, but Misbah couldn’t find a remedy, her dad consoled her but whenever he tried to speak, Misbah always covered his mouth with her hand, preventing him to say anything. He tried to stay with her a bit long but now it was almost a month then he had to join the work again else they’ll face some tough time. Misbah who already was mute now felt as she never needed a tongue. Her relatives stopped visiting her and it was her neighbours who used to parcel food 3 times a day, her dad now used to send money to them(neighbours) once a week to give Misbah her pocket money and to keep some for their generous behaviour. Misbah then decided to join the school again, it was difficult for her, trying to be normal but she had asked herself how long will she continue to mourn.

It was a devastating idea she had realized the very moment she overheard the whispers of students the very first day,

“Zuleikha was surely a loquacious person“,

“speaking too much is the reason she died so early”.

“yes I’ve heard melodies zooming right from Misbah’s house every night“.

Misbah now had developed a phobia, phobia of listening to anybody talking so freely, her heart always ached whenever heard someone talking as the ‘WORDS' took her mother’s life, she had started to think that she was the reason for her mother’s death, she should never had acted like a child which made her mom to pamper her like one. Ignoring the chatting of students over text papers were easy but she couldn’t un-see the change in behaviour of teachers on humming of students, now they were hyper strict about over talking in the class. Now even teachers used to write most of the stuff instead of explaining verbally. Misbah who once was the most bright child in the class was now slowly losing her charm, low marks on tests and no attention on writing essays. She had certain someone who would have had understood her conditions, when she looked for sir Hamood she only found gossip about him, how he’s not in school for over 1 week, but on Thursday morning she visited the office, the office was empty but the lights were on, she went near to the table, as close as she may not be allowed as a student, footsteps suddenly zoomed from the side of gates, she rushed from the place dropping a vase and a bead string (tasbeeh) on floor, it was him, Sir Hamood, she pocketed the fallen beads and broken string, placed the vase in it’s place before Hamood could notice,

“Good morning, Misbah…… I heard about your mother, have a seat”

she wrote him a few pages expressing her thoughts and conditions how she feels about her mother’s death, how she’s not being able to focus on her studies, how she blamed herself for her mother, he replied with nothing but smiled and asked her to come over and have dinner one night.

On Saturday night of winters Misbah repaired the tasbeeh and wrote an apology letter for cracking the vase, knocked the door of her neighbours, collected her pocket money and told them that she’ll be having dinner somewhere else that night, she took tuk-tuk(horse cart) as a ride till sir Hamood’s house, when she arrived she was greeted with a kiss on forehead by sir Hamood, when he took her on the dining table, Misbah’s eyes came out seeing her dad sitting right at the table. She was meeting him after 3 weeks. Sitting on the table her eyes were teary, looking at her dad she started sobbing again and hugged him from his waist,

“It’s ok, it’s ok, let her volcano erupt” said Sir Hamood.

“Sir, I thought.. “ said Zubayr.

“I’ll be scared to use my words?, yeah I was once but now look at me, I’m the oldest person in the town, I lived my life and I can talk freely, after all we all will die one day”.

Misbah looked up at Hamood with a mixture terror and tears in her eyes, now a phobia had settled in her heart, it was a horror for her to realize that as her father and teacher is talking they are being dragged nearer to death.

“I won’t die so soon, don’t you worry” ~Hamood

“it’s my 3rd Or maybe 2nd time I spoke a word in last few weeks” ~Zubayr

“And you chose to stay silent? Don’t be so afraid of death Zubayr” ~Hamood

“It’s really hard to imagine what will happen to Misbah after me sir”~ Zubayr

Misbah stretched her hands to gesture sign language *Abba No*, her heart beating rapidly increasing every time hearing conversation catching pace, having a warmth feeling on her head, her heart ached, her blood was now rushing to her brain.

“Misbah!” cried Zubayr, Placing his hand over her back “stay calm, stay calm” Misbah stared at Sir Hamood with a calm anger in her eyes before her head fell on the table and got unconscious. Zubayr cradled her on his lap.

“haven’t you seen birds Misbah? Ever heard how fluently they talk without being afraid of death. Some people may reason this for their handful months of lifespan But the thing is that they live, they fly.” ~Hamood

“so do we sir, don’t we? ” now stroking the back of Misbah

“I may accept that one day we humans too will fly, but to live? It seems impossible in these conditions, in this fear.”

“to live is not to speak sa….” Zubayr tried to argue with a hint of anger in his tone,

“But to speak is to live. You can’t raise your voice against evil, you can’t shout when somethings going wrong, you can’t have rational debates for the future of your own town when people are afraid of dying and You cannot argue over this while protecting your precious words Zubayr”

Zubayr opened his mouth to speak but shut it when he noticed a Tasbeeh (string of prayer beads) in Hamood’s hand under the table.

“what is that for sir” he asked calmly,

“this, you noticed, you know I had a dream last week”

“the angel?”

“I may consider calling him the devil, he came in his whitish attire he spoke very politely, in dream I was in a different realm I guess, he told me I’m left with 9000 words only”

“you’re counting your words on those beads?, since Last week?, sir that could be a nightmare as well” said Zubayr with a look of terror on his face

“I too thought of that until I felt a rising weakness in me, I ordered my self 90 tasbeeh, each of 100 beads last week, I should be dead when this box runs out”

“sir you need to stop talking, please! ”

“oh don’t you worry Zubayr, I have a few hundred words more to live, I’m counting each of them. Before you came I was left with my last 7 tasbeeh, and right now I’m left with 4 more to go, 413 words to be more specific.” -365 left-

“You chose to use your last words on us?”

“I would be more than happy if Misbah was Conscious enough to listen to my last few words” -346 left-

“is there anything I can do for you? ”

“well there is something you can do, not for me but for her” now pointing at Misbah and counting his words on the tasbeeh “look Zubayr, tomorrow morning I’ll leave this town, this complete island, I’ll go somewhere , it’ll be impossible for you people to know whether I’m alive or dead, so never mention of me in front of Misbah, she must not be scared of this curse, this town needs the voice of her, she’ll be the best leader to ever live for this town, and she may one day come up with the solution of this curse, which will ensure a bright future for this town as well as for herself.” ~Hamood -243 left-

“sir please stop talking and when Misbah will get to know that you’ve just disappeared after this night, she’ll surely form some sort of sceptical thoughts about you” ~Zubayr, noticing Hamood dropping the used tasbeeh and picking a new one from a box beneath the table.

“oh Zubayr, she’s no new, anyone who cannot understand your reasons will try to oppose you, they are, humans. You may count me one as well as I never understood the reason behind this curse which you call a blessing and always hated it with my whole heart” -192 left- ~Hamood

“Sir, Misbah needs you” ~Zubayr

“she doesn’t need me, what she needs is the reality, see Zubayr, when I was dreaming of that angel, I saw them, I saw two of my brightest students together, Zuleikha and Misbah” -159 left-

Zubayr went silent having a thousand colliding thoughts, how could Hamood see them there? Zuleikha’s dead and how come Misbah reaches in his dream? How could it be true and even if he saw it, isn’t it possible it’s all just a dream?

“it can’t be just a dream Zubayr, and if it is we’ll get to know soon, if I don’t die in a few minutes then we can breathe calmly and cheer a bottle on the name of life, but if I die then you can’t deny that it wasn’t true and for the sake of Misbah I need to tell you what I saw there” -93 left-

Zubayr looked into the eyes of Hamood completely still, and held Misbah on his lap.

“Zuleikha was not going to die so soon, her words did not run out neither her strength, she paid it, she paid her life to give Misbah a complete length life, Misbah was not a miracle to born with a destined length life, her mother gifted this, in return she paid her entire left out words, she bargained with the angel.” He sighed before continuing, “Tell Misbah to bargain with angels when it comes to her, she can bargain the whole destiny of this town and….”-9 left-

“this is nonsense “ Zubayr interrupted, with an energy which contained more than just anger “there is no proof whether if it’s true or not, and even if it’s true why drag my daughter in it?,”

Hamood now chose to stay silent, his eyes were watery now, and was looking at Misbah with a fear in his eyes.

“Don’t say anything! “ cried Zubayr who now was gazing at the Tasbeeh realizing that only a few beads are left to count, only 9.

“If you live, if you don’t die right now, Then you’ll stay, you’ll stay to help Misbah if you don’t die, won’t you?” said Zubayr in a whimpering voice.

“I’m afraid I can’t, in either case I….” -1 left-

A sound of dropping beads on the floor filled the silent room. Sir Hamood sat still on his chair, a movement appeared on his lips.

“So it was just a dream” Zubayr said in a puzzlement voice.

“Indeed” said Hamood, now tears dropping from his eyes, he felt he never breathed more freely than this moment. He kept on seeing the box of his tasbeeh at his feet, trying to see whether he missed one “It’s late Zubayr, you must take Misbah to house before she wakes up and questions you, after all you have a tale to tell her tomorrow about my disappearance”

The sun rose the next morning a bit early in Misbah’s opinion, she had woken up and had heard how Mr Hamood had an emergency call and he went on a long long journey. The only person who could understand her was now gone as well, she was left with her sorrow, a thousand unanswered questions and a last memento she couldn’t return, the repaired tasbeeh she had gotten from his office. She kept the tasbeeh along with an incomplete mystery.

They never heard from Hamood later on, Even now Zubayr a few days in a few years thinks why he never received any letter from Him.

The End.

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Thank you for giving this story your precious time, I hope you enjoyed it and understood it as well. Do share your feedback as every of your opinions matters to me negative or positive. And if you noticed you surely have realized that this story has an open ending, and I would love to see what you think happened at the end.

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Your's truly,

Mohammad Dilshad Ansari.

From: Md. Dilshad ansari, 19th January 2026

New delhi, India.

To: Sir Robert Frost,

Old Bennington Cemetery.

Dear Sir,

The world is ending, we the generation who read your poems during our high schools are witnessing this end. I may say the world is ending with both ice and fire, the irony is the ice is fuelling this fire. On one side, where this anger, hatred and jealousy is at its peak, where all these aspects are co-existing and people aren’t tired spreading the hate about each other, their anger to each other is as if they don’t share the same origin, as if one is created from clouds and others from dirt. Where jealousy is leading to hate and hate is leading to anger. Where everyone of them believes their ideology is supreme and others are wrong, where having contradicting thoughts are dismantling the relations. Where agreeing to disagree does not exist, Where the Nationalism is no more a proud ideology but a sentimental religion. Where everyone is ready to harm for their own cause, where laws and orders are mere paper works, where humanity exists but only in poems, where violence is judged by its harm and not by cause. Where Rape is judged by age, sex, occupation, reach and not by eyes. Where hate speeches are freedom of speech and criticism is anti-nationalism, where we ants have created insecticides.

Where, This world is parted into countries, the humans into Nationalists, The countries are parted into states, the nationalists into Wings, The states are parted into regions, the wings into Extremists, The Regions are parted into cities the extremists into genders and race.

Where people can’t hold themselves accountable and criticize their critics. Where hypocrites can’t see others’happiness and others’success, where accusations and allegations are trends.

In this world this Fire is fuelled by Ice. This other side, this ice, it’s here to suffice, suffice nothing but ignorance, ignorance of self proclaimed wise. They are cold, it’s the ego they hold, they ignore the wrong and decisions which are bold. They fear the outcomes, they ignore the tear, just because it’s not theirs, their care is mere. They let the world burn, they are not bothered, they smell redolent, it’s blood in which their hands are smothered, there’s no shame in their bone, when an innocent dies they do not mourn, they ignore the calamities which are not of their own, it’s not wood anything could carve it’s that their hearts are made of stone. These people are the cause the fire is in power, these people are ready to devour, when there’s a genocide they call themselves neutral, just because it’s not in their home they don’t mourn on funeral. Who lives and who dies, it’s themselves for whom they’ll demise, it’s the rich who eats and it’s poor who sow for rice, and blood is the cost, and sweat is it’s price. Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

It's end may not be cruel, it'll be both who will rule, this world will end in a duel, and it'll be ice which will become fire's fuel.

if you liked this letter Or my writing style i suggest you to read my other articles like ‘Fuck Profanity’ Or ‘ you’re a slave’. you can also check out my short story ‘A few more words’.

do consider leaving your thoughts Or addition for this letter.

How often it is, the plan which we had fancied to come in action fails due to time. We pillar our plans on the foundation of time, knowing that time is no one’s possession. time can never be loyal to anyone. we can certainly never imagine what comes when, especially in the case of the future.

“A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills” ~Arthur Schopenhauer.

We think that we’ll initiate a habit Or two from either this upcoming morning, this Monday, this 1st of month or this new year. What we forget is that we can never think what occurs at that particular day and time, we may succeed in initiating but who knows we’ll be able to continue it for long.

This concept, when I think about it I feel it is very naïve to exist, how can one person be so certain that there will come a time when initiating anything will automatically make sense, why not now?

If I want to go to the gym, why wait for the Monday or 1st of the month? Why not today? Why not now?, practically speaking if there’s no solid reason which can hinder your work, why then wait?

COOK IT YOURSELF

I once was on my bed, thinking about studying tomorrow morning when a thought lingered in my head, will there be a new sun rising tomorrow which may provide me more energy? Won’t it be the same? If yes then it’s worth waiting and if it’s not then what goes now?, sure enough I was on my study table till that night. I covered as much of a portion I could have done tomorrow. Now it won’t be ironic to say that the next morning I rushed to the hospital due to some family reasons (unexpectedly). That day I realized that there is no starting point we can ever wait for, there’s no factory which creates or fixes them, it’s us who needs to cook one. Though the ingredients (of starting point) are as rare these days as starry nights in cities, you need Courage to tackle your lust and desires along with Will to get up from your current point, once these two ingredients are into the pot you’ll cook them till nice and golden brown, garnish it with a dedication of not going back from where you have came. And you have yourself a starting point to begin your journey. Take notes that nowhere in the recipe you require a certain time or date.

I realized there will be no new sun tomorrow. There will be no difference in opportunities during 31st of December or 1st of January. I’ll breathe the same on Sunday as on Monday. I’ll dream of the same night and this morning. What will change is time. Which neither I want or can control.

I have to create my starting point, neither this morning nor this night, But Now.

Do check my other articles as well.

yours truly,

MD. Dilshad Ansari.

You’re a slave and you don’t even know it,

Freedom is what we ask for and slavery is what we archive. Of whom are we slave? are we slaves of colonizers? No we aren’t, are we slaves of our government? Not explicitly, so to whom our slavery belong?

The answer is, to our desires

Machiavelli believes that at the core of the human soul in the marrow of the psyche there is a beast an untamed animal which wants only the satisfaction of its desires underneath our super ego, underneath this veil of civility, this veneer of righteousness.

That particular untamed beast provokes us to do what so ever we desire for, and I’m assuming you’re obviously mature enough to understand that not all desires are good for us, there are multiple times when our desires can lead us to disasters, disasters for society, for our family, and most importantly disasters for ourselves. we assume that there’s a thick veil between needs and desires which is as visible as day and night, obvious to notice and easy to choose. well there is, but for those people who have self control and not for everyone, the more you tend to fulfil your desires the more curtain between Needs and desires tend to be thin. It’s more like feeding your untamed beast inside your psyche, first it makes you fulfil your small and casual desires like buying something for yourself or skipping a day of your gym. Nothing too big. But the more you’ll be doing these things the more you’ll give your control to that beast(that beast has a name, I don’t know in any other language but in Arabic it’s called «Nafs-al-’ammara»), so this Nafs will keep on gaining more and more control on you, making you lose control on your own desires, and at the end of the day you’ll be like a very vulnerable person anybody can excites you for something and you just need to find that interesting and you’ll do that (without thinking what will be the outcome)(so now you’re a vulnerable person anybody can provoke you to do any certain thing).

example:

This rise in open-relationship culture is one of the symptoms, when two persons are so out of control of their own desires that they have forgotten to say ‘No' to others and ‘No' to their own desires, and they are willing to be mentally with different people and engaging physically with different people just so they can fulfil their desires.

There are people who apart from being slave of their desires have made themselves so vulnerable that now many industries like beauty, tech, movies, fashion and even porn industries use them. Not having self control on your desires are the reason these industries are growing rapidly, they show you, they promote it, they made their products a standard of enjoyment, satisfaction, beauty, comfort, and high status etc, That when people see others using them, they tends to buy that as well without realizing whether it’s their need or not.

For example nowadays influencers, actors and beauty industries have set the standards of beauty so high by using make-up products or plastic surgeries that now normal people feel insecure about their face, many even go for the surgeries, without realizing that in many cases it can cause them cancer or permanent damage or even accidents leading to death. Just to achieve that level of beauty and just to satisfy their desire. (In no means I’m depicting that self care is harmful, I just gave an example, and what I emphasize is doing self-care while caring about yourself).

Another example is the high demand of iPhones. That company is building up by producing iPhones which are barely different from last year’s. And the buyers aren’t new ones, say a 30-40% are new buyers, others are those who update from iPhone 16 to 17 or 15 to 17, the thing is there is no NEED to update, the previous iPhones are as good as new ones but just to match the standards of the society you pay a couple of dollars extra every/alternate year. Is the new iPhone a need while already having one a year or two old? No it’s a want, and it’s a proof of your slavery to the industry, standards set by industries and to your own desires.

We need to take care of ourselves.

We need to take care of our mentality and mind-set.

We need to differentiate between wants and needs, and spend in accordance with them. No desire which you’ll have will seem to you wrong or undoable, for their own actions every thing seems fair. No matter Whether you are the oppressor or the oppressed, in your own sight you’ll always be on the correct side.

We need to be mindful before doing anything, no matter how fair we seem to ourselves we need to see what’s wrong and what’s correct, what’s want and what’s genuine need. I’m not saying every ‘want' is useless, but we need to see what’s fulfilling our work and what’s just satisfying our desires. Perform yoga, read books, follow scholars and your heart, and not your desires, not that untamed beast inside your psyche (Nafs).

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“Your nafs is just like your enemy. Once it finds you serious, it obeys you. If it finds weakness from you, it will take you as a prisoner.” ~ibn al qayyim

“For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” ~timothy, bible

“The mind acts like an enemy for those who do not control it.” ~Bhagwat geeta

“Self control is strength” ~James Allen.

Be strong.

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. Muhammad Dilshad Ansari.

I’m not here to lecture you on something, nor I expect you’re here get one.

We live in a society where profanity is so normal that cursing to express your joy for any kind of success, celebration and win is as steadily followed as cursing to mark your hate, anger and disagreement to something. The fact that these both genres are poles apart, shares no connectivity yet using the same way to express their sides.

But is it an issue?

Absolutely not. You have your free will to choose whatever to say or whichever way to pick to express your feelings, don’t you?.

If you do have that free will then It is obvious you’ve picked it(your words) by knowing their actual meaning, consequences of their utterance and you do think of their literal meaning just a fraction of a second before you utter it (as you do before picking any word to articulate your statement). Don’t you?

Then surely you can fit them in your statements.

For example if I’m walking across a street, I point somewhere and say "son of a bitch". There is nothing wrong, Because I pointed at a puppy and I stated a fact. And if I had pointed anywhere except a dog, it made no sense. And this ability to detect sensible meaning and to articulate it well is called eloquence.

And eloquence is a big victim of profanity.But why have eloquence in the first place? Is it really that important? Or does it even carry any kind of benefits?

For your information it does carry a significant role in your daily life problem solving skills, confidence building, your pace of articulation and the most important your Wittiness.

As sir Jawed Akhtar said, when asked about gaalis(curses).

“I’ll tell you something. In regions like Odisha, Bihar, and even in Mexico, where poverty exists, people tend to eat a lot of chili because the food lacks flavour. To make it taste better, they add spice. Similarly, expletives are the ‘chili’ of language. If you are articulate and witty enough, you don’t need that extra spice. When conversations lack depth, people resort to slang and gaalis(curses),”

The more you use slang the more you’ll lack eloquence in your speech. If there’s a condition in which you’re being forced to express your anger, you’ll have two options, first, deal it wisely by being witty and sensible, destroying your opponent’s ego and slapping them with your words, giving them a proper logical witty reply or second, you’ll just let out your anger and curse them, through which neither there will be a victory of you nor any harm to them, on top of that you’ll reward them by exposing your very vulnerable point which you were supposed to hide.

Now they can laugh on your face since curses no longer possess any weight and people no longer feel ashamed to be called certain curse-nouns. If you use slangs and curses frequently you’ll surely find yourself struggling in conditions like debate, you’ll struggle to find a proper word or phrase to replace your 'curstatement’.

Profanity is so much amalgamated in our native language many people don’t even realize before cursing, I’ve seen Cab drivers using vulgar language on their calls without realizing people sitting on backseat does even have a kid, it’s not only about cab drivers, wherever you go you’ll find someone walking across streets talking with their friends neither realizing nor minding their language.

The effects these day-to-day cursing culture are giving on the youth is insane, nowadays any kid who’s above 6th grade thinks that cursing is ‘Cool' according to those children cursing is the slice of life without which their youth won’t have flavour.

Profanity is an addiction, if you constantly use it, at the end of the day you’ll lose self control over your speech you’ll leave your tongue to speech and will engage your mind with something else. Whether you talk about yoga, mindfulness activity or any religious culture all these teaches us to have self-control on ourselves, to not let our feelings and emotions vulnerably out so other people can use it against us.

But now the question comes up ‘what can we do now?’ the answer is ‘a lot’ and the very first thing Is to start being sensible (I’m not saying the people who use profanity in their speeches are not sensible, but I’m addressing the majority) know your words, be witty, know your intentions, understand what can break other persons mindset without using curses, build your own momentum and don’t fall for something which everybody have already fallen for, try to differentiate between what’s good for you and what’s good for your desires, differentiate between wants and needs and you’ll always find that profanity falls on the ‘wants' side, it’s never a need to curse anybody, and the disadvantaged is to you if you curse as I said it’ll kill the eloquent man inside you which should had been out till now.

And yes there are people who are eloquent and use profanity as well, there are people who have no linguistic manner and don’t know how to phrase their statement even when they don’t use profanity. The point is you need to be someone to whom people understand the statement and value it, and that ability rarely comes by using profanity, make your progress, make a start towards eloquence and you’ll see the urge to curse calmly down.

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Until the next idea strikes my head. Chiao

Mohammad Dilshad Ansari