#the consequences of the monarchy on everyday life and how dependent people were becoming on them as tools of the monarch so they rebelled | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

purplesurveys · 4 years

Text

707

Do you think you're clever? I can be but I wouldn’t say it’s a dominant personality trait. Did you wear socks today? No, I haven’t worn socks since the last day I went to school :/ Can you remember how you celebrated your 10th birthday? I don’t remember how the whole day went but I do have a photo of me on that day. We were in our old house then and I was at the dining area smiling with my cake, surrounded by my mom and sister.

Know any magic tricks? Nah I can’t perform any of them. Do you sleep well most nights? These days I certainly do. They’ve suspended online classes, and acads is really the main thing taking up my time (and head) most days until recently. Without that I’m just sleeping, eating, and having random bursts of productivity everyday.

Are your nails painted? No. Is there somebody you know that you really don't trust? Yeah I have a couple of orgmates that are a little sketchy. I also dunno if I can trust my mom in the bigger scheme of things - we’re just not close like that. Is there music in your head right now? No need to have it playing in my head, I already have a lo-fi livestream playing on YouTube at the moment. When's the last time you baked a cake? Grade 6 when we baked a rainbow cake in home economics. What time was it half an hour ago? 7:26 PM. Did you ever play cowboys and indians when you were growing up? I have no idea what that game is. Probs an American thing? Can anyone confirm? When did it last rain? My dad said it drizzled earlier this afternoon, but I wouldn’t know because I was taking a nap. The last time it rained and I caught it was two nights ago. Would you like to become a dancer? I would love to be able to dance gracefully and call myself a dancer, but I wouldn’t want it to be my Number One Agenda, as in joining contests or have it be my whole career and stuff. It’ll be nice to simply have it as a hobby. What colour is the bathroom of your house painted? The top half of the wall is white, the bottom half consists of light brown tiles. Which country is to the north of your home country? Taiwan. Name one person of the same sex as you you wouldn't mind doing: My girlfriend. Haaaaah you thought. What is the most gory film you've seen? Evil Dead, but I’ve only seen the 2013 reboot. Is there anybody that you know that you just feel really sorry for? Yeah I guess, like my uncle for stubbornly never getting his life back on track. I’ve been done waiting for him to get better. Do you like the Austin Powers films? I’ve never seen any one of them, even the one Beyoncé is in.

Where is the worst place you have ever travelled to? All the places I’ve been to have been wonderful and it wouldn’t feel right to tag one of them as the ‘worst’ because all the trips have been paid for by my parents lmao. But the one trip that didn’t exactly turn out the way we would’ve wanted it to was Caramoan in Camarines Sur. It was raining almost the entire time, so the scenario was either 1) the rain messed with the cable signal and we only had one channel every time we were in the cabin or 2) we had to make do with being rained on whenever we wanted to go out to the beach. It was also in the middle of nowhere, so we didn’t have internet. Ever fallen down a hole? Nope. That’s one of the scenarios I’m particularly afraid of. Do you like to read poetry? No I hate having to. I’ve never understood poems. What's your preferred frozen snack? Other than ice cream? Idk, frozen fries maybe? Those hit differently. Is rap music overrated? I’d say some are, but rap generally has a rich underground culture as well so I wouldn’t say all of it is overrated. Do you work better in a clean or messy environment? That doesn’t matter to me. I care more about how warm/cold it is, because I can’t start working anywhere I find too hot or else I’ll feel too sluggish. Do you know any vegans? Only from the internet. Filipinos are big meat eaters so it’s hard to find resources for if you want to become vegan. There are vegan food stalls but they’re VERY few and far between, and they’re typically situated in hipper, more cosmopolitan parts of the city since veganism isn’t a known concept here. Earphones or headphones? Earphones. Do you like bananas? Eugh no. What's a film you've seen that confused you? Interstellar confuses me to this day. But I loved it a lot and I enjoyed the premise, and that’s what matters to me. Do you ever wear black lipstick? I don’t think I’ve ever worn it before. You can take any illegal drug without any bad consequences, which one? That’s a really dark question but uh... I’d go with meth because idk, Breaking Bad? I certainly wouldn’t want to try heroin though. What is next to your bed? I have a drawer with my clothes and other knickknacks on one side, and a chest with a bunch of memorabilia and old books I’ve had since I was a kid on the other side. Are your fingernails dirty? Nope. What would you change about yourself appearence-wise? I’d straighten my front teeth and make my teeth in general smaller. I’d also have some hair grow on my left eyebrow because I permanently damaged the hair growth there by plucking too much as an anxiety habit. How long do you normally spend in the shower? Depends on how relaxed I need to feel. If I’m showering for school it takes me 4-5 minutes. If it’s been hot all day like in the summer I’d take up to 15. When's the last time somebody called you "baby"? Sometime today, I don’t exactly remember when. Have you ever had to keep something important from your family? Like... my 4-year same-sex relationship? Yup. Don't you think things feel much better after a good cry? The things that made me cry don’t get better or automatically get fixed, but it’s always nice to give myself a break and to let everything out. Do you think the UK should keep its monarchy? I honestly don’t know enough about their system to confidently form an opinion about it. My only contribution to this conversation is that the royal family does interest me and I know more trivia about them than the average person should hahahahaha. True or false: you'd do Mila Kunis. I’d do her character in Friends with Benefits but like I don’t really feel that way for IRL Mila, mostly cos I’d rather do wholesome stuff with her hahaha. Which colour would you rather have your hair: pink, grey or green? Green > grey > pink. Don't you just hate the sound of people eating? NOOOOOOO are you kidding. Mukbang ASMRs are my faveeeeeee. What's your favourite music video? Meh I don’t really watch music videos. Is it your aim to be perfect? About the things I do, yeah. I’m not obsessed about having *everything* be perfect, even stuff I have no control over.. Ever climbed to the top of a mountain? No. That’s on my bucket list though. Have you ever fell for someone believing you could "fix" them? No. That’s never been a reason I’ve had feelings for someone. Someone's paying for a fancy dinner, where do you eat and who do you take? BLACKBIRD. I’ve wanted to try it for a while now but Makati is a bitch to get to + their food would literally take away two weeks’ worth of my allowance. I’d take Gab with me for sure. Can you honestly say you are truly happy with your life? Not right now, but I’m not hopeless about it either. Can you paint well? I can’t paint at all. Describe a picture of yourself that you hate: The candid ones are the ones I end up hating the most. If you could keep any animal as a pet, which would you choose? Just all the dogs would be fine, thanks. Something you did in the past that you're embarrassed about: I was bidding Gab’s dad goodbye because he was leaving to meet up with his friends or something. Anyway my shoes chose to be slippery that day and I completely tripped the whole way walking over to him and I even unconsciously grabbed onto his arm to keep myself from falling flat on my face. I AM WINCING JUST TYPING THIS OUT PLS SEND HELP Would you rather play a good or an evil character in a play? Evil. It’d be easier acting that way. Do you like porridge? It’s alright. I mostly avoid it because it was all I ate for breakfast from when I was 4 up to when I was 10, and I’m so so sick of the taste and texture by now.

Has anybody ever lied to you just to impress you? Idk, probably. Strangest gift you ever received: Don’t think I’ve ever received anything I was genuinely baffled by. But I try not to be like that - all gifts are gifts so I’m always grateful whenever someone gives me one. Do most people annoy you? Nah. But 14 year old Robyn taking surveys would probably say yes just to sound edgy :/ Don't you think you should really be doing something more productive? Idk man we’re in the middle of a global health crisis. I think being productive shouldn’t be a priority for once. Have you ever felt really out of place? Yesssssss this was me when I was trying to apply for AIESEC. The crowd was just too different and I didn’t last long in the application process. What's your favourite shade of blue? Royal and sky blue. Do you have any odd phobias? I used to be afraid of watching advertisements at night, but I think it’s mostly gone now. What's the longest you've gone without sleep? 18-20 hours maybe. I don’t let myself pull all-nighters. When was the last time you just wanted to be left alone? Earlier this noon when I felt disrespected by my dad. Do you believe in karma? Sure. Can you remember a world before iPods? Nope. Google says the first iPod came out in 2001, and I don’t remember being 3 years old or younger. When was the last time it was sunny? This morning. Would you like to be photographed by Terry Richardson? I’ve never heard of him but I checked Google just now and apparently he’s been an asshat to his subjects? So no. Smoke? Yes please I so have been needing one throughout this quarantine. I ran out of puffs for my vape pen which is even worse. Would you rather have a lazy day or a day of being really busy? I’ve had 31+ lazy days now. I wouldn’t mind a busy day. Do you like the way that spoken French sounds? I don’t get to hear it all that much but it was spoken so beautifully in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, so I guess I’m alright with it for the most part. I just don’t like the times it comes from the throat and it sounds a bit like hawking. D: But maybe it’s just a cultural thing - Filipino isn’t throaty at all so when we hear sounds like that we’re just not used to it. What's the best film soundtrack? As stupid as the storylines were, they really made sure the Twilight Saga soundtracks SLAPPED. Bon Iver, St. Vincent, Muse, Death Cab for Cutie, The Black Keys, Florence + The Machine, PARAMORE?????? They weren’t fucking around. Interstellar and Gone with the Wind also had amazing scores. Where did you go on your last date? My informal first date with Gabie was at a museum + this quaint Italian place in Greenbelt that has since closed. My legit first date with her was at a Bonchon LMFAOOOOOOOOOO Do people find you "cute"? Not really... only my girlfriend calls me that. Who does the best remixes? Eh not a fan. What is most of your money spent on? Gas, food, dates.

#survey #surveys

3 notes · View notes

newageislam-blog · 7 years

Text

Indian Muslims: Let us come out of denial

The disconnect is almost total. The police and the national media say one thing. The Muslim Press something entirely different. The national media is rejoicing that the culprits of terror bombings in Delhi, Rajasthan and Bombay have been caught and some killed in an encounter at Batla House in Delhi. Naturally if this is so it is a moment of joy; tinged with sorrow, of course, for the innocent victims of senseless terrorist attacks. But a moment of joy nevertheless, as there will be no more terrorist bombings and blasts taking lives and limbs of innocent people any more.

But the Muslim intelligentsia and Press don’t share this joy. Those caught and killed were Muslim. It is simply impossible for Muslims, practitioners of this great religion of peace, to have been involved in such dastardly acts. The police and the government are out to get our educated youth who are on an upward trajectory, seeking to make something of their lives. This reasoning is being proffered again and again throughout the Muslim Press, in different words and different idioms and different styles, but the story line is the same. The encounter was fake. The celebrated police officer killed was shot from behind, hence by other policemen themselves and not in a genuine encounter. The police story is entirely concocted, the media too is fabricating new stories everyday and they are all out to get us.

Now the police versions have proved wrong and fabricated on many occasions. The national media too, in its race for TRP ratings or circulation, doesn’t care too much for finding out the truth before putting it out. Alleged terrorists and killers are just terrorists and killers, even if they be fathers of murdered daughters, in the new milieu in which our media functions. So treating police-version-based media stories with a bucketful of salt is in order. No one is a terrorist or murderer until proven guilty in a court of law or indeed courts of law as there are superior courts too which sometimes overturn judgments of lower courts. Even in advanced countries of the West with better judicial and investigative systems, people have been found to be innocent, not only after convictions, but also after death sentences have already been carried out. So scepticism is in order and healthy.

But in the case of Indian Muslim intelligentsia and Press, one detects something more than simple, healthy scepticism. It is a state of total denial. One would have thought that with the world media in the last several years saturated with stories of Muslim brutality, of how Muslims are at each others’ and everybody else’s throats nearly everywhere in the world, particularly in the Muslim world, we would have become inured to the idea of Muslims being capable to extreme and senseless violence. But no, we are just victims; the world is out to get us.

We have even forgotten out history. We killed even the best of our Khalifas (successors to Prophet Mohammad PBUH), called Khulafa-e-Rashedeen. Then not long after the Prophet’s death, we killed his grand children and every member of their families, while torturing them with hunger and thirst first, and of course we continued to call ourselves Muslim and great believers in the religion that had been revealed by God to Prophet Mohammad (PBUH). Indeed half the world called the killers of Prophet Mohammad’s (PBUH) children Mohammedans until recently. Are we all killers of Prophet Mohammad’s family members? Yes, indeed, as long as we revere their killers, who were scions of the biggest enemies of Islam and the Prophet, and continue to accept their children and grand children as legitimate Khalifas. Indeed we not only killed prophet’s family but also allowed his system of complete equality of all human beings to be subverted. We accepted not only his killer to become his khalifa but also allowed him to set up a dynasty in compete violation of Islam’s basic rule of complete equality of all human beings and a rule by consultation (in short and in modern terminology, democracy). We also allowed the monarchy thus created to create a new institution of clergy, Mullahs and Maulanas, who then fabricated a lot of so-called Ahadees (plural of Hadees, Sayings of the Prophet), as they were unable to bring about changes in the Holy Quran to justify their un-Islamic rule over a so-called Muslim people.

Why is the narration of all this history relevant today? Well, it shows we are capable of total self-delusion. Most of us genuinely believe we are Muslims, while following the religious system created by the inveterate enemies of Islam. All the enemies of Islam joined Islam after Muslim victory over Mecca, following the age-old theory, ‘if you can’t beat them join them’. For once, the Prophet’s insight and intuition failed him. Unable to foresee what was going to be the consequence for Islam and for his own family, he forgave them and let them join the fold of Islam and become equal members of the Muslim society. As a prophet charged with the spreading of Islam he could have hardly refused to take them in his fold. But he could have easily got rid of them by punishing them as war criminals. These people had committed horrendous war crimes, something that is just not acceptable to Islam. They had even mutilated dead bodies of people very close and dear to the Prophet himself. What prophet did was perhaps the greatest act of generosity and forgiveness that history has seen. But the result has been disastrous for Islam. We Muslims have been following a religious system created by inveterate enemies of Islam, in the name of Islam.

This has made us capable of the greatest self-delusion. This attitude permeates all that we do or think. We just won’t accept facts. In the present case it is a fact that a section of Indian Muslims has for quite some time been radicalised enough to want to create an Islamic Khilafat in India and the world. This started, of course, with Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, the founder-ideologue of Jamaat-e-Islami. So this madness has been going on for over half a century. It first infected mostly elderly people but has now travelled down to the young, largely following the fashion in the West and financed by Wahhabi money coming from Saudi Arabia in unlimited quantities since the mid 1970s. Any particular young Muslim has been engaged in terrorism or not we cannot say until evidence against him is presented in the courts of law and a verdict is delivered. But the fact that a section of our youth, particularly the educated ones, have been thinking and expressing radical thoughts cannot be denied.

Is it a crime to think radical thoughts, one young man I was arguing with along these lines asked me the other day. No, I told him, it’s not a crime at all. But if you are known to be thinking and expressing those radical and indeed crazy thoughts, someone may be justified in suspecting you of radical acts and investigating your possible involvement. How does the society know that you have not started walking your talk? The peace and security of the society cannot be jeopardised for the interests of the individual. Some innocents also do and will suffer in the process. That is something the larger society cannot help. It would be best, of course, that we minimize what is known with that horrible term ‘collateral damage’. But the society’s primary interest lies in safeguarding the interests of the entire society.

Let us Muslims come out of our stupor and accept that there is a possibility that some of our youths may have been radicalised, partly out of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda and partly because we elders in the Muslim society, the intelligentsia and the leadership, have not apprised them of the facts of life. We have not given them the bigger picture. We have allowed them to become obsessed with victimhood. We turned the demolition of a disused mosque in 1992 as an issue of our identity. We reacted as if our very religious freedom was at stake. We failed to see and recognise and tell our youth that tens of thousands of mosques, madrasas and dargahs are functioning perfectly well and indeed we are opening new madrasas and building new mosques everyday. We behaved as if we were worshippers of the bricks the Babri mosque was built of and not namaziz who could pray in the wilderness, in the sea, in air, in moving trains, everywhere, for the God we worship is a universal energy, a universal intelligence, supreme wisdom, an abstract, not confined to space and time.

Similarly now we are behaving as if all Muslim youngsters going in for higher education have been rounded up and ‘encountered’. For all we know now, the national media and the police may be wrong and the Muslim Press right in this particular case. If we feel strongly about the innocence of these youths, let us fight their cases in courts of law and also courts of public opinion with all the vigour required. But let us not forget the blessings this country bestows on us. Let us not forget that millions of our youth are going about their business with perfect ease. Millions of us are engaged in the business of our choice. Scores of us have reached the top in the professions of their choice. Even in businesses like film-making and acting that depend for their success on the goodwill of millions of people, Muslims have reached the top. This country guarantees us constitutional equality and protection of the law. The implementation may be faulty, even occasionally prejudiced. Some guardians of law may not understand their constitutional duties and allow their personal prejudices to cloud their judgement. But let us not forget that the system we have is right. We only need to make sure that it performs well.

Think of the Muslim countries in our neighbourhood and beyond. What kind of constitutional rights do they give to their religious minorities? Can a Hindu become the President of Pakistan or Bangladesh? Can a Hindu even build a single temple in Saudi Arabia? Are Muslims, the majority community, fighting for their rights in these countries, as the Hindus, the majority community, fight for our rights here in India? Who brought the horrendous crimes perpetrated in Gujarat to the national and even international consciousness? Surely not the Muslim Press. It was the national and, if you like, the Hindu media that did it. Some Hindus, even at the cost of their patriotism being questioned, seek to fight our case.

And we, what do we do? It is our religious duty to fight for the rights of the oppressed, in a constitutional manner, of course, and within the ambit of the law. We could have at least articulated the grievances of these oppressed people in so-called Islamic lands. But not only we do nothing ourselves, we even condemn and excoriate the one lady who staked her life to highlight the plight of religious minorities in Bangladesh. She should have been our heroine. We should have garlanded her when she sought protection in our land. She has been doing what we should have been doing, fighting for the rights of religious minorities in Bangladesh. But we throw rotten eggs and chappals at her. In fact our elected representatives do that, shamelessly enough, and take pride in that affront.

The so-called Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid — a relic of the Mughal rule surviving on account of a strange fascination of our Hindu leaders with beards — has called for an all-Muslim parties meet on October 14 to discuss the situation arising out of the Batla House encounter. All the bearded fuddy-duddies have accepted and will be deliberating their next course of action. I hope they will remember that the security and future prosperity of the Muslim community depends not so much on the shape of the next government but on the amount of goodwill we have in the hearts of our neighbours from the majority community. It is this that we have been putting at stake by refusing to accept the very possibility of a few hotheads among us taking to the route of evil. We can continue to say that this particular individual is not guilty in our estimation or that this particular police or media theory does not seem right, but if we discount the very possibility of any Muslims being involved in acts of terrorism as we are doing now, we stand to lose the goodwill of our neighbours. That is a much worse situation than that of a seemingly friendly or not so friendly government coming to power or losing power. Governments will come and go. Political parties will gain and lose power. But we have to live with our neighbours; let us not lose their goodwill through stupidity and worse.

Click here: Moderate Islam

Source URL: http://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-and-jihad/sultan-shahin,-editor,-new-age-islam/indian-muslims–let-us-come-out-of-denial/d/807

0 notes