View from my window

A little girl goes shopping with her mother and sees a doll in the window of a toy shop. She falls in love with the doll and wants it. She knows her family cannot afford to buy it but this does not stop her from praying for it. She wishes and prays every time she is reminded of the doll. After a week, on her birthday, she opens the package given by her aunt and sees inside the doll she had seen in the window! She does not make a connection and thinks to herself, 'wish I had wished for something else, as seems I would've gotten it anyway'! What is the moral of the story? As believers we believe in the all mighty, all seeing and just! The deepest desires in our hearts, even the inarticulate ones are, in our belief, evident to Him. Our piety and our sins are in His knowledge and nothing escapes Him. This we believe! The child, in her innocence, believed so as well. But when she got what she wanted, the unseeable God seemed a distant reality-almost a non-reality. How coul

Last year I travelled quite a bit in Pakistan, traversing through urban centres and into the very heart of rural settlements. The thing that struck me the most was the decay or the 'in ruin' state of any structure I saw. Travelling from one destination to another, the landscape, though always amazing, columns upon columns of not yet ripe but laden mango trees in Sindh and Punjab; blind dolphins sun bathing in the river Indus; fields upon fields of lush green or golden wheat shimmering in the sun; yet any shop, house, hospital, Basic Health Unit, police station, flyover or anything that was constructed that I came across was in a state of 'not yet finished' or crumbling. Very rarely did I see anything being constructed, everything I saw was either unfinished but in use, or in use but almost on the verge of falling down.    On the contrary, my observation was completely different in India, especially, Mumbai, there was construction taking place at every corner. Hig