Skip to main content

Choices...

Everyday we make choices. Big choices, small choices, green choices, important choices, insignificant choices....but we make them without realizing that we have a choice. So many times the choices we make are not real choices but are made for us by forces outside of us. First and foremost we are persuaded by advertisement, through billboards, pop ups, television, newspapers or by advocates who have already realized their power to choose. Without educating us they advocate for their choice and we are swayed. Strong advocates for atheism, going vegetarian, going green, going organic, the list goes on. Then there is a modern and current sway which catches us unawares. You are caught in the domino effect and don't even realize your own conversion. And its a strange conversion because you always were what you suddenly start claiming but now you have to define your self, you cant choose to live in the border area, you have to declare. Not only that you have to now start defending your position, even if its liberalism!

And all these choices are seldom our own choices. We are made to make these choices suddenly, in mid sentence or mid aisle. We make them watching a film or reading a book. We make them in response to something or the other, in a flip second. But once made they start effecting all our other choices and suddenly become a paradigm through which we see the world, it narrows the world for us.

What if we actually became aware of our own power to choose?

Comments

MOHABBAT said…
one thing i still have'nt been able to figure out quds after reading ur post! do we have a choice or don't we? u tell us we have one and then u negate it as well!!! make up ur mind ma'am!
4 January 2009 at 07:38
مایون said…
I believe its not a coherent argument if I was not able to clear this significant point, but it boils down to this that choice is a liberation but it has to go through a process, it has to be adapted and then adopted knowledgeably. Any thing less then that is not a choice but a sway with the current, an influence which can be permanent and damaging with long term effects as it colors all your future choices. A choice is a choice only when its made consciously!
4 January 2009 at 22:53
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Captains!

Haven't written in a while and those following my blog would know by now that whenever something disturbing on the world scene happens, I stop writing. Its an irony because usually writers provide solace through their writings while I, lose all power of expression when I am disturbed. And then what is there to write? Follow any newspaper from around the world and there is only one message that you get: Pakistan is rapidly slipping into an abyss! I was born in the 70s and have grown up in the 90s, I have vague recollection of the 80s even though I was not old enough to understand what life under Zia's martial law was like but I have seen relay race of power between Benazir and Nawaz Sharif in the 90s but never in our history have we been so unsafe. Where every person big or small, significant or otherwise, powerful or weak, rich or poor is exposed equally to this invisible enemy. Call it what you might, Taliban, extremist, jihadi, Al Qaeda, seperatist, a murderer by any name is ...
3 comments
Read more

Is Pakistan a failed state?

I read somewhere that we don't acknowledge something terrible for as long as possible because there is a superstition that if you do then it will become a reality. I wonder why people ask this question and for the last time here is what I think. The justice giver in Pakistan was denied justice and he came out on the streets, he had a mass following, people from all walks of life, age groups, classes, gender, rallied along with him. He travelled through Pakistan. Every city, town, village he passed people came out in huge numbers to greet him and to show their support for what he stood for. This mass caused a dictatorship to fall and ousted a self delusional autocrat. It became a movement, a symbol, an idea and was on its way to achieve greater things when the brokers of power sitting in other countries got concerned (and rightly so, people have no right to choose for themselves) and made a coup d' etet against this movement. It took place in US, that much we know because though...
2 comments
Read more