Thursday 21 April 2011

A report from under the down under

You must excuse me for being away for over a week now. You see, my Ipad is not linking to a wifi where I am and because I got used to writing my thoughts on its notes, and applauding them afterwards, I forgot about the power of Microsoft words, and the umpteen things we can accomplish on it.

I still have few blogs written there, so when I return from my trip, you will have to watch out as you will be bombarded by one blog after the other.

Woke up this morning at around 5ish on the sound of birds, thought to myself that this cannot be right as last night it was pouring with rain and the wind was so strong that the streets were filled with leaves of the trees, of course it being autumn also doesn’t help. Yes I did say autumn, southern hemisphere is like looking at yourself at a mirror, weird but nice. Imagine you stand still but your image moves in the opposite direction?? Sorry I just had to say this to make it seem like a Harry potter movie.

Anyway, I picked up the blackberry, read all the weird notes the people send nowadays, messages about Bahrain, jokes, poems, funny stuff about preventing people from eating chocolate (I thought it is another scare) unless the sender is with them, and most recently cake recipes, so the BBM became like your laptop, which means you need to do some filtering and keep those that send you a lot of forwards in a folder on their own to read them later in the day when you are not busy.

I did this to my friends who send me forwards, I called the folder “from friends to be read later” of course this so called “later” never arrived, so I have more than 10000 emails waiting to be read in that folder? One of my friends figured this out, and one day she asked me which email account is on the blackberry, I told her innocently, the next day I received the same forward on all my email accounts, including the work account which should be only for students and as it is the advertisers got hold of it, and is filling with junk now. Sorry guys, I am not doing it on purpose, it is just that I prefer to spend more time on my work than on reading forwards. Please also in the future be selective on what to forward, what I see forwarded to me is as if I had never gone to school and my friends are trying to educate me on poetry, history, geography, science etc. Some of the stuff is interesting of course, but to be left for later on in life when one is retired.

Back to when I woke up at five this morning; I looked at my emails, 75 of them, looked at the important ones, deleted 60 of them, and answered two. Then of course I got bored, so went back to sleep. But the singing of the birds didn’t allow me. Had to come down to the hall, and made my breakfast, muesli, yogurt, milk, toast, peanut butter and jam, of course my tablets on a try, my coffee was ready, and the newspaper was at the door, took all of this to the balcony, and started reading and eating. I tell you guys, these people have seen nothing of what we saw in our lives. If you look at the newspaper, the headlines is about training kids on rugby by the players themselves, who fly to the various cities and do camps to train the children. The other headline is about a group of football players holding their cherished equipment guarding the net to prevent an amateur person from scoring a goal; a cry for scientists to count the various species of butterflies so they dont become extinct. Or talking about those that go out of their way to stop violence, or the Danish boy and his Dutch mate sentenced to jail for beating an innocent person in the streets of Queenstown. And so on and so forth. Of course many more news about the earthquake in Littleton, and how money is pouring in from various parts of the world to help rebuild that city. So you see, it is all about self indulgent, we care about what happened here and now, and to our people, not what is happening to the world. The world section is merely a one page talking about top issues only (Bahrain didnt feature at all).

I subscribe to a newspaper back home, to begin with I have to remove a hundred pages of classified, property listing, various advertisements, and some supplements that no one would read. And then I remove the sports pages, and I start with the Tabloid, which has pictures of the 85% nationalities that live in UAE, read my horoscope which really doesn’t resemble me at all, and then throw that too. The main two sets are the news part and the business part. The business part is depressing as it keeps on reminding us of the economic crisis that we are still living in, the slide in property prices, and the increase in interest rates. The central bank also has a lot to say about how business is run by the banks. Then I go to the main pages, we feature our beloved rulers, as you must see them on the main pages more than once, then the world news, and more world news and destruction. Nothing that will make you happy or smile, and I am wondering why? Why do I subscribe to a paper that makes me depressed for the rest of my day? I would rather see what we do and what other people do to improve the living of our town than what destruction is happening every where in the world. We focus on the negatives, but they focus on the positives. That is to me the main difference. They flourish themselves, and talk about their people’s achievement, we hide the achievements, and talk about how we should neglect ourselves and pretend that we do not exist and rather see what is happening around us. As if we do not count in our own countries. Over here when a name is mentioned it is a name of a person known to the community, over there we have to Google the name to see who that person is?

What should we do? This is terrible, to me that is the reason why we never grew as a nation, we do not influence the world, as we have been put down even by our own newspapers that we pay for?

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