Dervaish's Quetta Blog
A blog by Dervaish Ali of Quetta, Balochistan (Pakistan)
Assalam au Alaikum.
Hello. Konnichiwa. Namaste. Jambo. Hola, Bonjour. Kamusta, Boa Tarde. Ni Hau. Aan Yo Hasse Yo. Selamat...
میں کوئٹہ کا ایک لغڑی ہوں جو اب کوئٹہ سے بہت دور رہتا ہے لیکن کوئٹہ ہمیشہ اس کے دل اور دماغ میں رہتا ہے ۔
Welcome to Dervaish's Quetta Blog.
This is a blog about Quetta, Balocistan and more. I originally started this blog in 2016 for some of my former (Japanese) students. The blog remained inactive for more than two years after which I revived it in its present incarnation as a blog essentially about Quetta. It's informal writing, and really an effort to keep in touch with family and Quettawal friends, many of whom now live in far away lands, outside Quetta. It is a humble effort to keep the memory of the place, Quetta, and of its people and their ways alive in an age whose main aim is to inculcate amnesia. In other words, it is an effort to wage a struggle (jihad) against what the French postmodernists have called deterritorialization. By this term is meant the complete destruction of organic social relations, the age old links between people and their particular places by the unleashed forces of late modern capitalism that mercilessly flattens and violently devours everything in its path. Wendell Berry was right when he said, "If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are." And so was Milan Kundera when he once argued that "The struggle of people against oppression is also a struggle of memory against forgetting."
I'll be posting here about issues of common interest, and some that may not interest everybody. Please read, reflect, comment and share.
"...our concern is with the task and not with its reward; our business is to be sure that in any conflict we are on the side of Justice."
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
"Our tales are narratives of human experience, and therefore, they do not tell of beautiful things. But one cannot both embellish a tale to please the hearer and at the same time keep to the truth. The tongue should be the echo of that which must be told and it cannot be adapted according to the moods and tastes of man."
Osaraq, a Polar Eskimo
"Writin' is fightin'!" Ishmael Reed
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."
Arundhati Roy
Quetta: Then and now
