Dhada

The Hakim's Daughter She came from a long line of Ayurvedic doctors, a stoic, patient, and bitingly witty woman, of enormous courage and dedication. She escaped from a horrific massacre during partition, survived to save her first son (besides me in the picture) from a sinking ship, managed to get the word out to my father that she was alive and needed rescue from a refugee camp in the salt marshes where Alexander the Macedonian met his near end. By the time I came along, she had settled in Buzi, Mozambique. She had brought with her apothecary with some remedies rescued from her father’s clinic. Her lap afforded me the best view of a purple-blue sky on summer days woven as they always were by a dense canopy of tremulous jacaranda leaves near where she sat! Ah! 

  Old Spice, Caravelas, and my Father by Mustafah Dhada on Saturday, June 18, 2011, at 10:51pm ·   Last year I wrote about my father - “And the Drums Kept Up The Beat” essentializing his sense of dignity and purpose while cuffed to a set of damning circumstances – see the note section here for a quick review. He survived these assaults somewhat damaged but not destroyed. Soon thereafter, I left home for schooling. I was nine then. I saw him again 12 years later. I had just turned 21. He looked darker. His skin was denser from exposure to the sun, firmer to the touch, and taut. It shrink-wrapped the muscles on his arms and legs like limpets terrified to let his inner mojo go wild and free. Over the years, his eyes had traveled deeper into his sockets. His beaked nose chiseled the air with purpose and direction. He was much thinner, somber, and appeared to feel things at a much deeper level now. He had not lost his gritty distaste for ambiguity, however, nor his warmth steep...

 The Monk and The Opium Medallion I well remember the occasion. It was supper at the local Basque restaurant. A top-notch firm of web-designers was in town delivering their final findings. I told the story of how one day at 18 or so while traveling from the Kharakhurram Pass I befriended a secret police officer for the frontier province where Osama is no more. He slipped a medallion of opium resin into my bag. I was an unwitting mule. Mercifully, I was bitten by an angry mob of mosquitos and had to get off the train and find shelter. Did not appear at the designated terminal in what he must have thought to be the appointed time and instead fell ill for several days, eventually discovering the medallion. Never found out the tail end of the story. The image of a cassock clad Sufi mendicant with a hood to boot carrying a narcotic medallion is too rib-tickling funny. Imagine him with the medallion, which was in desperate need to find its new owner down south where Alexander, the ...

  The Ultimate Illusive Reality  I was a little over six or seven – cannot remember which. I recall sitting beside my mother in front of a jacaranda tree on the cement verandah of the small zinc-roofed house waiting for my father to arrive from work. I normally could spy him walking at a distance near the river bend where the boats took him to work on the other side of the river where he worked then at a sugar cane plantation processing plant. The heat of the afternoon snaked up in gaily-abandoned waves from below the veranda slab. I lay my head on her lap and found myself looking at the sky up above. It was as blue as a domed lapis lazuli speckled with candy fluffs heading towards the river estuary. I asked her, “If God is merciful and compassionate then how come there is hell.” Somehow that moment defined my journey in search of meaning and in search of inner peace and inner reality for a lifetime of living. That journey of course took me first towards the Jesuits and...

  Why I Am A Historian We all face death. Some of us feel more intensely as we approach it. Others can render it an if. Youth dulled by the security of inexperience helps drape its immediacy. Yet it is an aged life that makes for a deeper grave, a place for safekeeping one’s wounds, one’s sorrows, one’s perhaps frequent elation delivered in jolts of endorphins, and jealously guarded memories. The closer you are to death seasoned in old age, the denser the text, and the greater the need to tuck oneself in a deeper than usual tapestry of sustainable warmth. Today I have one year less to live. I was born 59 years ago, in a small village without electricity, running water, sewer, tarred roads, public transport, and without a local ice-cream parlor. The village hugged a marshy riverbank with croaking toads, fleshy fat crocodiles, and vapid iguanas always on the lookout for free-range chicken eggs. The nights were filled with un-seeable sounds. Toads would belch and croak, one louder ...

  My March to Agnosticism - Post Birthday Reflection or Two by Mustafah Dhada on Friday, 19 November 2010 at 15:52   18 November 2010   I spent a bit of time yesterday on my birthday and tried to get to grips with the unknown. I began questioning the validity of dogmatic credence, (holy trinity, transubstantiation, God as the rationally unprovable) near the end of my monastic existence in my early twenties. I was then fasting every Monday and Thursday. The month of Ramadan followed by abstinence during Lent complemented my devotional life in seclusion. My diet was Spartan, and the rigors of prayers, followed by studies of holy books sharpened acuity.    It was only a matter of time before I began turning the Cartesian knife inwards – a sort of spiritual hara-kari. What was livable to others proved soul-searingly painful to me. How could holy men accommodate duplicity in pursuit of the pure spirit?  Predatory sexuality was a case in point. W...

America After the Rubicon Crossing Mustafah Dhada 01 January 2017 Today’s America shares three features with Russia, and some of the developed nations, Britain is a case in point here. The rest of the developing world will ultimately come to have some of these features, should they prove susceptible to these trends in race-baited economic nationalism. The three features are the rise of oligarchies; the increase of robots in modes of production; and the social search for identity in knowledge-based economies.  In the Russian Federation, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw its sudden departure from the Afghan stalemate against the CIA-backed mujahideen, whose victory ultimately ushered in the Taliban. Internally it left intact two formidable 74 year old structures, both impregnable to regime change in Russia. One was the nomenklatura, an oligarchy with access to state-controlled resources designed to advance Communism at home and stimulate global change through the Comintern. Th...

    America: Have We Crossed The Rubicon? Friday, September 21, 2012 by Mustafah Dhada, FRSA, FRAS, D. Phil (Oxon) Professor of History, California State University, Bakersfield       Exeunt Ghost and Hamlet. Horatio: 
  He waxes desperate with imagination. Marcellus: 
 Let's follow. 'Tis not fit thus to obey him. Horatio: 
 Have after. To what issue will this come? Marcellus: 
 Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Horatio: 
 Heaven will direct it. Marcellus: 
 Nay, let's follow him.  Exeunt. ( Hamlet Act 1, Scene 4, 87–91 )     Our own woes began some twenty years ago. The climate appeared different then. We were an empire at its near zenith. But something was afoot. Some of us watched beady-eyed for events to unfold. Unfold they did. Major forces were already at play once the Berlin Wall collapsed. Students, acolytes, and admirers of Leo Strauss, the controversial German-trained American political philosopher and classicist led one ...