Well, after 48 hours’ woth of mashakaat, here I am penning down my first blog entry (ya, ya I am a computer illiterate)...well better late than never…especially so after a hard and looong day at work… The amount they can make you run and when herself my boss is such a lazy bum!!
Boy! I just finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseni...makes you feel fortunate to be born in a democratic nation…the Taliban sucked man!! These were some of their (note: only some) guidelines for women:
>Women will not speak unless spoken to
>Makeup is prohibited
>If fingers are found painted, they will be chopped off
>Painting, dancing, music, poetry is prohibited
>They will not be seen outside their homes alone without a male relative
And so and so forth…to top it all, all hospitals for women were converted into “males only” territory leaving a small, dingy, smelly structure for the treatment of women with no docs, no medicine available... Imagine undergoing an operation without anaesthesia, which is exactly what one of the protagonists (Laila) underwent and which made my insides curl… Also, Laila’s soulmate (a very endearing, one-legged, pashtun Tariq) reminded me of that special person in my life and how fortunate I am to have him in my life… I don’t know if it was in fact a good thing, but I felt relieved when the US declared war on the Taliban in the book.
