book of aphorisms by a Pakistani lawyer

Man

Martyrs are narcissistic persons. In loving a cause, they love themselves.
The more you talk about others, the more others will come to know about you.
Condemning is such a sweet pleasure. The shallow persons indulge in it.
A pessimist is only happy when he makes others unhappy .
Character is built in society and intelligence in solitude.
Man is the most queer of all creation, for he excels in artful savagery.
A busybody is a nobody who is everybody.
Man is the most ferocious beast, having power to destroy all life on earth thirty times over with his present nuclear capability. Should this apocalyptic event happen by any catastrophic misfortune or calculation, the nuclear winter will set in for the untold thousands of years and species of homo sapiens and all life will be obliterated; so much for the meek inheriting the earth.
First step in the making of man was taken in the cave by a child who said “Mama”. All the subsequent rise to humanity, through language and culture, has commenced from this expression of love and cry for help.
The story of post modem man is the emergence of a fragmented and hollow man engaged in frivolous revelries and existing alienated in isolation, and expressing himself in obtuse and meaningless verbosity.
Freedom fighters are terrorists for their oppressors.
Fighters dying for a cause that succeeds are martyrs. If the cause fails, they are traitors.
Man started as a naked ape. In a million years, he has progressed to a well-dressed brute.
Carnivores kill when they need to. Man kills when he wants to.
In suburban society, a good neighbour is an unconcerned neighbour .
We praise the virtues of our opponent, when he is safely buried in the grave.
There are great Britons but there is nothing great about Great Britain now .
Courtesy is concealment of aggressive behaviour in company to make a man out of the savage.
He who aspires but does not perspire, breeds wasteful idleness.
He who has obscenity in his thoughts is obsessed by the idea of obscenity.
In the soul’s silence are formed quintessential emotions and ideas about life, which actuate our responses to the outer world, enabling us to assert that we are individuals. Solitude elevates.
It is natural that man should treat the world as anthropocentric, because he is the only feature of matter which is conscious of his being, expresses his awareness and manipulates other matter. Man will probably come to dominate all matter including stars and remould it nearest to his heart’s content with inherent hazard of destroying himself in the process. In case he emerges triumphant from the confrontation with the forces of cosmos, he will achieve a position of unique pre-eminence and utter domination in the universe; and truly make himself in the image of God.
If man were to annihilate himself and all the flora and fauna of the earth by nuclear holocaust, the possibility of which event is always present so long as there are nuclear weapons capable of destroying the earth thirty times over, the theory of evolution of man will be changed into the tragedy of his devolution to the condition of beasts with the irony that there will be no one left, after the Armageddon, to write or read that tragedy, if man survives, which is highly unlikely.
The twenty first century will be the precursor of a post modem era in medicine. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology will have been established as leading sciences. A class of super rich and privileged humans will emerge, in whom the genetic composition will be fine-tuned for longevity, anticipating and eliminating genetic diseases with body parts for replacement of wizened organs.
Since the dawn of civilization, there have been constant wars and bloodshed by man. Ifhe is the best of all creation, what could be the worst?
Man is the only animal who can cry and laugh, for he alone realizes the dichotomy of pain and pleasure.
In olden days, man lived off the sweat of man and boldly named it slavery. The whole civilizations, like Greek, Roman, Arab and English were built on the labour of this inhuman institution. Today, a much bigger majority of the wretched in the third world poor countries, toils for the pleasures and luxuries of a 1nuch smaller minority, mostly in Europe and America. Ours is the age of “haves” and “have nots”, but we term it a free capitalist economy. It is the same oppressive and tyrannical slavery of labour in the sophisticated illusion of freedom and absence of compulsion. Apparently, there are no persons like the Roman master who tore the arm of his famous slave and philosopher Epictetus to find out how much pain a stoic could bear without complaining about the tyranny of fate. Man keeps exploiting man. The people of antiquity had the virtue of honesty to call a spade a spade by naming it slavery.
Peoples of the deserts and mountains throughout the world, living in harsh conditions of scarcity and hard labour, had to conceive harsh laws devoid of tender mercies and forgiveness tor the sake of survival. Punishment was swift, exemplary and summary, as ordained by some ofthe ancient religions. Geography shapes a religion.
Man is an enigmatic amalgam of contraries, of sublime good and harrowing evil, of shining reason and dark passions and of unbounded love and bottomless hatred.
Ultimately, nature may win as earth will be destroyed in eons to come and all the victories of man in subduing it may prove pyrrhic, but the triumph of man is in the attempt to assert his mind over the matter, so that he could have his millennia in the scheme of existence.
Science and technology, if used sanely, will one day establish in the evolutionary process that man is made in the image of God.
The world manifests both the grandeur and harshness of creation. It is a condition of being to ascribe meaning to existence. Science h&s upset ancient attitudes and aspirations towards life, but a rational outlook makes man lonely and alienated.
To be sanely human is to be humane .
Life preys upon life by tooth and claw or by economic manipulation. The former is direct and quick by animals and the latter is deceitful and slow by man.
It is common to complain about the misfortunes oflife without realizing that life is not supposed to be fair .
An anthem makes a man to give his life for a song .
Everyone has plethora of desires, but only a few have equanimity to realize that they get what they deserve, and sometimes, even not that.
Shakespeare has eu]ogized man as “What a piece of work is a man! how nob]e in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and adrp.irable ! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how 1ike a god!” But since the beginning of civilization when marauders invaded sett1ements, sacked cities and plunged mankind in continual pain, grief and bloodshed to es tab Ji sh or to hold on to kingdoms or power until today’s conquest of Iraq by the Americans through their 1atest and deadly super bombs and other precision targeting missiles and weapons of war, man has wickedly destroyed and killed more men than the deaths caused by all the natural disasters and diseases put together. Again, there is nothing noble or angelic about man, when he economical1y ensnares vast popu1ations of the world or butchers and tortures with ghoulish frenzy, weak and innocent in wars to subjugate them. Collectively acting, man is the same contemptible brute as ever. He is lethal and devilish and hardly benign and god-like. However, such behaviour has also evolved societies by new contacts and ideas, but certainly this is riot the admirable way to create a wonderful piece of work.
Planning takes a man to his destination and choice to his destiny.
Myths will always be with us in some guise, as man cannot live without illusions.
For a person, who will not accept notional assertions because he insists on reasonable verification, the act ofliving is a solitary and hard task to evolve his own norms of behaviour to harmoniously respond to society and constantly ascertain and assess the meaning and significance ofjoys, tragedies and contradictions of life, which become matters of exploration and discovery when •.he looks at the grim reality that the universe does not appear to have ostensible purpose, and man and particularly a feeling man, is lonely in the unimaginably vast cosmos.
Incredulous are taken more seriously in the anxiety to convince or to denounce by the scriptures.
Nature has produced uncountable stars, galaxies, super novae and black holes in unimaginably
gigantic proportions. In comparison, man is a speck of matter and a momentary flash in the pan. He is as fragile as the film of a bubble in contrast to the roaming asteroids in space. But accidentally, he has a power which is mightier than the dead size and extreme force of the objects in the void. He can think and mould the nature for good or bad, something the insensate nature cannot do on her own, contrary to the laws of expansion and contraction of the universe on a set course. According to the third law of thermodynamics, the energy will ultimately be spent and end in entropy. The universe will cease to function in a whimper, which will take billions or even google of years and the destiny of man, in the meantime ifhe survives, cannot even be guessed in what he will become, but still the life of man or an evolved man-like being will ultimately be finite.
A charming person is more lovely than loving.
To wish to be prosperous as others is envy, but to make others miserable is jealousy.
Mystics declare that the universe is love. Actually, they assert that man has dignity in nonentity.
Blame provokes resistance and praise promotes to conciliation.
Loss of power is painfully disconcerting to the powerful, as fame is to the famous and beauty to the beautiful, when they have to shed them with time and age and come down to reality to pine for the lost glory.
Every speaker, who denig r ates that he is unworthy of praise, is actually desiring more adulation.
Everybody wants wealth, power or fame, for these can be had without merit. Very few aspire for excellence, because it can only be acquired through devotion and hard work.
The true mark of a progressive civilization is recognition that every man, good or had, has inherent dignity. Among all human rights, dignity is so sacrosanct that it is inviolable without any restrictive riders. Even a condemned person deserves swift death to avoid pain.
Nothing has meaning in nature. Meaning is assigned by man, who creates dignity for himself and value for nature .
It is funny to watch a pompous dignitary slip. Suddenly, he appears human
Success discourages some to dare again.
A cleric is as flat as beer can be.
Those nations thrive whose ideas evolve. Stagnation of thought is the death of a culture.
An eminent man thinks that whatever he says is significant. You are only required to nod quietly to keep up the flow of mutual conversation.
An eminent person, living in the aura of his eminence, sometimes longs for frank company of disinterested friends, who are uninterested in his boastful behaviour.
lfyou are kept waiting by an eminent person you have called upon, you will tolerate the insult, if there is a dire need or if you are fascinated by his arrogance.
Nothing is good or evil in itself. It is the impact on man which makes it so, for man is the measure of all things. Volcanoes and tornadoes, though deadly, are fascinating to watch in their fury of eruption and funneling winds from the safety of observation.
In danger, caution is anticipated reason, and panic is unfettered fear.
Experts who debate the comparative merits and demerits of lethal injection, electrocution, guillotine or hanging, in fact, recognize the dignity of the condemned to swift and painless death.
You are not above the person in estimation, if you vainly think he is beneath you .
You cannot buy gratitude, you have to earn it.
For the economic gain, we are churning out hedonistic, selfish and belligerent new generations, which are addicted to. the cheap and thrilling trash of weird and detective stories and violent video games for children and adolescents. In manhood, they will live in the orgy of self-indulgence, being insensitive to the pain of the poor and wretched. Our world is now deficient in imagination and mercy. Frequent wars kill millions of people for hegemony and testing of new lethal weapons. It is engaged in the frenzied pursuits of money and power; and people
exceed every moral limit for trampling human values to achieve them.
Intelligence is the ability to perform a task efficiently, inspiration is to do it creatively and the genius is their mysterious amalgam for reasons not yet fathomed.
Discontent is a spur to ambition. But it is the rightness or wrongness of the method that matters.
Life is an astounding phenomenon from the modest beginning of bonded atoms into the cells and molecules, mutating eventually to evolve as the only erect and thinking organism, man. His occurrence on the earth is unique, as there is no other being like him. It is by a pure accident that this being survived and emerged, inspite of innumerable perils of annihilation in the process of mutations in the billions of years. Man is a marvel of creation. How could he just happen to happen? There must be his creator and of this astonishing universe. This is one dilemma of enquiry. But if man is created by design, what is the need for so much mystery, wastefullness and inconsistency surrounding creation and condition of man and why is appearance of such an exemplary creature so late and woefully brief in the scheme of things, after so much trouble, wastage and delay in extinction and variation of the living matter, taking eons of time to develop into a thinking mind? Is it a time-consuming experiment, which has not, so far, succeeded in the longevity oflife to slow down variation, but without any regard to the thinking individuals?
Or will there be some other specie evolved yet in the coming millions of years to replace Homo Sapians?
The quest of longevity through genetics and biotechnology will revolutionize man’s culture and strengthen human body. Man cannot live really long life inhis present sedate and sedentary ways created by the civilizational comforts with the present nuts and bolts of his body, quickly wearing out.
No animal can afford to be stupid, save man.
In our age of affluence, a great majority of humans are destitute.
Thrillers, horror stories and cheap books are read far in excess to the serious literature, which
shows that man is more a creature of raw emotions than good sense.
Sometimes, one blushes at the evolution for atrocities of man to man.
All animals eat, but man is the only animal who cooks.
Acts treated as savage and abhorrent in a normal civilian context are elevated to the splendor of bravery and heroism, if they are inflicted on the hated enemy in war. We glorify death in war by lionizing our dead and demonizing the enemy losses.
Six million innocent men, women and children were massacred by the Nazi Ge1mans in holocaust, only because they were Jews. The world promised that the event like the horrendous Jewish genocide will never occur again. But fifty years later in 1994 and within a hundred days, about eight hundred thousand Tutsy minority were butchered in Rwanda by the Catholic Hutu majority in racial cleansing. Soon the Serbs meted out the same fiendish treatment to the Croats and Kosovars of Bosnia. Besides, in the 20th century, four major and about a dozen minor wars have been fought – mostly by the West – in which nearly 20 million people have been killed. Recently in March, 2003, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, both military and civilians, have been murdered by the depleted uranium missiles and crater-creating American super bombs.Inspite of the scientific progress and prosperity, the war, calamity, misery, anguish, racial genocide and death by famine have continued unabated. Basic drives of greed, anger and jealousy in the human nature have not been sublimated, since the primeval age of cave dwellers. Nature of man has not intrinsically evolved from beastliness .

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Rasheed A. Akhund

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