Happy Birthday Daddy

I grew up as the first child to my parents. My mother is very kind and loving and my father was very kind and loving and strong headed. You never said no to my father. He had a particularly strong mental composition and had an opinion about everything. These things, I now realize, are are neither good not bad, but are just things that define a man just as my father's kindness, wisdom and his loving and forgiving nature also defined him.

True to the norm of the day, my relationship with my father was based on fear and respect. That also meant that I was never really close to my father (in the modern sense), although I was closer to him than he himself ever was to his father.

It was only very late in my life (and his) that I was able to look at our relationship with any level of objectivity. It was then that I realized that the fabric of our relationship actually put the onus of defining our relationship on me. I realized that I had to turn it around and go back to basics. So I started expressing. I would drive him around, share my inner fears and ambitions with him, and I would hug him a lot. In the corporate language; I basically started "communicating actively" with him.

That was the good thing. The bad things was that when I finally started bridging years of this communication divide, it was too late. My father passed away a couple of years later leaving me with so much that I still wanted to tell him.

I sit here today on his would-be 67th birthday thinking what can I do now that he is gone. The answer thankfully is very clear and quick to come. I can stop this from propagating further through our generations. I have to start "sharing" with my son who is now 19 and is quite a strong headed young man himself. I have to start expressing, share my inner fears and ambitions and hug him a lot. Oh I would do better to leave the driving around to him now that he has earned his driving license.

We live through our children; our sons and daughters, and I hope that my son will not be sitting thinking the same thoughts when I am gone because that will make me very sad. So my present to my father for his birthday today is a special email that I sent to my children.

Happy Birthday Daddy! May you live for ever.

Crime and (barbaric) Punishment

A friend sent this article from Daily Dawn titled "Who will cast the first stone?"

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/irfan-husain-who-will-cast-the-first-stone-470

... Interesting article. It starts a debate however, and a few things need to be established before nations follow suit throwing away the so called "barbaric" punishments.

1. Is it the extent of punishment that makes them barbaric? If so then we need to really rediscover what makes adultery or murder a lesser crime now than it was earlier. Are the victims of these crimes any less cheated or any less dead now?
2. Do systems that implement "scripture" punishments have the requisite method of trial in place also? e.g. 4 witnesses etc. (too simplistic but just I hope it sends my meaning across)

With any system of punishments, in any jurisprudent nation in the world, an essential sub-system is or should be implemented; that of audit and control (the judicial system). Even if a country were to abolish all "scripture" punishments but lacked this audit and control system, punishments will be given to innocent people while the guilty will roam free. To me, absence of this justice system is "barbaric".

Whenever an innocent person is killed wrongfully, whether it is by stoning or by electric chair, or whenever a killer roams about free, humanity is violated.