...Berlin......................................
I've moved again...
as I still don't really feel comfortable at blogger, I've moved to wordpress and will give it a try there. Sorry-lah!
what I'm currently reading...
...is "Islam and Democracy" by Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist. Her writing is beautifully poetic. The first pages are about why in her opinion the Muslim world is scared of Western democracy. She says many ideas of Western democracy reflect an old Islamic dream that Muslims have so far failed to accomplish due to the reign of selfish and powerful caliphs.
Ahmadiyya
Yesterday I joined an "interreligious" talk and learned about the Ahmadiyya group, a group of Muslims whose beliefs differ from those of mainstream Muslims and who therefore are persecuted in the Muslim world, particularly in Pakistan and Bangladesh.The Ahmadiyya movement is split into the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement.Mohammad Ali of the Lahore Ahmadiyya community in Berlin held a talk about his community and their beliefs. The most arguable point is the death of Jesus, the Ahmadis believe that he died like all other humans and was not physically lifted to heaven by God.
Most interesting about this meeting was the reactions of the audience. Most of the mainly Muslim listeners didn't seem to be too happy about these ideas.
Links:Lahore Ahmadiyya MovementAhmadiyya Muslim Community in Deutschland
alternative
"There is no alternative" is what we hear and believe. The companies and their media are making us believe that the world has always been like that. It hasn't and we all actually know that.
I'm reading all these alternative texts and I'm quite excited. Not that I truly believe I will live long enough to see the drastic change that is expecting humankind. But since I believe in eternal life I might well have the chance to see from somewhere else what little steps en masse can cause.
Politics and therefore people's lives used to be controlled by the church. Now they're controlled by economy. The church, science, technology and economy are to serve humans, not the other way round.
Humankind is too ready to believe in a God-given or nature-given world order.
It's fun to get involved with alternative ideas. People have been involved with alternative ideas for hundreds of years and I couldn't say that I'm not happy about my right to vote.
Attac Summer Academy & Energy
Attac is a network-style mixture between an organised NGO and a chaotic social movement. Attac was founded in 1998 in France and has members all over Europe, most of them in France and Germany. For five days, attac activists and interested outsiders from all over Germany met in Karlsruhe to educate each other about topics related to globalisation. Which is basically everything. From global finances and poverty to human rights abuses to nature destruction to the prejudices against migrants, you find someone for every topic at attac. Mostly middle class academics, but also people who are more hands-on.
Sleeping in tents, we had to cope with the constant clamminess of rainy camping, but I was well prepared this time.
I joined a workshop about ressources and energy and learned a lot about nuclear energy and renewable energy sources. I learned that all that talking about solar and wind energy solving all our energy problems are crap and that there's no way we can keep up nowaday's lifestyle. If every person on this earth consumed 1,5 kilowatts, things would be alright. But Europeans use 6 kilowatts and North-Americans 11!! People in the poorer countries hardly use any anything, but China is catching up.
The whole situation is crazily dangerous and still the car industry is trying to blind us by saying researchers will one day develop a car that runs with water. Still they're telling us how advanced solar and wind energy are.
They're trying to tell us that research and technology are capable of solving these problems. They're not. It's us who will have to spend some time thinking about our lifestyles.
Not only regarding energy, though. Globalisation touches every second of our daily life. Which chocolates we eat and where we buy our milk has great influence on the lives of thousands of people.
Everyone in this world knows that there is something wrong. At Attac, people try to find out what it is and how we can change it.
On the last day, we held a small demonstration against the privatisation of the German train network. England is currently suffering from the problems following their network's privatisation; why are we making the same mistake!?
train journey, copied from the diary, 04th August 2006:
Earlier, I got the backpack down from the top of the wardrobe, it felt good to pack again, even if it's only for a week. I'm on the train on my way to the "
attac summer academy" in Karlsruhe in the south of Germany. My hometown Berlin is in the north east, so I'll have to travel across the whole country.
I'm watching the golden green landscape rushing by and I'm astonished by how much empty space there is. You never see a single soul!
Maybe my comparisons are a bit laughable since the last country that I travelled by train was Bangladesh ;)
The lush green landscape was spotted with colourfully dressed men and women working in the fields. There were cows and sheep and deer and birds....
Here, everything is done by machines, all I see is cropped fields without a single human hint.
I recall how strange Germany looks from above, from the sky. It's split into thousands of rectangles in different sizes. Every centimetre of earth and soil has an owner here, there's harldy anything left that belongs to no one or to all of us.
Earlier, the train left Berlin from the fancy new Central Station and just minutes later passed through the old station. The old station was where people hugged their loved ones, where I waited for my friends, where I picked up my visitors. Now the InterCityExpress just passes the station withing a few seconds and it looks shabby, grey and abandoned. Although I never especially liked that station, I feel sorry for it. At least it had history and character, other than that fancy shopping mall-look-a-like glass palace that we now have at Anhalter/ Central Station.
----later----
Wow, after hours of empy fields I've finally seen some cows. Germany's subsidised agriculture seems to work without heavy usage of humans or animals....
Everything is being taken care by machines.
The sky
The last parcel with my stuff from Malaysia has arrived, I'm so happy! All the things I bought in Bangladesh are inside. The clothes I wore back then, the souvenirs... I'm now wearing the anklet Adit's sister gave to me.
Strange, how memories stick to objects.
A friend of mine has inspired me to pay attention to the sky again. (Since my daily life momentarily consists of not much more than my daily French lessons and some reading, I happily absorb any suggestions to discover little phenomena in my routine.)
He remembered that whenever he played computer games, he found the illustration of the sky looking fake.. This made him pay attention to the real sky and he discovered that his imagination of the sky matched reality less than the computer display did. He had had a wrong perception of the sky that he walks under daily. That's crazy.
Him pointing that out made me wonder of how many things we have a wrong perception. Sometimes when I travel, people ask me what snow is like. And whether our lakes really freeze and what frozen lakes are like. I'm embarrased and sad to admit that I don't know because I never pay attention! The magic that snow first had when I moved back to Germany has gone. Six years ago I starred at the white landscape outside our house, fascinated by every little snow flake. Snow was that little gift that you get for all the dullness of winter. Now I'm just annoyed. And I don't ever stop for a single second to appreciate the sky.
I'll give the sky a close look tomorrow. I'll taste the rain, next time it rains.