After less than two weeks I can already confirm that planning a wedding can be stressful, but at least I'm only getting married once. Pakistan's Azhar Haidri's decision to get married twice in 24 hours is described by the BBC as a solution to the age-old dilemma of whether to embark on an arranged or a love marriage."
Nonsense, its a lazy arrangement which will means that the woman he didn't want to marry (i.e. the arranged one) will play a secondary role in a household that doesn't want her to be there. Humaira Qasim may have consented to the arrangement, but you have to wonder what her choices actually were?
But whatever my thoughts on polygamy may be, I do have a respect for Azhar's willingness to take on double wedding planning as that in itself does show some kind of commitment.
Mr Haidri (right) says that he has found the perfect compromise
I announced my engagement to my work colleagues, mainly as a justification of the fact that I will be taking a week off in France this December using time earned from working extra days in the Pakistan Flood Response (who can deny me the opportunity to go wedding planning?).
The news spread quickly, including to colleagues I had worked with in Vietnam earlier in June. And from there I received the two best messages ever: Dear Mark
Do you remember me? I have nice time with you. Especially, in karaoke night.
Congratulation to you for engaging with your sweet heart. I hope you and her happy forever and you are welcome to visit.
Wow, what did I get up to in Vietnam? Thankfully this had noone copied in as it could have been interpreted in many ways and none of them particularly well, although it did come from a male colleague. Otherwise, a more sober line from an older and more experienced male colleague:
Congratulate for Max to become a tied -up husband.
I had the great idea of watching as many wedding movies as possible in order to get some ideas on themes, planning, etc. It turned out to be a stupid idea, partly because getting married in France whilst planning it from Bangladesh isn't a story-line that has been picked up in Hollywood. But also because wedding movies are generally pretty awful and so I wasted a lot of precious wedding planning time. Lessons learnt as follows:
Made of Honour: Don't invite Patrick Dempsey to your wedding. Don't allow the bride to have a male witness unless they are family and/or gay. Don't invite any Scottish people as they will come wearing a kilt and take all the attention.
Four Weddings and a Funeral: Don't invite Andie Macdowell to your wedding. Do invite as many gay people as possible as they make the best guests (all wedding movies seem to feature at least one homosexual character). Bride must not wear a meringue. Don't hire Wet Wet Wet or Marty Pellow as your wedding band (although it could be quite cool). Don't have anyone who is privately educated as responsible for any of the formal duties on the big day.
Bride Wars: Don't invite Kate Hudson to anything, ever (how did she even get famous?). Technically the groom-to-be does not have any role to play in planning a wedding. Apparently: "You don't alter Vera Wang; You alter yourself for Vera Wang". Actually, don't replicate anything that happened in this film.
My Best Friend's Wedding: Get married as soon as possbile so that no best friends can come and claim back my fiance. Actually, without realising it I already beat the basic premise of the film by proposing a month before my fiance's 28th birthday. Otherwise the film was completely useless. Oh, and don't invite Cameron Diaz either.
Rachel Getting Married: Arguably the best film of the lot, but equally the least encouraging. Don't invite any drug addicts to your wedding. Basically, if you were to follow the basic premise of this film it would be to not invite your family in your wedding in the first place.
So I'm getting married, and it has already been decided that the wedding will be in France for diplomatic purposes. Hours have been spent online looking at potential locations, of which there are many incredible options considering we're planning to do it in Provence (the bride to be is from there, not because we love Peter Mayle). In the end it has been my future parents-in-law that have visited the selection of we provided, and we think we're sorted and have managed to find a slot between all the people who plan their wedding up to 2 years in advance (seriously, some places were booked through to 2012).
So the next stage is determining what the ceremony should look like. As it will be summer, and in France, I thought a simple affair with good food and ample booze would be best. I provided the following picture as to illustrate my vision so for my fiancé to share with my future parents-in-law:
She didn't see the funny side of it. Lesson number 1 for the wedding: don't make unnecessary jokes about planning (even when it comes to discussions on the colour of table cloths, although technically me sharing the photo wasn't a joke). Instead I'll keep my vision restricted to more practical matters as we continue planning. I think we're getting married in a castle anyhow.
When I was in Pakistan last month I wrote a post on the photo of a girl that was used by the Guardian to illustrate one of its articles on the relief programme. They've been spotted doing so again at Aid Thoughts, who do a much better job than I did at hammering the message home, summarising simply that it is exploitation when the media continues to publish such photos:
"These are real children, ones that are obviously in need of help, but you do them a disservice when you exploit them in this way to make your arguments."
Children at a food distribution point at a makeshift camp in Haiti after the earthquake struck in January 2010. Photograph: Marco Dormino/AFP/Getty Images
I was given a surprise birthday present last month of a video camera and have been looking around for inspiration for my first feature length film. It came through the film below from a friends blog; a well made video that provides a brief insight into the life of the rickshawallah, along with some pensive music and arty, lingering shots:
Rickshawallahs are what make Dhaka unique. They provide the city's very own Velib, Bicing, Bixi, or Barclay's Cycle Hire, except for that you have someone else to ride you around town. Always male and always skinny (I saw a fat rickshawallah in Delhi and he looked ridiculous), they also sell drugs, prostitutes, and cause the majority of traffic jams with their ridiculous (lack of) road-sense. My colleagues tell me that if they the government were to try and get them off the streets, they have the power (through the people that they rent the bikes from) to bring the government down.
Needless to say that watching the film is very thought provoking, as it seems that pulling a rickshaw is a neat example of a poverty trap. But even more thought provoking is whether you could organise these cyclists (for that is what they effectively are) in to a road race team and enter them in the Pro-Tour. They spend all day training (i.e. working), can only get into better shape (i.e. grow some muscle) and know how to handle a bike (rickshaws are a lot harder to handle than you would think). Surely, its just a case of finding the best 18 rickshawallahs, dressing them in lycra and trading in their steel 3-wheelers for some carbon fibre machines. Change their diet a little bit and give them some training, and Bob's your uncle: Bangladesh is able to produce world class athletes like the Jamaican (Cool Runnings) bobsleigh team at the 1988 Winter Olympics, only with more success.
And there lies the potential for my film: Cool Cycling. This should make for an interesting weekend project.
I very rarely mention the fact that I have a girlfriend on this blog. She doesn't really like the fact that in my posts I've confessed my love for a pet turtle more frequently than my devotion to her (although she took the fact that I partly blamed her for my high cholesterol very well). I try to point out to her that there is one part of my life that I don't wish to include in this exercise on exhibitionism, but she still doesn't completely agree.
Except for today. Five years ago we met in an uninspiring courtyard in Surrey Quays. Brought together by two bottles of the finest Nicaraguan rum, a pair of shoes, a shared hatred of our learning institution and fellow students and a confused desire to impact somehow on the unfairness we see in the world around us; I learnt to speak French, she learnt to eat Marmite (as they say) and we've now got a pet turtle that we both very much love.
I don't believe in the sentiment that the other person makes you complete. Certainly you can help the other to become a better person, and she now accepts that at times it can be justified to eat dinner at 6pm like an Englishman, and thanks to her I'm a lot more patient and accept that you can't always immediately know what you want.
But I do believe that you can have a connection which is deeper than is possible to humanly comprehend, that you can understand someone and be drawn closer together without realising it, which doesn't require explaining, and that to let yourself go with that force is the most exciting thing in life.
Perhaps it has taken me five years but now I know what I want. C'est toi.
We invented a game for the drive from the guesthouse to the office in Islamabad, whereby if you spotted a woman in the street and claimed to have seen her first, you won a point. It was a challenging game until we drove past a women's college when classes must have just finished, but it easily satisfied our stereotype of the Pakistani woman and their social status. This is partly mixed up with the stories that have recently covered women and Islam in the European press: the banning of the veil in France, the cancelled stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani in Iran, and even the recent justification of the ongoing presence of Western forces in Afghanistan as a means of safeguarding women's rights. In all of these stories, one of the underlying assumption seems to be a simplified understanding of the status of women in Islam, and the perception that if women don't have the same freedom's as their European counterparts, then they can't have much of a life.
Being in Pakistan the past month, its clear that the country is so diverse that its too easy to misunderstand the lives of women in the country and confuse it with religion. A colleague at dinner summarised this the other night that whereas in the far north, a woman will only ever know the interior of her father's and husband's house, if a woman 700km and over 100 dialects further south doesn't go out to work in the fields, then her family will starve. And so this week when I visited a farmer's cooperative project that I had designed in South Punjab, I was surprised to arrive at the Worldlife milk cooperative which was all female .
It was the first that I was taken to visit and had assumed that this was a deliberate action by the project staff, as promoting gender is an easy way to impress a kafir. But this wasn't a stunt, and the women literally meant business. For the first time in Pakistan I entered a room in which women were in the majority, and whilst most still looked down when they talked to the all-male group of project visitors, I realised that it is not possible for them to be stereotypically passive or hidden. Apart from their plans for the cooperative which will have them directly negotiating with companies such as Nestle in the next three months, they told me that they are responsible not only for looking after the livestock that produces the milk for the cooperative, whilst caring for children and running their families, but right now they are also collecting the annual cotton harvest in late-summer temperatures of 35 degrees.
In the next cooperative, whilst I danced with the men who showered me in flower petals, it was the women who were asking the serious questions, such as what the cooperative could do on a bad day when the milk gets spoilt and they can't sell it (turn it in to khoya, ghee or rasgulla is the answer).
What struck me is that even if they are sitting in a different room, out the back, wearing scarves and hiding their faces, these women are only doing this in one particular social interaction which can not summarise their whole existence. They clearly do have their own lives and their own networks, and they are probably just as keen on keeping preserving them from the wider patriarchal society, as the media is in portraying them as subservient and without control over their lives in that very same society. It was just two days in rural Pakistan, but it now seems lazy and even patronising to assume that just because they can't do as we do, then there must be nothing for them to do at all, or that just because they can't be seen, it doesn't mean they're not doing anything worthwhile.
