An Open Letter to the Editorial Staff of Chowk

tahmad #123: ``but on the subject of this board you bash rationality and reason itself. I guess that is good army training (``Their`s not to reason why...``). I study your anti-reason blitzkrieg on this simple issue with awe. You will no doubt serve as an inspiration to future generations of chowkies``

I would like to put in my vote to ban tahmad. Seriously.

He has attempted to carry out a personal attack on me. Even though I have not addressed him at all, throughout this thread. All of this, after he has suggested, in an earlier reply:

``Chowk is such a wonderful forum for the ``civil society`` of the subcontinent to interact in an intelligent and open manner.....The one guideline that I think is most commonly violated, and one that I think is also most destructive in terms of promoting a friendly discussion on chowk is the third one, namely:
Please refrain from frivolous statements that are inflammatory towards any race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. ``

So, he sets the rules and then openly violates them. What about inflammatory statements towards individuals, like the one you just made about me, with absolutely no provocation?

See, this is why I prefer the arjun_ms and jays over the tahmads. The former abuse, attack and attempt to humiliate. However, they don`t consider themselves above others. They don`t also want to become members of the ban police, while simultaneously attacking others.

Tahmad`s reply is the best reason for not attempting to ban anyone. Everyone has skeletons in their closets, including the ones who are pushing hard to point out the faults in others, while committing the same faults themselves.......

I`ll take an abuser over a hypocrite anyday.

TAhmed:

``I can see the book ``The Art of War of Reason`` by RomairTzu. Or possible ``On War`` by Claus Romairowitz. ``

HAHAHAHAHA!!! TAhmed, you kill me, man!!!

....you can already see the result of barring 12 head from posting on the front page and he is floundering back on unplugged.....i am sure he has been trying to post something on front page but being filtered out....you can observe the sharp increase in the continuity of the topic under discussion without any moderator on all threads...had he been posting here, we would be discussing bangladesh creation or some unrelated matters....

Farzana,

Is 12 head responsible for posting the private email of a listserver and the address of a Pakistani prof. in derogatory contexts without their permission?

Is he to be held accountable?

dr ansari,

............. you are so dang nice and polite you make me sick! ....... please don`t let me stop you from torturing us with your poetry - i won`t admit it, but i do enjoy some of it ............

............. by the way, what is it the connection between medicine and poetry ? ............ i have at least half a dozen physician friends who are always trying to drag me to mushairas .........

Romair #122 You bash not just India, as you say, but on the subject of this board you bash rationality and reason itself. I guess that is good army training (``Their`s not to reason why...``). I study your anti-reason blitzkrieg on this simple issue with awe. You will no doubt serve as an inspiration to future generations of chowkies...I can see the book ``The Art of War of Reason`` by RomairTzu. Or possible ``On War`` by Claus Romairowitz.

Stuka #111: The ideas of rooms is interesting. Groups could have their own little rooms, and not allow anyone they don`t want to enter, inside. I am not quite sure which room I would be interested in. I do bash India, but only on three issues: Kashmir, BJP and the arms race it has started in South Asia. On all other Indo-Pak issues, I could go either way......

I hope enough opinions have been expressed on this thread to convince Chowk-Staff (who exactly is this mysterious Chowk Staff, by the way) that they should not start banning people. Abuse is never good. But anyone who wants to debate issues in a realistic environment, as opposed to an artificial environment, needs to learn to handle it, manipulate it, deal with it, and also learn to ignore it. The solution isn`t to set up a, ``ban`` police.

Ana: just an observation, I remember the time when it was almost a game to count the names of 12-head and figure out which new interactor was 12-head. I must admit it has made me suspicious of new interactors.

But lately I haven`t seen many of the several nicks 12-head used to barrage us with. Do you think he forgot his passwords? I always wondered if he kept a list of passwords and usernames next to his computer. poor guy. yes it is a terrible waste of our time to have to put up with a barrage of posts from him, but either I haven`t seen a lot of that lately, or chowk staff deletes them or i`m mentally on auto-ignore.


Lots of interesting posts, some very well written posts on this hard topic. I don`t think anybody asked for censoring, but people commented on the quality of interaction.

How can the quality be maintained with increasing numbers? Almost all the people who say quality of interactions at Chowk has gone down are talking about the days when there were fewer interactors on Chowk. The more people who come to Chowk, the more diverse opinions and personalities. The more difficult it is to wade through stuff and find something that interests you - no?

btw: Farzana, couldn`t help noticing the song lyrics in your earlier posts :) were you listening to the radio while writing out those?

FerozK: you said it all

feroz:
i had every intention of keeping away from chowk until i realized i needed to copy something from my ilog. Peeked in here, saw the usual dishooN dishaaN, and found your reasonable post among the ruins. what you say compels me to respond, but how?
i think in one of my posts i voiced the very same thing you did, that it is not just up to the chowk staff but all of us to maintain civility and bear a certain responsibility on this site. on that we are agreed.
you are absolutely correct when you say that wisdom cannot be forced here on chowk. or outside of it. and that decency cannot really be defined. it has been said time and time again that i am calling for censorship and the banning of persons from chowk. either i wrote this letter badly or people don`t read very well. i`m inclined to think i wrote the letter badly, because obviously everyone here at chowk can read, but i digress. you and many others here are definitely more patient people than some of us who have left. and i have to give what some would refer to as props but i will say `daad` to you for your patience and the way in which you respond to negative posters.
i wish i could share your enthusiasm about things changing for the better though. as long as we have posters who come here and talk about how muslims are trash or hindus and who killed more of who, and who has suffered the most (all of us have!), as long as we continue to denigrate posters by making comments about their mothers and their sex-life, chowk is not going to make a change for the better. and trying to convince hardened hearts (or those with no heart at all, but sang-e-khasht) can only go so far, then you have to wipe your feet clean of the dust of that person`s dehleez and walk away. it`s nice to have rose-colored glasses (and i mean no disrespect to you in saying that you do), but some of ours have broken, and we`re hard pressed to get them repaired, or replaced. :-) my hope is that you keep your rose-colored glasses, and not give up on part two of the Meditations, `cause in doing so, you just may turn old jaded cynics like me around!!! yes, i know only too well that life can be offensive and rude as well, but i can`t walk away from life, nor do i want to. chowk is not quite like life though, thank goodness. it has revolving doors, and elevators...well maybe on the elevators!
and given that chowk does have revolving doors, departures aren`t quite permanent (until death, that is). and i may make the occasional return to read articles by friends..which includes you. so fear not the heat of the sun. . .one old jaded fool will return at some point to humor the old sentimental one. how`s that? :-)
i hope to hear more about your trip to pakistan...read bits of it in your ilog. were you in lahore?
warm regards,
ana

Saminashah #103

Your distaste for tangling with unpleasant people is understandable … then why is ignoring them on a cyberforum so difficult? ‘Rhinoceros hide’ may be an especially unattractive metaphor – why not recall ‘water off a duck’s back’ and ‘sticks and stones’? The polymorphous pervert is the cyber-equivalent of someone who exposes himself to passers-by – he craves the attention, thrives off reactions of panicked outrage. Practically no one gives him the time of day; the opinions about him range from ‘merely annoying’ to ‘absolutely intolerable’, which is as damning as it gets on Chowk. In the cyber-world, these people can do you no physical harm (I’m not referring to violations of real-world privacy). Only you can confer on them the least power to upset you. Why let jerks disturb your equanimity?

I honestly have no desire to lecture or patronize you in any way, and I’d hate to get you mad. I will venture to speculate though, that in an oddly reactive way, and at several removes, a good number of otherwise confident and resourceful women are still excessively influenced by received traditional notions of how women ought to react to hostility (by calling for help, making a scene, invoking societal norms, etc). A great deal of that may still make sense in physically threatening situations. Such considerations don’t apply on Chowk.

As to male interactors, they aren’t usually taunted about promiscuity (or, about their virility, or lack of it – a more obvious line of attack on men) largely because of common cultural expectations that most grown men can take these attacks in their stride. Whereas the similar expectation about women is that they may be more susceptible to such tactics. These taunts will largely stop, and a healthier equilibrium be established, precisely when the cultural expectation becomes current that the return on time invested in harassing women just isn’t worth the tepid reaction it creates. That won’t happen unless women help make it happen. Trying to curtail the speech of jerks isn’t going to fix the underlying mentality – it might instead make it worse.

I do apologise if anything above is really stupid or insensitive. Just my two bits worth.

re: tahemd

{you will see that i am saying that chowk should implement its guidelines AND those guidelines indicate the type of forum chowk`s founders envisioned it to be. }


...damn, left your sense of your humor home today?

Hamid sahab: I apologise. That post was written in a crummy mood. I didn`t mean to be disrespectful.

Samina (#68):
Here are my answers to your specific queries…
1.12-head did post one response. Perhaps being directly implicated, he sees no way out. Perhaps he is looking for an opening, for no one has said they unconditionally love him.
2.I am not aware of the incident re. the sexual harassment case and the girl seeking feedback. How did he get the post? Perhaps the people at the portal would know. The rights of that young woman are certainly important, but by reproducing that post on Chowk, no one in their right mind would say that 12-head was exercising “freedom of speech”. It would be seen as a sick mind at work.
3.Re. the female Pakistani professor’s address being posted. Again, we are in a world where everything is public. Am sorry to bring myself in here again, but my address has been posted (where I have been accused of brown-nosing the Hindutva parties!) and threatening mail has been a part of life even pre-internet days. Not very pleasant, but there it is.
4.Why do you expect ‘positive’ contributions from everyone all the time, Samina? And why from one who is recognised as ‘negative’? Let him compare female practioners of yoga with whatever he wishes to…it does not reduce yoga, women or anything. I posted something raunchy about orgasms on off-the-wall, right? That did not contribute positively either, but it was fun. We all know what he said about us there…who cares? I had said, “For women only’, but he was not the only guy who came in there…did it matter? NO.
5.There are not many female interactors on Chowk, and I assume on most portals. The reasons could be that women have better things to do, they are not terribly interested in Indo-Pak bashing (which is the mainstay here at least), and they do not say something unless they have something of substance to utter. Yes, hostility towards them does impede their discussions to an extent. But has that stopped you or Ana or me? Will it? I should think not. Women are sensitive and prone to get hurt more often (my opinion), but they also have greater reserves of strength.

I would have been happier had you not given 12-head the kind of importance you do. But of course the way you deal with people is entirely upto you. I can only offer my two-bits…and this time you asked for it!

Regards,
Farzana

...people, please discuss the topic at hand and stop falling prey to farcena`s attempts to hog this board to get some attention...

thanks

re:Ana Dobarah

Your article has forced me to post a reply, even though I was planning on waiting a few more days before entering the fray on Chowk.

What you said needed to be said, but leaving Chowk will not solve the problem. The problem will not be solved if interactors abdicate their responsibility and leave since Chowk is a community and we all, not just the Chowk staff, have a responsiblity to make certain that civility prevails on Chowk. Chowk and its interactions are a reflection of us and whether they are good, bad or ugly and offensive, they reflect our personalities as human beings. Like all human beings, we are flawed creatures and we have our weakeness and what you and I read on Chowk, as interacts, is the sum of those weakness.

There have been times, when I have cried out in frustration at the war of inanities, which rages on Chowk. I have been interacting on Chowk since July 16, 1998 and I can honestly say that Chowk has played an instrumental role in the development of my thought process. There is not a single interactor on Chowk, who has not taught me to re-examine what I had believed in and thanks to Chowk, I have followed the sayings of Plato wisely: an unexamined life is not worth living. Over the last five years, I have evolved from the petulance of national arrogance to the humility of wisdom, which has taught me that I do not know everything and there is much, still left for me to learn.

The wisdom, which Chowk teaches as to how to behave, in this virtual community, cannot be forced; decency and how to act decently on Chowk cannot defined, because personally speaking, I define decency not in a moral sense, but in the terms of what my grandmother taught me as to what is right and what is wrong and how to tell the difference. Each morning, when I get up the first thing I do is read part two of the Roman emperor Marcus Aureilius`s book, the Meditions. The lines, which I read say that I shall meet all sorts of people in a day - good and bad, just and evil, kind and inconsiderate and they will all try to convince me, but I will not lose faith in my own self as a human being, because I have the option to judge, with whom I will associate. The same applies on Chowk. You, my dear friend, have the option to dignify an interact with a reply or to ignore it. Like the swirling eddies of life, Chowk is what you are and the goodness and the badness on Chowk depends on your ability to balance the two choices. Chowk gives you the freedom to associate and with whom you associate, will determine your cyber experience on Chowk and it is up to you to decide the value of your efforts and contributions and what you hope to gain from Chowk.

You are entitled to your point of view and I agree with you that present level of discourse on Chowk leaves much to be desired, and if you want to improve it, decide for yourself and seperate the trival from the profound, if you wish. I wish that you would stay on as interactor and if you do decide to follow this fool`s advice, I promise you that Chowk will never disappoint you. I know this, because I too was ready to give on Chowk many times and leave Chowk in disgust. I view Chowk as place to share ideas and have a discussion which will make me a better person by the knowledge I can teach to others and the knowledge I can learn from others. Yes; lately I have been disappointed and in the present sense, I am disheartened by the lack of considerate reciprocity, which premeates the discussions on Chowk, but I have no wish to quit Chowk, otherwise I might as well quit life, because it too is offensive and rude.

Ana, please reconsider your choice and stay at Chowk and make a differance at Chowk by standing away from the crowd, because as in life, if you act within this virtual community with consideration and moderation, with objectivity and truth; with kindness and a lack of malice, others will notice you and soon they will themselves became silent and listen to what you have to say and what is more, might even understand the words you are saying to them. Patience and forebearance and tolerance are needed on Chowk, but the end is truly worthwhile, because the end is measured in hope that we can all change for the better. Please stay if only to humor an old sentimental fool like me and I shall be entirely indebted to your kindness.

Best Wishes & Regards

Feroz R. Khan

Gee, does anybody know where the men`s room is.