"Destitute's Plight"

“Destitute’s Plight”

If you eclipse taking to heart, transcend bearing in mind, and attend to the destitute instead, He will listen to you.

No matter how much you pray to God and the thousands of pilgrimages you will have sojourned before your commencement in the afterworld, if you have ever calcitrated an aching heart, then every one of your good deeds stands invalidated.

Listen to Destitute’s plight, He will be kind to you.

Even if you’re parceling a penny to the penniless but politely, He will recompense tens of millions.

Listen to the destitute!

In hunger, Destitute’s children have only their tears to gulp. Whatever the compulsions of poverty, these children must endure all!

These are the days of their childhood, the time to play! This is not the age to suffer hardships. Have mercy, forgo mercilessness, and lift them up! Theirs are ours!

Hold them near, shoulder them closely, and embrace them with ease, not upset! Don’t let these flowers become windswept by wrangling tempests. Listen to destitution!

This ill, old man stumbling upon every sanctuary step, still insists upon extending his hand for alms for the sake of Destitute’s children, rather than subject these innocent unfortunates to the brutalities of begging. He roams around with his hand outstretched for the sake of these children.

If perchance this accompaniment should fade as a result of the ill, old man’s cessation, where will they go, these ill-fated ones once overseen by the ill, old man?

These dimming lamps, these faintly twinkling stars, these homeless, helpless individuals whose fates rest in your hands, our hands!

Listen to the destitute’s plight! He will be kind to you!

Prem Dhawan (13 June 1923 – 7 May 2001)

Translated from the Hindi by M.S. Alverston, 12/30/14.

Nigel-Wright Intra-galactic Relations #5

Nigel-Wright Intra-galactic Relations #5

(K)ehkashan: Did you know that the Millions March in New York City on Saturday, December 13, 2014 had tens of thousands of participants and multicultural contingents as did the National Action Network’s Justice For All March in Washington, DC, also held that Saturday?  

(P)apa Harry: Is that so, my love?

(K)ehkashan: The organizers of the protest in New York City were unafraid to collaborate and place “Palestine Contingent” on their campaign posters, going as far as to print “NYC 2 Palestine” parallel to “Millions March NYC” with only an illustration, of a left-hand human fist swathed with the colors of the Palestinian flag, separating the two.         

(D)addy Anwar: There’s not much separating the plight of American civilians from the plight of civilians elsewhere. Democracy is on the line and police brutality is on the rise. Reminds me of a protest sign held up in front of the E. Barrett Prettyman US Courthouse in Washington, DC during the Justice For All March that read, “Ferguson = Ayotzinapa” as in there is an overwhelming concurrence about the destructiveness and devolvement involved with categorically delineating the human race in the new and globally connected millennium.      

(K)ehkashan: Ayotzinapa?   

(D)addy Anwar: The Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa, the all-men’s school in Tixla, Guerrero, Mexico that had 43 of its students go missing in transit to Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, where they had planned to interrupt a Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia conference to protest the government’s  favoring urban colleges and their graduates over rural alternatives for the purposes of  financing and hiring.       

(P)apa Harry: Mexico is comprised of 32 states, one of which is Guerrero. Tixla and Iguala are towns in the state of Guerrero and the students of Ayotzinapa were focused on that particular conference because the wife of the Mayor of Iguala was chairing the  September 24, 2014 event and set to succeed her husband as mayor in 2015. Did you know the famous city and beachfront Acapulco is in Guerrero and also a seaport between Panama and San Francisco, California, USA? 

(K)ehkashan: Acapulco de Juarez, Guerrero, Mexico?      

(P)apa Harry: Yes, that’s the one.

(D)addy Anwar: The symposium where the Ayotzinapa student activists were planning to rally was arranged by that social welfare services organization whose name translates as The National System for Integral Family Development.        

(K)ehkashan: Sounds too familiar to The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies that formed in 2001 following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Can Americans still recall the specifics of that terrifying day? Do they remember the four planes crashing that traumatic day, two of which disintegrated the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, the third partially disintegrating the Pentagon, and the fourth being deterred off-course in route to Washington, DC by the courageous United Airlines Flight 93 passengers aboard?      

(P)apa Harry: I don’t know, my love. Do you? Can you?

(K)ehkashan: I’m certain of certain certainties that I do know and can communicate. This sudden intrigue with James Franco and Seth Rogen’s latest film The Interview is the result of a very coordinated effort by the capitalist nationalist elites in the United States of America who have no regard for anybody but their own wealth and status, like the Tea Party Republican billionaire donors and their Republican and Democratic candidates turned legislators, like Presidents George Walker Bush and William Jefferson Clinton. Guess who wants to be a billionaire?      

(P)apa Harry: The approaching United States Congress?

(K)ehkashan: That too! However! But! Former President Bill Clinton wants to be a billionaire and Former President George Walker Bush is already a billionaire a trillion times over and his brother Jeb Bush is positioned to surmount South Korea, China, and Russia with the same mythology the Bush Regime surmounted Iraq, Afghanistan, and Indo-Pak with the slow and intransigently fuddy-duddy American Media in this new millennium.  

(D)addy Anwar: The capitalist nationalist elites, the Bush Regime, and the American Media?

(K)ehkashan: These three entities corroborate toxic mythologies about ethnicities and cultures and economies globally and have perfected defrauding the American Electorate.

(D)addy Anwar: How do you figure television pundits into their formulaic disdain?

(K)ehkashan: Preconceived and prearranged financial pretenses, and then prewritten propaganda to be publicly performed by preposterously prepaid pinhead pundits and politicians.

(D)addy Anwar: What about Jeb Bush and George Prescott Bush?

(K)ehkashan: The totalitarian rigidity of the Bush presidencies 41 and 43 is worth studying in great detail but must be done so democratically, an endangered endeavor.

(P)apa Harry: How did democratic pedagogies become endangered?

(K)ehkashan: The United States Congress and the Supreme Court of the United States are centralized entities but only within this Bush Regime and Jeb Bush is carefully positioning himself for the 2016 Elections, knowing the Republican Majority in both the House of Representatives and United States Senate have methodically perfected redistricting the country to favor neoconservative candidates, and misdirecting voters if not entirely disenfranchising them by selectively shredding voter registration forms and enforcing stricter identification documentation requirements at the polling places.                 

  

(P)apa Harry: What is an unmistakable construct or consequence of the Bush Regime?

(K)ehkashan: The influx of editorial prescripts and the death of modern oratory due to the Republican Tea Party’s unconscionable rise. I know because I am currently enrolled in drama and scheduled to compete in modern oratory and editorial writing at a local UIL meet this spring.        

(D)addy Anwar: The University Interscholastic League! Wow! To become a successful speaker, you must achieve complete reconciliation with the past and learn to focus on the present and leave the charge of dreaming to when you slumber. I know because I competed in UIL in order to avoid schoolwork and the exhausting routine of reporting to classes from which competitors were legitimately exempt on days of competition.          

(K)ehkashan: Yes! The best incentives of all are the excused absences you’re allowed to accrue due to extracurricular activities. The 113^th Congress’s extended absences from Capitol Hill were inexcusable. Have you noticed how the news cycle changes directions according to a preprogrammed wind vane that points wherever the Bush Regime wants

chaos, suffering, destruction, and death?

(P)apa Harry: Chaos, suffering, destruction, and death are the only points on the Bush Regime’s weather vane?

(K)ehkashan: Yes. And James Franco and Seth Rogen are the current cockerels in the grand design of that wind vane preprogrammed for global unrest and miseries by the Bush Regime and President Bill Clinton’s own poultry pragmatism with which he cosponsors the mobilization of terrorism with those dynastic and flush Bushes.  

(D)addy Anwar: Cosponsoring the mobilization of terrorism? Or was President Bill Clinton just another cockerel in the Herbert Walker Ellis Prescott Bush weather vane?

(K)ehkashan: That weather vane must be dismounted from atop the world map. According to a December 13, 2014 New York Times article by Andrew Higgins, Denmark is choosing to rehabilitate jihadist fighters instead of imprisoning them, which makes me wonder about slave revolts and the underground railroad and American prison populations throughout history. The totalitarian toxicity of the Bushes is much worse than that of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

(P)apa Harry: I can picture The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies running parallel with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

(K)ehkashan: American oligarchs and their prepaid pundits, politicians, and press corps are wretchedly supremacist in their handling of world affairs and domestic issues. Isn’t the United States of America facing terrifying realities with these neoconservatives deliberating random acts of cyber warfare and gun violence due to this totalitarian toxicity that goes whitewashed and unnoticed because of generations of propaganda targeting minorities and women and the destitute? Otherwise, why wasn’t the latest James Bond movie to be released next year leaked to the public since it too is a Sony film? This hype surrounding the release of the James Franco and Seth Rogen film has been staggering for over a year! But not a clue has been disclosed regarding the James Bond franchise! Convenient inconveniences!

Twelve Thirteen Fourteen

Nigel-Wright Intra-galactic Relations #4

(K)ehkashan: It’s terribly difficult these days to differentiate who’s grand, old, and pusillanimous in politics and who is not!   

(D)addy Anwar: Grand, old, and pusillanimous? GOP?

(K)ehkashan: And the Democrats! There’s a new onslaught of Democrats that are aligned with the Tea Party Republicans who orchestrated the defeat of the Democratic Party and progressive candidates across the United States in the November 4, 2014 Midterm Elections.         

(P)apa Harry: The Tea Party Democrats? How so? Expound upon the mechanics, my love.

(K)ehkashan: Yes. I was listening to The Byrds and wanted to know more about their history and the lyrics to their songs. That inquisitiveness led me to the celebrated jazz prodigy and pioneer Miles Davis upon whose recommendation Columbia Records had signed The Byrds in 1964, by which time Davis was a confirmed legendary musician many times over.       

(P)apa Harry: Okay. Miles Davis got The Byrds a contract with Columbia Records in the mid-sixties.

(D)addy Anwar: And Miles Davis was an established and innovative artist himself at the time, having come onto the music scene in the 1940s.

(K)ehkashan: Whereas, despite having started in the 1960s and becoming renowned for their renditions of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn”, The Byrds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame fifteen years before Miles Davis was given the honor posthumously. 

(D)addy Anwar: That’s unjust. However, what’s more unfair is the derogatory tonality of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s biography of Miles Davis. Compare it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s biography on The Byrds and you can sense the underlying reprehensible dismissal of Miles Davis’s genius and wisdom by the mainstream media then and today.  

(P)apa Harry: The same underlying reprehensible dismissal of black men’s lives as in the homicides of Akai Gurley, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin at the hands of cold-blooded police officers like Darren Wilson and unfit neighborhood night watchmen like George Zimmerman.   

(K)ehkashan: Miles Davis died the year The Byrds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1991. He was sixty-five-years-old and had created and been credited for an astonishing number of breakthroughs in sound across musical genres. John Lennon was too inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posthumously like Miles Davis, and had also died of a gunshot wound like Gurley, Garner, Brown, and Martin. However, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice’s being shot by police officers while at play with a toy gun in the snow outside his home and the subsequent trauma his two sisters suffered in the hands of that same patrolling police force is horrifying.      

(D)addy Anwar: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame stresses the insignificance of Miles Davis’s genius and wisdom with such unnecessary exhaustiveness throughout its biographical bit that I wished it had had the courage to edit that visceral bitterness all these years later. That same visceral bitterness with which the Tea Party Republicans and their Democratic counterparts in the United States Senate are stalling the trillion dollar spending bill.    

(K)ehkashan: The prelude to the stalling came after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky left the Senate, at which time his Republican colleague Senator Ted Cruz of Texas approached the dais and proceeded to stall the legislation despite the House of Representatives having passed the measure and adjourned itself for the holidays.       

(D)addy Anwar: Senator Mitch McConnell should not have been permitted to leave the Senate as he did, with a presumptuous strut personally and absolute inaction publicly.  

(K)ehkashan: Speaking of pork barreling, what is it deemed when a politician’s constituents do not matter anymore either? And the Majority Party perched in the United States Congress got there by all means necessary except legitimately?   

(P)apa Harry: Why is what called pork barreling, my love? The matter of restitution for past injustices, slavery specifically, is where pork barreling originates. It is alleged that slaves were rationed off barrels of salt pork mercilessly, the task of dividing a barrel being left to the masses enslaved by generationally cruel masters.

(K)ehkashan: As one peaceful protestor inquired in print upon a poster board today, “Is breathing a white privilege too? Black lives matter.”

Nigel-Wright Intra-galactic Relations #3

(K)ehkashan: The United States of America is still the home of the brave. I’ll give it that. However, there is an underlying de-intellectualizing of my generation due to the terrible collaboration between the status quo elitists and the American media giants. Particularly this Republican Party conglomerate that misidentifies itself as belonging to the people when it is clearly setup for meeting special interests like, well, lobby groups that focus entirely on minimizing commercialization in certain fields of public interests like what Sheldon Adelson is doing on the East Coast by interfering in the business of government to keep his reign on the gambling industry.

(P)apa Harry: What exactly is Sheldon Adelson doing on the East Coast of the United States, my love?

(D)addy Anwar: What exactly hasn’t Sheldon Adelson been doing coast-to-coast?

(K)ehkashan: That’s absolutely my point, Daddy. Don’t you see, Papa? Sheldon Adelson’s got a lot of prominent public figures adorning his own organizational regalia—the Republican Jewish Coalition’s to be specific—like Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie, and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.   

(D)addy Anwar: What kind of regalia specifically?

(P)apa Harry: Wait a minute! Hold on! We are venturing on sacred ground and I will not tolerate anything less than seriousness as we speak of the Judeo-Christian and Muslim faiths, because no matter how cartoonish and deserving of derision the right wing financiers and their politicians may be, they are socioeconomic forces of nature that mustn’t be addressed dismissively and religion is never a laughing matter. You understand, my love?   

(K)ehkashan: Papa! Yes! I know!

(P)apa Harry: I meant every word I said then, my love.  

(D)addy Anwar: But that mustn’t keep me from inquiring about the exact nature of this right wing organizational regalia that members of Sheldon Adelson’s Republican Jewish Coalition adorn?

(K)ehkashan: Daddy! Sheldon Adelson’s public mouthpieces, in particular Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie, and Jon Stewart, all wear yarmulkes with Adelson’s monogram embossed upon the fabric.   

(P)apa Harry: Enough! The two of you! Really Anwar? Kehkashan! The kippah or kippot if plural are the prayer caps that Jewish males and females wear, as part of custom outlined in both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Judaism.    

(K)ehkashan: A custom is known in Judaism as a minhag and its plural is minhagim. Surprisingly, the practice of a minhag or a set of minhagim can vary from family to family as well as individual-to-individual. The Talmud or Shisha Sedarim, or Shas as it is abbreviated in Hebrew, has six componential parts or “six orders” according to Wikipedia. The Shas reminds me of the Pillars of Islam and the Hindi word sheesha, which means mirror or glass.       

(P)apa Harry: Doesn’t the Hindi word sundaram mean beautiful?

(K)ehkashan: If the Shisha Sedarim were alternatively viewed as Sheesha Sundaram, or beautiful mirror or glass, couldn’t the warring tensions between the Judeo and Christian and Muslim and Hindu and so on and so forth be rendered alterable? I mean, instead of criticizing and critiquing, can’t we all just get along and rise up against the status quo making it impossible for US to live with dignity and self-worth with such insufficient wages and equally unjust policing? And didn’t the Republican Tea GOP actually want to move part time work hours up from twenty or thirty to forty hours per week?     

(D)addy Anwar: You need to keep your facts checked, darling. Otherwise, you run the risk of treading in dangerous waters just like the Republican Tea GOP you mentioned just now. According to a USA Today March 26, 2014 article addressing the number of hours at minimum wage needed to afford rent, the least amount of hours to accumulate before being able to pay 30% of one’s income on rent would be 69 hours, the case if you’re living in Montana and Arkansas. How many hours does it take someone in Texas to afford rent on the state’s minimum wage?    

(K)ehkashan: Over 69?

(D)addy Anwar: Ninety-three! It would take someone in Texas at least 93 hours of minimum wage work to afford a two-bedroom apartment unit in the state. 

(K)ehkashan: I know the plight of Bruce Springsteen’s Outlaw Pete! At six months old he’d done six months in jail! Outlaw Pete is the plight of the unborn developing inside its disenfranchised and desperate mother’s womb! At 25 a Mustang pony he did steal And he rode her ‘round and ‘round on heaven’s wheel Father Jesus I’m an outlaw, killer, and a thief. Outlaw Pete’s mother is in her 25^th week of pregnancy, or the start of the third trimester, by which time she has slipped into total self-neglect.      

(P)apa Harry: Outlaw Pete’s father’s actions could also be taken into account?

(K)ehkashan: And I slow down only to sow my grief.

(D)addy Anwar: I think your Papa means to say that the fate of the unborn child rests in the circumstances faced by its father too. Reminds me of Donald Driver’s autobiography Driven. His emphasis on paying college athletes a living wage alongside their scholarships and tuitions and fees is explored with such honesty and compassion by Driver as are the issues of living in poverty with a single working mother and multiple siblings from different marriages and unsalvageable relationships but love for each and every one of your sisters and brothers nevertheless enduring such tidal waves.   

(P)apa Harry: Yes. A child’s tomorrows do arise from his or her parents’ present tensions. Richard Williams’ autobiography Black and White: The Way I See It explores the ups and downs and highs and lows of race relations and fatherhood, his own incredible development from street smart kid to savvy businessman to outstanding life coach to tennis greats Venus and Serena Williams. There are moments in the book where you hold your breath because Williams writes with such candor about almost not making it through a hurdle or obstacle placed before him.  

(K)ehkashan: Rob Lowe’s Love Life is an interesting read and filled with amazing revelations about Lowe’s persona on and off the camera. Despite being stereotyped otherwise on camera, Lowe’s a really loyal husband and brilliant father off camera since circa 1991. He coached his sons’ grade school basketball teams and managed to get them into the playoffs finally and win before being dismissed from his position by parents who did not want their children to lose sight of the point that basketball was just an extracurricular sport.

(D)addy Anwar: Do you think folkie parents personally resent cool guys like Coach Lowe? Folkie folks get foxy about folkways. Folkie folks get foxy about folkways.

(K)ehkashan: Daddy? Daddy! You’re dancing! Stop it! You’re too old for this! Please!

(D)addy Anwar: Folkie folks get foxy about folkways! Folkie folks get foxy about folkways! Folkie folks get foxy about folkways! Folkie folks get foxy about folkways! Folkie folks get foxy about folkways! Folkie folks get foxy about folkways! Folkie folks get foxy about folkways! Folkie folks get foxy about folkways! Folkie folks get foxy about folkways!

(P)apa Harry: Well, as long as Daddy is lost in his present pestilent postures, let me ask you about Debbie Allen’s The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker broadcast on Black Entertainment Television, or BET, last night.

(K)ehkashan: Debbie Allen’s The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker deserves to be performed at President Vladimir Putin’s Fisht Olympic Stadium in Sochi, Russia and broadcast to a global audience because of its breathtakingly international rewrite of the Christmas classic. Plus, Debbie Allen and BET could use the technology utilized at the Sochi Olympic Games last February. Wow! That February seems so far away, doesn’t it?

(D)addy Anwar: Since circa 2014? There’s another to arrive in two months time as well, circa 2015!

(K)ehkashan: I’m too old for this!