i found a book i love next to my other fav book..almost finished with reading "desperately seeking paradise", a terrific and highly engaging book..if you are interested in some discourse on the religion..

this book however is not at all that 'heavy'..as one review had it,

"one thing special about this book is that sardar does not preach; he seeks people to debate with, learn from and laugh with, and there are plenty of laughs along the way. "

in fact i find my self chuckling and smiling at a lot of his astute observations and his commentaries...an example, running through the book, there are some on the bearded ones..like one on the men we have here..

"i return to malaysia to continue our work. for me it was still a land of people without beards. the straggly, wispy beards of the more pious malays are totally unconvincing. to someone like me, who is generously endowed with hair all over his body, it appeared that the malays had almost impossible task attempting to cultivate a beard..it had to be a providential sign, it out to mean that ther were amenable to change, more open to alternative possibilities within islam..."


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last evening i went to my fav bookshop, kino, before meeting my friends. i was feeling very happy about my 'desperately seeking...' readings, i wandered once against towards the bookshelves..but as i got nearer...i noticed a man looking somewhat familiar beside the same shelves i was heading to..i stared and realised he looked like my dad! what was my dad doing amongst english books (not that he cant read them..but not likely)..then i realised it was my uncle! thank god he was absorbed in checking out the books..he did not notice me. i could have just walked straight towards him and greeted him..but i decided against that..coz there i was in my low hipster jeans..cropped top and all going towards religious studies shelves, and meeting my uncle of all people! to save ourselves from a possible akward moment, i turned back. phy said it sounded rather rude of me..but i just though it was weird..

there's something about my paternal family and religion..i think this side is more bound to it that my maternal side, maybe partly because of my late grandfather's influence.

saying that, everyone of us kids in the paternal family went through the secular education route..but the secular leaning is perhaps stronger for me than all my other female cousins..as i had written it down before in my blog..i am the second eldest female granddaughter in the family and the only one not wearing the tudung..but of coz..nobody in the family said anything about or against it....

right now, i find myself still enamoured by worldly superficialities, like the allure of low hipster jeans. sometimes.for now. hopefully. but then again there are things which i am keen on learning, and relearning and currently for the faith, the seductive part of it for me, lies not in the traditions which we are so used to and grown accustomed, but the cerebral stuffs...hence the readings..maybe this arise from the science background..i never realised it..but maybe it's that scientific mind and analytical yearning..perhaps?

i dunno really..if it is any surprising at all..or just as we know all along, we humans are contradictions, or maybe its all about straddling two worlds.