Toothache and Cedar Tree

Sector F-11, Islamabad. I turn right from Mehr Ali Shah Road¹ onto the sloped street towards Salman Market. Along this street is a small tomb, surrounded by trees and situated a little higher than the surface of the road. The neighbourhood includes grandly built houses and a beautiful park, which makes it easy to miss the tomb as you travel along the street. Inside the tomb is that special cedar tree that I have come to look at: they say that hammering a nail in the trunk of this cedar tree can cure your toothache.

I enter the bounds of the tomb and spot a young man who is watering the plants and washing the floor. There’s a calm vibe inside the tomb, perhaps because of the abundance of greenery. A little further to the side is a shade, under which rows are laid down for saying prayers. A middle-aged man, dressed in a shirt and pants, is sitting under that shade. He eyes me curiously, but I reach towards the young man and greet him. He replies back affably. We shake hands.

I ask him about the cedar tree. “Yes, do you have the nail with you?” he asks me back. I smile and shake my head, “I have heard about the tree; just want to see it.” He points towards a small structure and tells me that that tree is just beside it. I move in that direction and pass the structure to find the cedar tree.

There are two trees present there, and their trunks are kind of unnaturally buried into the soft ground. It seems as if the level of the ground has risen due to excessive soil, but it’s difficult to say if the high level of this ground is natural or artificial. One of these trees is the cedar tree, the other I fail to recognize. Both the trees have hundreds of nails hammered into them by hundreds of people wanting to get rid of their toothaches. The cedar tree is taller and possesses a wider trunk. The number of nails hammered into it is also higher.

I turn around and call the young man, asking for permission to take pictures of the tree. Permission is granted. I take a few shots using my mobile phone’s camera.

I take a step forward and inspect the nails closely. Old and new, rusted and shiny. From a distance, these nails seem to give an uncomfortable texture to the tree’s trunk. Up-close, the overall effect is quite creepy.

I feel sorry for the cedar tree.

At some places, I also see coins of Rs. 1 and 2 hammered along the nail. I am surpised and somewhat amused at the same time.

I come back towards the young man. “Whose tomb is it?”

He points towards the structure, “Shah Faqeer Paracha sahab.” He then tells that a past caretaker (mujawir, مجاور), of the tomb is also buried there, but I forget the caretaker’s name.

I ask him about the nails.

“Yes, Shah Sahab teaches a recitation…” he tells about two azkaar (اذکار) and their count, “… you repeat the recitation and then touch the nail with the affected tooth. If more than one tooth is aching, you touch the nail with all of them one by one, and then hammer it into the tree.”

I do not understand how this can possibly cure a toothache, but nod in response.

The young man offers me a glass of water. I thank him, “How long have you been here?”

“I work somewhere else, but sometimes come here to do my duty by watering the plants, or cleaning the area.” He pauses, “I am not aware if photography is allowed, but I thought that you might as well take some pictures now that you are here.” He looks around, probably in search of the permanent mujawir of the tomb.

I move towards the structure again where the grave of Shah Faqeer Paracha is present, and then take another picture.

Suddenly, a voice in rapidly spoken Punjabi echoes in the air. I fail to understand it, but look towards the direction it came from to find an old and bearded man, standing on the prayer rows and looking at me. He is probably the permanent mujawir of the tomb. I am unable to conclude if he is mad at me or just scolding the young man for something else. The young man, who is busy in watering the plants, doesn’t turn towards the old man but gives a brief reply in Punjabi. I am again unable to understand it, so I look at the old mujawir and the man dressed in shirt and pants, thank the young man, and leave the tomb.

So many questions rise in my head. How old is this cedar tree? Who planted it? What’s the name of the second tree? When did the ritual of hammering nails for curing toothaches start? Why are there coins of Rs. 1 and 2 with some nails? On average, how many people within a month come here to hammer a nail? Did Shah Faqeer Paracha use to live here as well? When did he pass away?

I think that instead of that young man, perhaps these questions can be answered by the old mujawir. And then I think that perhaps I should have talked to the old mujawir too, though that conversation might not have been that pleasant…

I sit in my car and start driving back towards Mehr Ali Shah Road.

Miniflux

Miniflux is a minimalist and open source feed reader. It has no bloat, no social media, no folders. It even has no search.

For some, this lack of features can be a deal breaker. For others—like me—it’s just what the doctor ordered.

After the shutdown of Google Reader, I had migrated my feeds to CommaFeed. CommaFeed is also a minimalist and open source feed reader, though not as bare bones as Miniflux. And while I was quite happy with CommaFeed, I was not self-hosting it; instead, I was using its hosted service. I did create an account on Red Hat’s OpenShift, which is a fine venue for hosting CommaFeed, but I already had a VPS at Linode (which is awesome, by the way), and I wanted a feed reader that I could easily run on my existing Linode. Tiny Tiny RSS came with enthusiastic recommendations, but for some reason I never really warmed up to it. Then one day when I was idly browsing through GitHub, I came across Miniflux.

Miniflux provides a simple, readable interface that looks and works perfect on small and large screens alike. One of its few features is the ability to download full content of articles, which is handy for those feeds that include only a summary. There are no folders, and surprisingly, I don’t miss them. I was also surprised at how easy the installation was: all it required was a simple git clone and some necessary web server configuration, and voila, it was up and running. (For those who cannot or do not want to self-host, there’s a hosted version available for a small, one-time fee.) And finally, being small and bloat-free means that Miniflux is fast—really fast.

Of course, Miniflux is not for everybody, but if you are a fan of minimalism and web feeds, you should check it out.

Science and poetry

I was skimming through the online edition of famous “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” yesterday, when this footnote caught my eye:

“The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth.” I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

I am not qualified enough to comment on either science or poetry, but the above quote has reaffirmed Richard Feynman’s superstar status for me. I hope that I’ll finally get to read some of his books in 2014.

New blog

Pick the odd one out: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Blog.

Or perhaps, as some would say, pick the dead one out.

Jason Kottke, a prolific blogger himself, recently wrote:

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.

John Scalzi posted an insightful response to Kottke’s post:

This isn’t to say that a blog can’t be useful for the people who have a need or interest in them — they absolutely can be. For the people who want to be able to write longer posts, keep a permanent self-branded outpost, and (importantly) have much more substantial control of their online persona, blogs have no real substitute.

So, yes, traditional blogging is not what the cool kids do these days, but it will always have its uses; hence, my new blog.¹

Also, I have always thought of Facebook and Twitter and other social media services not as a threat but as a complement to blogging. Twitter, in particular, seems to me like a giant, crowd-sourced feed of interesting blog posts (among its other uses). Nothing, though, beats a dedicated feed reader for leisurely scrolling through a stream of recent posts from your favorite blogs. (Yes, I am still mad at Google for pulling the plug on Google Reader, but I am also grateful that CommaFeed exists.)

So here is my new blog, the demise of blogging notwithstanding. Let’s see where it takes me.