He said that each new literary effort leaves him even more convinced that Urdu literature in general and poetry in particular was not only maintaining its position but actually gaining stature and following. He said that poetry to him is a balance between one’s innate ability to feel, observe and create verse, and the technical craft that can be learnt, honed and polished. “A good verse has to strike a perfect balance between beauty of thought and a technically sound craftsmanship in its expression,” he added.

He urged all new writers to continue to work hard on the craftsmanship of writing. Shabnam Shakil, a renowned poetess while commenting on ‘Kiyun’ termed Sharjeel’s verse as “immensely mature both in thought and style of expression”, especially for someone whose very first collection of poetry has come out.

She also appreciated the author’s command over the Urdu language, especially the strong Persian and Arabic flavor in it. Meanwhile, the author, Sharjeel, regaled the audience with lighthearted tales of the hardships faced by first-time authors in getting their works published.

He hoped that poetry fans across the border and second generation of Pakistani Diaspora allover the world who can understand but cannot read Urdu will find the website a useful platform for remaining in touch with their roots back home. The event was attended by poetry lovers of the twin-cities.-SANA

Introduction

Tokyo Twins looks at two issues -

what the roots of terrorism are, and what the end of terrorism might be.
One new chapter, in both text and audio, will be posted each week to Pakistan Times.

Tokyo Twins-Chapter 3-mp3 audio
Chapter 3 - Unseeing a gathering storm.

Katie and Susan O’Brien negotiated their bodies and school backpacks and Shintaiso gear through the maze of commuters on the train at Chofu Station and stepped onto the station platform and into a lesser maze and put their footsteps on autopilot for the twenty-minute walk home.

“Mom and Dad will be …” said Susan, half wondering…

“…back tomorrow night,” Katie said.

“Been a long three weeks without them.” said Susan.

“Yeah… hope they weren’t kidding when they promised this would be their last long trip together.” said Katie.

“Better be.” Susan said.

“What is it in Kashmir anyway?”

“Sweaters.” Susan chuckled.

“Yeah, it’s like: ‘my Mom and Dad spent three weeks in Kashmir and all I got was this cashmere t-shirt’,” Katie joked and gave a twin’s nudge with her shoulder into the shoulder of her sister.

“Hey, don’t start.” said Susan.

“I thought we were doing the local train tonight,” said Katie, “ya know, get off at Fuda Station so we wouldn’t have to walk past Hebiyama…”

“I know. I forgot.” said Susan.

“Me too… ‘til now.” Katie said.

“Well, we’ll walk fast, and hey, the full moon’s out tonight. I love seeing how the moon reflects off the water in the rice paddies.” said Susan.

“Me too. Not something we get to see very often…” Katie said.

“Yep, only now… late spring…” said Susan.

“Just when the bull frogs are mating.” Katie said.

“Guess they like this time of year as much as we do.” said Susan.

“I’m hearing them already.” Katie said.

“Yeah me too - half mile away.” Susan said. “Noisy little things.”

“Just one singing bullfrog close to your bedroom window…” Katie said.

“They have us outnumbered a million to one, Katie chan.” Susan interrupted. “Don’t encourage ‘em.”

“We should ‘a got off at Fuda Station.” Katie said.

“Let’s not think about it.” Said Susan.

“Think about what?” Katie said pushing her shoulder into her sister’s again.

“I can’t remember.” said Susan.

“Then why are you walking so fast.” Katie said. “Hey, whatever the rumors are about Hebiyama… who cares?”

Susan was silent for a bit. “Me. I care.”

Katie released a quick sigh. “Yeah me too. Well, there it is… coming up… a hundred meters ahead… our wonderful and mysterious bamboo forest, Hebiyama.”

“Oh stop it. You’re scaring both of us.” Susan said.

The girls became quiet now, vigilant, absorbing the blackness of the bamboo forest of Hebiyama now spreading out beside them for hundreds of meters to the left and to the very edge of the road they walked.

Whatever or whoever was in there would only have to reach a single length of an arm to snatch them into the dark.

The more they tried to see and to listen at the total blackness, the more blinded and deafened they felt.

The rice paddies were carved flat into the earth ten meters below on the other side of the road and the racket coming up out of there from the bullfrogs didn’t help.

“This was a bad thing to forget about.” Susan said measuring out the words in monotone.

Katie countered to hold back her own accelerating pulse. “Not if you’re admiring the reflection of moonlight off the water to our right!”

“Maybe I’ll just keep walking.” said Susan.

“Wait.” Katie said.

“I’m walking; you wait.” Susan said.

“No wait. shhh.” Katie grabbed Susan’s forearm and lifted her index finger to her lips.

Now Katie was talking with her eyes wide open, darting glances between her sister and into the forest.

Seconds ticked by, then more seconds, and froze the young sisters into fear.

Katie’s index finger was still at her lips.

“Daijoubu?” suddenly came a man’s voice from the blackness. “Are you all right?”

“No!” the girls screamed and took off at a sprint.

“Run!” said Susan.

“I’m running!” Katie said.

They were two hundred meters from home, school backpacks and Shintaiso gear nearly flying off their shoulders. Katie and Susan spotted two men in suits getting into a car in front of their house. And the car drove away in the other direction.

“Who’s that?” Susan gasped.

“Keep running!” yelled Katie.

The girls threw up their arms to slow themselves down, landing out of breath and making loud thuds against their front door.

Katie groped for her house key and the two stood panting and the front door itself slowly opened.

The lights were off inside the house and they couldn’t see their grandmother’s face.

“Obá-chan? Obá-chan!” the girls chanted and stumbled into the house.

No response.

The girls stood at the entrance, their mouths still open, and stared at their grandmother who walked soundlessly down the hall toward a bedroom and clicked on a light and turned around.

Katie and Susan O’Brien were seeing a blank and distant look on their grandmother’s face.

“Obá-chan! There’s a man…” Susan started.

And Katie grabbed Susan’s arm again sensing trouble with their grandmother.

“Obá-chan, are you all right?” Katie said, and lay a hand on her shoulder.

“Are you sick?” Susan asked.

“Huh?” said their grandmother. “Oh. I’m fine.” Her eyes floating back toward the present now. Her voice still in another place.

“You don’t look so fine,” said Susan.

“Who was that? Those men who just drove off?”

“Oh, that was nothing… that was… um… they were lost… stopped for directions.”

“Why are all the lights off?” Katie asked.

Katie and Susan O’Brien stood looking at their grandmother. They had never seen anxiety in her normally calm eyes, never seen worry – or was it fear – tighten the muscles in her face.

“You’re out of breath.” said grandmother.

The girls grabbed each other’s hand.

“We were racing.” said Susan.

Katie nodded her head rapidly.

“Go and start your bath. Dinner’ll be ready soon.”

Introduction

Tokyo Twins looks at two issues -

what the roots of terrorism are, and what the end of terrorism might be.
Two new chapters, in both text and audio, will be posted each week to Pakistan Times.

Chapter 2
“Why can’t I get this!” Katie starts in a whimper and ends in a yell.

She is referring to the running back flips she performs with the intention of catching a hoop thrown precisely 20 meters at precisely 64 degrees.

It’s the beginning of the tumbling sequence… the final sequence, actually, in her competition routine.

Katie’s been working on this one for a while. She catches the hoop with her right foot – to forego the whimper and yell.

“I was doing it better three weeks ago!”

“Keep working, Katie! Again now. Concentrate.” said the coach. “You’re almost there!”

Susan worked mechanically on a similar tumbling run, with a ribbon instead of a hoop. The final catch after throwing the ribbon Susan does with her knees.

The coach is Inga Godotnova, a Russian Federation National Champion, Olympic medalist and one of the best in the world ten years ago.

Katie and Susan have been with her for a year, and say this about her.

“She’s nice,” Susan says.

“She’s good,” says Katie.

Well. “Nice” goes a long way with these two O’Briens. And “good”, for the girls, is high recognition – rarely a part of the deal.

In the past twelve months, Katie and Susan O’Brien have gone from the top tiers in Tokyo for their age group to the top tiers in Japan.

Shintaiso is now their chosen life.

Shintaiso is Rhythmic Sportive Gymnastics, or simply Rhythmic Gymnastics, these days.

Katie and Susan O’Brien began regular workouts nine years ago at five years old.

Their father, Henry O’Brien, would take them to a gym in Setagaya-ku every Saturday afternoon.

The girls said they enjoyed it. Henry thought it was cute. The girls could barely bend to touch their knees, let alone their toes…

Now, both mom and dad shake their heads in wonder at the progress the girls have made, somewhat quietly, without hype, without drama, one workout at a time,  stacking up the days gluing one upon the other with tiny bits of progress, or maybe none… a sturdy enough stack, well earned the girls feel, and now topping 3,000.

Their parents never talked to them about becoming champions. Not once.

They could simply look in their eyes to see the girls already knew what it is they’d be.

“Enough playing! Back to work!” said the voice of their coach.

A short break was coming to an end, and a dozen teenage girls, a few a bit younger, scattered and fetched a slew of mallets and balls, ribbons and hoops, a headband or two, and fell into a square of four girls across, three back.

In rhythmic gymnastics as in dance as in sumo you not only warm up you warm down.

Now it was time to warm down – not Katie and Susan’s favorite thing about Shintaiso.

The day was already long at the conclusion of practice, and still homework to do, a meal to help prepare then eating and cleaning-up and more homework just before bedtime.

Time spent commuting from home to school to gym  and then back home… daily riding on rail, or walking to one, or waiting at a station platform, tallies over three hours each day, three hours that might be spent getting homework done allowing more time to sleep.

But standing up in trains and subway cars crowded with people, not just shoulder to shoulder, but cheek to cheek and bellies to backs, makes it kinda hard to spread out your stuff, your assignments and books and papers and pens.

Susan O’Brien over e-mail recently corrected her cousin in America who was comparing the riding of Tokyo mass transit to getting canned with a mass of sardines.

“Not fair.” Susan said. “Sardines don’t have to listen for their station. Sardines don’t have to stand-up.”

But tonight there was one more concern going home.

One they usually didn’t have.

Someone was lurking, and maybe living in the thick bamboo forest next to their home near the Tama River.

Yes. A thick bamboo forest right in the middle of Tokyo… Hebiyama or Snake Mountain… set aside and protected by the government for ongoing archaeological research into the Japanese culture that flourished there by the very same river two thousand five hundred years ago.

the audio version of this chapter on mp3 is available here:

Chapter 3 will be posted next Wednesday.

Introduction

Tokyo Twins looks at two issues -

what the roots of terrorism are, and what the end of terrorism might be.
Two new chapters, in both text and audio, will be posted each week to Pakistan Times.

Tokyo Twins - Chapter 01 - mp3 audio

Chapter 1 - A bit about the Tokyo Twins.

This is a story about two Japanese girls whose names are Katie and Susan O’Brien. Sisters. Identical twins. Fourteen years old. Born in 1992 on New Years Day, the holiest day in the Japanese calendar.

Yet born removed by one pacific ocean and one continent away from this Japanese holiday, in the middle of a corn field, sort of, in the capital city of Iowa. No big deal in Des Moines.

At nine months old, in the arms of their parents, Henry and Mieko O’Brien, and tagging along at a distance their three-year-old brother Jack, they landed to live and to grow as a traditional Japanese family in the doll house suburbs of Chofu-shi Tokyo.

Typical Japanese teenage girls. (Yes, the word typical does apply here.) Good students. Good piano players. Good friends between themselves - mainly. Good friends to many friends they share. Way busier than they need to be. Without too much complaint.

It is a basic nature of Katie and Susan O’Brien, seemingly acquired before birth, to make serious ways of being serious, like practicing their particular sport five hours per day six day per week. Not counting lengthy daily travel times. Not counting practices performed at home.

And they have been running this weekly schedule for almost three years. Serious about their day-to-day lives, regardless of what else is going on. Merely growing up a kid in Tokyo is, by itself, rather serious stuff.

Katie and Susan O’Brien are athletes. Nationally ranked rhythmic gymnasts for their age, and naturally shooting for a spot on the Japan national team, and ultimately the Olympic team.

Surprisingly capable of practical jokes. Not the worn out jokes for twins - they find these boring - but subtle and devious jokes played upon those who would dare hurt the feelings or the physics of either or both… be they family, friend, or foe.

You’ll just have to get to know them and see for yourself.

You could sum it up this way: Katie and Susan O’Brien are cute as hell and tough as nails.

And I suspect they still would be whether they were growing up in Tokyo Japan or Des Moines Iowa or St. Petersburg Russia or County Cork Ireland, home of their Irish ancestry.

Perhaps you are thinking (after all many have and do) how can they really be Japanese with names like Katie and Susan O’Brien?

Their fellow citizens from time to time continue to raise the issue.

And here’s how the girls handle it: Katie and Susan O’Brien simply don’t care. They see themselves as Japanese.

So, in this land of pucker and bow they somehow radiate nonchalance… about: their foreign sounding names, about: their place of birth, about: their no doubt-about-it dark Irish features.

They wear each day a cultural shrug of their shoulders, knowing it isn’t the Japanese thing to do.

When Susan got clubbed in the mouth with an aluminum baseball bat at the age of four by an older bully kid at day-care, people that knew them, learned new this about them: Nobody challenges what makes them different from other Japanese children.

The girls established their intolerance for being singled-out early in their lives.

And they do so still, non-verbally for the most part, with eye contact that is eerily confident for anyone in life, let alone for two foreign looking teenage girls in a culture that considers such aggression with the eyes impolite or far worse.

Besides these few character traits, you couldn’t tell them apart from any other 14 year old Japanese girl.

Except, oh yeah, that dark Irish look about them, or Mediterranean?

Olive skinned, black hair, huge Castilian black eyes.

They were born travelers who yearly accompanied their father on one of his business trips to the US or to China or to India.

But they still made faces at one another whenever some stranger presumed they were native speakers of Hindi or Hebrew, Spanish or Arabic, Greek or French.

Besides these things mentioned, Katie and Susan O’Brien know the rules of Japanese life and play them to a tee.

Moreover, in this culture that doesn’t recognize the “natural” human tendency to occasionally make a mistake - besides what’s discussed above - neither and never do they.

They don’t accept mistakes of themselves, nor mistakes of others, and they are, at once, rather proud of that and rather frustrated too.

__________________________________________________

Chapter 2 will be posted in a few days.

The unit was shooting for the Hindi movie ‘Dastan’ which stars Anupam Kher, Rahul Bose and Sarika and is being directed by Santosh Shivan. ‘The entire film crew including Anupam Kher and Rahul Bose reached Pahalgam safely this evening,’ said the officer.

‘The vehicular movement in the area was disrupted by the sudden snowfall. It is snowing heavily in Chandanwari and in Pahalgam town. Some vehicles of the unit are still stranded near Chandanwari,’ he added. The crew has been busy shooting in and around the picturesque resort of Pahalgam for the past nearly 20 days.-SANA