A Tale of Two Faisals

So, it turns out that Faisal Shahzad is just another spoilt brat from the developing world, with a massive sense of entitlement and and absolutely no self-awareness. "Why do you have to follow democracy?" asks Faisal, the well-funded son of a retired Pakistani airforce officer, in a long email to like-minded vipers. (Btw, someone needs to find out if the source of Faisal's father wealth is legit, or -as is common - just the well-known cornering of national resources by a corrupt power elite).

"Why do you have to follow democracy (Human-made laws) if you're already given Laws revealed from Allah, Quran and Sunnah?" asks the moron who went nightclubbing as an undergraduate at the University of Bridgetport, before he turned into the proverbial ungrateful viper. Why indeed, Faisal, why indeed? You answered that question very well, didn't you, you self-entitled jackass (can there be a hybrid viper-jackass)? In fact, if you have any more of such "divinely-revealed" laws for the world, well then, thank you very much, but no thanks. The world definitely does not need any more such laws as articulated by the babalog .



Half a world away, there is another Faisel. Dr. Shah Faisel, a resident of Indian Kashmir, lost his father to terrorism at a young age. An incident that might have broken him and his remaining family turned the young boy into something else. Instead of turning that rage into venom, and becoming a ticking timebomb against innocents, Dr. Faisel used the past seven years to turn himself into somebody worthy of celebration. He first studied to become a physician, then decided to take the extremely hard Indian Civil Services Exam, leaving home to study at the supportive Hamdard Study Circle in New Delhi. To give you an idea of just how hard it is to get through, in 2007 approximately 300,000 people took the exam, of which about 800 were finally selected. About the same numbers and proportions for this year too. And Dr. Shah Faisel was the topper, as in "stood first" in Indian English, the first Kashmiri to top the exam and to add to the pool of Indian Muslims within the ranks of India's policymakers.

Perhaps, it is because Dr. Shah Faisel was not one of the babalog, perhaps because his circumstances were so very different from his namesake buffoon in North America, perhaps because he had no one to give him regular cash infusions, perhaps because he didn't have an inflated sense of entitlement, that he was able to do something positive for himself, for the memory of his murdered father, and for his community. As he described the tragedy that struck him, "I had only two choices - to be bogged down, or to stand up and face the challenge." And unlike the cowardly Faisal of Bridgeport, the Faisel of Kashmir will be held up as a role model for other Indian Kashmiris to follow.