In a society which forbids a lot of things, many people end up doing them in the privacy of their homes.
NIDERRAU, GERMANY: This is with reference to Feisal H Naqvi’s article of September 6 titled “Dancing for joy? Haw hai!”.
In a society which forbids a lot of things, many people end up doing them in the privacy of their homes. In the West, the situation is different and the sexes can mix publicly and this is not frowned upon by society at large. And, to quote the writer, such mixing does not need to lead to “like like”.
The more a state or society separates the sexes, the more acute their respective desires for one another become. In Pakistan, I notice that boys and men look at women in the streets the way a thirsty person looks at water. Women, of course, look at men when nobody is watching them. Otherwise they will be considered ‘fast’.
We should realise and understand that it is quite normal for men and women to be interested in one another and that this should not be discouraged. Of course, I am not suggesting that people in Pakistan should have freedom of the kind that their counterparts in the West have but we need to be a bit less rigid. And nobody has the right to call anyone who does this an ‘infidel’.
Sharif Lone
Published in The Express Tribune, September 8th, 2011.
