Salma Farook's Blog

We have been conditioned to believe that the value of human life is something that fluctuates; a scoreboard of sorts. Being physically attractive means we’re re more worthy. Having more wealth and material possessions means we are owed more respect. Having a higher level of education and more accomplishments under our belts somehow equates with being more. More human, more worthy, more points on the scoreboard.

But we’re more than the sum of the opportunities that were handed to us and the use or disuse we made of them. We are more than our choices, than our mistakes, than our biggest trophies or stacks of gold. We cannot allow consumerism and capitalism to allow us to commodify something as priceless as humanity. 

The life as a homeless man isn’t inferior to the life of a president. The life of a thief not inferior to that of a priest.  We are not owed respect simply because we inherited wealth or even when we built it from scratch. We deserve every compassion, respect, every dignity and human right simply because we are human.

When death is the only promise that time keeps, do we really “own” anything more than our current breaths? In mere seconds, anything and everything can be taken from us. In the blink of an eye, we can have everything. We are merely custodians of this earth and every opportunity it represents; tasked with the accountability of leaving it better- or at the very least in minimum working condition- to the generation after us, and the people around us. 

Our wealth, our education, our every accomplishment simple tools that were both, presented to us and made use of by us, to better ourselves. To live more wholesome lives. To imbibe it with more meaning. To deal responsibly with the  materials, both abstract and concrete, that have been placed in our care in the short time that we will be here. 

To respect and honour all humans is to respect and honor yourself. To demean or indignify any human means to demean yourself. There is no hierarchy. Only accountability.

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Until challenged to think differently, I am more idealist than realist. Go back in time a couple years and ask me if all lives are equal, and I would look at you like you’re mad. Duh, all lives are equal.

Truth is, I never really thought about this. Until one day, I learnt the concept of triage. In a mass medical emergency (think a horrible multi-vehicle accident) a health care worker should split incoming patients into red (immediate attention needed but patient can be stabilised and saved), yellow (serious, but not immediately life-threatening) and green (need of minimum care, minor injuries). It’s pretty straight forward so far.

Then comes the black category; this consists of patients who are dead, or who are so close to death that they’re no longer a priority. I cringe as I write this, but the argument is infallible: if you have one life-saving machine and there are two people who need it, A and B, and A is likely to survive if he gets it, whereas B would probably die even if he does. Two is more than one. It’s math.

Even as the guileless child inside me screams at the unfairness of it; the realist keeps a steady argument going.

We give a death sentence to a serial killer because it will protect many innocent people. We allow animal testing to go on because we want our children to have safe medicines.

If forced to decide, I would want the driverless car to be programmed to swerve towards the old man, and then probably die of guilt.

Arguments on all of the above can keep going on and on and on. All sides will have valid points, both the idealists and the realists will continue an endless war. This used to disturb me.

A year ago, I would shy away from this conversation because it was too uncomfortable, too painful. Both sides seemed to be invalidating themselves when they took a side and said, it should be this way. I have slowly realised these arguments are healthy; they’re the only way forward when our inquisitive minds continue to push us along this path of evolution. These issues will keep coming up, and not because some lives are worth more or less, but because all lives are worthy, all life is precious. That’s why we argue and debate. Each and every life deserves an advocate and our words have mutual effects on our collective growth.

But aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?

The driverless car is something yet to come. Animal testing and vegan arguments are changing, evolving and are time-based according to the societal scenario we live in. We could all be forced to be vegan to save our planet in a few years. Animal testing could become obsolete with cell culture testing.

But aren’t there a few timeless issues when it comes to the value of a life?

The right to live.

The right to adhere to any faith.

The right to prosperity.

The right to dignity.

It’s okay if we mess up on the issues that are in the gray areas, clarity will eventually come, but what about the ones we’ve collectively agreed on?

They’re still being violated all over the world, and shouldn’t that be our focus? In my opinion, all lives are equal (idealist, sorry) but life isn’t worth anything if we aren’t creating a better world.

Politics will use propaganda to make you believe that these fundamentals are as debatable as the right to eat meat, but they’re not. Insinuation and divide-and-rule ideologies can make us subconsciously act as if some people are more worthy than others, especially when identity triggers are used. We need to stop falling for this. Humanity changes, it evolves. What seems relevant now wasn’t so a thousand years ago, and who knows where we’ll be a thousand years from now, but the basics are the basics.

I’ve heard events of decades ago (They destroyed our mosques! – They forced all the Brahmins out.  – This land belonged to us in the first place!) used to validate cruelty of today, human rights violations happening now.

Listen, it wasn’t okay then. It isn’t okay now. It never ever will be okay.

No human should suffer because of the colour of their skin or their belief system or  their demands for dignity and freedom.

We’ve agreed on this.

Now we only need to remember it.

When TV polarises humans into radical groups, we should remember we are the same.

When some people are projected as “other”, we should remember that we all fall in love the same way.

When politicians use events of yesterday to collect todays votes, we should remember that we all bleed red.

When lines are drawn between us, and we are set up as enemies even before we realise it, we should remember that we cry and laugh in the same language.

We don’t have to agree on everything.

We don’t all have to be the same.

Unity in diversity is so much more powerful than uniformity.

Live, and let live.

Because all lives are equal, all lives are worthy.

We are different. We are one.

We are capable of world peace.

All my love,

Salma

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I’ve always been a dreamer. You know when you are a child and you cook up the most titillating scenarios in your head just before sleeping, hoping it will translate into a wonderful dream? I still do that. I didn’t let adulthood convince me that I’m not the pink power ranger with the additional ability to fly.

Dreaming, whether awake or asleep, is a wonderful state of being. It is your mind putting away all of it’s doubts, insecurities and giving itself over completely to it’s desires. It’s potent, it feels good but enough dreaming! It’s time to get moving!

Move it, move it.

I tend to get stuck at the dreaming/planning phase, and I guess many of us do. As a child, I dreamt of being one of the youngest published authors ever, but I didn’t muster up the courage and diligence needed to complete a manuscript and publish anything until I was almost done with Med-school.

This state of dreaming is fun, comfortable, cosy. It’s absolutely risk-free. It gives you the glowing happiness of achievement without you actually doing anything and that is exactly why it is so dangerous. Ten years went by and I had only published a book in my imagination.

So if you’re here, telling yourself that you’re just standing at the peak, admiring the view before you leap, I’m here to remind you (and myself) to jump already!

“The world is not a wish granting factory.” I’m not asking you to jump because it’s easy or because everything is going to go perfectly according to plan, and your dreams will self-realise themselves. Not at all. The opposite is true. Things are going to fly into your face. On your dream trajectory to success, the parachute is going to have a faulty deploy mechanism and crash and burn, but you’ll get back up from the rubble and the dust (Avengers theme music in the background), look back up and know exactly what you need to do to make it through the next time.

Mistakes are the best teachers and you can’t make any if you’re stuck in the dreaming phase. Start moving, start doing; it’s the only path to progress.

If I could give you one tip to get started, it would be this:

WRITE DOWN YOUR GOAL

You’ve probably heard this one a million times but, not surprisingly, a “Publish a book!” reminder in my diary didn’t get me to do anything for so many years.

SO WHEN YOU WRITE DOWN YOUR GOAL, BREAK IT DOWN INTO 10-12 MAIN STEPS YOU WOULD NEED TO DO TO REACH THAT GOAL, WITH REALISTIC DEADLINES FOR EACH.

For example, in my case it was:

Complete writing the manuscript (By December 2018)
Get illustrations done (By February 2019)
Create an ebook
Choose a self-publishing company
Print my book
Sell my book

Reading back on this makes me smile at my naiveté. In reality, there are about a half a dozen steps that I missed or hadn’t thought off. Each obstacle and roadblock needed additional steps to work through, but that’s okay; this was a good place to start.

NOW TAKE EACH STEP AND BREAK IT DOWN INTO DAILY TASKS THAT YOU CAN KEEP YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE FOR.

Keep doing this until you can tick off the first step and move to the second. For example,

Complete my manuscript becomes “Write at least twenty minutes everyday.” The simpler your daily tasks are the better.

COME BACK TO THIS PAGE OFTEN

You will need to keep coming back and adjusting this page every day depending on the obstacles you face and the things you learn when you actually start to do instead of dream.

It’s not going to be easy, but it sure is fun!

Much love,

Salma

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Someone once told me that the release of my book would be like my own baby coming out. I didn’t really feel it for my first book “What Your Soul Already Knows” but it hit me straight in the solar plexus this time with “The Octopus Curse”.

How is a book like a baby you ask? Well, here’s a list:

It took me 9 months to make it.
I’ve gotten all hormonal over it, even cried a few times.
It’s a damned painful process yet bafflingly wonderful at the same time. (HOW?!!)
I love it more than is good for my personal health (I see moms of toddlers nodding.)
It makes me so happy when someone says. “OHMYGOD, your book (baby) is so beautiful!”
And it is so darn beautiful isn’t it… (see how I get all mushy?)

This is the reason why I haven’t been all that active on social media, and I thank everyone who messaged to check up on me. You’re the best.

A by-product of two cultures fusing, I have always felt a little lost in my skin, and traveling has always made me feel better. The more I traveled, the more I realized that although women were different in many ways, divided in many ways, whether it be by culture or clothing style, race or religion, size or life-choices, some things were always, always the same, no matter how far I went. The light in a girl’s eyes when she sees chocolate, the way a mother touches her baby’s cheek, tears, laughter, sorrow and joy; across all these bridges, the whole of womankind met and merged.

I saw a bit of myself in every woman I met, and that finally gave me the courage to share my poetry of over ten years. I realized we need to celebrate these bridges that so beautifully unite us.

I’m sure this bookbaby has a lot more to teach me, but even before it’s launch on November 1st 2019, it has taught me so much!

If you’re thinking about self-publishing a book, there are some mistakes that I wouldn’t want to repeat if I had the chance to start all over again.

1) Do not start before you’ve finished, aka, complete your manuscript! First things first! Write, then rewrite. Self-edit a thousand times, until it sparkles like a diamond. Then give it to a few other people (editors) who will shoot some bullets into it, so you can see all the cracks and weak points and fix them. It can be difficult, painful even, to hear criticism of your hard work, but this is necessary. You will thank yourself later.

2) Do not ignore or be dismissive of other books in your genre. Read, read, read…read books in the genre you write. Hold them in your hand, sniff them, sleep with them under your pillow. There is so much to learn for anyone who is self-publishing by taking a good, long look at the books already on the market and doing well. For example, the themes that are more likely to sell. I don’t believe that should be the criteria for deciding what you want to write. You should write what you love to write, but knowing what is more likely to sell would guide you in things such as deciding if you want to offset print a thousand copies or offer print on demand for every single order that is placed. You would also learn a lot about the style of the current books in the genre, and might even see some things that inspire you. For me, it helped me decide which poems to include in the book, and guided me as to which were the ones others would, more probably, enjoy.

3) Do not rush the process, but set a deadline. This may seem paradoxical but it’s essential. You need to set a deadline, a release date for your book and work towards it. If you don’t or if you keep changing it, you are in danger of never actually feeling satisfied enough with your book to actually get to publishing it. It makes it difficult to plan other things around your launch as well. At the same time, you cannot rush the process. Changes done in haste, are rarely done well. So the deadline needs to be concrete, but also reasonable. I would say for any book would require atleast 8 to 12 months of work after the manuscript is completed to be ready for printing and release, but it would also depend on the exact work, as each one would have different requirements.

4) Do not try to design your own book cover. I actually didn’t make this mistake, but I know others might be tempted to; Do not compromise on this. Your cover is the first thing that someone sees, and the whole “don’t judge a book by its cover” doesn’t fly too far in today’s visually excitable world. If you’re a talented who-ha with incredible Photoshop skills, it’s still the same. Don’t try this one.

5) Do not make major decisions based off a screen. It is impossible to make a wise decision solely by looking at a laptop screen, and even worse a phone screen. A simple black and white print (to size) would give you a better idea how things would look on paper. For example, a size 16 font is NOT appropriate for a poetry book. I have no idea what I was thinking. In fact, I realized I wasn’t very happy with the size 14 that’s currently in my book…after I had gotten a thousand copies printed. Not fun. Not at all.

6) Do not make full page illustrations with fixed blank boxes. I don’t know how relevant this is to you, but it’s something I learned the hard way. In The Octopus Curse, I asked the illustrator to draw the patterns after already deciding and delimiting the box spaced in which the poem was on the patterned pages. Later in the process, I decided to change the size of the book, and I couldn’t (easily) adjust the boxed areas because they were pre-drawn into the pattern itself. The wiser thing to do would have been to ask for patterns covering the whole page, and then place a blank box wherever I needed. It would have saved a whole lot of (unnecessary) pain.

7) Do not be careless with the proof copy. Before the final printing cycle, make sure to request a proof copy of the book. Go over this copy with the utmost care. This is the last chance you get to fix anything you might have missed or anything you are not satisfied with. Carelessness costs money, time and emotional energy. It’s a golden rule.

8) Do not despair. Self-publishing a book is one hell of a bumpy ride. Sometimes, you are going to feel like it’s just not worth it. You will feel it in your gut that it’s a failure, that it isn’t going to sell more than ten copies. You may be right. It might not sell more than ten copies, but it’s definitely not a failure. You’ve created something out of nothing. You’ve put a little bit of yourself out there. It doesn’t even matter how many you sell, you’ve accomplished so much already.

PS: There are ways to make sure your book doesn’t sell just ten copies. More on that in another post.

Meanwhile, for residents of India, the book is currently available for pre-order with an early bird discount of 40%; this is the lowest the price will ever be. You can use the coupon code SALMA40.

Much love,

Salma

 

 

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I’ve been trying to write this post for three days now, and I’m still not sure that I’ve got it right.

July 2k18 has been THE dream month for me. I recently finished Med school, and as a kind of victory dance, my husband and I did a one-month Asia trip. Starting from Malaysia, to Thailand, and then to Cambodia; it was incredible.

For all intents and purposes, this trip was supposed to ‘fix’ me. I imagined I would come back, thirty-one days later, and the creative juices would just flow. Come August, I was definitely supposed to be a more inspired/inspiring person.

To be honest, it’s not quite working out like that.

Sure, I’m not the same person I was when I started July 2k18. But where, and how do I start telling you about how I became the (still-confused) person I am now?

Do I go in chronological order?

Backwards, maybe?

Or should I just pull out random strands of time, and hope you get the bigger picture?

I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out.

I am so full, and overflowing with all the places I’ve been to and the people I’ve met, that coherency seems in short supply.

The one thing I do know for sure, is travelling makes you see everything differently. All your theories about life and people get fragmented, until the only thing that remains is the trust that there’s always something you don’t know, always some miracle or another waiting just around the corner.

I travelled looking for answers, but now, I have more questions than ever.

And maybe, that’s exactly what I needed. Possibly, it’s what we all need. Because to genuinely ask a question, demands that we have the innate open-mindedness and tolerance to wade through all the answers. Even those that challenge everything we believe in.

There’s no growth in being stagnant, the only way to get places is to flow.

It’s how rivers become the ocean, and how words, I hope, will one day, become world peace.

 

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Sometime today, I will be publishing my very first book. I’m kinetic with the excitement of it all.

WYSAK has been such a wonderful journey; it holds a very special place in my heart because it is the very first piece of me that I will be sharing with the world, at large.

I started writing very young; it is the form of expression that feels the most natural to me. But, for the longest time, I stopped completely. I thought I had lost that part of myself, until one day, I was reminded that it was too precious to lose.

It was incredibly difficult to start again; frustrating and consuming.

Now it feels terrifying to put it out there.

But, put ourselves out, we must.

Sure, not everyone is going to like it. It might not go very far at all. We put ourselves at risk, holding up a part of ourselves for criticism, maybe ridicule. We stand up, knowing full well that we may take a shot, or a hundred.

But, stand up, we must.

So as I take this monumental step, I encourage the same of you:

Write that dream book.

Be brave with that start-up.

Go on that trip.

Step on that stage.

Find your voice and say whatever you’ve always wanted to say.

In a perfect world, we would all be bravehearts ready to put more of ourselves outside of us, without skin and bones for protection.

The part of you that you anchor out at sea, independent of you, is resilient. It is you but, it is greater than you. In a very elemental way, it is different from you:

It is immortal.

It is change.

It is hope.

So, take a little bit of your soul and put it out there into the world. Yes, it might get bruised and trampled on. Yes, the world is scary.

However, I say your focus is wrong. You’re looking at it from the wrong end. It’s not about what the world can do to you, it’s about what you can do to the world.

And you?

You can do wonders.

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