REHANA BLOGS

In the entire span of my short life, I have missed five flights, two international ones included. Maybe there’s an art to it, I wouldn’t know. It seems remarkably easy, after the first time you do it. And sometimes, it’s just the first flight that matters, and all the connecting ones are lost too. Sometimes, you land in different cities, and sometimes, your luggage gets left in Nairobi, three connecting flights away. In that case, it never helps to make a fuss; you might just as well go on to your final destination, and include the lost luggage in your nightly prayers. In time, it shall make its way to where it was supposed to be in the first place, and if you’re lucky, it’ll only be slightly wet. If you’ve had the foresight to pack it up with plastic paper to avoid moistness, odds are that you won’t be missing your flight in the first place. If you have a habit of chatting all the time, as I do, you have to be more careful. Once, I began chatting with a colleague, and the next thing I...

Sometimes when you meet a person, you instinctively know that that person will feature in your life henceforth. It’s like a decision taken that cannot be accounted for by personal choices; neither taste, nor religion nor race. It’s more a subconscious understanding between two people. If I were poetic, I’d say that it was a meeting of the auras that surround us, before it becomes a conscious meeting. When you read The Fountainhead, you come across this scenario, where Howard Roark meets Dominique’s husband for the first time. He comes prepared to hate Gail Wynand for being his lover’s husband, and yet, that first time the two meet; there is no consciousness of anything apart from the feeling that they’ve known each other forever; that perhaps they were part of the same soul in another life. Past relationships cease to exist in that moment, and Dominique becomes just another person in both their lives. It is an inherent feature of human beings in this world that we tend to believe i...

When Kenya first became a republic, in the year 1964, a freedom fighter, Jomo Kenyatta, came to the fore, and was declared the first president of Kenya . He sat on the throne from 1963 to 1978. He had been a war veteran, involved in the MauMau uprising, and consequently, had spent a lot of time in prison. He was the pioneer of political leadership in the land, and unfortunately for the Kenyans, managed to wear the mantle of leadership very fixedly upon his shoulders. The ashes of the British Empire in Kenya had not yet begun to settle when the first rumbles of discontent were heard. Crime was high. Birth rate was high. Poverty levels continued to ascend, as slums began to rise up from previously prospering areas. Why was this great country bowed so low? At the time of independence, the economic status was at par with most of the Asian countries. Ten years later, Kenya was just another third world country. The world was laughing. What had happened? Ignorance had its uses, a...

After everything that has happened in this country, the election of the Speaker for the Parliament and Legislative council was a bit of an anticlimax. The rich ones are still in the fight of the High Seat, and the poor are in the fight for their lives. And yet, the two seem to merge, in that their needs can be considered to be quite similar. If by similar, one can equate life with power. Or food with influence. It is laughable, really, that the president of a democratic country has lost the respect of his people, his subjects. For what else can one call it, when the members of parliament refuse to pledge allegiance to him. Let us start off with the scenario that took place when a lawyer by the name of Ababu Namwamba was sworn in. He had to make the pledge three times. The first time, he said that we would be a subject of his president, Mr. Raila Odinga, and of the democratic republic of Kenya . Now why he would mention Mr. Odinga, when the president’s name is Mwai Kibaki, is beyo...

Life is a comedy. One moment in time, I’m on a rainbow, dancing upon the beams of light, absorbing the different hues, and radiating them. The next, I’m in a pit, too deep to climb out, yet too shallow. I can observe the world enjoying, but I can’t enjoy with them. And then comes another moment, where everything is the way I want it to be, but nothing is the way it should be. Who was it who said that day by day, everything is the same, but at the end, everything’s changed? For a long time, I’ve been in a cocoon, protected from the fallacies of the universe, and its people. And when I came out, it was strange and different. Assaulted from all sides by the views and opinions of people I find I can’t tolerate, I try my best to make do. What happened to the ego? What happened to thinking for yourself? They say its all about you now. We’re modern, they say. The world is at your fingertips. Grab out and catch hold of what you want, and never let go. They say. Is it true? Is it right? One won...