PERFECT SYMMETRY

I was watching one of the Iraqi dish channels earlier today (there are like a thousand of them!! each with a different political or social agenda … that says a lot about their unity). It was a game show. The bottom line was … the funniest team wins. In one of the challenges, they asked each team to nominate somebody to tell a funny poem. One of the poems left me rather perplexed.

The poet started it off by talking about the lack of security in Iraq these days … that there were bombing everywhere … he sets up the scene … he is in a bus in Baghdad … an old woman with a big bag sits next to him … he notices that she is rather huge and old … he does not feel good about her … she keeps checking that big bag of hers, and adjusting things in it. He starts thinking that she is a suicide bomber… He goes on and on talking about death and how certain it is. Everybody around him looked as somber as they can get. It was dead serious.

He went on …

So there he was facing certain death … he decides to do something …he grabs the bag and runs out of the bus! She chases him down the road … He finds out later that she was only rolling cigarettes.

Now the end might not be that funny (or funny at all). But the fact that Iraqis are able to see humor in their extremely grim situation is astonishing. I guess the same kind of resilience exists here…but never to this level!