Zain

Ami miskin ki ar bolbo boss?To understand me you really have to understand the words miskin and gorib, which really have no appropriate English translation. Well actually they have a pretty straightforward literal translation, they mean poor, as in a poor person begging for money on the street. But you also have to understand what those words meant to my whole group of friends, an entire class of kids at Sunbeams School. My school, the school I went to all my life until age 16 and not just some creche, nursery or daycare center, was called Sunbeams. When I was young my cousin Tiger and I(and later on my friend Shov)would play this game called "Gorib Manush" - which translates to "Poor Man". In it i was the gorib manush and I would ask tiger (or later shov with tiger as his faithful manservant) for money. I would be refused the money and then Tiger and Shov would swear at me and beat me (in play of course, i'm sure this already sounds weird but it wasn't some kind of sick childhood S & M fantasy). And that was the whole game, every single time it was some variation on this simple but (to us at least) incredibly hilarious theme. When we were about 14, we realized that goribness permeated our entire existence, that there were a million little aspects of our lives and the world around us that were just incredibly, inexplicably gorib. And nothing was (and to this day among my friends nothing still is) as funny and profound as revealing the goribness, the fundamental goribota of the world around us. And I, Zain Ali, floating in an endless sea of gorib, was (and am) more gorib than most people could ever dream of being. I was a beacon of higher goribness, the original Gorib Manush. so when were we about 16 or 17 and started smoking pot and the goribness just got plain out of hand i was given a special title, honoring my excess of gorib:Miskinmiskin is a derogatory term used by saudis to refer to migrant workers from Bangladesh, the one who do all the really shit jobs. my friend shov discovered the word when he was translating docs for an NGO about migrant labourers. It was from an interview with a migrant workers complaining about terrible conditions and lack of respect from the native Saudis and the man (let's say his name was Bulbul) said something along these lines:"They treat us so badly here, they even call us miskin to our face."And so since that day, when we got high at my house and shov told us that story, they have called me miskin.I'm sure that most of you won't know what to make of this and that some of you may be offended and it may not be PC enough for the despicable mediocrity that parades down the falls of liberal arts colleges, but none of you were there. none of you experienced what we did in that great country they call Bangladesh, on the filthy, gorib streets of that great, thriving metropolis that they call Dhaka. So fuck you.