June 18, 2005

blo.gs and politics

A friend called me yesterday from Sydney, Australia for a little chat about jobs, marital status and so on, but he was clearly burning with a not-so-comfortable question that finally came out hesitantly:
"Did you vote?”
"Hell No!", I replied.
The day before yesterday, Iranians went to the polls to elect a new president.
Actually, a body of six theologians appointed by the Supreme Leader and six jurists nominated by the judiciary and approved by parliament, has the power to bar candidates from standing in elections (see this page ), then the filtered candidates can run for president and people are always encouraged to participate in elections.
Don’t you love this kind of democracy?
My friend was saying that political change had always been very slow and arduous. “Would 80 years suffice for a democratic change in a political system?” I said. Then we agreed that we had to get involved in some kind of changing people’s intellectual culture, instead. I said “yeah, I have always been into that”, remembering my trip to Tehran two years ago. Then and there, the pretty girls that I met were all into some sort of intellectual act, like writing poems, translating literary works, and talking mysticism. So when I rented a nice apartment in a decent neighborhood in Tehran for two months, I started asking the girls to come over for a coffee and some “cultural activity”.
They all laughed!
The dot, by the way, in blo.gs in the title of this entry, is not a typo. http://www.blo.gs , a weblog ping service that endears me most to blogrolling, was acquired by Yahoo last week. This is good news folks, good news!

June 18, 2005 07:16 PM