Laila al-Zwaini

 I am devastated to learn of the untimely passing of Laila al-Zwaini, one of my closest people, on 19 April 2025. She was only 59.

She was an Arabist and a public intellectual in the Netherlands. She expounded the concept of "Dawla Madaniyya", through which she advocated for liberty and civil engagement rooted in Arabic history and culture. She also advocated strongly against attempts to impose strictly Western notions of democracy in the region.

There was something magical about her incredibly empathetic personality: she was loath to condemn, and was eager to engage in discourse to understand the causes of humanitarian conflicts. "Only when you can conduct a compassionate inquiry - without condemnation - into the psyches of all parties to a conflict", we had agreed in a private conversation, "can you discover a lasting solution to a problem".

Struck by the grief of her passing, I was compulsively going through our email correspondence. I am sure she wouldn't mind me sharing two more snippets from our private conversations:

30 January 2017

"Last week I was a guest in a tv-show (for Muslims mainly), and there was a young woman with a niqab who was for the first time on tv. I was the only person - next to the interviewer - whom she trusted to be at the table too, as I have never publicly condemned a woman's right to wear a face-veil, based on rule of law principles (although I strongly disagree, but that's personal)."

This story encapsulates brilliantly not only her affable nature, but also her approach to religious liberty. The veil was a "cultural right", which ought to be respected, even if she did not agree with it personally. These "cultural rights" in her framework were limited individual liberties, and did not extend to the mutilation or restrictions of others' right to choose otherwise. That was not, according to her, prescribed by shari'a.

31 March 2015

"Last week I participated in the Movies That Matter film festival in The Hague, it was really inspiring to meet such courageous human rights activists from all over the world. One of them was Dr Mukwege from Congo, "The man who mends women", this was the name of a documentary about him and his mission. As a gynaecologist, he has already 'mended' over 40.000 (!!) Congolese women who had been violently and sexually assaulted (and mutilated..) by men who use rape as a weapon of war. He now tries to get (such forms of) rape defined as a war crime by the international community and ICC.

So far, nobody else takes action... Congo is just not on the Western radar, only for their (blood)minerals...".

The Dr. Mukwege she was referring to received the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize!

A powerhouse intellectual she was, but not one who resided only in the ivory-towers of academia. She risked her life to work for peace in war-torn Yemen and Afghanistan with the United Nations.

Personally, she loved going on long bike-rides and runs - especially when the weather was sunny. She loved going to the movies and concerts, and engaging in meaningful conversations. She made the most wicked breakfasts too! She was a dreamer and she was a doer!

I loved her very much, and regret that we drifted apart some years ago. Apart from my personal loss, which won't be repaired, she has left behind a legacy of compassionate thought leadership in the field of Arabic studies. Recently, she worked on an eight-part documentary for Leiden University, "Sleutel tot het Midden-Oosten - De Oosterse Collectie in Leiden". In these videos, as Kurt De Belder puts it, "Laila al-Zwaini travels throughout Leiden in search of traces of Middle Eastern cultures and learns everything about what makes Leiden an Eastern city".

Ad Astra

 I am sitting at the edge of the jetty used by a ferry to take people to and fro the widest section of the third of the Rijn that flows next to our house.. The water is rippling, but not from any boat traffic,  but by the gentle breeze, which also makes the reed rustle. The sounds of frogs and aquatic birds seem to echo through the space around me, but they too are sonorous. It has been a long time since I have felt so at ease in my own skin.

My walk with my friend was long over, but i felt the need to walk some more. There is something sanguine about late Spring evenings. Sunlight fades ever so gradually that it allows one to appreciate the many hues of blue of the sky. And as the night draws its curtains on the sun, the nature of reflections in the water changes too. But one must be patient to discern these. 

At first I was busy making pictures, and my eyes were glued to the screen of my phone, which was busy keeping me "connected". And then I had the urge to slow down. It was funny, because just as I peeled the screen from my eyes, it seemed that there were no stars, even though the sky was cloudless.

"There may be no stars to sleep under", I thought to myself, "but I might as well let the lukewarm breeze blanket me". I am glad I did that. The momentary lack of stars was not a celestial fault, but rather my own... my eyes were battered by the intense glow of the screen! Thankfully, I let the screen glaze melt off my eyes, and very soon the stars began to reveal themselves one after another. Soon my eyes recovered enough to spot what seemed like a satellite - it was far too distant, and it moved much too fast to be a plane. I tried to follow its trajectory for as long as I could. No sooner than my gaze approached the horizon, did I realise that a blood red full moon had just arisen. 

I have been laying here for well over an hour now. Charlie has made himself comfortable as well. I know I must return home, but the lust of staying here a bit longer is stronger. Call it beauty, magic or whatever, I do not think a cliché could capture the gezelligheid (Dutch for "coziness") of my solitude under the stars and the moon. But it does seem to me that there we all may be able to experience this connection with nature, if only we looked away from the God forsaken phones for a while, every once in a while.

The moon has now risen a lot higher now. On that note, i must cease writing this letter on my phone at once, and lie down for a while again.

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We live in a world full of labels and isms

Can we not see its causing a chasm?

It’s right or it’s wrong, good or bad

If everything’s black or white

No colour – isn’t it sad?

Racist, elitist, castist and sexist

Socialist, capitalist, communist and anarchist

Atheist, egotist, hedonist, annihilationist

Oh my word – aren’t we but istists?

We point a finger – but what about me?

Ignorance is bliss – did I just point three?

Can we please live – respond, not react?

Agree not to harm, but forgive and disagree?

Don’t you see my friend, only then can we be free.

A peripatetic parent looks up in lockdown

 Generally, word associations seem difficult to replace. However, there may be some exceptional events that might create new ones that eclipse old associations. For example, most Cricket enthusiasts may have associated the term "twenty-twenty" with the game's shortest format. And then the year 2020 happened! 

Last night, the Netherlands embarked on its second total lockdown which will last 5-weeks. Whilst I was sanguine about reduced carbon emissions during the lockdown in spring, I find the prospects of Gaia staying home through this winter closure exsanguinating. Five days from winter solstice, scarce sunlight and the plummeting mercury afford few opportunities to play outside with other children. How are the two of us to stimulate her incredibly curious sponge of a mind for such a long time? After all, 5 weeks for her is the equivalent of just over 21 months for a 40-year old! 

After putting Gaia to bed last night, I left for my evening walk. It was an utterly unusual night, at least for the Netherlands. It is generally cloudy and often windy (no wonder the Dutch were early adopters of windmills) here. Last night, however, there wasn't a trace of cloud, nor so much as a breeze. Preoccupied with the consequences of lockdown for Gaia, however, my head was down as I walked in search for inspiration, not noticing anything out of the ordinary. It was only when I started walking next to a canal in the pitch dark did I notice the twinkling lights reflecting off it. No sooner than I looked up did the stars take my breath away.

It was new moon night, and yet it seemed that the celestial bodies had pronounced: "Let there be light"! In that instant I forgot about my anguish about lockdown, and ideas that had earlier seemed difficult started seeming more feasible!

Only a couple of days ago, Joline was mentioning about Jupiter and Saturn being closest to each other from Earth's vantage point in December 2020. Whilst Mars was easy to spot lording over the southwest of the Leiden sky (despite a bit more light pollution in that direction), I was unable to spot the other Jupiter and Saturn.

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I remember clearly the emotions I experienced when Joline and I discovered that we were going to be parents. The need to protect what was yet the abstract idea of our child against certain experiences to ensure that she has a better life than mine was visceral. 

School in Bombay was perhaps the worst time of my life. A single, ill-trained teacher managing as many as 85 students in one classroom; in a culture subscribing to humiliation and unfettered corporal punishment as a mode of disciplining recalcitrant boys like me could not have yielded happy memories. Those memories fuelled the thought that we ought to homeschool our child. 

I had already begun fantasizing about using the Socratic method to help her - who was but an embryo - find answers to questions herself. I was daydreaming about travelling with her to the Bastille and Jallianwala Bagh whilst studying the French Revolution and the Indian freedom struggle respectively; or to the Savanna or Tundra whilst studying geography.  In my mind, this couldn't be achieved by sending her to "normal" school, but in truth I was just afraid of my memories of school. 

Joline and I have managed to realise some of those daydreams about helping Gaia find her own answers. But none of those ideas excludes her from going to school in the Netherlands, which is nothing like the one I went to in India of the 1980s and 1990s.

One of my daydreamed ideas that has materialised, but only partially, is that Gaia loves asking questions about, and discovering, the natural world. She loves asking questions about wildlife. Not only can she say the words, but she has also digested concepts such as metamorphosis and hibernation. She also loves heavenly bodies, and knows vaguely some elements of the Solar system. I had always dreamed of having an amateur telescope at her disposal to discover nebulae, planets and their rings. And that we do not have. 

Failing to spot Saturn and Jupiter last night, I rushed back home to check what Joline was talking about. According to National Geographic, those two, brightest planets of the solar system will engage in a celestial dance on winter solstice for the first time in 397 years! 

I am trying to find out if we can rent a cottage in Schiermonnikoog, the smallest of the inhabited Wadden islands of the Netherlands for winter solstice to witness the event. Schiermonnikoog has the darkest skies of the country from where one can spot 3000 stars with the naked eye, provided there is no cloud cover, of course! Perhaps it is not possible to acquire the right telescope before 21 December 2020, but I shall try nonetheless. Hopefully the celestial powers will say "let there be light" again; so we shall go to a dark place to see it!

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Today was day 1 of lockdown, and it went swimmingly. Gaia ate all her meals well, and had a lot of fun solving puzzles and reading about african wildlife in her new TeePee tent. Luckily, it was a sunny afternoon, and she was able to play with some other children in the neighbourhood park - wearing her brand new pair of sneakers for the first time. But we have 34 more days to go!

Homeschooling may have been an irrational idea back when Gaia was conceived, but it is the only way out now. Serendipitously, I am unemployed at the moment, and can devote the time. One does wonder how working parents are going to cope though!

A key to happiness

We recently bought a Jaguar sports car, and it puts a smile on my face each time i drive it. Last week, i went kayaking for the first time in four years, and arrived at the kayaking club in the Jag.

There i met Bob - an old member of the club in his sixties - who has Alzheimer's disease. Bob had been an adventurer in his younger days and traveled to Africa by bicycle from the Netherlands. He loves fixing things, and one often sees him welding broken rudders at the club. When asked what was new, I told Bob about our new house, new child, new jobs etc., and my friend added: "and a new car". "Which car", asked Bob. I sjowed him the key, with the picture of an angry feline on it.

"I don't know this brand, which one is it?"

"What do you see on the key fob, Bob?"

"A tiger."

"Which other big cats can you think of?"

"A jaguar.. jaguar.. you've got a Jaguar!!!", Bob was delighted to have finally solved the mystery. And his joy was contagious. 

Despite his handicap, and the knowledge thereof, I have always found Bob to be one of the happiest people I know. He has never been bothered by things he cannot do, but does everything he can to the best of his ability, and to the utmost enjoyment.

My best friend and i often talk about the meaning of happiness. Walking along a canal a couple of days ago, i had an epiphany: one of the keys to happiness is to celebrate possibilities rather than mourning what one might perceive to be impossible.

Both poles are as cold!

It is unlikely that global warming was the cause, but my frosty relationship with Fritzie had begun to thaw. But like climate change, the warming was erratic and yielded some tempestuous interactions, two of which stand out.

Meditation

Writing my PhD was an intense experience in which I meditated on how some things worked and how they did not. I meditated on what was intended and what was being achieved - what the gaps were, and what were their causes. And a cause is key to a solution. 

At times, I could not sleep for days at end, finding nothing. And when, out of sheer exhaustion, my consciousness slipped away,

Law in a democracy: an eventual choice between elective dictatorship or mob justice?

As a lawyer, one is hardwired to distinguish between what is legal and what is illegal. One is hardwired to defend those who society may view as despicable for their actions, which may be repugnant to one's sensibilities, but are not illegal. After all, as defenders of democracy, lawyers are hardwired to jealously defend the rule of law, against the rule of sentiment. Aren't we?

Racist Gandhi?

Recently, I invited a Donald Trump admirer (who has the honesty to admit that she would have voted for certain elected dictators had she lived in those times) to read Gandhi's 'The Story of My Experiments with Truth'. But she said it was too long for her. So she tried German Wikipedia instead. Soon I received a text message from him: "Hey Dhruv, I have read the part where he is in South Africa - he seems to be a thorough racist."  She followed it up by some corroboratory evidence in an email which said: "They must have read Wilipedia: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34265882".

an exceptional traffic story (the discovery of India road trip)

22 December 2015

Fabian was very keen to visit one of the waterfalls near Khajuraho, but Tim was not, since he wanted to write postcards. So Fabian, Joline and I decided to go. The drive lasted a couple of hours, but we never made it to the waterfalls. We did not correctly insert the address in the GPS device, and it took us to the end of the street on which our Ashram was situated. But that part of the street was perhaps the most chaotic little street I had seen. Scores of motorbikes, bicycles, feral cattle, bullock carts, busses, hand carts, hawkers selling vegetables. So we decided to properly enter the address for the waterfalls in the GPS device and we were set in motion. Very slowly.

Khajuraho (the discovery of India road trip)

22 December 2015

Of all the places we have visited so far, Khajuraho was the most overrated destination so far. I had expected to discover many more nuances about this city and its culture, but it seems to me that there isn’t much more than what has been published about it already. The only other culture on display was one in which touts chased tourists to sell their wares. The city is essentially a dust bowl, and a few temples from the Chandela Empire. The temples are pretty, no doubt, but the few that have remained have been so overexposed that there is almost no sculpture one hadn’t seen before in pictures. The sculpture of Varaha – the third avatar of Vishnu as a wild boar – was most impressive. One that I had not seen before, the sculpture was a stylised representation of a boar. The stone is minutely sculpted to bear distinct representations of about a thousand gods, goddesses over its body.

Koliwada (the discovery of India road trip)

Sunday, 13 December 2015

Incredible as it was, the last bit of the lawsuit work had spilled over, and I had to go to notarise my affidavit at 08:30, this morning – a Sunday morning. But once this was done, it was done, and finally, we were able to go to Elephanta. It took us all day and we took one of the last ferries back to Bombay. We were rather tired and hungry when we returned home at about 19:00.

Salty breeze from the Arabian Sea & Prince of Wales Museum (the discovery of India road trip)

Writing from memory at dawn on 18 December 2015

Friday, 11 December 2015

I am a witness for my father in a court case, and I was supposed to spend the morning at the lawyers’ offices. The plan was to thereafter visit the Elephanta Caves, and see some of old Bombay. However, the morning extended into the evening, and I returned home only at about 18:30. I was afraid that JF&T would be bored, and annoyed with me. But it seemed they were quite happy to have found the time to relax, and recover from the fatigue.

Thespo (the discovery of India road trip)

Thursday, 10 December 2015

I have a rather close bond with Thespo - my favourite theatre festival. It provided me with great relief in what I see as the dark years of my identity crisis. Those were the days when parents worried about what I would make of my life. Keen on helping, they pressured me to choose between Chartered Accountancy and a Masters of Business Administration. I did occasionally cave into these pressures, but only to drop out of the various coaching classes I enrolled with. They realised that I would often miss my CA coaching classes to hang out to the office of Q Theatre Productions, which were the Thespo headquarters on 26 July 2005 – the day when torrential rains flooded Bombay like never before or since – and I had to stay there for a few days. They warned me not to waste my time with theatre thereafter. When I decided to not head their warnings, and to be part of the production team for the festival anyway, they asked me to choose between staying at home and Thespo. The choice was obvious. It was going to be the place where I had the space to think for myself, be respected for who I was, and which let my creative energies freely flow. I chose Thespo.

As luck would have it, we arrived in Bombay during Thespo, and there was no way I was going to miss it. Braving jetlag and fatigue, I decided to go watch a few performances at Prithvi Theatre, which is one of the festival venues. Curious about the cultural scene in Bombay, Joline, Fabian and Tim (I will collectively refer to them as JF&T) decided to join too. So, after the walk, we were off to Thespo.

just arrived (the discovery of India road trip)

Thursday, 10 December 2015

Arriving in Bombay was a bit of a disappointment. Aesthetically, the airport has been vastly improved, but come to the immigration hall, and there were only about a third of the booths occupied by officers, and the queues were simply chaotic. People going under barriers to get ahead, or simply walking past the queue and protests with a smugness writ large on their faces were annoying and disheartening. And, of course, the legend of the giant toilet bowl – one is treated to the aromatic treat of ammonia as soon as one lands in Bombay – continues! I had lived here long enough to know, and have visited a number of times since I first left for the Netherlands to experience a reverse shock. So I will write about the constant honking, visible plumes of smoke and soot, slums et al.

In the midst of it all, Tim, Fabian and I decided to go for a walk in the neighbourhood, but ended up walking more. We walked to my school, college, and some other places where I spent a lot of time in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Not all was the same, but even where the places looked different, the heat, the dust, and the smells took me back to when, for some seemingly inexplicable reason, I loved the searing summer heat. But it was not inexplicable anymore:

about to depart (the discovery of India road trip)

Wednesday, 9 December 2015

At long last, the day has arrived. After two months of hard work and little sleep, the day finally comes when we must fly to India. It is my first vacation of this year, and I am very much looking forward to it. Yet the excitement is not as palpable as I would have imagined it would be. With about 2-4 hours of sleep every weeknight, and no exercise to speak of, my body is fatigued, and my mind is abuzz with thoughts about international tax law. My constitution seems to be numbed, and I do not feel so very much.

The road to India

Having discovered our compatibility in South Africa in 2013, Joline was excited to plan the next adventure together – preferably to India, my country of birth. I had equally enjoyed our African adventures, but was more anxious to get cracking on my doctoral thesis than intent on going for another vacation anytime soon. So, we decided to plan on travelling abroad only in the winter of 2016, when I expect my thesis to be firmly on track. Also, I was not so keen on returning to the country I had left for good. But by June 2015, it became clear that I was going to spend the better part of 2016, and the first quarter of 2017 in the US for my doctoral work, and a vacation before the end of 2017 was unlikely.

...rhetorical in Maastricht

So, I was invited to participate in a debate on the motion that “The European Union should accept more refugees from the Syrian Arab Republic”. I thought it was interesting, and I was happy to accept. But only subsequently was I told that I must argue against the motion!

Loveless in Mannheim; Confused in Dossenheim

11 October 2015

Having car-pooled from Herzogenrath - a German town close to the Dutch border near Maastricht - I arrived in Mannheim late this evening, and went to the tram station to go to Dossenheim. It was the first time I had carpooled, but the pleasantness of the journey had left me underprepared for what I was about to encounter.

The eye of an angry God - 2

The Netherlands is not exactly a place frequented by clear skies, but we had a cloudless sky in Maastricht when it mattered! 

After a few cups of hot chocolate, a friend and I trekked to a field on a nearby hilltop - away from most city lights - and set up the telescope near the Dutch-Belgian border. We stayed up the entire night to see the celestial shadow-works and it was spectacular! It was wonderful to have the optical aids to see Earth’s shadow engulf the moon, crater by crater!

But not everything went as planned.