Bismillah. First post! On sinning.

This post is basically a speech I gave last year for the English Speaking Union Debate and came 2nd in the country with.  I had the opportunity to go to London for the international finals (flying first-class, all-expenses paid) but didn't as they were clashing with my exams. Stupid, right?
N.B. Speeches never look as good on paper.

Change (Renewal & Regeneration)

Bismillah hirRahman nirRaheem

Assalamualaikum ladies and gentlemen.

I plan to talk about personal change. How we try so hard to become better people, but fail miserably. But before all that, I want to tell you a story about myself.

I come from a very religious background. Hence, the beard. In my family, talking unnecessarily to unrelated members of the opposite sex is a big no-no. Needless to say, dating is out of the question. Having said that, I go to a co-educational institution as well, so you can imagine how things are for me. On one hand, there is the God and family whom I love more than anything else on Earth pulling at me and on the other hand there are the charming girls at school whom again, I love in a different way, more than anything else on Earth. Anyway, I go to school every morning and brace myself. Today I will not talk to girls, I won’t joke or hang around with them, I shall be this shining example of piety, the bastion of the values my family has inculcated in me since birth. I walk through the school gates, and see her. I think “Hey I’ll just go say hi, no harm in that. She’s a classmate and after all, one must be courteous to the ladies,” I finish rather lamely. And it’s all downhill from there. By home time, I have her number and email address and am just about to ask her out, when I see my dad at the school gates here to pick me up. My voice falters, “hey, umm, will you go …for chem class tomorrow?” I finish rather lamely again. But the reason I falter, the reason I don’t ask her out is that I see my dad’s long beard and the sincerity that radiates from his face, and I am ashamed. I think of how much I admire him, how cool I think he is, how much I want to be like him and I say, “That’s it. No more! I am going to renew myself from now on, I shall be a completely new Faysal. I will be the kind of guy whom mothers point out to their kids and say, “honey, why can’t you be like him?”” Basically, I say everything I said in the morning.

The next morning, my dad drops me to school. I literally bounce out of the car, buoyed by this other-worldly aura of holiness. I strut through the school gates, the image of my dad’s long, free flowing beard still vibrantly bouncing in my mind, only to be replaced by her long free flowing hair vibrantly bouncing in my mind. (Sigh) here we go again. And today, I do ask her out.

Needless to say, by now, heaven and its 72 virgins have waltzed gracefully out of my mind.

So, ladies and gentlemen, the aim of this anecdote from my life was to show you how hard it is to change ourselves. Now, many of you, especially the more liberal ones may not be able to relate to the exact nature of my sin, but I am sure all of you face my quandary regularly. You commit a sin, any sin, regret it sincerely, and say “That’s it! No more. Now I’ll renew myself.” Then you commit the sin again, and the cycle goes on.

So, my fellow sinners, can we change? Change? Yes, we can! However, there are three and only three ways for personal regeneration.

The first is that a life changing experience must happen to you. Preferably, it should be as dramatic as possible, like in a soap opera. However, you can’t depend on these to change you. That kind of stuff rarely happens. And when it does, it mostly only happens to those wonderful people in the Reader’s Digest and The Chicken Soup for the Soul. After all, if life changing events were so common, the Reader’s Digest would be a Hard Bound encyclopaedia sized, weekly publication instead of the tiny, paperback monthly magazine it is. So let’s skip to the second method of change.

Peer Pressure. We’ve got to be surrounded by good people 24/7. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this.

For the smokers in the room, remember your first smoke? How you thought, smoking can’t be a cardinal sin if all my buddies are doing it. Well, now you know why you have to hang out with the goody two shoes, the mama’s boys and the daddy’s girls. Okay, I can’t hang out with the daddy’s girls. And if it’s a relative who got you hooked, I guess you have to change families then.

But to cut yourself off from the bad lot, you need the third method of change, will power. The will to stand against the baddies. So, ladies and gentlemen, once you use your willpower to change your friends and kick a bad habit, who knows, you may just get $100 from sending in this life changing experience to the Reader’s Digest. Thank you.