Adventures of Mr.Behi

Don't you dare....

I am a critique of Iranian government, the way they treat human rights and freedom of speech and so many other things but at the same time, I am outraged by the way US is trying to collect means of putting pressure in Iran or attack Iranian people. In Iran we always laugh at our leaders when they appear on TV claiming something...people always say: "Do they really think we are that stupid to believe that?". This is what I am asking myself watching the acquisitions of Iranian arms in Iraq these days...what a manipulative propaganda! A country which has the biggest expenditure in arms, has the biggest amount of exportation of arms, has been in every and each major military conflict in the world since zillion years back...and came half way around the world occupied two countries that once sold arms to...is now putting the blame on Iran!

Lets accept that Iranian arms are in Iraq. I am not surprised! our borders can not be fully controlled...each year thousand of tons of drugs come from Afghanistan and end up in Turkey through this country by traffickers...alcoholic beverages are carried by trained mules over the untouchable mountains of Kurdistan, what do you thing they carry back?...I am sure there is a "Lord of War" within the Iranian revolutionary guard who is making money out of this...if that is right OK fine...and why poor people of Iran should deserve to fear like hell anticipating an attack....

US is attacking the minds of international community...bombing the logics...targeting sane thinking...yes you can bomb me but don't you dare imagining that I will be that stupid to make my dislike of Iranian government be the yes to militarism...don't you dare bombing our minds...these minds could not be concurred by domestic dictators...your bombs are stronger...fine...our voices can go higher!

No.5, Tripoli, Libya!

It all started when my bank asked for my new home address in Tripoli as they said they could not accept the P.O.Box of the company. So I said fine, called the company agent and asked for the postal address of the apartment that I will be staying at. This was the reply I received when I asked: You see this road around the office, you follow and follow till you see this building with this color and then there is an exit, you get into the exit and there is round about, you pass it and there is a white building...you pass it and there is a building with this many floors, after that there is an alley, you get in and turn left and ask the guard, he will tell you! But I need to write it to my bank what is the street number? I asked with surprise.

I finally gathered that many streets do not have any name here. The postmen here should be kings of postmen getting around and finding places and even the address of the post office is like "you know this shop there? ....get to it and go right....". Finally, my address was like, after this...and in front of that...and happily I could assign your apartment number with the floor which is in fact a digit! That was fun discussing this with people and interestingly, they told me that before lifting the embargo, in one time there was the fear of invasion by foreign forces so the government removed all the road signs that were indicating the distance between the cities and this also happened to many of the streets...I think they need a reminder to put them back...imagine driving in a desert with no road signs...

I am in Tripoli in front of the park, near the white building, turn left when you see the big tree and get into the alley (normally some guys are standing there) get in and drive as long as when you get back, you wouldn't see the sea...turn left and that is me...No.5, Tripoli, Libya...

You never know...

The other night I was having dinner with some colleagues, one Australian and three others who were from Indonesia and we were talking about different things...our company, working conditions in different locations and it went to flooding in Jakarta and as they were all either from Indonesia or worked/lived there, they were talking about different things in Jakarta and I suddenly remembered my wired experience of travelling to Jakarta that never happened...

I think I wrote about this here before but I started telling that some years back, I got my visa for a business trip to Jakarta and the Jakarta office suddenly e-mailed and said that the event would be delayed for one week for all the attendees to get their visa...OK and time went on and on the original date of my arrival (before delay), a bomb went off in the same hotel that I had the booking! See this ooooohh I was lucky...

when I finished the story, one of the Indonesian guys said that he was also supposed to be there at that day and he missed it! and the Australian guy said one of his close family members checked out just two days before the event from the same hotel....but I was lucky I was not there! imagine travelling half way around the world to be in a bomb blast like this...three years on in Libya, now I meet someone who also missed it by chance....you never know...

The health function in dictatorship equation

It is a chaotic world but you can still fit some curves over the mass of events and find a nice, meaningful trend. I was reading this Persian blog today that compared two pictures from the Iranian leader, first one taken recently showing him talking to army generals calling the rumours of his illness "the conspiracy of enemies". That was said after rumours spread across the country that the leader is suffering from a serious cancer. And you know we are Iranians!, can we help not to exaggerate when passing the story to our friends?" so you could hear people saying on behalf of the cousin of the wife of their friend's uncle who knew closely the personal physician of the leader! that he was in his death bed. It did not help much after he showed up on TV sometime ago, with his voice abnormally changed and his body awfully crumbled.

But the question is not whether his illness is lethal or not? oh wait a minute, as the same blog also noted, the leader of Cuba also had to deny his illness and called it in the same way, conspiracy of enemies! Should these guys ask themselves why it is that the interest in their death is so high? can we conclude that dictators make people so sick of their always being there? that they just want them go for a change? oh...we Iranians are good at hoping for this aren't we. We always want change without knowing what we want to change into....chanting for things we do not have, burning whatever we do have...

But anyway....seems now we can also  predict where this equation goes, by a simple interpolation! Dictators often fall when their logical values supporting them start to fade. The slope of their power goes down and even when it looks like that they will go on till eternity, they hit the axis of doom one day! Alone...

Libya after embargo

I came back to Libya a few days ago again without Mrs.Behi. We need to wait for the hectic visa process to pass so we can reunite. Tripoli is one level greener that last November and weather is absolutely great -nice, cool and comfortable with a little bit of refreshing mosture in the air.

All the way from the airport and in couple of more occasions, I tried to take some pictures from the streets to give a glimse of life of Tripoli to Mrs.Behi (thanks to the vibration reduction of my new Nikoor lense, I managed to get some good shots from the car). The lifting of US embargo is showing itself vividly, as the rush of the foreign oil companies for new prospects feeds money to the economy, people are getting more to pend. Tripoli is a city with not much to do but it is obvious that higher investing capability is bringing nicer colors to the shop windows.

One good thing here is the good price of Italian cloths and apparantly suites are chaeper than Italy itself as no taxation occures. Yet still, I assume many of the Libyans would not consider those cheap either. Why did Libya go to that road in the first place? this is the question I always ask and how come all of a sudden everything changed in the minds of the leaders? and to be honest, the embargo that they went through (with no flight coming in and out) is much worse than the US embargo that is imposed on Iran-actually for the moment before it gets worse. Libyans are rising from the misery of the embargo that targeted their leaders but victimized them themselves!