Adventures of Mr.Behi

Lunatics of New York

Iran and Libya made funny scenes in this years UN general assembly. As an Iranian who happened to live in Libya for a short while, it was even more amusing -I shall call it amusing for the only reason that my rage has gone so far and the instances so frequent.

Ahmadinejad repeated his story of denial but this time also added fraud in his election, crack down on protesters, shooting at people, rape and murders in prisons to his list of denials. I am curious to see how the world wants to deal with this guy who feels no liability towards what happens to his electorate whom he claims to represent.

Ghadafi took my sorrow and pity to the next level. Not for him certainly but for the people of Libya. This guy has managed to rule this oil rich country for forty years. For such small population, the infrastructure of the country is a disgrace. You see the rich, who ride their expensive cars and fill them with cheap gas, living in large houses who fly outside of the country for slight need for medical care while the rest of the people are deprived of a decent hospital in the capital.

I have heard stories from my friends in Libya on how any voice of opposition is silenced and how overwhelming is the iron shadow of the regime. Ghadafi is the guy whose own home was attacked by US forces and was one of the most hated figures around. Now since he paid compensation for the bombings he sponsored, all human rights loving countries are flocking in there to suck up more oil and gas and make him and his system more indisputable.

Imagine Ahmadinejad relinquishing the nuclear program and shaking hand with the west. Imagine oil companies surging to Iran to restate exploration rights. Will any one of them would still ask "Who killed Neda?"

The Red Line

After what happened yesterday with the speech of the supreme leader, the situation now is very volatile. The plans for the gatherings today are still going ahead. We are holding our breath as we read our friends posting very emotional messages of goodbyes and farewells in Facebook as they head out to the streets. Iran is changing.... as the mighty command of the supreme leader is ignored and his charisma shatters....Please come home safe dear friends!

P.S: Back in Feb 2007, I posted an article about the leader "The Health Function in Dictatorship equation". It is still so relevant. Read it again here

And the race begins

The Iranian presidential race is in full swing and my wishful imagination is for it to end with Ahmadinejad kicked out of the prime position. He certainly should go through many sessions of rehabilitation and psychiatric therapy to become free from the his self-respecting delusion. Either this or we would need his appointments to see how we shall endure four more years of this guy.

The Fake

President Ahmadinejad performed yet another miracle: He selected someone as  interior minister who claimed to have a Ph.D. degree in law from The University of Oxford! When questions rose on the authenticity of the degree, the guy outraged, threatened the media and produced this to shut them up. A degree so suspicious that is feared to be faked, with grammar mistakes and with names signing it who are not even member of the Faculty of Law!
Iranian blogsphere is now full of articles quoting the response from The University of Oxford, confirming that no degree has ever been given to the guy. Such an outrageous act from somone who is supposed to bring law and order and protect the votes of people in elections! If Ahmadinejad wants to fake the next election, he'd better to employ someone who does it less obviously. What a shame!

Cleaning Friday

The last weekend before Iranian new year and we are trying to put ourselves in new year atmosphere. Election is on inside Iran and I am sure I could see people shopping and I could go out and buy stuff for our "haft-seen" collection if I was there (look at the one we had once in our apartment in Tehran). Outside where we are in a place where there is no significant number of Iranians, instead of getting a ready to use green plate, we had to grow the seeds ourselves. After trying a couple of different types of seeds in the market, Mrs.Behi has been so passionately watching and caring for the seeds to grow and there are some signs of growth (see her wishing for the best). Read more about Iranian new year

One of the most important customs is the cleanup that we Iranians do every year before the new year arrives. Many in Iran are probably finished doing that or are doing this now. Likewise, the Islamic system of Iran has apparently done some significant cleanup in the list of parliamentary candidates and like all previous elections, many were disqualified. This is not something new in the system so I shall stop talking loud about the limitations and lack of freedom in Iran. Like all previous rounds of elections, this one is far from perfect and for sure there is no chance is given to people to elect someone against the system. Yet, at least there is an election and because parliament seats are dedicated to states and counties, down to districts and small cities, there is a chance of having at least a bunch who are critiques of current government slogans especially some who can question the government in what it claims in reaching for people in remote areas and its populist propaganda. There is little choice here and people shall choose between a complete pro-ahmadinejad parliament and a little less complete pro-ahmadinejad parliament with a reformist fraction. In the last presidential election many did not vote for reformists and pragmatists with the argument that  "Anyway! there are all the same and with the leader on top, it will not make any difference"...I had a lard time convincing those people that leaving the field will just make it easier for the opponent to score...and they did...

New year is here and there will be many days of holidays...people will be busy with their new year affairs and the hard-line party has already done a good cleanup to make the next parliament suited to its purpose. That is supposed to be the house of the people...they might have cleaned it up with an odorous sweep but shall we let them to re-decorate it as well with the owners of the house watching them stand still? Physics tell us that with doing nothing, no mechanical work will be done...and to be honest, at least there are elections...do we like it better to be like a sheikhdom or kingdom as some countries around us?
I shall get back to cleaning...   

The Orbiting Dream

The news was a real surprise: Iran launched a rocket to space to add yet another surprising stride to the basket of its advanced science collection. After active stem cell research and a really noisy nuclear program, I guess we shall now be happy about having something up there rotating! Oh we already had an Iranian lady who became the first woman space tourist. I remember when I was a graduate student, I spent some time as an intern in a government-owned agency in Tehran and our job was to analyze satellite images for environmental and meteorological studies. Many of these satellite were and still are out there with their images publicly available for purchase. That was well before the age of GoogleEarth and what we were doing was very classy and Hi-Tech. This agency later got transformed and merged into Iranian Space Agency. I remember seeing a couple of graduate students of IT and Telecom in one of the rooms spending a multi-million dollar grant to design a communication satellite together with the Chinese :)

When the agency started before the revolution, we were the big friend of the Americans and were the first in the region into which US started transferring space imaging technology. Near Tehran there was a huge imaging factory with a monster satellite receiver. The receiver had the serial number ending to 001, the first of its kind to be built for the purpose of receiving images from a new earth observing satellite for civilian applications. The station soon hibernated after the revolution. And now we sent a rocket!. I would be happy though if we really could have achieved the domestic potential to carry something that far but I hope it is really true and not like another thing bought from the Russians and the Chinese. Russia is practically sweeping its soviet warehouses to sell to Iran and China with its garbage quality exports, cheap labor and the VETO power has been busy waving its spider web for the Iranian cash.

Ahmadinejad needs a tour of the Student Park

These days while the story of Columbia University is still hot, Iranian blogs show their anger on both remarks of Columbia president and lies of Iran's president. The claim that he made about homosexuals that they don't exist in Iran in the way they exist everywhere else, looked like a joke in the first place just like many of his prior statements but created a set of furious reactions in Iranian blog sphere not just because of the topic of "Homosexuals" but because Ahmadinejad's tradition of denial. You ask him about x issue and he says: what x issue? who told you that? He did so for high inflation rate and high prices in Iran and also about lack of freedom of speech. Many of bloggers like Masih Alinejad reacted to the recent claim by suggesting him to tour "The student Park" in downtown Tehran where many believe is one of the main hangouts of the undercover gay population of Tehran.

The student park or "park-e Daneshjoo" is in downtown Tehran adjacent to the famous city theater hall. I grew up and lived in the downtown and can vividly remember how this park transformed in years. The name of the park came from old times and I remember when I was five and used to go in the play ground in there, tens of university students from the nearby Tehran university used to hang out there with their books, making study groups on the grass. The city theater has been one of the main attractions for art lovers and attracted theater fans to the neighborhood of the park whenever a good play was around.

Later when I was a high school student, they built a library in the back of the park. I was not a member of that library but it became so famous around the town as a place where student boys and girls used to start friendships. Later, the authorities divided working days of the library between boys and girls to prevent that.

When I became a university student, the lovely tradition of studying in that park was history and those scenes could barely be seen. The park was famous then as a hang out of drug dealers and prostitutes especially during the night but since then, you could see young boys with make up holding hands around the area and the student park hosted this very controversial group of people. Recently, the park hosted a very famous women demonstrations that was cracked down by the authorities and made the park famous all around the news.

Whatever the park is famous for, I still remember my running around its pool, using the swing and curiously looking at students on the grass solving mathematical problems...good old days.

See where the Park is on GoogleEarth

The academics who they are not

After watching the entire cast of Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia, I can summarize my reaction in one phrase: "Feeling pity for two people who believe they have academic spirit and they are so far from it".

Columbia President Lee Bollinger repetitively called himself an academic with right to know while he used an outrageous language not expected from a professor. It is not the degree but you would expect some personal growth to have happened in a person after reaching such academic level. Seems that he panicky reacted to criticisms of holding such meeting and had to scape somehow! He did so but from the limits of social behavior. If you call someone a petty from the beginning, then you are not ready to listen and "academically speaking", you are biased. It was so disappointing  listening to those words and the shadow of those strong and unwelcoming words prevented enough attention to be given to some of his true statements and questions and gave chance to Ahmadinejad to escape them easily. Again, our first big academic of the day certainly lost the purpose. If I was a Columbia student, I would have delayed my graduation to avoid his signature on my degree!   

Interestingly, Ahmadinejad called himself an academic at the same time. He does so in many of his speeches no matter where. The start of his talk was funny when he made that religious speech on importance of science to enlighten humanity :) As if he was talking to a group of elementary school students in a remote village. This self-called academic was not afraid to make a lot of big-fat lies either and showed how he himself is biased with only a few information channels. This was true for the case of freedom in Iran, freedom of women, freedom of speech at universities and the Middle-East conflict. He did a lot of cursing in there by answering questions with other questions without getting to the point. This was a brief snapshot of his general policy...talking big, not specific, without aim and certainly not in the shape of a president nor an academic intellectual. I would however say that with him under such blistering attacks in there, not much could be expected.

Ahmadnejad in NY

There is a proverb in Persian saying “This coat is too big for you” used for someone who pretends doing what he/she is too immature for. Since Ahmadinajad became president, we started regretting as this proverb started to make sense about him. To me, He is politically so immature that he rarely thinks what he puts himself into and what future outcome his remarks might have or else he does think and his framework of thinking is so away from reality. He is a simple man for whom presidential chair is too big, so big that after two years, he still could not come to comprehend his own position and has never learned to abide to normal diplomatic behaviour that is expected from a president. From such an unfair election, no better president elect would have come out.

Last year after coming back from the UN, he claimed that during his speech, a rim of light surrounded him. Domestically, he claimed so many unrealistic things as well. I would say that his talks about holocaust and the wiping off Israel are as insignificant as his other statement. As a result, I think comparing him to Hitler is a very unrealistic and is truly propaganda to fuel a war. The regrettable fact is “why he has put himself and his country in such position by talking before thinking?” We will add this question to the tons of others we have left unanswered from the Islamic republic.

P.S: We arrived in Tripoli today from Rome with so many great memories from Italy and gigabytes of pictures. In days to come, I put all the details in the blog

Will you let it go?

It is like an epidemic feeling. When I was inside Iran, reading blogs of Iranians living outside, I could feel a certain degree of exaggeration or if not, an elevated level of sensitivity towards unpleasant political and social news in Iran. Now that I am rather outside, I guess I am getting covered by the same shadow.
The pathetic habit of media in bringing all the ugly in front of me makes this shadow much darker and more scary. Will Iran ever become what we are hoping for her to be? and what are we hoping for anyway? under the shadow, in the darkness, in search of what we are moving our hands so desperately.

Sadly, Iranian government is like an angry gangster that always avenges its owns citizens. They claim they are "Islamic" but they act so harsh to people. If you are an intellectual, you are a spy, if you are a cleric who does not like them, you are "diverted". If are young and want to be just young, you are "made fool by the enemy". I do not want to generalize and be like those who give a picture of Iran as if it is hell...it is not...but the government should just let people live as they want...they can not suffer from economic disasters AND more sanctions AND threat of war AND social restriction AND ban in normal stuff AND censorship AND lack of freedom of speech AND political limitation and and... will you please let it go in one area at least?

While I am getting more into work these days, too busy to write, Mrs.Behi is busy writing. Today she wrote about what she would be involved with if we were in Tehran (read her insights here).

Perhaps I should just give up nagging for the moment. We have rented new movies that we want to watch and it is 10:30 p.m after a long day. I need to go back to Mrs.Behi and did you know how cute she was when she was little? see this