when you don’t have a rid from my house, then you have to walk for about 400 to 500 meters in order to reach the main road. I used to hate walking this distance and just stay at home or call a friend to pick me up. Today i woke up late and missed my only rid out of my house. I had breakfast with my mom and my sister and my nephew and stayed at home for a few hours thinking of not going anywhere just to avoid that walk. With no plans on my mind i still got ready for some strange reason. My cousin called me and asked me whether i wanted a rid or not and i told him that i don’t. I decided to walk to the main road today. If you want to get a bus then you probably have to walk about 600 meters and to get a taxi then you have to walk for more than a kilometer. I decided to get a taxi. My house is about half a kilometer away from the main road and this distance is a dirt road. The first two hundred meters has a bad chemical odor, but not an unbearable one, because of the constraction of new houses and shops. The remaining 400 meters smell of different plants at different points-I usually didn’t like this smell either. Today these 600 meters were different in a good way. I saw sights and felt amazing freshness which just blew me away. Last night’s rain washed all the trees, plants, and roads and you could see the natural greenness of trees and the reddish brownness of the dirt road. Half wet dirt walls that run along the dirt road added to the beauty of this morning. This one section of the road smelled like you are walking on a river bank because this section of a wall was build from river sand and smelled like you are at a beach but with no waves. The air was cold but the sun was warm and this combination gave a feeling that i cannot describe. I just kept walking and walking. I was lost somewhere in mind when a boy interrupted and said hi to me. I didn’t get it the first time so he said hi again. It took me a while to respond by i guess it was not that late. It was very sweet of him because he also made me realize that i was about 20 meters away from the main road. 

“I am from Afghanistan,” every time i say that to someone, his or her expression changes immediately. its has become something natural for me; just by mentioning Afghanistan people get shocked and surprised. At many instances i was asked whether i was with the taliban or not right after introducing myself-i am from Afghanistan- and then it is followed by many others like: how many guns i have with me at home? do i know how to use a gun? and many stereotypical questions similar to these. these are huge doubts about my country that almost everyone outside afghanistan has and some times i spent hours to clear these doubts in some people’s minds-which i love to do and am very good at it too. Now what bothers me is, where do they get this image of Afghanistan?All these doubts and questions about an Afghan come from every book written about Afghanistan. most of the books are written by outsiders who have once or twice or never visited the country. those that have visited my country have stayed in five star hotels or army bases; they have never bothered to go out from the capital city to see the real picture of Afghanistan but why would they? its easy for the writers to portray an Afghan as a barbaric stereotype since everyone like it that way. When talking about unreliable authors; its very difficult for me to ignore one name, Robert D. Kaplan. “you rarely see women in Afghanistan; you do see some moving tents with narrow hole for the eye,” writes Kaplan in his book ‘Soldiers of God’. Kaplan is one writer who has visited most of Afghanistan but still hasn’t seen the real picture of the people, especially the pashtuns. For Kaplan Afghanistan is a male dominated, tribal, and a wild society that needs to be either fenced or the people should be tamed so that the rest of the world can live in peace. There are many writers that create a sort of imaginary, barbaric and wild society within Afghanistan for only one reason, people want to read about it. Because of these western writers and the so-called “world affairs experts”, no one knows what is the real Afghanistan and who are the people living in it? If someone like me writes about Afghanistan or criticizes  the books that dont state the truth about the people of my country is just considered not qualified to challenge writers like Kaplan.After a lot of consideration I have come to this conclusion that we-Afghans- should just sit back and listen to whatever the outside world wants to call us or say about us.

The very name Pakhtun spells honor and glory,

Lacking that honor, what is the Afghan story?

                                                            Khushal Khan Khatak

August 1 is when I flew into India from Kabul, Afghanistan. The Delhi International Airport I thought was amazing, until I came out and saw the taxi stand right outside the airport. I had to go to the domestic airport to get to Chennai but because of my fellow Afghan student missed the flight. He apparently put his residence permit, which we were suppose to show at the airport in order to get entry into the country, in his suitcase which was somewhere in the cargo.I helped him get a new permit and proved that we were students.It took us a while doing so and because of which we arrived late to the Domestic Airport, about 15 minutes. well to be honest it was not only the permit that took time, we also didn’t know what to do or where to go once we got entry into the country(the reason i didn’t know was that I didn’t show up for the meeting where we were suppose to get instructions for what to do or who to contact). after waiting for 25 minutes at the international airport I realized that I have tickets with me and that might tell me what to do next-my fellow Afghan couldn’t read English or Hindi and I could only read English- I forgot to mention that it was my first time on a plane and I didn’t really know how domestic and international flights work. After looking at my tickets I found out that I have a flight to another city, Chennai, from the domestic airport in Delhi.I got both of us a taxi and went to the domestic airport but we were an hour late. This meant that we were not flying anywhere tonight, and so I had to find a place to stay for the night. Before leaving for a hotel I booked our tickets for tomorrow.Came to the airport early next morning to make sure we don’t miss our flight again. That night I spent $120 to get a room somewhere close to the airport. Finally on the plane to chennai, my fellow Afghan again got the window seat like he has been getting through out the trip, and landed in Chennai in the afternoon.We walked out of the airport and I saw someone holding a piece of paper with our names on it and at that moment I just couldn’t hide my happiness, even though my name was spelled wrong, i was very happy. I walked up to the guy and shook his hand, my fellow Afghan asked me very surprisingly how in the world I recognized him? and I said, “well, he was holding a paper with our names on it.”