Give Me Falafel or Give Me Death

When I was in Jordan I attended a small party for hospital employees hosted by a filthy rich drug company. We were having dinner, as I was enjoying my fifth dish I noticed the janitor eating cold falafel which was placed on the side.

I told him "Why are you eating falafel, go have some pizza, it's hot and goood"

He said, "Don't wanna eat pizza, I'm afraid I might like it, and I can't afford it, so I'll miss it then I would feel miserable"

I loved his answer, a man of plenty of wisdom and scarceness of money. If you don't try something you'll never miss it. If you don't get sick you won't know how great it is to be healthy. As my best friend Aerosmith says in his Mo3allaqaat "You got to lose to know how to win".

This could explain why the rich are less happy than the poor; they've got more, and the more they got the more things they are gonna miss as time passes. Being rich is a measure of the things you have that money cannot buy. Those things are very precious and once lost they cannot be replaced.


We have a choice to catch up with the world and sometimes we need to, otherwise the average age of death for any Jordanian would still be 49 years (statistics from 1945) . We're moving forward quickly, we're trying to run as fast as we can to catch up with the pace. Nice, we've got smart and ambitious young generation that can do the job at this point of time.

Our only "oil" according to late King Hussein is the human being and the more educated and skillful a Jordanian is the more likely s/he is willing to leave the country and live abroad, and it doesn't look like it's gonna change soon.

Not a long time ago, most of what Jordanians seeked was some delicious falafel and bread, a bus that can take them to work and the ability to enjoy raising kids and providing them with any kind of education to enable them to grow up in a secure environment.

These days there is true poverty in Jordan that never existed before, real ignorance, amazing levels of primitivism of thinking that were not present at the times people were illiterate and schools were virtually nonexistent, all that on top of a competitive level of corruption that is not spoken about. With all combined I'm only concerned that one day or another we'll stumble and fall and then the falafel will taste bitter instead of sweet and a trip in bus can feel like hell and raising kids will sound like a punishment from God and we will realize then that falafel intoxication was much healthier than a "withdrawal from pizza".