Blog Week 3: Parvaiz

I really was interested in Parvaiz's relationship with terrorism in the novel. To readers and most of the characters in the novel, Parvaiz is defined as himself. What I mean by this is that he is first looked at through the lense of a person, with his decisions (like joining ISIS) being observed after the tacit understanding and acknowledgement of Parvaiz's humanity. However, through the eyes of the media and Karamat Lone, he seems to be viewed more as a statistic. For example, the article title: "How Many Parvaiz Pashas Will it Take for the Government to Wake Up?" (Shamsie 210). Here, he is not looked at as himself, he is looked at as a quota that the media wants/expects the government to reach to finally be able to say "enough". There is not a Parvaiz Pasha, there are only "Parvaiz Pashas".

This idea stuck out and made a lot of sense to me because of a specific phrase I remember from drivers-ed that was repeated nearly every class: "don't be a statistic". This was the first opportunity I had to be able to recognize that people are not always viewed as people. A person's actions often lump themselves into a greater statistic. In this way, Parvaiz's actions made him a statistic. Looking at statistics is simply looking at numbers, not people. One cannot feel bad for a statistic the same way one can for a person. The media and Lone can use this tactic to reduce Parvaiz's existence to what they want him to mean/be: a bad example.