Requiem for a black moon soul

Bernard Grua
4 min readOct 24, 2021
Post-growth, @BarefootRara, Ramla Akhtar, Growth Is Not Just One Thing
Casey Horner via Unsplash

There was a time a freshly graduated urban student from Karachi upper urban middle class, with an expensive British education, had a real talent for writing fictions and for advertising an expertise she did not have thru her re-formulation of trendy topics. Surfing the wave, she considered herself as a Writer and as a Consultant.

Unfortunately, nobody in “patriarchal Pakistan”, as she says, was ready to hire a young professional female with no experience for the jobs she was pretending to. Her career disillusions and her unsuccessful personal life caused her severe depressions with more and more frequent mental disorders.

Ramla Akhtar, aka Rmala Aalam, Karimabad Altit fort. Picture by Bernard Grua
Karimabad, Baltit fort, by Bernard Grua

Tragic episodes

In 2013, at the age of 33, she decided to leave the southern megalopolis for settling in mountainous northern Pakistan, where she thought she would be starting a completely different existence. She renamed herself into a different alias. Far away from her family, social and religious coercive environment, she enjoyed a long term adulterous relationship with a moutain guide. Unfortunately, facing the end of her romance, unable to adapt to this harsh region and to get along with its inhabitants, everything went worse. After some tragic episodes, including physical fights with elderlies, she had to flee the Gojal village, where she owned a cover herbal shop providing her with a kind of social status. Nobody was supposed to know that she was unable to sustain her livelyhood and that she was funded by an inheritance before relying on her family charity. Since 2020, she has been staying in basic Gilgit guesthouses, moving from one to another one, when the situation has become too conflictual with local people and with her hosts.

Ramla Akhtar, aka Rmala Aalam, Khunjerab. Picture by Bernard Grua
Karakoram mountains near Khunjerab pass, by Bernard Grua

I am a writer!

One of the ultimate paper she was able to produce, ten years ago. Pinned today on her Twitter profile for asserting that she was a writer.

Alas, she can’t properly write anymore. In a desperate effort for gaining attention, her last posts on “Medium” were terribly outrageous mistakes. She was banned. Her account was closed. Sadly, all of her previous production on this media was lost. As a consequence, there are no limits to her irritation and to the persecution state of mind haunting her, days and nights. Nowadays, she spends her time on social media to get back some of the audience she once enjoyed. When she is not in a mental crisis period, she reports, with difficulties, about her former “success”, posting some papers from more than a decade ago. She says:

I am a writer!

Rakaposhi Peak & Passu Peak, by Bernard Grua

The lost soul

This is the very sad story of a promising under-rated potential which went too high and too fast, before being burnt. If you have some compassion for this lost soul, save a though for her and mention her in your prayers. She desperately needs them.

Ramla Akhtar, aka Rmala Aalam, Eagle nests. Picture by Bernard Grua
Eagle nests by Bernard Grua

Meanwhile, act responsiby on Medium. Don’t take the risk to loose your account and all your past publications because you publish an inflaming article under a strong emotion. Thank God, this is not Twitter! Medium is not a place for confrontation or illegal business.

Site policies prohibit posts that name specific private individuals for the purpose of targeted harassment or shaming, especially where doing so is likely to incite or foster further harassment, threats, and violence.

Bullying, threatening, or shaming someone, or posting things likely to encourage others to do so

Doxing, which includes not only private or obscure personal information but also the aggregation of publicly available information to target, shame, blackmail, harass, intimidate, threaten, or endanger

Posting content primarily to drive traffic to, or increase the search rankings of, an external site, product, or service

For more details, see the full Medium rules.

Blackmailing Medium under the argument of “Supremacism” & “White privilege” via a desperate instrumentation of #BLM (Black Lives Matter) or #POC (People Of Color) would be of no help.

This paper was initially published as a comment to an article.

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Bernard Grua

Photographer, writer, contributor to French & foreign media: culture, history, heritage, geopolitics — https://bernardgrua.nethttps://pamirinstitute.org