by Mohammed Musthafa
The following events have been dramatized and are not in chronological order.
Imagine a suburb in Damascus. The black tarred roads provide a contrast to the orange hue of bricks bathed in sunlight. It’s about 3:30 in the afternoon, and Khalid has just put his younger sister to sleep. He sneaks back to the living room, and after making sure that his mother locked the door before leaving for work, he picks up his battered laptop, manages to fix the charger into the half defunct socket, and settles down to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones.
That seems jarring to some of you, perhaps? A teenager in Syria obsessively clinging onto the latest episode of an HBO Television series seems far-fetched, especially when you’re busy imagining that he’d be watching an Arabic show.
But fret not. Khalid has ample reasons to be obsessed over a fantasy drama series that breaks almost every custom held dear to his religiously conservative parents. After all, it was them who sent him to an English medium school, and it was them who dismissed it when he began listening to songs by Eminem. So he naturally graduated from episodes of Friends to the latest phenomenon dominating American Television. And he wasn’t alone. Many youngsters around the globe were able to - courtesy of illegal torrents – follow the adventures of the Stark family.
Imagine a suburb in Damascus. The black tarred roads provide a contrast to the orange hue of bricks bathed in sunlight. It’s about 3:30 in the afternoon, and Khalid has just put his younger sister to sleep. He sneaks back to the living room, and after making sure that his mother locked the door before leaving for work, he picks up his battered laptop, manages to fix the charger into the half defunct socket, and settles down to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones.
That seems jarring to some of you, perhaps? A teenager in Syria obsessively clinging onto the latest episode of an HBO Television series seems far-fetched, especially when you’re busy imagining that he’d be watching an Arabic show.
But fret not. Khalid has ample reasons to be obsessed over a fantasy drama series that breaks almost every custom held dear to his religiously conservative parents. After all, it was them who sent him to an English medium school, and it was them who dismissed it when he began listening to songs by Eminem. So he naturally graduated from episodes of Friends to the latest phenomenon dominating American Television. And he wasn’t alone. Many youngsters around the globe were able to - courtesy of illegal torrents – follow the adventures of the Stark family.