ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Father of The Oqual Cycle: The Man Who Rewrote Human History
AMJAD FAROOQ PhD DIC
Professor | Scientist | Philosopher | Author
Few are awarded the Nobel Prize. Even fewer earn a place in history. Hardly anyone becomes immortal through their legacy and impact on human society.
Professor Farooq has indeed etched his place in immortality through his discovery of an earth-shattering phenomenon central to making sense of trials and triumphs of our society though, like all paradigm-shifting discoveries from terraspherism to heliocentrism, it may take centuries before the significance of oquacyclism (or the theory of oqual cycle) finally dawns upon our society.
"While humans may be quick to adopt new technologies, they are however notoriously slow and lackadaisical when it comes to upgrading their knowledge of the physical world due to their deeply-ingrained herd mentality", Professor Farooq laments.
How did a little-known goatherd from an unlikely corner of the world end up rewriting human history?
In 1971, Amjad took his first breath in a nondescript abode planted in the middle of nowhere in a poverty-stricken family of peasants in rural Mirpur—a city located in the foothills of Himalayas in the northeastern region of Azad Kashmir in Pakistan.
Amjad's early life set the tone for what would turn out to be an example of what can be achieved in life provided that one channels their energy to what matters in life rather than beating the bushes in a futile cycle.
With no tellies or tubbies at his disposal, his childhood rather centered upon herding goats, riding donkeys, and the crushing marks of thorns on the soles of his feet bear testament to the hard work ethic that embodies his soul.
In 1985, at the tender age of thirteen, the opportunity to immigrate to England offered Amjad a new lease on life.
Equipped with only a handful of words of the host language coupled with a setting that could not have been more alien to that of his upbringing in his native Kashmir, England presented Amjad with nothing short of a culture shock.
Yet, Amjad would rise to the challenge against all odds—a feature that would become the epitome of his later life.
Although he faced many hurdles early-on in his new hunting ground, it was not long before Amjad discovered that his passion lay in science and that scientific curiosities challenged his innermost conscience.
Despite the family pressure to pursue medicine, he began to prioritize science (or what are these days called the STEM subjects) from around mid-teens—STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Through his hard work and passion combined with the opportunity for top-notch pre-baccalaureate education courtesy of Bradford College in northern England, Amjad rose through the academic ranks quickly and with flying colors.
Although a physics whiz, Amjad's interest in understanding the intricacies of life meant that he had to settle for an undergraduate degree in a biomedical science.
In 1994, he obtained his baccalaureate with top distinctions underscored by a First Class Honors in Biochemistry from the University of Manchester in the northwest of England.
Next, Amjad moved to Imperial College London to undertake doctoral research on bacteriorhodopsin—a proton pump that converts sunlight into chemical energy in the so-called halobacteria.
In 1998, after obtaining his doctorate from the University of London, Amjad relocated to what was then the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan with a highly competitive postdoctoral fellowship, courtesy of the UK Wellcome Trust, in order to not only broaden his scientific and cultural horizons but to also look for greener pastures.
In 2004, Amjad's exceptional scientific productivity and promise as an independent scholar during the course of his postdoctoral training led to his recruitment at the tenure-track rank of Assistant Professor at the Leonard Miller School of Medicine of the University of Miami in South Florida.
In 2012, his continuing high scientific productivity was further rewarded with a promotion to the tenured-rank of Associate Professor at the University of Miami—where today he remains actively involved in research and education.
In his leisure time, Professor Farooq leads an active life and avidly writes on deeply intellectual-and-philosophical topics that few, if any, have the wisdom-and-intrepidity to explore to add to a breath of fresh air-and-candor rarely on display in today’s society mired in sociopolitical upheaval.
Although a biophysicist by trade with more than 100 scientific articles and books across four decades, Professor Farooq is best characterized as a polymath whose working knowledge transcends fields as diverse as astronomy, economy, climatology, psychology, sociology, geopolitics, history, and religion to add to his impeccable polyglotticity stretching from basic command of Spanish-French-and-Arabic through fluency in Punjabi-Urdu-and-Hindi to philosophical-and-metaphorical execution in English.
Powered by such a deeply analytical and culturally-diverse background coupled with a fearless mind renowned for pulling no punches, nothing could have perhaps been more fitting than the fact that a hitherto unknown rhythm as central as oqual cycle to understanding the inner workings of our society would be unearthed by none other than the one-and-only Professor Farooq.
What triggered a biophysicist to shift his focus from studying thermodynamics of protein society to unraveling the sociodynamics of human society?
It is said that luck plays a central role in the pursuit of big discoveries and that every cloud comes with a silver lining though one must have golden wisdom to capitalize on it.
And capitalize Professor Farooq did when his laboratory was denied federal funding time and again during the Teenies (or 2010s) in the midst of his prime years not only because his outstanding scientific productivity was a much-touted model for his peers to emulate but more so due to the fact that he fearlessly vowed to continue doing fundamental research rather than don a hoodwinking cloak and pursue utter garbage that was politically sound but scientifically fraud—a scenario that a vast majority of today's apparently celebrated scientists have indeed been pursuing over the past couple of decades though it should be hardly jarring given that the societal pendulum swings well over to the left as we begin to navigate the second half of oqual cycle which we have indeed been doing so since the outset of 21st century.
Unshackled by the pressure to conform to herd mentality and pursue what everyone else was doing, Professor Farooq would enter a defining period of bewildering wilderness during which he often found himself unsure of where his scientific breakthrough would come from.
As luck would have it, Professor Farooq's curiosity and polymathy coupled with multi-dimensional freedom at his finger tips, he would stumble upon the observation that it was not only his own scientific career that had been severely hamstrung as it underwent a diametric change of fortunes over the span of his rather young life but that almost everyone else around him had also seen their fortunes evaporate, or at the very minimum, they were coerced into following the big herd or face the axe should they continue to pursue what set their pulse racing every morning.
To make sense of such bizarre societal madness that he suspected could be due to a cyclical phenomenon, Professor Farooq wholeheartedly turned his analytical and scientific mind toward unraveling this potentially earth-shattering theory.
Coincidentally, the weaponization of the outbreak of Coronavirus Pandemic (2019-2023) by the powers-that-be to choke and instill fear into our society's veins through draconian and self-destructive measures from mandated lockdowns to mandatory vaccinations would only serve to heighten his resolve of unlocking the mystery of a cyclical phenomenon that could account for the triumph of such evil every now and then on our shores.
While much of the world was hunkering down in 2020, Professor Farooq upped the ante on his mission to crack the code and continued to go about his life as if nothing had transpired and in no small part comforted by his scientific knowledge that the odds of an individual falling prey to what was undoubtedly a deadly pathogen were miniscule due to the highly polymorphic nature of the ACE2 receptor located on the host's lung tissue—that is indeed the primary reason why so many young and healthy individuals succumbed to death upon contracting the coronavirus, all the while so many octogenarians did not even break a sweat likely due to the unique conformation of their ACE2 receptor that must have apparently denied the intruder entry into their lung tissue, thereby averting the onset of life-threatening pneumonia.
Powered by his scientific knowledge that if a genuine cycle does indeed orchestrate the reins of our society, then it must be characterized by a fixed periodicity and that it must also be under the thumb of a celestial body in a manner akin to the fact that our daily and annual rhythms are governed by the Earth's motions.
Before too long, his mathematically-driven work stretching as far back as a millennium in some cases would handsomely pay off against the backdrop of the 2020 Great Lockdown when he finally had a moment of epiphany and noticed a remarkable correlation between the changing sociopolitical fortunes of our society and the progression of Uranian year with an orbital frequency of 84 years—with the ice giant's southern spring-and-summer seasons corresponding to a multidecadal period underscored by an overall prosperity on earth dubbed the "first half", and its southern autumn-and-winter seasons coinciding with a multidecadal period of an overall meltdown of our society dubbed the "second half", with each stage lasting some 42 years on average.
The rest is of course history.
Arguably, the discovery of oqual cycle ranks among some of the most seminal breakthroughs of our civilization from terraspherism to heliocentrism.
To say that Professor Farooq has gained immortality through his discovery of oqual cycle would be to put it earthly.
Like all paradigm-shifting discoveries from terraspherism to heliocentrism that took centuries before they became widely accepted among the literati of earlier times, the oqual cycle will also be put on trial for centuries to come before it goes mainstream as the world finally begins to pay heed to its dire spell on our society.
"The truly-gifted minds however do not need to wait that long but should rather begin to navigate their future with rational wisdom lent by the oqual cycle in lieu of continuing to live in blissful ignorance", Professor Farooq quips.
What does the oqual cycle have in store for humanity over the coming decade?
It is noteworthy that it is during the second half of oqual cycle that the societal pendulum begins to swing to the left when evil begins to rear its ugly head and reaches a climax circa what is dubbed "annus horribilis" of oqual cycle as is the case across much of the globe today with the next annus horribilis (2028) barely years away and its earlier counterparts having befallen humanity in 1944, 1860, 1776, 1692, 1608, and 1524 since the birth of Modern Age in 1451—separated by exactly 84 years, the decade centered on each aforementioned annus horribilis of oqual cycle witnessed nothing short of a hell-on-earth.
Admittedly, almost every facet of our society from sociopolitics through economy to climate has been steadily turning upside down since the outset of 21st century so much so that many have become resigned to admit that they no longer recognize the beautiful world they once grew up in and have quietly begun to adapt to the new normal as if it were here to stay till the end of times due to their ignorance of the oscillatory behavior of our society's socioeconomic health.
In line with the recurring spell of oqual cycle, a new dawn of hope and prosperity reminiscent of those good old days from the second half of 20th century is however set to return to our shores in about a decade or so after we have paid the piper for our collective crimes amassed over the past several decades from the destruction of environment through exploitation of the poor to the normalization of immorality at every societal level.
Being a direct by-product of our society having ditched truth and meritocracy on the altar of promoting lies and mediocrity, the looming armageddon has in fact already descended upon some of us from Gaza to Haiti and will soon pay almost every corner of the world a visit as we approach annus horribilis (2028).
As we find ourselves teetering on the toes of the 84th anniversary of the previous annus horribilis (1944), the looming armageddon will likely make World War II (1939-1945) look like a stroll in the park given that each oqual cycle reaches crescendo circa annus horribilis with a bang that dwarfs its predecessor due to the availability of evermore deadly killing machines at the disposal of powers-that-be.
Not only are the odds of the ongoing armageddon slowly morphing into a nuclearcalypse over the next decade statistically very high but such a catastrophe is all but obligatory to purge our society of its excesses and imbalances so as to usher in a global reset once every 84 years on average.
In other words, our society having already lost its moral compass cannot rediscover its mojo unless it is handed due retribution for its wrongdoings in a manner similar to the fact that a criminal will never change their behavior until they get punched in the face.
To say that an armageddon is a prerequisite for breaking ties with our dysfunctional zeitgeist would be a huge understatement.
While the ongoing armageddon bloating into an 800-kiloton nuclear gorilla is unavoidable in that the crime has already been committed and the punishment must therefore be handed out, the future generations can however avert the return of such a hell-on-earth to our shores once every 84 years should they care and dare to pay heed to the dire spell of oqual cycle on our society and set about making right choices from the get-go in order to keep the toxic excesses and imbalances at bay.
The spell of oqual cycle on our society is indeed stochastic rather than deterministic.
Still, those who disregard the dire spell of oqual cycle will be doing so at their own peril in that they will surely be inviting an otherwise avoidable armageddon onto their shores in the centuries to come.
Meanwhile, those of us who are lucky enough to survive the looming armageddon will have a beautiful world to look forward to.
To add icing on the cake, today's toddlers and babies born over the next decade or so will be the luckiest in a lifetime in a manner akin to the babies born during the 1930s and 1940s—there is indeed a reason why much of today's generation of elderly have always viewed the world through rose-colored glasses, all the while most of those in their prime years today view the world as nothing more than a mafia where might is right rather than what is actually right.
Make no mistake, the oqual cycle lends breathtaking wisdom that humanity has hitherto never had though few have the guts to face the truth even though its spell on our lives is here to stay till the end of times.