fashionistas and the taliban: follow Defiance with Dialog

After defying the Taliban during fashion show week, with bare backs and sleek shoulders, fashion designers have decided to hold dialog with key representatives of the tehzeeb-i-taliban.  "You can not always win by defiance," said Pooh, the CEO of Fashion Show Pakistan.  "You gotta catwalk the talk.  We held a large fashion show at a secret location with 142,000 security guards," he continued.  "All 150 guests got a call the night before verifying the location.  We paraded low cut blouses in the shadow of the sword.  It was exhilarating like wasabi and cocaine mixed up."  But with a somber expression, Pooh claimed, that the time was now ripe for face to face dialog.  "No battle can be won by defiance and snubbery alone."


Representing the fashion industry, Designer Diz Diz, 48, better known as Pakistan's Versace and Vera Wang all wrapped into one delicious satin gown, went to meet a member of the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan. He told us that Billu Mehsud was almost convinced that baggy shalwars would go well with beige halter tops.  "I showed them the computer generated image of a six foot talib standing on the most gigantic rock, touting a rifle in a tank top." 


His eyes misty, Diz Diz, recalled that the taliban of the 90s were the original metrosexuals -- kohl lined eyes, exceptionally long legs, aquiline profiles-- they went from town to town in pickup trucks, elimininating corruption and burning poppy fields."We need to go back to our roots, and put the vice back in virtue," Diz winked. Tehzeeb is a faction of the Taliban that, arguably, is the most amenable to this type of dialog.  "We will turn them into SMDs! Sexy machines for destruction."


Billu seemed keen on a flashy, broad silver belt that Diz had designed specially for suicide bombers.  "Look, I'm dead against these violent tactics.  But if you must go and take peeps with you, you may as well go in style." Diz clarified his position that he did not condone suicide attacks.


The Mehsuds seemed resolute that women should not be allowed to wear the latest styles.  They shook their heads at a catalog of urban contemporary womens' fashion.  And then shook them again.  Diz realized that this was non negotiable territory, and chose instead the path of diplomacy in talking the Taliban out of bombing girls' schools.  


Diz explained there were plenty of methods to oppress women without resorting to such barbarism.  "Lowest wages, horrible healthcare, institutionalized discrimination are conventional means of retaining their inferior status.  Why blow up schools, and kill no one, when through culture and education you can naturally chip away at their self esteem and reinforce their primary role as brides, wives and reproducers?"  


Again, Diz, clarified, with a sparkle in his eye, he hates killing but he had to choose he'd do it softly, strumming a guitar.


A red headed second cousin, who we later discovered was a bastard, was chewing on swine leather at a distance, a habit he developed fighting the Soviets.  Rather crudely, he interrupted and said: "I blow schools because we got a lucrative contract from the navy to do so."  The red head disclosed that he had recently bombed boys' school because he could not meet the navy's quota for school targets.  No one was convinced by the bastard's allegations.   


The dialog ended peacefully with Diz showing a bunch of giggling teenage taliban (recruited for suicide mission) how to dance to the Y-M-C-A.  As a gesture of goodwill, the Talibs pardoned a couple due to be stoned and instead got stoned with Diz.


"Young men, there is indeed no need to be so down," smiled Diz in an interview as he was taken blindfolded on a seventeen hour truck journey back to Karachi.  "There is a world we fashionistas can win."

18 women killed in quest for cloth

Eighteen women were trampled to death on Saturday at the lawn exhibition of a major designer who chose to remain anonymous.  The melee ensued when 1,400 women arrived at the doors of the Garden Royale where the designer was exhibiting their latest summer collections.  Eager customers had been promised three days of voluptuous shopping.  But by the end of the second day all prints had run out.  When the enthusiastic shoppers arrived the third day, they banged the windows and doors of the Garden.  There was no response - which made some women burn in rage, and others curse like sailors.  A guard then emerged to deal with the irate women.  Indignantly, they demanded their rights to fabric.  


It is rumored that the guard may have acted negligently in disclosing that two prints were still available, and that shoppers should see him the small godown behind the building.  This resulted in a stampede to secure the prints.  Now these gardens are badly designed, with corridors from the pre-colonial era, open gutters, and stray swines grazing.  Several women slipped and fell.  Other fell on top of them, and pretty soon there were bundles of fallen women.  


Outside, the congestion and traffic caused by the lawn exhibitions prevented ambulances from reaching the dead and the injured.  Several of the women could have been saved had they been rushed to the Middle East Hospital right next door to the Garden.  But only recently, a hotelier got rights to build a luxury hotel with aquarium filled with live mermaids - and the hospital was demolished overnight.  


Jamila, who wishes not to disclose her last name, cradled a bundle of cloth.  She lost her daughter in law, affectionately called Pimple, in the stampede.  Her own daughters are injured and recovering at Abbasi Shaheed Hopital.  Fighting back tears, she held up the lawn and said, "I will dedicate these suits to the memory of my bahu, who was squashed this morning."


It is indeed a sad day for all designers and lawn makers, and it highlights how desperately we need to shift lawn exhibitions to rural farmhouses, or cricket stadiums.  "We do not want to publicize our grief, and cheapen it so."  Designers have lobbied media to block news of this story as it may impact sales.  


 "There is a desperation amongst the people," a local government official stated. "Naturally, when people are frustrated, whenever they get such an opportunity they grab the maximum."




 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8255285.stm


(my respects to the forgotten women who actually died - not in a lawn stampede but because of poverty, in a quest for food - and inspired by the Maila Times."

some cute students

This weekend, I'm in solitary celebration of my own.  On Thursday, I finished all three courses I teach.  We ended criminal damage with a bang, and with a case about the March 2003 war on Iraq by the allied forces.  A group of protesters burned RUF property, and prayed to be excused from criminal damage charges, as they were ultimately saving Iraq from absolute destruction.  The excuse didn't work.  Iraq was absolutely destroyed.


I was excited that in the last class we got to talk about -- a "statute" of Margaret  Thatcher's getting decapitated, activists cutting fences of US military airbases with hacksaws, and vicars scratching political messages on pillars outside parliament buildings. My excitement did not resonate with the students.


I had half baked notions to make them question judicial statements that necessity can never be an excuse for trespass as a shameless defence of private property -- how judges usurp Parliament's role simply to assert their own distaste of homosexuality.


They are stressed about exams.  And somehow, the urgency rings through  -- Madam, we understand your desire to remind us that ultimately the rightness of law is but a chimera, and an ode to the powers that be, but this stress only reminds us that we are looking to pass, and then become judges and crore pati corporate lawyers.  And then become the powers that be.


A student said what a stupid waste of time, and what was his counsel thinking to raise such an excuse.  (For the Iraq protesters' case)


But there are always diamonds in the rough.  One kid was like. Well, if she was Ayn Rand, surely they would have said she can burn bridges, and cross Rubicons, and do whatever, and doesn't have to wait for gestapo to knock down her door.  Now he's worked on his anti-Semitism  but his political instinct is right.  Cases seem to work out where people are in essence hating or fleeing the enemies of the UK and the US.  


Shia hijackers who were afraid Saddam would hang them partially succeeded in claiming they hijacked a plane to Amman under duress.  Suddenly the word immediacy (required for a claim of duress) was doing linguistic acrobats.


Its fun to see the kids who have shown up for class realize the material is actually quite simple.  The last two weeks were a piece of cake for them.  They have mastered legalese, or else theft and robbery are really easy chapters.  They lap it up.  Does a naked man (dressed only in socks) commit burglary when he climbs into the inner sill of a girl's window before she purportedly beckoned to invite him in? Was Robin Hood really dishonest if he believed ordinary moral people would regard stealing from the rich to feed the poor honest?


And now's when there is a bigger urgency to find tricks to pass.  As the stress piles up on them, I'm relieved   A relief that can only be compared to swimming 40 laps, most of them front crawl, and walking into a hot jacuzzi or growing organic seeds, and watching the plants climb climb to reach the tops of green canopies.  


The painful terror of exams and revisions, notwithstanding.  Once the material is out, its a gigantic leap into the realm of  -- "Fcuk, the ball is in your court now."


And so this entry is for some of my sweet sweet students.  Those who have made class bearable by speaking up, and narrated facts with earnest faces, and offered defenses for the defenseless, fought back with faintly funny humor, those who have asked questions that snapped me out of the outlandish fear that I was teaching a class of amoebas.  That there is intelligent life.  That like Chris Tucker in "Rush Hour", I do not need to enunciate:  Do You Understand the Words That Are Coming Out of My Mouth?


To this moronic group of people whose only protection from a suicide bomber is the last row, rows of gunny bags, a cute Pathan chowkidar who mans the metal detector, and a goofy smile.  Hats off! 


And kudos to you - the religious arrogance was so low profile this time around - the namazis would leave at maghrib most discreetly - they were subtle and mild voiced about prayer and never once demanded I halt the class.  And so when I was teaching a case in strict liability about a defendant named Mohammad, I said, "Mohammad was a gambler."  I was reminded of Cohen's song  "Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water."  I checked myself.  I do pray I am never under the hypocritical tyranny of blasphemy.  So I said, for some god is light, for some he is fire, and for the rest of us, he is in you and me.


To each her own.  Take your victim as you find her.  A Jehovah's can refuse transfusion if she so desires.  I got nods and murmurs.


I have taught so freely and openly, and am amazed at these young open hearts.  May you kick some major ass.  And file some bail applications, and always follow in Asma's footsteps.

a new england ghost story

The Dead, by Sylvia Plath

Revolving in oval loops of solar speed,

Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes

Dead men render love and war no heed,

Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.

No spiritual Caesars are these dead;

They want no proud paternal kingdom come;

And when at last they blunder into bed

World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.

Rolled round with goodly loam and cradled deep,

These bone shanks will not wake immaculate

To trumpet-toppling dawn of doomstruck day : 

They loll forever in colossal sleep;

Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up

From their fond, final, infamous decay.

The story begins in a small wintry college town in New England.  The October chill was setting in, and we were five international students sharing an apartment with a territorial old cat from Sweden, and a young Russian Blue named Billy Bob.  We had recently seen Interview with a Vampire, and it had left an indelible impression.  J. Ann and I could spook each other just talking about a scene or another  But I have to say the elevated awareness of the undead, like that part where Tom Cruise shows Brad Pitt, life on ecstasy inspired more than frightened.  So in this backdrop, we decided to summon a ghost.  Smita was not into it at all; she'd rather lay on the couch and day dream, but we needed a fourth finger on the Ouija board.

Now all four of us were avowed pro choicers, except Smita to whom politics was of no concern, as she plodded through pre-med and ordered regularly underwear from the Victoria's Secret catalog.  But she still had a medical sense of a woman's rights.  Andrew was fairly progressive, brought up on the diversity and birth control, an ABCD, to whom I had the traits of his dreaded FOB father.  I do not know what exactly he thought I, a college junior, had in common with a 67 year old Bengali man.  I mean, I am shia Pakistani woman.  I mean that's a lie, I am not Shia.  I was nothing like this man who left messages with the words "ulla ka patta" interspersed.

Then J. Ann, who'd had the church knocked out of her only a few semesters ago - but who in the recesses of her heart cradled a cliched guilt.  But if called on it, she would deny it to the point of you repenting; so you would not doubt her radicalism.  It were as if she was on the verge of killing a white person, and destroying private property.  Poor sweet catholic girl.  I remember her rolling out of bed on Sunday am, and sprinting across campus to church, in nothing but a t-shirt and an unbuttoned jacket.  Never any socks.  And here she was denouncing baby fetuses. 

.  

And me.  Pretty much dedicated to a women's revolution in the third world.  

And then it happened.  A shift-shift and a nudge-nudge and the glass beneath our fingers was moving.  There was a ghost amidst us.

At fist the spirit went nuts.  It manically went back and forth on the paper serving as a Ouija.  We soothed and calmed it and finally it seemed ready to answer questions.  Seething, though.  Our first question as to it's sex seemed to agitate it once again.  It went back and forth between female and male.  And then when we asked if it was a man, it replied no.  A woman. No.  A child, a child, surely you must be a child?  

The spirit got angry again.  We looked at each other accusingly.  Smita had an innocent expression - and a silly smile.  J. Ann and I suspected Andrew but he was vehement that he wasn't doing it; that his smirk was nervousness.  He looked just freaked enough for us to let go.  I swore, and she swore.  We did the inquisitorial, you lift, now you lift.  And as each finger lifted, eerily, the glass continued to move.

So we squelched our screams, and decided that this was indeed an angry spirit somehow sent to us, for some reason.  How much more astray could we get.  We had systematically abandoned the sciences (except Smita), and were content serving pizza and cheap wine that came in liters at an Irish joint and living three to a room to save rent.  Billy Bob walked by and planted himself on the couch.  Somehow his furry gray presence was reassuring.  The old Swedish cat was locked inside one of the bedroom because she hated BB, and pissed in our Swedish roommate's boots as revenge.

The spirit was now moving back and forth at a fast pace between F and U.  We gather it was saying fuck you fuck you fuck you.  The invective continued for a few seconds.  Someone had the courage to ask why.  Why are you so angry with us?

It spelled out the following with the urgency of someone who has run out of time.

B-cos, you have a life.

Of course, the punchline is as our intrepid spirit disclosed a moment later that he/she was an aborted fetus.  

We were all pretty disturbed that night.  Why would we play such a sick prank on each other?  Why was our collective conscience messing around?  It isn't that we shared any overbearing guilt about abortions.  None of us had ever been pregnant.  It wasn't that this was a dilemma, for any of us, in any overt way.  It wasn't as if we were on some planned parenthood campaign.  Then why?

There is no reason.  We were young and stupid, and we were just having fun.   Or were we?

  I recently told this story to my law students, and I recount here just for fun.

God made me Maoist

Someone whose identity is immaterial  said the following about Arundhati Roy's essay describing her visit with Maoists in Chattisgarh.


http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738-1

The beauty of her prose was lost in my distaste for her attempts to turn these criminals and cowards into heroes. Communism is a failed idealogy (even China does not adhere to it) and the "comrades" are bereft of a genuine idealogy - at least as it benefits the masses.  -XX

Dear XX:

If your read the essay in its entirety you would know that far from grandeurs of ideology, this is a lesson of the simplicity of struggle. The ordinary language of everyday resistance to a bombastic repression - a repression of greed and acquisition - that seeks to displace and decimate a people, drive them into illiteracy and poverty, hinduize them and bribe their leaders into false Brahmindom - for the resources of their land - bauxite and aluminium - for pauper rates given for bamboos and bidris.  

This is a story of a woman, a comrade if you will, who has lost two partners in encounters. A mother who walks behind the corpse of her son hung, clothless, on a pole. Stories of young girls gang raped and killed, and how there is no longer any grass on the spot they were raped. This is a story about burned villages, and camps of barbed wire where villagers must surrender before they are hunted down for being maoist. This is about the maligning of a people, nationally, for standing up - and saying no to being squashed.  

This is a story about how resistance disciplines itself, and walks in patrols of concentric circles. How it "scavenges" a looted vehicle for parts before cremating it. How it smiles with the innocence of a generation to whom the 80s struggle against the forest department is a narrative from history.  




This is about when lawlessness strikes, and democracy fails, how people must take justice in their own hands, and chalk their own destinies.




Arundhati does not romanticize them - She judges them not with any explicit loyalty to China that was or Maoist rhetoric, or any allegiance to their more immediate leader/ideologue Charu Mazumdar -- but with the openness of heart of someone who sees internal security threats as miracles who traverse treacherous terrains with guns and loads with agility. Who understand the struggle in economics - who ask for techniques of organic farming and permaculture. Who thank that someone from Delhi cares and she disabuses them of that belief.

She far from romanticizes these people you disparagingly call comrades. It is instead you who, by the implied thrust of your comment, romanticize these tribals as people who must obligingly move away and make room for the Tatas and the other giant corporations - so that progress may shine upon India and "proper" ideologies be put in place. Ideologies that are already based in shattering principles. You want that killed and marginalized people shift to the fringes smilingly, and if not smilingly, then silently.  

What alternatives do you have for them? More importantly, what alternatives do you have for yourself? You can't be neutral when an avalanche hits your home. And when democracy, too, fails you.

women's pleasure

Do a pair of Vivienne Westwood shoes really drive a sensible man wild? I guess I am old fashioned, but I thought physical attraction was, well, physical.  And shoes are not physical.  I mean their only value is in getting knocked off and sent flying across the room.  So when a friend posted that her new pair of shoes possessed the capacity to seduce - I corrected her that men are not interested in shoes or diamond handbags or expensive watches.  They are interested in the bottomline, not Carrie Bradshaw.  But, I am confounded at how naive I had been.  Yes, there are cavemen amongst us, but even amongst the caveman hiding demurely is a metrosexual man.  A man who notices a woman's perfume, and gets excited not by the sight of curves, but the designer labels accentuating and covering those curves.

Now, it'd be fine to call this man metrosexual; it would be tasteful, perhaps charitable.  Or in economic terms, you could call him an ultra consumer who must spend his excess wealth, drawn from the sweat and toil of the workers, in indulgent possessions.  And his ability to tell a fake posing as a top 100 label, a vile talent to distinguish the real women from the fake.  The real women are the financially viable ones. They are the ones who will continue to enact an opulent lifestyle, by wearing the very best, and driving in the newest cars - adding to and celebrating their husband's wealth.  And when they go shopping, they'll even pick out a pair of designer boxers for him.  

Cynically young girls are given few options, but to aspire to follow their footsteps - they are discouraged from study away from home - they get their hair set by the big names - they press the keys of fine cell phones and blackberries - they receive orthodontics and other cosmetic assistance - they lust for the big wedding with a marquee, and elegant lounges set up for her guests.  They breathe in henna and dreams of gold dowries.  They are but a sad carcass of womanhood.

But shit, who am I to judge them?  

Romantically speaking. I'd rather girls fall shit faced in a pool of love, read a lot of somber stuff, theory and physics, and snap out of childhood in a fall down a slope covered in snow.  And then find themselves in a quicksand of half baked jobs and ideas. And then at some later stage, decide whether they want to have the next ten years of their lives obliterated by motherhood (which is a joy but it does erase the half of our former selves). And then go spend retirement with the maoists on some hilly station in South Asia.  Of-course owning politics does not mean denouncing fashion, as a Naomi Klein type said in a college lecture, "I wear low cut blouses because I want to."

I am obviously biased.  What I really need to know is where now is women's pleasure.  And the famously hackneyed, what do women really want?

Surely not to be harlots of consumerism.  Hopefully not catwalkers for names in lawns.  Certainly not reproducers for an industrialist class.  Maybe not geeks reviewing 15 page papers at 5 am.  Maybe not the aunties in sunglasses and gigantic handbags protesting against karo kari outside the high court. But then, maybe, what?

Define thyself young woman!  (The ladies have uncrossed their legs.)  

Okay, now you are wondering why this feminist rant was titled the titillatingly misleading "women's pleasure"...Because I recently read a khatmal's blog that said if you make your title dirty, more people read. Laugh out silently.  Harlot indeed.  Sorry if this piece if incredibly tilted towards the non working class woman.

I am from Karachi

and that automatically makes me 10 times cooler than you?

With apologies to the expats who would rather remember Karachi as the embodiment of a cool, urban city - resilient, magical, quirky - hard as nails.  We have with truckloads of art; we have each evening topped by a Sheema Kirmani dance.  We are mired in poverty, but the fighting spirit of a black belt -- industrious, hospitable, and blacklisted.  

No one wants to come to Club Karachi because it's dangerous.  Yet you all want to be here, because once you get our love, everything is second best.  When you come here , we show you a good time.  We take you to Manora - we show you the Hindu temples, the sheedi bastis; we play you some nice tennis in private lawns in Malir.  We drink you some margaritas - we take you for Bakra on winter evenings that make you swoon.  We show you the city lights - still burning despite the power cuts.  Its kinda cool on a brief vacation, or a teeny development mission - when the lights go out- and the third world seems quainter, duskier, warmer.  You may even want to climb up a public bus and experience the quaintness from up there.  And we can talk  We talk and we talk.  And we tell you why we are so special.  And when you go home you even believe us. 

So here is why I am automatically 10 times cooler than you.

1. We can get drunk on Murree vodka at the french beach, and then toss the can, the bottle, and the box it came in into the sea, and watch the gentle warm waves toss these back and forth on the moonlit seashore, while couples greedily smooch back at the hut.

2.  If I am pretty boy from the slums, better still a pretty boy with white skin, I can dress up in drag, and walk the streets freely.  And with some luck I may be able to find safe, paying customers who simply want to weep all night as they tell me about their repressed sexualities.  (The worst customers are the taliban - they don't pay, they say hoors are prettier, and then they blow up.)

3. And if I survive till next year, I will have enough money to open a bank account.  And with 2 lakh rupees clutched in my nail polish hands, I will proudly walk into anyone of the 43,000 banks in the city. I can, if I want , choose Islamic banking or Silk banking.  Thank goodness for Dubai. 

4.  And thank goodness for the Chief Justice - he will take a suo motu for anyone and anything.  Will your CJ do that?  He even declared last year that transgendered people are people, you know, with rights and stuff.  (Ok, so that didn't get me a better job; but stop bitching because it's cool, WAY cool.)

5.  And if my sister asks me if I could be her pimp, (so she can have 2 lakhs too) I will tell her it isn't safe for girls to stand on street corners.  The taliban don't like that part.  But she can work at a beauty parlor, and wax rich women, and maybe find a madam that way.  We have so many freedoms. 

6.  I can, If I am menopausal, play tambola every night .  So what if they knocked down the casinos?  I can do Mondays Gymkhana -  Tuesdays Karachi Club - Wednesdays Sailors Club.  I can buy a dozen cards, and play full house, and I can go home with 500 rupees and toaster ovens every night and use terms like snowball and lucky for some, number 13, and pretend that its 1969 while my husband stares vacuously at 12 year old girls.

7. And on the weekend when I get a break from Bingo night, I do committees.  Forget, that it make no sense, and no interest - I just love Mrs. Jalbani's fried fish with pepsi.

8.  If I am 40 and single and male, no worries.  I have the distinct privilege of finding women 24 years younger than me to marry me because I am wealthy.  You may think  this is a form of legalized prostitution.  It is.  But all I gotta say is no one is bloody forcing these young women.

9. Ok, I think this one makes me pretty cool - I used to think it was so cruel that people begged with babies cradled in their arms.  Then I found out the babies were drugged.  I was crushed.  But now I have developed a thick skin.  I no longer worry when I see the kids.  They come to my window - their noses barely reach.  I know it's a harsh life, and all, but it really isn't my fault.  Pretty cool, na! How resilient we are.

10. I can hire a a child to be my maid and when anyone tells me, that is child labor, I can turn around and tell the wannabee social worker, I am saving her from a life of starvation in her village.  She was all skin and bones last year, and now this girl stuffs her face with spinach and cheese samosas.   And we let her.

11. We don't give labor rights so they have to protest in their factories and mills all the time, but the good thing is we don't get to read about it because media does not like such stories.  Life is not a bed of roses, but we don't like misery shoved down our throats all the time.  You have your nice life, your salads, your bars, and your meadows - we have to fight to get our peace and relaxation.


12. And we forget horrors fast, you know.  If you had jalooses of bombs, stampedes for flour, vigilantes burning, chemical explosions, 3 year olds being raped, witch hunts for talibs every single day - you would too.  And that's why you admire our spirit.  We cast these sordid memories aside, and we start each new day on a fresh slate.  We are the brave and the bold.  We are the cool.  


(And oh, I have no idea what happened to those women who were killed in the stampede for flour.  I don't think they got compensation.)  


Oblivion zindabad!

13.  Oh, we say inshallah and mashallah, not because we are religious, but it adds a touch you know...like we know we're not infallible, and maybe there is something, someone out there watching us and wishing us well (I think I saw his toe peeping out from a cloud) -- because we so cool, and we are, of course, automatically 10 times cooler than you.

Oh, fudge, I just realized I can't go on because there are too many reasons why we are cooler...I mean we run lights; we slaughter animals on the street and leave their remains and the bands we used to stop them from fleeing our blades.  Such cool urban paraphernalia.  


It makes you want to write a novel.