Summer Diaries: Kia Seekha?

Seventeen days ago, we began summer with a splash. My daughter, 6, has been learning swimming for two years at school, but could barely float.  So we decided that this summer would be it.  Swimming is an important skill, and you need it to graduate some colleges, and M was willing to go to the coach -- which was a really big deal for which I must thank her ballet teacher who accustomed her to tyranny.

The coach -- on most days, he's as foul tempered, sarcastic, and cramping, and understandably --at any given moment, there are 14 children, and their 17 enthusiastic mothers vying for his attention.  Invariably, when he's in the middle of a triumphant breadth, pulling along a child who is kicking quite well, some befuddled kid in large goggles and with a ruffian stroke, will bang into his back, and rob the moment.  And he won't scold the kid.  He gets this look of plain disgust on his face.  Then some soccer mom will scream from the sideline, "Sir, please work with Mohammad Jibran."  He said to me once, snidely, "They think they have bought me. Mein kisi ka khareeda hua nahin hoon."  He gets a wage, not commissions.

I remember when M was a baby, our apartment complex in Northern California, was offering swim lessons.  The coach was a black woman and she had only one student.  We were in an H1B work visa ghetto and most of the middle class Indians did not think it wise to pay for swim class, or that it was a necessary craft. She was polite and encouraging.  Any child would be brimming with self confidence for just dipping his or her head under water, or even just showing up in a smile and trunks.   She was young and sweet, and wore a Baywatch red swimsuit; edges of her gold tinted afro unrestrained by a swim cap, would get wet and dark..

Not our coach.  He ducks you, pulls you; he's older, with a slight limp, goatee, hair fully white, and pashtun nose.  I have also noticed him smacking faces, except he gets some vibe from me, and has not tried it with my kid and stays cautiously verbal with her.  If he's particularly pissed off or feeling mean, he bangs the kick board so hard on the water, your stomach hurts watching and remembering your own badly placed dives from youth.  Truly, he has no business being around young children.  But then he has moments of tenderness.  When a child will weep mid stream, and a pretty mother will panic, he'll get sheepish and consoling -- and later he will give the child precious extra minutes, all the while maintaining eye contact with the proud mama, who is now shouting, "Maya, you are doing so well. Maya, you're a big girl."

Yesterday, he tried synchronizing M's arm motion with her leg motion, except M stopped kicking the moment she moved her arms.  He yelled.  So she stopped moving her arms and kicked instead.  He yelled.  And eventually, she stopped moving both arms and legs and just kind of squirmed forward.  When she came up, he pulled her face close to his and yelled:  "Does your arm not move?"  Yeh tera haath nahi chalta?  15 din se aa rahi hai, kiya seekha?  What have you learned these past 15 days?  M was speechless, and didn't quite get that he was suggesting she is, um, disabled?   She skipped class one day and he cornered her and demanded an explanation.  At first M did not know what to say, so he pressed on.  She finally came up with.."Meri Mommy ne.."  He was so bored by now and said, "Don't miss again!" and turned away, leaving me a little intrigued about how I was about to be implicated by my lawyer child.

But children deal.  They seem unfazed by casual meanness, the insinuating bangs of the kick board, or I imagine.  Children do not get sarcasm -- almost never -- so don't try it at home.  They understand just one word.  "Chutti!"  M too  knows how to filter out his madness.  M's ballet teacher was Central Asian, and trained in Moscow, and had a posture made of iron and steel.  When we used to ask her to be less harsh she was alarmingly defiant and asked us how we would feel if on stage our child missed a step.  The swim coach is comparably less militaristic - even if he is ex army.  When I talk to my daughter about his anger issues (as I did about the ballet teacher), she says he gets only a "little upset."  The ballet teacher had inspired a higher level of petrification.  But then when I asked her one day if we could skip swim class because the routine is exhausting for me, her eyes widened, and emphatically she declared:

"We can never miss class!"

The mothers are dedicated.  Some of them wear hijabs, niqabs, abayas, and burqas which is their constitutional right.  But their children, unfortunately, are not as free.  I know Maya must be a big girl but does that necessarily imply she gets to wear a burqini at age 7?  All the girls have conservative suits, the type scuba divers wear.  You get to be a child for 10 years.  Then come the awkward years.  And then you are grown for 70.  So is it really necessary to cover up so much for the first ten?

But it isn't really the mothers.  Its not they alone who have sexualized their girls prematurely.   As soon as a girl turns nine or ten, she can probably feel the weight of the glares on her legs.  Our parents were less Islamized by the Wahabi Deobandi influence.  It was the merry eighties, and pockets were still hung over from the liberal seventies, while in other pockets, Zia caned people under the Hudood.  We wore swim suits well into the awkward ages.  But, I can definitely vouch for this.  Even then, no awkward age girl felt comfortable in a swimsuit.  Girls who vacationed in Europe were an exception, and they were happy sliding and diving in bikinis.

We, though, were bogged down, and underwhelmed by the stares.  We were self conscious and guarded.  People stared, and the staring started when you turned ten - and for some girls, nine. And you had to figure out and perfect that maneuver.  Wear your cap in the ladies' room.  Shower before.  Find a chair close to the pool.  Dump your towel quick.  Dive.  In all less than 3 seconds.

Girls have it rough, and these are the most privileged lot.  So don't start on me.  I almost titled this entry, "Swimming with the Taleban," but then realized, I'm no longer interested in countering or mocking their stupid narrative.  Not in this blog.  I am not even on speaking terms with the west anymore.  History sab jaante hain.

So in the meanwhile, here's to girls being girls, and summer in a swimsuit!

The Press Club Protest Genre

I don't know how I feel about Press Club Protest.  Yes, at some level it affirms the state's pretense of freedom of speech, assembly and our other constitutional guarantees at one sacred spot only.  I, myself, have sat in police offices telling officials about what the roads our procession will follow onwards to the Club.  But of late, I have stopped going.  I didn't go for Sarfaraz because I was tired of seeing the same 17 people.  And obviously the real struggles are happening outside KESC buildings, the real battles are in communities and streets.  When you have power outage for weeks, its the neighborhood that comes out; when a pipe needs fixing, its the people directly affected that come out, and not outside the PC, but outside a municipal office.


But Press Club for me, Karachi, Lahore, or Sukkur, and specially the Press Club Protest is a Place Holder.  Its not politically smart to abandon any space completely even if the space has gradually diminished in its capacity to challenge the status quo, and has become impotent -- the protest cloning itself week after week.  I would rather that the world continue this protest for three interconnected reasons.


1) For the novice or the unattached it a venue for politicization and solidarity meet-up, for birth and growth, a place where you expect to see and connect with the happy and the conflicted, rebellious faces; and its better than siting in inaction and rot.  For newbies, its also a "safe" starting point, and to (oh) the places they will go..


2) If a press club protest suddenly attracts many more people, then it could be amazing.  And at some level, its about the people, not the place; there could be a clamp down and a suspension of fundamental freedoms quite promptly (and brutally) if one day some 2,500 uninvited Pashtuns showed up from Landhi to protest drones.


3) When the revolution comes, its going to be an easy place for many activists to show up with or without a text message, especially the ones who are not linked to a union or a community based group, and are floating through NGOs and organizations, or simply reading at home, the students, and the youth.  Read text: "We are taking on the (ISI) goons.  1 Million expected."  But where?  Kashmir Road Sports Complex, Peoples Stadium, KU campus.  Press Club is intuitive, kind of like a catch all space for the old and young who are opposed to something.  The only real alternative I can think of is Mai Kolachi.


The Caveat:


What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that radical groups totally need to revamp their mode of press club protest utilization.  For lack of creativity and discipline, we see the same: procession, burning of effigies, photos, chants (although these improve time to time), hunger strikes, followed by chai, if the activists have time, which they usually don't.  It is good to let off steam, but like ANSWER rallies in the United States, if it becomes the sole purpose of your protest, then its bad.  Then letting of steam is letting go of momentum.  Plus, you must have roots in the relevant communities, and build campaigns rather than come out in orphan protests that are not backed by on the ground action.  Campaigns followed by a PC protest (as a tactic) would be an opportunity to do the requisite publicity and meet up.

But I wanted to say, in this moment, lets not completely give up Press Club, but reinvent it.  Bring the cool back into it.  Make it bigger, hipper, dangerous-er.  And here are two moments in time that I thought the press club protest was quite nice:  

I wrote this on September 10, 2010:
http://lurkinginambush.blogspot.com/2010/09/march-to-press-club-is-not-willing-to.html

And then before I migrated to Blog, I wrote this on facebook on November 8, 2008.   

a case of exploding red flags

by XXXX, on Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 11:59pm

If it were possible to romanticize one rally, it would be this one. There was a current in the air. The shot from the van caught a sea of red flags. These belonged to the labor party. Our 120 brown, red and back signs were conspicuous in their condemnation of the bombing up north. One that Sherbaz made awkwardly read "Stop Killing Small kids." Sorry, Sherbaz, but my Urdu can be as expressive as your English. Husna made an enthusiastic show of hers - Pashtuns are not Taliban. Pashtun students fought to be photographed, and demanded I get them the pictures. They are on Flicker, guys, and we’ve have had a number of views.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/green_desert/sets/72157608569366459/

There were moments of nerve racking tension. The jeep we had hired began to move. The driver made a unilateral decision to start the march. And as if by magic people began to race after it. Ushering a march is a strange job; no one really listens to you and with a glassy inevitability in their eyes, they charge toward you with signs.

I stupidly gave my information to a man dressed in white who was probably an intelligence guy. It was already too late when a PR friend alerted me saying he is not a reporter.

A very spirited chanting ensued. Hum Mulk Bachanay Niklein Hain, Aao Hamaray Saath Chalo. I know, it’s a little pompous and delusional to think a baby rally can save the country. But in Pakistan where drawing room cynicism is high, such statements uncannily come across as sincere and compassionate.

Things are bad out here. People’s wages are the same; yet the cost of living is out of control. Urdu press will regularly report of parents selling their children for a few thousand rupees. Rising prices are numbers for us but a matter of starvation for many.

Hence, our message of protest resonated with many. A call to halt the massacre of civilians in the Northwest sounded a whole lot like a call for economic justice (roti kapra chath) for the urban poor. We did not get the usual snickers - the typical look of amusement in the eyes of people watching a co-ed tamasha in overwhelmingly male public spaces. People related. People were dead serious. People filled balconies and murmured 'mashallah.'

Everyone is sensing the pinch. After the lawyers redefined the genre of protest through a 19 month mobilization, the common people are no longer cynical about the show of street power. I may have imagined it but there was even a nod of appreciation for women’s participation. Perhaps, it was just me coming full circle in my own skin in a place that appears close to home, and a place that had better tolerance.

For a believer like me, it was a silly and sentimental moment when I spotted a masjid minaret and a church steeple in the background of a shot of a protest brimming with left wingers and socialists.

On the gender thing though. In saddar, especially, there is such overwhelming presence of men, and a scattering of women, like salt on an immense salad. And they are busy rushing, playing invisible, and hiding curves, follicles, and mouths. However, I do not think people want this kind of gender apartheid. They want a more mixed society and inter-sex interaction, and softness. Yet when it comes to being down with freedom for your own family’s women – you don’t see even the activists encourage them to come out.

The rally ended at the historic press club. People made speeches. We dispersed. I dealt with emotional outbursts – my own included.

Earlier that day, I got into an argument with a Karachi multi millionaire; he’s a liberal and a philanthropist with bubbling patriotism. Ideologically he is not on the same wavelength. He doesn’t think we have condemned the Taliban loud enough. We have. But we’ve been clear that there are more people dying and being displaced due to the bombing by Pakistan, Nato, and the US than by the Taliban terror. However, we can not deny that the Taliban are a fascist force.

He said he does not trust people with foreign passports to speak for the welfare of Pakistan. And I do not trust Pakistanis who own multiple properties, to speak for the welfare of Pakistan

Pakistan: Heart Country

I've read most of Anatol Lieven's provocatively titled, "Pakistan, A Hard Country."  Excitedly, I thought, when I bought a stack of optimistic books from Liberty Bookstore such as "Listening to Grasshoppers,"  -- here is a respected, white journalist, a professor, who does not think Pakistan is a failed state -- someone who calls out the prejudices, stereotypes, and misinformation in the Western narrative on Pakistan which portrays it as a cauldron of incestuous militants.  He informs us that we have not failed, unlike Somalia and Congo.  We are better than Bihar by per capita income, worse than Karnataka.  Our insurgencies are not worrisome as long as insurgents do not seize much of rural countryside, junior army officers do not rebel, (which they haven't), and there isn't a mass uprising in the cities (which there isn't).  Fair enough.  I felt reassured even if a shrine was bombed a mile away from our law class at Szabist.  It's not out of control.

Merrily, I  checked out Anatol's face.  A nice face, and I could see traces of Russian aristocracy. Someone who could be quite the student magnet -- enjoys shikar (hunting wild boar) trips hosted by the waderos he befriends.  He describes his host's homes as ornate, quasi rococo, but is cautious about how much he insults his contacts.  Perhaps, he imagines they will furiously turn to the page they are are mentioned on and refuse his next stay at their guest house.  With Munir Malik he spares no blows and says, on many issues, he displays "a contempt for logic, rationality and basic rules of evidence."

At about 200 pages in, most people will have a sense of where he's going with this.  There is no good news Lieven has to offer.  He goes on to affirm every possible oppressive structure or problematic organization as if it were a miracle -- the Jamaat-i-Islami (disciplined lower middle class cadres with a soft spot for the Taliban), the MQM (violent, but organized, have made Karachi a wonderful city of flyovers), the army (so what if they give land to their retirees), the PML-N (tough, Punjabi businessmen who hated nationalization), and even the feudal kinship system (for what would replace it would be worse.)


At one point, he talks about rangers maintaining order in the city, and his temptation to kiss one, he cautions, is a urge that must be resisted.  Bitterly, this is a sentence he may want to delete in the next print of the book in the aftermath of the brutal murder of a 17 year old boy, Sarfaraz, by rangers at Benazir Park in Karachi.
   
He asserts that jirgas are the most democratic institutions in Pakistan as they provide local justice in a manner that is not as alienating as colonial legacy courts.  I almost nod in acquiescence; he acknowledges that jirgas are discriminatory to women.  I can see how local expertise and knowledge minus the sexism and classim can be useful to the justice system to build upon like the magistracy system in the UK.  But then he fails to comment on how there are groups (if city based) that oppose the jirga system as does Amnesty International - and even if these are criticisms from outsiders, it remains that jirgas are based in non-egalitarian, dynastic power systems, ownership of land, and control of resources.  Men who administer and decide in jirgas own property, or have Syed and Sufi lineage which they use to command loyalty and unconditional reverence.  Their authority to decide on judicial matters is derived from their continued subjugation of the masses.


To bring them, and hence jirgas, under the purview of the English/shariah legal system would make the system fairer.  After all, the Baluchi Sardar who presides over Jirgas, whose long curls remind Lieven of student days in the UK, and who opposes Swara and rape orders, got his education in the west.  He brings a Western (perhaps, alienating) human rights perspective to his decisions.  If there were systemic reforms, then decisions would have to conform to principles of human rights, but in a less arbitrary or capricious manner, and less dependent on the whims and fancies of individual socially (but never economically) progressive sardars.  


Lieven affirms that things work in Pakistan through kinship and patronage.  It's a negotiated state, and it's all good, and the state is missing in the rural countryside.  The police too follow local kinship patterns to resolve disputes.  Is his nonchalant non judgmental-ism supposed to make us feel any better about rule of law?  He does not have to live here.  And he would say, neither do you --  because you are a westernized city elite. 


The chapter on the military is when you really start to wonder if Lieven is an embedded reporter for the establishment elites of Pakistan.  It doesn't matter to him that they engage in sugar, cement and cereal business and award real estate to generals.  They're not obliged to follow the west's model of what armies should and shouldn't do.  Where did this system of land bequests come from anyway?  The Swat operation of 2009 was a success and Lieven is uninterested in really taking a hard look at its human consequences.  Lieven, it seems, never quite makes it past raving about the military's structure, and in this, he loses credibility and plot.   Isn't the military one of the biggest impediments to democracy and equal distribution of resources? He never answers this satisfactorily.

Nonetheless, the book has good information and insights; expresses a well-founded fear of the water scarcity in the country, presents the other side to Musharraf's modern enlightenment, gives great descriptions of visits to Altaf's home in Azizabad,  has interesting interviews with Dr. Shamim Gul, Baluchistan's police surgeon and her midnight post mortems on the bodies of girls killed for honor -- but as an ideology, it fails.  As a counter narrative, he has hardly anything to cough up besides the obvious - there is more to Pakistan than terror and failure, and that he has an appetite for our hospitality.  (I too, as a school girl, was a guest of the Talpurs, and it was fantastic.)


It isn't condoling when he mentions the famous Lahore museum (where Rudyard Kipling's father was once a curator), motorways of Punjab, and a hip city cafe as signs of Pakistan not being a failed state or on the brink.  It's akin to me saying we're alive and kicking because my daughter's being taught freestyle by an ex army coach who bangs kick boards on water to scare kids, and I managed to score an Eric Carle from Sunday Bazaar today, and some other children's' classics.


To be a good author/analyst you have to offer analysis of the ordinary hopes and desires of the people and how these can be achieved realistically.  It goes beyond just providing interviews from the street where people regurgitate stereotypical impressions.  What about some of the non mainstream currents in society - the lefties, the movements, even if negligible compared to the large parties, and the fact that many ordinary people loathe the military, the intelligence, and the establishment, and do not have housing, and are more concerned with basic needs.  How one man's plot of land is another man's oppression.  Plots allotted to officers, especially in fertile areas, for service is a naked usurpation of the rights of landless haris (mostly indigenous) who then depend on oppressive, if traditional and customary, jirga systems run by pirs and sardars - who in turn receive patronage from the military.  


Perhaps, what is funny about Lieven is that he makes fun of our English without meaning to:


I asked him what they were. 'Flamingoes,' he replied.
'Um, I don't think so, Sir...;
'No, you're right of course, they are not flamingoes....we call them koonj.'


In other parts, he observes the strained legal English of a lawyer dictating notes.  One reviewer calls out his cultural specificity -- But I would say, it's white man tripping, drawing comparisons which Pakistanis may even find mildly pleasing.  He is describing an ANP dominated neighborhood in East Karachi.


I realized it was one of those scenes of Hollywood gangster films set in the 1920s or 30s with dreary roadhouses and brothels standing alone ...I half expected Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro to turn up.


There is good news about Pakistan.  There are at least three dead men in the last 10 days.  But, we remain a society that does not accept or label state terrorism as terrorism   The state is present in peoples' lives, often directly, and sometimes complicitly through its omissions of services and infrastructure.


May 30
Saleem Shehzad, a journalist, who wrote about Taleban and Navy connections and lapses in security apparatus, was kidnapped and killed.  

June 1st
Saba Dashtyari a Baluch nationalist professor, born in Lyari, was shot.  

June 8th
Sarfaraz, a young man, from the Sultanabad slums was shot by rangers in Karachi as he plead for his life.


In every home, hatred for the military's budget, the repression in Baluchistan, its drunk on power massacre of the poor is growing.  People are seeing the hypocrisies and the fissures, and the dismay and anxiety caused by these recent murders are exposing how brittle people feel.  The media can be unrelenting.  Even if on email, press people are sarcastically wondering how the Supreme Court CJ can take suo motu notice of the release of Atiqa Odho, an actor.  She was carrying two bottles of wines on a local flight.  She is not dead, hence a bigger threat to piety and Ummah?


In other news, 4,500 KESC workers were sacked, but are refusing to go down without a fight.  I noticed how some of my comrades sat in dharna with them.  Audaciously, the KESC hired 6,000 workers to replace them - workers they'd pay less as new hires and contract employees.  The union leader, after 29 years of service, makes only Rs. 30,000.  The CEO of KESC makes, a source tells me, Rs. 8,000,000 month (more than what most Pakistani would make in a lifetime) while he and management think its fair game to blame the union for sinking the city in hot darkness.  Its really their inefficient distribution networks and power production that privatization and heavily paid top management can not seem to solve.


http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2011/05/who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire-with-kesc/

We may be a mess, but we do it our way.  Narmada Bachao Andolan in India led by Medha Patkar, may not have stopped the dam despite it creating inter class, peasant city progressive solidarity, a robust movement, pro people literature questioning the wisdom of big dams, but we are the ones who actually without the inter class movement and the massive literature stopped the Kalabagh dam.  We did with all the inter provincial rivalry and angst, and some NGO activity, a local social scientist tells me.

You also can't make Pakistan what it isn't because it appeals to your hippy heart.  My traitor heart would take the progressive Indian side on this, but, ideologically, I think, we have much more to hope for than Anatol's open hearted, but limited, book will have us.