adjusting to karachi living

When you first come to live in Karachi, you are bit anxious about how things are and get frustrated easily.  Slowly you learn how to do the city.  And here are some small lessons I have learned.

Never talk to society women about where to buy lace, they'll never shut up.  In fact they'll talk so much about tailors and boutiques, if you could tap all that energy through some scientific magic, you'd have several gallons of petrol.

If you see a woman who gets unusually animated when talking about her tailor, run for your life.

Never get upset with a waiter who brings you your samosa, his fingers underneath the plate, and his thumb pressing gently into your food.  Just peel off the part he touched and toss it, and enjoy the rest.

Never talk to men if you think you can get the job done by talking to a woman.  If you do, not only will the job not get done, he will think you desire him.

When lost in places far from Clifton and Defence, stop and ask the nearest ricksha wala, "Ji, yeh Nipa Chowrangi kidhar hai?"  And if you are really desperate, "Saddar kaunsa road jaata hai, bhaiyya?"

Never get on a flyover  It will lead you to a never-land where you will encounter Mustafa Kemal who will hug you, and you may never be the same again.

If you find yourself walking alone on a road with a motorcycle wala behind you, run, scale a wall, or surprise him with judo.  Whatever you do, be ready for something.

Be endearing and call everyone Beta.  It may hurt your ego a but remember 75% of the people around you are under 25, and it just helps ease the situation.

Don't be a fool when the waiter brings the bill in a restaurant and say, "Whats 15% of this?" Just shut up and leave a generous tip.

Always pay the boys who clean your window.  Its just bad karma to be stingy.

If you have an important day coming, do not eat salads, pani puri, or at Mr. Burger, Roasters, or Mcdonalds.

Trust a hijra about how old you look.  Khuda tujhay pyara sa beta dai means you look young and fertile. Khuda tujhay Hajj karai, you look old and respectable.  Khuda teray naseeb achay karay, you look troubled and middle aged.  

Never overtake anyone; if they beep at you  from behind you, let them pass.  You never know, they just might shoot you in a drunken rage.

And don't try to stare into Prados with tinted glass for the same reason.

If its a red light on an isolated road, don't wait for it to turn green, creep forward, look on all sides, and keep moving.  Otherwise, obey traffic rules.  Do not bribe a police officer; apologize profusely, provide an excuse for talking on the cellphone, and, if need be, accept a citation.

People have a very strong relationship with their cellphones. So whatever.

Whenever you give directions, always rely on teen talvar, do talvar, and Park Towers, and if its a society lady just tell her, "You've seen Threadz, right?"

Never share information about yourself.  If you've lived in the U.S. you have probably chatted up the grocery store guy about your college experience, your vacations in Kenya, your first crush, but out here people don't share personal details. Zip it, and zip up.

Remember a mango is not dessert, its a meal

Be a slave to fashion.  You don't need to be an elitist you make sure you are wearing what other people are wearing.  Its easier to blend in and avoid unnecessary tension when you can rattle things from within.

Embrace the fact that men and women do not interact with each other in a normal way.  Men and women have segregated social lives.  Accept it, and don't try to cause ripples.  Change comes slowly.

Always trust an intelligent woman on things.

Remember some women do wear just undergarments under abayas in case a situation ever comes up.

Nachos aren't really worth it when you have to pay Rs. 300 for a packet.  Learn to enjoy namak paaray.

Get to know your dhobi.  You never know when you'll need him.

Refuse to acknowledge a man trying to give you parking instructions unless it is a good looking Pashtun.

Get used to Sunday Bazaar.  You may find it dusty and overwhelming at first, but its a community shopping experience.  Bargain wisely and don't buy used shoes.

If you are in a hurry, don't start to talk to a group of women about their experiences giving birth.

If you're in a hurry don't start a conversation about weight.

Never trust a man who spends more than five minutes talking about himself or on the book he is writing.

Never the trust the world bank, the IMF, the military, the agencies, the feudals, the politicians, Israel, the U.S., the capitalists, or Nadeem F Paracha..

Remind yourself that you are living in a place with weak regulations - the chicken may have hormones and you won't know it.  The building may not have a fire escape.  Its elevator may not have been inspected in years.  Always believe that God is on your team.

UPS is an essential.  So are ice lollies for children.

The guy in the white shalwar kameez and the dark sunglasses is an intelligence guy.

the bomb that didn't shake us

Yesterday, I went to work, and the word was that there'd been a blast.  This time it was close to home - two streets away from my son's old school.  My colleagues' house was next door to the blast site and was damaged extensively - one of her employees and his son are dead.   My niece was in her school yard a couple of streets away.  The ground in her school swayed for several minutes and panic stricken teachers instructed students to stand in corners and wait.  She told me the story today with a stoic matter of factness.  There was fear in her voice, but also a sense of taking it in her stride.

All the schools in the area are indefinitely closed.  Even my son's old school which almost never shut down - even if it meant disobeying government orders or risking city trouble.  CAS never compromised on even one day's worth of education.  Parents are worried to send their children to school because of the unpredictability.  Some of the classrooms are in the basement and that brings with it reasons to imagine the worst possible scenario. No one really knows where the next attack will be, and when, which police officer may be a target, what station, what military outpost, which government official's house -- because no one has the information about intelligence operations conducted against militants, and the nature and degree of the role played by anyone who lives so invisibly around us - embedded so casually in our midst carrying with them cells for the most terrible dangers of our lives.  No one even knows whether there is any vision for an end to this violence on all sides.

About seven kilometers away from the site of the blast, we felt we were almost in a different city.  My children's school did not shut down and life resumed almost instantly.  When May 12th happened I stopped class - asked my students to talk in an effort to politicize, to offer catharsis, to engage young people.  Last year, in 2010,  I was teaching an evening class when the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi was bombed.  We were less than a kilometer away -- but for some architectural reason, we did not feel the tremors, or hear the sound.  But the cellphones went nuts and students began to panic.  I gave them a few minutes to make calls, and then resumed class.

This time around, I taught unblinkingly.  Students wrote an exam on promissory estoppel as if doctrines would save them --us.   Sorrow has become a redundancy in our lives.  A few years ago, a blast so close would have given us pause.  We would be grieving, thinking, exploring, petitioning, bringing out the candles for vigils, talking to each other, lamenting the loss.  And now the perpetual violence on the replay button, the news of suicide blasts and severed heads, the chilling stories of targeted killings where victims are slaughtered like goats, the casualness of blood, the you tube videos of trained assassins who recount the details of their 58 murders in our very city as if they were talking about vaccinations, the floods that have devastated rural Sindh two years in a row.

You lose the capacity to grieve;  you become desensitized.  You stop realizing what it means to have ripped bodies and pools of blood on the roads you have traveled just days ago.  I am pretty sure I felt more when I heard about the people killed in Gujarat pogrom in 2002.  Constant tragedy has a way of dehumanizing all of us.  I took a nap today.  I was exhausted and felt a congestion in my chest.  I woke up and headed to work.  Am I allowed such peace, I wondered.  Am I allowed such normalcy when people around me die -- my fellow Karachites -- our hearts beating together in our experience of the tumultuous happenings of our time, the inflation of hunger, the despondency of the years  -- or has it always been the case?  Some people are allowed peace while others die slowly and invisibly from the terror of poverty in the city's inner circles, in the outskirts of its industrial developments.  The city stretches its sinewy arms over useless flyovers, somebody's 10%, and superfluous malls and deliberately, coolly crushes people every single day in its embrace, in its utter disunity, in its callous disparity - in its senseless budgeting, privatizing, and legislating.

Violence numbs even politics and activism.  How do you collect yourself and pick up pieces to organize against, amidst, engulfed in violence?  Perhaps those in and close to the blast never do or do so with mad newness.  The others move on with a tighter, more self conscious pace, and people so mockingly from afar will call us resilient --without so much as a moment's thought that it is disparaging to call us that.

Its a fact of life.  Work, school, hospitals, exhibitions will go on.  So will the vacations, and travels to Dubai of the rich.  Just as sceneries change in computer games, from icy mountains to grassy savannahs and then to thick amazon forests, blasts are blending into the background.  Navy, police, shrines, and roadsides. Until there is mass chaos, mayhem, curfew, and until the food runs out in the pantry - we will persevere, and not because we are tough and resilient, but because we are clueless and apolitical and because we have no choice but to go on with the business of living.  There will be Dawn bread on the table tomorrow.  The paper would have landed on my father-in law's car rolled up.  The dew drops will have covered leaves.  I will feel anxious that Sadiq was so eager to cut the palm branches that shielded us from the stares of the street.  Karachi will be fresh for moments only in its first sweep of morning.  The rickshas will stop for me as I cross the road and I will wave no to them.  My friend, the newspaper vendor, will hobble to my window and tell me how he was hit by a motorcyclist and now his foot must be operated.   I will look at all people on the front lines and worry for them.

But cluelessness is unforgivable in these times. And so is the columnist, ex Marxist, Nadeem F Paracha (NFP).  Right winged people posing as liberals - supporting war and implicitly even imperialism, desiring democracy only for themselves and their kin, and covering up their blatant mistrust and disdain of the youth with their mere sense that the youth think rebellion is fashionable but have no depth --when its really people like him who have systematically failed to provide analysis that would allow the youth to develop critical ways of thinking - a full understanding of the systems responsible for such violence - the US's misadventures, the military's greed and complicity with the imperialistic designs, constant war in lieu of development, the social and legal oppression of the people of FATA, debt servicing and IMF conditionalities that have wreaked havoc on the poor, both rural and urban, stagnant wages and bad industrial laws, ungreen revolutions, and uneven lives.

NFP tweets:


Did a drone kill that kid and his mother today in Karachi? Oh, it was a response to drone attacks. Wah! How brave our heroes, the TTP!
http://twitter.com/#!/NadeemfParacha/status/115820888540192768


In reality, a blast in our midst should remind us that we should be opposing drone attacks and not playing clever word games asserting the humanity of some victims and denying the lived experiences of people in FATA who are fleeing the most terrible attacks --as numbing, as devastating, as traumatic, as fatal as the one two days ago.  HRCP estimates 957 people were killed in drone attacks in 2010 alone, many, if not most, were civilians. Some were children and certainly not part of the TTP.  Many were women.  All were denied due process of the law in this most brutal form of summary execution - not given even one chance to present evidence that they had nothing to do with militancy.  Yet, we are willing to hold democracy and compassion in abeyance because we can't relate to people living in areas where militancy has taken root -- because they are invisible in our so called liberal English discourse that is paranoid only about the liberties of a few.  At the peak of the Swat operation there were as many as 3 million of these people internally displaced by the military operations and the drones - their homes, peace and lives losing their continuity forever.  One thing people like him can not admit is that drone attacks violate the human rights of the people of FATA, are illegal and contravene international humanitarian law.  Many United States civil liberties oppose drones, doubt their precision, and argue against the lack of transparency and accountability in the system.

Drones are terrorism too.  State sanctioned.

Sarcastically, he comments in another article:

 It is a sad fact that some Pakistanis use more time protesting about trivial issues such as blasphemy, gang-rape cases and the fourteen people who were killed in the only suicide attack that has ever taken place in this country, instead of protesting against the drones that have killed billions of Pakistanis. But then, such misguided people are all alcoholics, drug addicts and believers of free sex, so one cannot expect them to speak out against the drones. They will all burn in hell. Inshahallah.


http://www.dawn.com/2011/04/28/drone-attacks-the-truth-is-out.html


Why this idiotic and false dichotomy? Why does opposing drones somehow mean that you tacitly and implicitly support what the militants stand for?  Why can't you be against drones as well as religious extremism  and militancy?  How deceptive of him to create a self righteousness around opposing the blasphemy laws and violence against women and mock people opposing other forms of human rights violations and terrorism - drones.


In an interview with the Huffington Post, NFP says:  "Now's the time for the United States to adjust its ways and try more to engage with the people of Pakistan through their representatives in the shape of the country's mainstream political parties."


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sobia-ali/nadeem-farooq-paracha-abo_b_960013.html


This is obviously not true as many political parties are collaborating with the U.S.  We have evidence of that through wikileaks.  More importantly, this is said without any perspective on the U.S.'s role in the politics of the region, the agriculture, the trade agreements that affect the poor of the region, and whether it even makes sense to talk about soft interventions right now.  Perhaps, what NFP needs is the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to remind him that drone victims are people too - and that drones violate human rights.  He would believe them, I think.

Delhi Belly Flailing to Shock and Awe

Apparently Shoaib Mansoor's  film, "Bol", is a big hit in India, and this may be cause to celebrate for some, but really, its hardly a surprise. A patriarchal protagonist, Hakim Sahib, who single handedly oppresses all his daughters, impregnates his wife every year in the futile hope of a male heir but he is cursed with girl sperm, and almost strangulates a baby girl to preserve her honor - it all adds up nicely to what many oblivious middle class Indians and even the upper class ones would imagine a Pakistani male to be.  Also adds up nicely to narratives that make successful novels in the west about the east, Brick Lane, Kite Runner - the triumphs and annihilations of women and minorities against oppressive patriarchal cultures - which in turn allow for military actions and drone campaigns against such cultures - by super powers.

Hold that expression while we send over drones...

So it disturbs me - and also while I appreciated "Bol's" effort to handle many social issues, some of its music, its shots, its characters, its politics were throughly liberal  --blame the individual for the failings of the state - they could just reproduce less so they have fewer mouths to feed.  

But this blog is not about Pakistani films, its about Indian films - our main fare for entertainment in Pakistan.  When "Delhi Belly" did not make it to the screens in Karachi, I was a little disappointed because I thought it was an rebellious film made by a maverick studio, and now I'd be watching a grainier version.  But just because you use the "che" word in every other sentence does not make the film rebellious.  If you're trying so hard to show that Indian youth are cool, tough, not bothered by traditions, bored with reverence, then also show them to be fighting oppressive trends in society - and victims, if not entirely economically, but at some psychological level so the ordinary viewer can relate to them, connect to them as human beings.

But these three, supposedly suffering roommates are hardly people one would feel sorry for.  They have jobs, they drink cartons of orange juice; the protagonist, Tashi, played by Imran Khan, (poor little rich boy) has a car and an apartment waiting in dowry for him once he marries his financee, a pretty flight attendant, played by Shehnaz Treasurywala.  Why she is working as a flight attendant is a mystery because her parents seem more than comfortable.  Only one of them, a shady photographer, who takes photos of corpses and for blackmailing, seems to be struggling.  In sum, they are the "ches"  or lets just say "fools" in order to be deliberately respectful.  The plot is simple enough -  a mix up of bags, drug lords getting stool instead of diamonds, and then chasing the roommates to recover their property.

Intestopan?

In one of the earlier scenes, Imran Khan's character and his future love interest, a suitably hip and sexually liberated woman, (ya sure, call her Bohemian) interview a flaky star who wants to "sing, dance, direct, and write."  She then sings for them a song that is predictably awful, so our two much cooler protagonists can laugh and display their own enlightened state, and actually appear like the bigger fools because of the sheer contrived nature of the scene.  Later at the end of the movie, clad in burqas, and after a narrow escape from the bad guys, the two jump each other, and make out.  Two people clad in burqas making out - the imagery is screaming for attention - Muslim lesbians --when in reality the couple is a straight Hindu couple.  The chemistry between the two characters is so missing, you feel awkward for them as actors that they have to kiss each other even if you are made to believe that its the adrenaline induced spontaneity.

please make it stop

Amir Khan Productions attempted to be kitschy and pulp fiction-esque, but they forgot to make the characters endearing and engaged in each other's life.   If you can't like the characters, then you do not ever really care about their hopes and dreams either.  You can't just insert galis, men scratching and serving cases of Delhi belly, scatological humor, spunk, and over the top craziness hoping to shock and awe the audience - but have no substance the audience can emotionally connect with, and weak male centered, hetero normative messaging.  There is a song in the film where one of the characters, a cartoonist bogged down by uncreative bosses, fantasizes after he is dumped by his girlfriend.  He walks into her wedding and announces how she has been with him.  Her family is scandalized - and the woman humiliated as she is thrust about like live flesh.  You can't laugh at it, as its a desi girl's nightmare scenario, and yet the scene is trying so hard to be funny and empower young creative men who've been abandoned for better options like American engineers.

At the end of the day, what has bothers me most about recent Indian cinema is its sense of superiority - the NRI has arrived politics of "Zindagi Na Milegi", the belief that they can turn Quentin Tarantino's  "Pulp Fiction" and "True Romance" on its head without a glitch -- without a sense of how unoriginal they are being.  Curse words absent a cause.  Pulp minus the gooda.  Cuteness without a calling.  Plagiarism and grit without reflection and compassion. Even the filthy apartment, an uncomfortable closeness with decaying, dirty wcs, and the sense of apathy and disorderliness seems borrowed from the film"Trainspotting" but incongruous with the characters in Delhi Belly.



I mean, guys, I am happy to be a "buddhi rooh" here.  I know I am in good company.  Get over Congress and Gandhi, and how Mumbai reminds you of New York; take a position on the Indian army's role in Kashmir, stop gloating about how after Soviet collapse, the Valad-a-mirs and the Russian models are dancing to your tunes.  Old white couples come to vacation in India, but Indians are not bending over backwards for them anymore - they are just sexy, their fake orgasms shock and awe the elderly couple.  Later they deal with an explosion as they celebrate their anniversary over a glass of wine -- the woman yells.  "We should have just gone to Disneyland."  We just can't get over how quirky we Indians can be - but you can't help thinking the white couple as a prop display the film-makers naked desire for the western gaze.

Nach Natasha.

I hope this most painfully supercilious and itchy trend in Indian film making will be over soon, but why should it when the imperative is Cannes and Big Cash; and Peepli Live on farmer suicides simply don't do enough.  In contrast, "Tere Bin Laden" is raunchier and has more of the Indie spirit as Ali Zafar has zest.