The Organic brew; pakistan, photography, qawwali, poetry & a general acerbic sentiment.

KO on the Houbara Bustard hunting parties in Pakistan & our shameless obsequious panderings to the Arabs.
KO :: Hunting with the Sheikhs

Here we go again, the government gives in to foaming-at-the mouth mullahs once again; and sates (temporarily) their hunger for the killing of all forms of (non-violent) joy in Pakistan. I guess we should just learn our lesson and circumscribe entertainment to burning KFCs and roasting motorcycles.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Kite flyers arrested in Pakistan
Kite flyers arrested in Pakistan

Whether consciously or otherwise – this blog generally remains silent on issues of politics; atleast for me, I’ve never felt a need to voice potentially divisive (and more importantly, perhaps pointless) opinion on a place I’ve always thought of as a little cubby hole celebrating the rich, liberal culture of desi lands.

But recent events in back home, resulting from—or so they tell us—the cartoon controversy have driven me into breaking this silence. As usual, whilst the ‘liberals’ stand by motionless, as the engines of government stand hostage to the tyrannies of the religious establishment, another piece of society falls and dissolves into the brimming ocean of intolerance, of violence and cruelty. It just isn’t about religion any more; well perhaps it is – but only as a means to an end. For certainly who stands on the parapet to convince others that religion-any religion-condones torching KFC workers alive, that allows motorcycles belonging to the poor to be lined up and burnt, even while their owners stand by weeping and powerless, that encourages ransacking call offices selling mobile SIMS can be nothing short of pure unadulterated evil.

Banks, even Pakistani ones were apparently especially complicit in the publishing of the cartoons, for what other reason could there be for legions of crazed seminary students to be targeting them? It certainly couldn’t have anything to do with the defiling presence of money, the holy after all, have no need for such worldliness.

But they certainly have shown remarkable foresight – as they felt society slowly turning away from them, the reigns loosening under the welcome shade of accretive liberalism; they realized the importance of this event as the ‘perfect storm’ they could unleash to turn society towards them again – and more importantly, turn against the moderation of Musharraf.
Only a couple of days ago – journalists such as BBC’s Aamer Ahmed Khan ascribed the remarkable lack of protests in Pakistan to a feeling amongst the Mullahs that there was no political capital to be gained. This however was just the calm before the storm – time spent conniving and planning the events, this was no spontaneous combustion, no ad-lib conflagration, but a choreographed and contrived outburst.

Ultimately, there is no love lost between me and these Mullahs of doom, I have never expected any better of them and they certainly have delivered. What angers me is also perhaps not so much the destruction itself – for anybody that has lived through the roaring nineties in Karachi, wonton infliction of anarchy is a fact of life -what truly grieves me, is how in this perverse situation, those who have planned this see no irony in using religion to make miserable the lives of those already stuck in the wretchedness of perpetual penury.

The rich have their armed guards, their friends in high places, and the mobs stay clear. The poor however, have no one to protect them and so must learn to see their valuables, and even their loved ones go up in flames stroked by ‘fire accelerating chemicals’.

I saw a young man cry on Geo as a line of motorcycles burnt in the background – the motorcycle is gone he wailed, but not the loan that he took out for it. Far away, in an upturned monstrosity of marble, a long dead soul may just have wept with him.

Amongst the eliteist fringe-media of English dailies in Pakistan, journalistic ability doesn’t seem to be a particular requirement to be a hack. For the run-of-the mill everyday pieces, the newspapers recycle old content, just changing the numbers to reflect whatever it was that transpired yesterday. The case of ‘Two unidentified bodies found in Defence’ tomorrow becomes the 3 unclaimed bodies in PECHS, there is no requirement of context, and none seems to be wanted. Removed and cold reporting in cataloguing in chronological order of the days events.
Even more disappointing then, to read the columns where, atleast, one would not be unreasonable to expect some analysis or introspection to balance out the sheer mundanity with which newspapers treat their bread and butter. But far from being lucid, galvanizing activists for social change, columnists here are content with relating anecdotes of their illustrious careers, or worse.
Perhaps almost the single exception is Cawasjee, who has seemingly spent the last eon bemoaning the slightly irrelevant (given the tail spin our society seems to be in) case of building control in Karachi; and despite it all he has had his successes.
As for the others, nothing illustrates more this puerile self-obsessed egotistical brand of writing more than Irfan Husain’s column in the Daily Times today. In the best of times, Irfan is out on a pretty obvious mission to astound his readers with the depth of his urbanity. These inanities usually take the face of decidedly under-developed Wodehouseian prose breathlessly relating tales of his pigeon hunting in England’s rolling countryside.
Sometimes even Irfan raises the bar for himself, today is just one such day when he outdoes himself, for today, after a ramble neither here or there about us going down the drain, he leaves us with the following:

Tailpiece: Although there is not much to be thankful for after October’s earthquake, we still celebrated Thanksgiving by cooking turkeys. I ordered two 10-kilo birds, and Sheila (my daughter-in-law) and I cooked one each. Mine took six hours of cooking and basting. They must have been good because Shakir’s and Sheila’s friends did not leave so much as a morsel…

Read the whole piece here (if you can trudge through it)

It really is pathetic.

William Darymple hosted a Sufi themed night ‘sufi soul’ at the Barbican, with a number of ’sufis’ in attendance; including Rahat Fateh Ali Khan (or Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as he now likes to call himself). But if the evening ever held your attention it was during the mesmerising performance of Gunga and Mitu Saein, who follow in the famous footsteps of Pappu Saein, part of the same devotional percussionist troupe from Lahore’s Shah Jamal Shrine.

Interestingly- it seems Gunga saein is infact deaf, and only learnt to play the drum because his father taught him the rhythms by beating them on his body [see this interesting article on Lahore]. There was a great synchronicity between the two as the drums beat out complicated beats at a frenetic pace, all the while whirling, in great red blur of speed; it seems incredible to think that one of the performers couldn’t actually hear what the other was playing. While the barbican may not have been the ideal place for them to perform, for they looked slightly lost in the cavernous space around them; I guess my impression is coloured by the fact that the last time I saw them perform, at Shah Jamal in Lahore, they whirled at the eye of a small sweaty cordon of devotees under a heady pall of bhang smoke-a far more befitting atmosphere. One that may have been difficult to recreate in London.

Rahat meanwhile was nothing short of acutely appalling, maybe even a slight embarrassment. As he went on to sing 10 qawwalis in the space of about of an hour; he explained slightly apologetically “time barra short hai”, which apparently then gave him a free hand to trivialize the qawwalis into 5 minute soundclips rendered in a distinctly poppish air. So here we were, listening to choice Nusrat qawwalis, grotesquely disfigured by a pedestrian qawwal who obviously had no intention of actually understanding what it was he sang. And far from the extensive selection of farsi, urdu and Punjabi poetry that Nusrat drew upon to link couplets seamlessly, most of Rahat’s improvisations seemed to be collected from truck poetry.

There comes a time in every mans life when he regrets not carrying around with him a selection of choice, overripe tomatoes- sitting in the Barbican, under the painful cacophony emanating from Rahat, I realized that moment, which comes but once, was upon me but I was powerless to seize it as it passed. A door has closed.
Shame.

I should post some more photographs from the event on the main website; see streetphotos.net for another Gunga & Mithu Saein snap

Talk turned today to my impressions of that ghastly film ‘bride and prejudice’ (on which I wrote a particularly vitriolic write up as I foamed at the mouth having wasted a hard earned 5 quid on the film) this was just one of coincidences that happens, unconnected I am sure to the fact that The Friday Times published a rather late film review, which to my considerable disgust manages to explain away the films monstrous failings under the guise of something about ‘Bollywood being Bollywood’.
I am also currently reading Salman Rushdie’s ‘midnight’s children’ which after many misses with the likes of Kamila Shamise is one of the few books by a desi author I find inspiring. I need not add that the book, or atleast what I’ve read of it is a tour de force of inspired, and deeply imaginative writing.
My excitement for a newly discovered desi writer I admire is tempered by today’s reading of the stinging review of Shalimar the Clown (Rushdie’s latest book) in the New York Times book review; it seems Rushdie may have lost the touch, ‘lazily’ crafting single faceted characters cast in premature plots. Shame, for as far as Midnight’s children goes, the writing is nothing if not captivatingly brilliant.

These many diverse threads seems to flow into a seemingly irrelevant article by William Dalrymple, titled unenlightening ‘the lost sub-continent (Observer, August 13, 2005)’ as I read through it, funny how I realize it to be a confluence of ideas I so sure I’ve almost toyed with sub-consciously over the last couple of days.

Take Kamila Shamsie, a rather pedestrial author if you ask me (who, for the purposes of this post stands in for all the myriad similar clones celebrated as ‘writers’) and yet, she and others of her elk are celebrated as writes – even while they piggybacking either the ‘chutnification’ phenomenon (to borrow Rushdie’s expression) or indeed our hunger to immerse ourselves in stories from home. My invective is put more elegantly in the article itself:

writer and critic Pankaj Mishra has attacked what he called the “slickly exilic version of India”, manufactured by a “cosmopolitan Third World elite … suffused with nostalgia, interwoven with myth, and often weighed down with a kind of intellectual simplicity foreign readers are rarely equipped to notice”.

So why bride and prejudice then?
The movie is more than just a badly written, anemically plotted absurdity, it is a manifestation of this very sort of scrubbed, romantic flights of fancy that come about from skewed perceptions of what living in the sub-continent is really about. Cloying visions of India/Pakistan are all very well, but when we start believing them to be true or even worse, dumb down artistic expression to worthless baubelized trinkets, Mishra’s indictment for intellectual simplicity seems to hit home. There is no other explanation for why preposterously bad literature, such as that penned by Shamsie should succeed.

Turning to a thread touched upon in the article, I cant help but wonder how we so can readily accept English writing by homegrown authors (who, as we find flee the coop as soon as possible) as our ‘own’ ironically, since most of this is written with an eye to the west at any rate. I think its one of those everyday exceptional things that you kind of never realize is rather unusual. It would be hard to imagine, for example this kind of sentiment in any other part of the world for literature that is written in a language and cultural context so at odds to its own.

But then this post-colonial stake that the sub-continent retains in the English language means English is considered as much a local language as Urdu or Hindi. For the educated middle class that generally begets these authors, perhaps even more so. When these authors work dal recipies into books with a mind to boost sales in sub-urban waterstones, the castigation as a sell out, de-ethnicised desi now seems understandable in context. And herein i think lies the explanation of why they are treated so different from Hemmingway. Where they share a language, the two milieus are also diametrically apposed; it’s in many ways a mutually exclusive constraint that writers from other English speaking countries such as Australia don’t have to face.

On the whole the article Dalrymple is arresting if meandering; he brings a perspective few other ‘firgangi’ authors can match, immersed as he is in the ways of the sub-continent; his mention in passing to Dehli ki Akhri Shama, just the sort random aside he can draw upon to make his writing so much more interesting.

The footnote mentions ‘white mughals’ Dalrymple’s latest book is to be brought to the stage. Many were unable to push through the book (admittedly it made for some rather heavy going every now and then) hopefully theatre will make the fascinating story he narrates more widely heard. In the current din of clash of civilizations, it would be illuminating to hear an account of people who agreed that at the end of the day, we are more similar that dissimilar.

On the 14th the new ‘official’ national anthem was unveiled:

Whatever its other uses may be – taking part in the anachronistic evening closing rituals of PTV will probably be its main purpose. Sorely missed will be the equally dated, crumpled and buckled original version that I grew up watching. The circa 1980s film was an interesting freeze frame if you will, a time-capsule, which featured our then greatest achievements; the newly commissioned Pakistan steel mills, Pak-suzuki (I think) and other dubious sources of patriotic zeal.

In Pakistan now awakening to the wonders of slick tv productions and spin, a new (some of ‘symbols of pride’ of old still feature) pop-ified version comes to us thanks to Asim Reza and Najam Shiraz (in no particular order).

One must be thankful atleast that someone has taken the initiative – but having watched it a couple of times, I remain marginally ambivalent about it.

You certainly cant argue with the individual merits of the shots Asim takes. Some of them are indeed are quite good, with spectacular lighting and even the odd sublime transition. But as a storyboard in total, I think it disappoints. There seems to be an overabundance of track-shots* with some quick-stills furthing ruining an at best patchy flow, apart from a few exceptions, the scenes also feel self contained with little fluidity and rhythm.

On the plus, some of the slow motion takes are cool and tastefully done, even if somewhat trite. The PAF shot also features the recently inducted female fighter pilots which I thought was a smart idea and a not too subtle nod to ‘enlightened moderation’, of note also was the transition where a mosque/gurdwara/church/temple flash in quick succession (nestled by colourised versions of some baba tapes).

Hair splitting it may be – but an irritating issue I often have with such ‘patriotic’ videos in south asia (particularly across the border in India) is their dreamily romantic, and really completely ridiculous depiction of the Thar / Thal / Rajasthan / Kutcch desert dwellers. The directors always insist these people are shown as rustic variants of E popping 24 trance hoppers, whirling away in the scorching 50 degree desert heat like lunatics… it just seems so wantonly effected and dramatised. I’m quite certain they don’t actually do this out there- inspite of my faith in intelligent design, I am sure they still would have long gone extinct.

So in conclusion, on the whole – noble effort, even if najam X15 is a bit harsh on the senses, but I only say that the production team would have done it justice had they spent some more time in post production.

* What can I say, the man likes his track shots-although it has to be said, he used them to great effect in what is arguably pakistan’s best television ad ever, the one he directed for Paktel

National Anthem - Rapidshare