I was sent the captioned article by a friend. Thankfully, not a pessimistic perspective on contemporary Pakistan. (more…)

I was introduced to this photo taken by Khanpride by Jami Sirhandi.

His plea was to stand up to the ‘development mafia’ and stop this vandalism.

Across Pakistan, rampant and unplanned urbanisation is taking its toll on green spaces and the trees. As it is our forest cover has denuded to alarming proportions; and now we are creating urban wastelands of dubious impact in the name of development.

The image on the right, again shows how trees have vanished and there has been no re-plantation despite the usual lip-service that is paid on these occasions.

Saving trees is not just a romantic notion: it is vital to our future and involves the right of our next generations to survive on this planet.

Stand up and be counted, as they say…

Khaled Ahmed is the endangered variety of writers. A true man of letters proficient in world languages, histories and cultures, he is a journalist who does not refrain from confronting the truth. There are very few individuals like him who advance the traditions of seeking knowledge and pontificating in a classical sense. I have been an admirer of his writings since my teens when I would read the Frontier Post (yes it was a thoughtful publication and a refreshing alternative to semi-controlled media in Zia days).

In his recent article published in the The Friday Times (that he also edits), he argues that “because of the death of Pakistani culture, normalisation with India has become more crucial than most of us realise”.

After 60 years Pakistan is helplessly witnessing the destruction of its culture by elements arising from within its society. The mission of purifying society to make it a fit vehicle for Islam has passed from the state. This process has been incremental, but after Talibanisation, the culture-destroying process has accelerated. The state seems to be getting cold feet over something it did earnestly since 1947 in the name of its purifying ideology. Now worried about its global image, it is face to face with religious anarchy and wants society to become tolerant and moderate, which is the function of culture.

Read the full article here.

The concluding paragraph is pretty grim -

Before 1947, Muslims offended with the fahashi (obscenity) of Saadat Hasan Manto took him repeatedly to court, only to hear the Muslim judges under British Raj say that what Manto wrote was high culture, not obscenity. After 1947, every time he was dragged before the court for obscenity, he was convicted! The judge in Karachi gave him tea in the evening and told him he was the country’s greatest short story writer, but convicted him for obscenity in the morning. Now the state wants to stop killing culture, but it is too late.

Thanks to my friend Temporal, I had a chance to read this account of contemporary Pakistan – The diary of a border crosser – authored by Rehan Ansari published by DNA. This piece highlights the recent developments in Pakistan and the major shifts underway.

My stints in Pakistan should have made me a believer in the coming revolution, instead I developed a knee jerk teary-eyedness when listening to revolutionary Faiz.

Admittedly, the article is woolly and rambles, but it does present an upbeat picture of contemporary Pakistan. It ends with advice to the Indians to change their visa policy and help the ones struggling for democracy in Pakistan.

Welcome, you and your pals come and go as you like,’  should be India’s birthday gift to these Pakistanis. Happy Birthday, we acknowledge that you have arrived.

Great advice but here is what I had to say on the article that:

..competently presented the changing contours of Pakistani society and its inherent dynamism – a free media and rising middle class are accelerating the emergence of a “new” Pakistan.

Hope someone is paying attention to this in India, not least the media that still has to shed its acquiescence to the bureaucratized worldview of the Indian establishment, and global constructs of Jihad, burqas and terror sold as journalism.

Writing in the Guardian, Madeline Bunting laments the growing inequities in Britain.Her powerful critique is not jut applicable to the British society…

Full entry here >>

The current controversy on Rushdie’s knighthood has several dimensions. Amid the knee-jerk reactions alluding to the grand-conspiracy-against-Islam, it brings out various layers and levels of literature’s role and position in societies and now in the globalized world.

I was once a fan of Rushdie and avidly devoured his books with great admiration. From Grimus to The Moor’s Last Sigh, I marveled at his playfulness with the english language and its idiom which undoubtedly he has enriched. The collection of essays titled Imaginary Homelands was a combination of disparate but original writings. Somewhere during this process came the ridiculous Satanic Verses which other than its blasphemous content and brazen disrespect for a vast majority of Muslims was a bad piece of writing!

The decline of Rushdie as a writer, finally, was confirmed by the trashy “Ground Beneath Her Feet“. Thereafter, one read strange, ignorant pieces of his non-fiction in the Western mainstream media that needed his stature to find a rationale for the imperial projects in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Shalimar the Clown, his recent novel was even worse as it proved to be bereft of subtlety and re-invoked all the crappy, soul-destroying images and cliches of our times. In a non-serious piece, published in the Friday Times (Pakistan) in December 2005, I wrote:

Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Shalimar the Clown, is enough to add to one’s misery. I finished browsing it; what else can you do with such stuff posing as quality fiction? As if the name of the central character Shalimar was not enough to offend a native reader such as I, the heroine India Ophuls changing her name to Kashmira was the ultimate illustration of cheap exoticism and a hackneyed dive into pass magical realism. Alas, Rushdie has started believing in his own mantra and the twisting of historical narrative. It simply does not work now. He is more of a bard for the ascendancy of the global tide against Islamism and perhaps he should stick to that. Better if he were to provide some intellectual depth to Fox News, or even better, if he started writing scripts for his young wifes tele-plays. Shalimar successfully completes the trilogy of Rushdies worst novels, the other two being The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury . Aijaz Ahmad, a US-based academic, argued a long time ago that Rushdie and Naipul were avatars of oriental consciousness. Small wonder that they are reviewed, exalted and globally hyped.

Much to my delight, a friend  an aspiring critic  sent me the review by Theo Tait of the London Review of Books: Noting what Rushdies style produces in the novel, Tait writes that it .. . is a cross between a piece of magic realism which displays all the worst vices of the style, and the contemporary international thriller. It is passionate, well-informed and sometimes interesting; but also hackneyed, simplistic and often very, very silly…”

Today, I read this brilliant article published in the Guardian written by a noted academic, Priyamvada Gopal that essentially is a lament of all that Rushdie and his new writings stand for:

Sir Salman, on the other hand, is partly the creation of the fatwa that played its role in strengthening the self-fulfilling “clash of civilisations” that both Bush and Osama bin Laden find so handy. Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of “freedom” and “liberation”. The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicious trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.

Vociferously supporting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on “humane” grounds, condemning criticism of the war on terror as “petulant anti-Americanism” and above all, aligning tyranny and violence solely with Islam, Rushdie has abdicated his own understanding of the novelist’s task as “giving the lie to official facts”. Now he recalls his own creation Baal, the talented poet who becomes a giggling hack coralled into attacking his ruler’s enemies. Denuded of texture and complexity, it is no accident that this fiction since the early 90s has disappeared into a critical wasteland. The mutation of this relevant and stentorian writer into a pallid chorister is a tragic allegory of our benighted times, of the kind he once narrated so vividly.

In any case, Ali Eteraz is right when he states that what’s there is a colonial siege of the minds in this whole issue.

And, please also see a sensible editorial by the Pakistani newspaper DAWN here.

This dubious honour is yet another endeavour to reward the constructed clash of civilizations. The fact that Rushdie has accepted it, further confirms his degeneration as another script writer of this “theory”. Meanwhile, the protests in Iran and Pakistan only reinforce this vicious cycle of neo-orientalism .

Shameful indeed.

Themrise Khan sent me her provocative piece on Pakistani electronic media. It is a contested standpoint and will not be appreciated by all. But it earnestly attempts to revisit the role of media in a dispassionate manner avoiding the cliched media freedom versus censorship debates.

Full entry here >>

I am grateful to Nabeela Apa – our dear friend – for sending the link to this story published in the New York Observer. Apparently, Huma Abedin is an energetic and trusted associate of Hillary Clinton. She is media shy and works in the background to manage the campaign of the Presidential candidate. This is what the NY Observer had to say: Read it here >>

Delhi’s Red Fort was once a symbol of Mughal power and the myriad India was ruled for centuries from this fort. Full entry here >>

“Writer Arundhati Roy said in an interview last week that at least India’s growing middle class was reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed.

Full entry here >>

The Daily Times Pakistan has published a story on surveys carried out by various organizations. The results are quite revealing not least for Pakistan.

Pakistani liberals would need to change their view that it is a society heading towards extremism and the Jihad-flaunting Islamists would be upset that they are not supported by an overwhelming majority. Most importantly, the global media barons would also be left bewildered as their spin-doctors and experts have been, to a great degree, proven wrong!

Read more >>

Mayank Austen Soofi in Delhi is an interesting character. A good writer and a prolific blogger, he is also fascinated by Pakistan. One of his blogs is called Pakistan Paindabad.

Read article here >>

This is how a picture has been captioned by Mayank Soofi, a talented writer in Delhi.

Mayank’s photo-blog contains some interesting images. The photo below, taken recently in Delhi, highlights the contrast between the symbols of consumerist globalization and the have-nots..

I also found a related post with an apt title: Malls, Multiplexes and McDonald’s – The New Communist World Order.

This is a challenge of our times. How do we reconcile the world of statistics with poverty and inequality as a real human condition.

A friend also emailed me this piece arguing the need for putting aside “pride” about a growing economy and focusing on “the lives of average citizens”. I am not making a political statement given the “otherness” that comes with my citizenship of India’s much loved-hate[d] neighbour. I am more intrigued by the image and the tale it spins. If Scheherzade were alive, she could easily use digital images to save her life!

Again, thanks to Mayank, I also saw this photo with his thoughtful comment.

” Morning rush hour in a busy east Delhi intersection. …  Commuters in confusion. A man, covered with a sheet, lying on the pavement. Sleeping? Dead? Who knows, who cares! “

A single picture can tell a thousand stories.