Irony of our current existence

The city is on high alert and we’re in the office fretting over whether or not we will be able to get our space ready for installation on time.

It’s another afternoon of blowing smoke rings out of the first floor window, watching men lay out prayer mats in the parking lot below.  He has probably left for the airport by now.  When the Friday khutba emphatically resounds through the premises he may already be comfortably seated in the lounge waiting for his flight.  What lives are these that seek respite with children in other countries rather than with significant others of many long years?  Marriage is a terrible thing, it can only be tolerated once, they say.   I smile because I know that most who say that are truly committed to their families but too consumed with bravado to admit as much and yet I wonder about this need to get away every so often.

Azadi Mubarak

National Identity is a construct.  When I recognize that, I accept that there is nothing ontological or natural about the ties I feel to a piece of land, populated by a set of people, and given a certain name.  Even so, I must also accept that accepting its construction does not necessarily mean having to negate it the way we have had to negate gender constructs.  Negating this particular construct does not serve to set me free in the way embracing it does.  When I embrace it, I can value the carnage on BM’s last train from Amritsar, I can enjoy a Cricket Match in a way I could never enjoy American football, I can cherish the magnanimity in the philanthropic endeavours around me, I appreciate that had I not been Pakistani, I’d have been Indian and 62 years down from that particular moment, I know I don’t want to be called Indian.

And yet would I rather be called American/British/Australian/Canadian?  The transnational/immigrant reality flashes before my eyes momentarily.  I’d much rather have that life but I wouldn’t want to be any of those nationalities.  For all the dilutions in my acculturated pot of being, of all the labels I could fall under, I think I can deal with “Pakistani” most comfortably,  perhaps if for no other reason, for the fact that I was born with it, in much the same way that I was born with my name.  I’ve disliked my name for years but I can’t swap it for any other.

It is only when I embrace the construct that I take ownership and only then does the path of active citizenship open itself to me. To negate the construct is to be in transit.  In 2009 I do not celebrate freedom from the British, I celebrate the freedom to unpack my cases.

So she asked me what it was that I really wanted and for a second I had nothing to say.  I thought for a minute but I still didn’t have anything to say.   So I thought a little longer and still nothing!   She wonders how I survived on autopilot for 2 years, with absolutely no goals in mind, no desires, nothing to wish for and I tell her I don’t know.  I really don’t.  What is unsettling for me is that I have yet to resurface from the limbo.  I know that the time is now but how does one do it?

Sparc Event

“Taleem Child Labour kay khilaaf aik mo’ssar hathyar hai” was the theme of the city-wide speech and poster competition organized by SPARC – Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child.  Perhaps because the email sent to me stated the theme as “Education is a tool to end Child Labour” and perhaps because the venue of the event was the Defence Library, I had not imagined it to be a government school event where the lingua franca was to be Urdu.  So I walked cluelessly in to the sea of blue and white uniforms with hair cut short and without a dupatta to be hit in the gut with a tidal rush of guilt.  I could see how I would be perceived: a flaky aunty who watches from a safe distance and doesn’t get her hands dirty.  Horrid!

For some reason I had not realized how many government schools there are in Karachi.  Perhaps because I’ve been so enmeshed in the upper echelon of private schools lately that in my mind, government schools had just ceased to exist.  That was when I realized why it was imperative for this event to be a government school affair.  The children who went to these schools were maids’ children, drivers’ children, gardeners’ children, watchmen’s children.  They were children who were likely to have to leave school halfway to help their parents with their financial responsibilities.  They were likely to live in neighbourhoods where they may be friends with children who go to mechanics’ workshops and bricklayers’ kilns instead of going to school.  I understood then that SPARC had it right: through this exercise, it was seeking to educate and empower the very children who were susceptible to abuse instead of going the elitist NGO route of raising awareness among the unaffected affluent circles.

The event made me think that my time spent on the other side of town is straining my ties with reality.  This may be the bane of the middle class, we apparently have no time for causes because “my first responsibility is to ensure my children get the very best in life and hence I must be consumed ensuring that is the case.  Everyone struggles; if they struggle, I do too, what’s the difference?”  How does one transcend the cycle?

I am professedly Marxist: I believe in abolishing class privilege and yet I can’t forgo the comforts of my privilege.  I hate shopping at Tariq Road and am the first to rub my status in the face of the “low life rat’s ass of an accountant” at the office who dares think he can hit on me.  Hypocritical and horrid!  I think it’s more complicated than that though.  Gender is the additional variable which prevents me from forgoing class distinction simply because as one goes lower down on the socio-economic ladder, gender imbalance increases and roles become more defined.  I could make myself live on meagre rations but I could not never stand to be reduced to the lower middle income bracket’s definition of being a woman.  What does that make me though?  Intellectually Marxist and practically elitist?

Metaphor

The cybernetic oxymoron pumped with self-induced helium risks falling flat on its face.  Will it bleed painfully when it perishes?  Or is perish quite the word?   Like most products of the post-human age it has had a life without existence.  Can it then perish without being?  The endless nothingness that hovers between me and you, you and me, me and him, him and her, her and you — is it the same nothingness of emptiness?  It is a full nothingness, full of tender touches and gluttonous orgasms.  It is full, brimming with the fullness of your person, my person, his person, her person.  It is so very full of the impersonalities of our persons.  It is a labrynthine negation that looks for an affirmation of the self through the hyperself, knowing all the while that the hyperself is a construct reconstructed to infinity.  Their numbers increase through multiplication and division, growing by the droves becoming many of each and one of many and they seek comfort in togetherness, happily unremembering the nothingness of the space in between. 

Reviewing…

The mogra and rose bushes are in full bloom. The love birds are enjoying their new cage which, according to Foofy, has all the characteristics of a jungle gym.

Some adolescents tried following me home and we ended up racing cars all the way to Cantt station.  Spring fever, I suppose.

I’m three weeks away to completing my project and moving on with my life, even though I have no idea what I’m  moving on to.

I finished “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and I can tell now why it was so well received abroad:  it mocked one of the most disliked rulers in the country’s history; its humour was local but much of its presentation was not; its hero had more of Top Gun’s maverick in him than a Chitrali Sher Khan; it professed an unabashed homosexual relationship within the strictly regimented, conservative space of the military establishment of a country which is constitutionally Islamic.  Sure, it had all the ingredients to make it a winner.

One of the most cutting things anyone has said to me in life:

“Don’t be a spinster before your time is up.”

eh!

If the purple dragon ensconced in my bed could actually breathe fire, I’d stick my head in its mouth.  Come to think of it, unworked-for fatigue and precariously hinged frustration tolerance would probably follow me there too!

Another English language channel

So I was thinking the other day, why don’t I watch Dawn News?  From Convent School where speaking in Urdu was largely forbidden except during the Urdu class to a home where my American-University-educated mother encouraged speaking and thinking in English, Urdu has been my second language despite my Pakistani nationality.  Now I am not about to take the post colonial lens on this and lament the inadequacy of my Urdu because of some latent, inbred cultural complex.  I honestly don’t think that the limitations of language have ever made me less patriotic than the next person.  What I do find curious though is that despite being a Pakistani who routinely reads an English newspaper, I am not at all drawn to a channel that spews news in English and just while I am contemplating this indifference, Express launches a competitor.

I think a good chunk of my antipathy has to do with all the pseudo British and American accents that go across the board.  If the English language channel caters to the English speaking Pakistani then why does it not talk in the native dialect of English?  If however it is operating as do outsourced call centers and requires to really communicate with the Western world then why is its programming directed at a niche Pakistani market where all the men and women pointedly exude their affluence?  For example, why is it not possible for the women anchors to be wearing shalwars instead of capris and still be talking in English?  It appears as though only the super affluent in this city prefer communicating in English when in reality there is a good section of middle class Karachiites who do too but neither are they represented and nor are they targeted.  Documentaries too take on a very sanitized, outsider look at local happenings.  This is clearly not akin to al-Jazeera’s philosophy which seeks to speak to the West in its own language and debunk its hegemony through counteractive devices.  This is more a case of ’sell to the market which will yield the more profitable returns’: use the sweatshop base and generate income in foreign currency.

So if one of these was not enough, we now have another one to grace the idiot box.