one hundred essays

68.

2012-01-10T11:26:00.000-08:00

My wedding present to myself arrived today.

The new bookshelf we ordered is wide enough to hold it for sure. I think the little cubbyholes in the wall unit are meant for decoration, so I bought decor I can read and dream on and sleep with.

For three thousand one hundred and sixty eight rupees, I have twelve new volumes which I will one day stamp with a custom-made stamp saying "From the library of Sarah and Emaad." One day, I will donate one or more of these treasures and someone will flip to the first stamped page and say here is someone who loved very much and the beauty will multiply like caterpillars building cocoons in a bicycle basket. Twelve to add to a few dozen more which I will take with me, twelve to subtract from the few dozen I leave behind. On hot, brooding afternoons in July, I will take them out of the growing-older shelf, dust off the less-loved ones and arrange them by author, by subject, by title.

And when the first rush of newness-of the books, of my life, of everything-has passed, I will have old friends and new ideas waiting to be held. I will dream with Marquez, imagine with Roy and pontificate on politics with Said and Ahmed. On a rainy afternoon, I will cry about war, celebrate humanity and perfect my Urdu with Faiz and Manto. Perhaps on a bad tutoring day I will fall back on the Elements of Grammar and after a long one, retire with Pattanjali and his yoga sutras.

I am not getting married because I don't want to be alone. I have too much to read to worry about that.

I am getting married because I am excited to share my books and my love and my life with my best friend in the world.

Until then, my new present is waiting to be opened.

67.

2012-01-09T12:53:00.000-08:00

I wish I had some aptitude for physics. I think an understanding of the physical universe outside of the stupidities and banalities of human existence would be both fascinating and therapeutic.

I don't really mean to call all of human existence stupid and banal, but much of it is. Or at least its interpretation is. It drives me crazy thinking about how many people don't think at all. Because one of my goals is to channel yoga practice into daily life, I try and remind myself that wise people are the ones who know they know nothing and that I don't know anything about anybody until I've walked a mile in their shoes, but I confess that I don't practice what I preach to myself.

I watch women a lot and wonder what they are really like and what they think about when they are alone or making tea or in the shower or in bed. Always women. I tend to gloss over the men I see in daily life, but women interest me. I will wait for them, impatiently, as I stand in line at the tailor's shop and wonder if they love their husbands or if they are unhappy with their lives. Sometimes I eavesdrop on conversations in public places and sometimes-too many times-wonder if people think at all. About anything. Or whether they just float from one thing to another, making stupid comments and loving their children and being normal citizens and being hypocrites and sipping chai. Again and again, I cruelly think, you don't think at all, and I remind myself they are mothers and sisters and friends and human beings and must think about something, but I fall short of that yogi-like love for humanity. All in all, Pakistani society drives me mad. Not just my own social class, but all of them. I've been lucky to have worked with people from all walks of life and although wonderful people are to be found everywhere, so are the stupid and ignorant.

People are cruel that way. They fascinate you and then stomp on your interest in derision and laugh in your face at the expectation that they will be as beautiful as you want them to be. I want to see them and their stories of love and passion and disappointment and hurt and sins and redemption, but so often all you get is what seems like emptiness and slumped out giving upness. I'm left to my own self-centered disillusionment, thinking I wish I understood physics better to take me away from the world of people and into something bigger and forever expanding.

66.

2011-12-30T07:59:00.000-08:00

I see Karachi through a car window all the time. I wish I could walk out of my house anytime I like and go as far as I want, but the farthest I have walked around here is down the street to buy milk or cat food and even that feels heady and exciting just because I am on my own two legs. I love walking. I would deliberately miss the bus to the supermarket in college so I had an excuse to walk there and back, especially when it was snowing. In Karachi, girls like me walk around on walking tracks. That drives me crazy. Walking around an ugly track, with exactly one square kilometer of grass in the middle, which you are not allowed to step on. Round and round like a hamster on a wheel, just to get the kind of exercise human beings are meant to get just living their ordinary lives.
When you walk, you're forced to pay attention to the world and you see things that car windows don't allow at 80mph. The other day I was walking back to the car down a congested road and an old woman tugged at my kameez. She was squatting on the floor, begging from a dark corner behind a paan shop, in front of a staircase that looked like it might collapse. One of the men there turned to her and told her to go away, but not harshly. She laughed and waved him away and I thought what crazy eyes and I wanted to stop right there and ask her about the city and that staircase and if she has children and how she pays for her paan, but of course I didn't. I smiled though, because she startled me and she almost looked like she wouldn't mind having a conversation right there, but she and I were worlds apart already and I got into the car and shut myself off again.
We don't really see each other, do we? I write this blog without my real name on it because I want to walk around this city and stare at you and ask about your life, but invisibly. Invisibly I watch you and quietly I scream and I scream and I scream because I want to be heard and not seen. Recently, people have started telling me they like my blog, which makes me realise my initials are not a very good pseudonym and it terrifies me a bit, because they have all seen me naked and shouting and no longer faceless. My two month hiatus from writing wasn't because I was walking around and learning about you, but because I wasn't. I was afraid to do it all knowing people know who I am, but here I am stepping out of my car and saying hello, I'll still write. My name is Sarah Elahi, I wasn't very good at annonymity and here I am for real.

2011-12-21T08:10:00.000-08:00

Blogger stats has informed me I have readers in France, Netherlands, Ukraine, Romania and South Africa! I'm sure whoever you are, you stumbled on this blog by mistake, because I don't know anybody in these countries-but if you're reading this, say hello in the comments! I'd love to know what brought you here :)

I would also love to know why my blog is linked to an LA weight loss site and a business selling Ajwa dates, but that's for a different day. The internet is a mysterious place.

65.

2011-11-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

I woke up today knowing its November 2nd and didn’t want to bother getting out of bed. The second day of November. This was supposed to be my day. This was the day I chose for the exhibition that would showcase my year of painstaking research on the 1971 war. I wanted to throw myself a pity party with my pillows and not go to work, but I did because it’s crunch time for college applications and I had promised to help someone with a personal statement. Waking up was the saintliest thing I did today. I’ve been completely petty otherwise.

You know how sometimes on your birthday you’ll be in Physics class or at the grocery store and nobody will know it’s your birthday and you’ll feel like you know something everyone else doesn’t? You’ll feel like there’s something you should be sharing with people. In a good way. I have that same feeling today, but the sad version of it. All day, I’ve been thinking CAP, CAP, CAP and nobody here knows why I left. I feel like a liar. Nobody ever asks me about my last job, so I haven’t had to lie-yet. I’m feeling heavy with my secret. It’s not something I want to share, but it’s weighing down my hair and eyebrows and mouth. Somebody mentioned the exhibition in the staff room today and asked me if it’s the same organization I worked at that’s putting it up. She said my ex-boss is a brilliant woman who achieved so much in life. “I don’t want to talk about this!!” was what I thought, but “Yes” was all I said. Again, that lying feeling. It’s staff room talk to you, it was a whole nine months of excitement to me.

I want to hug my friends who actually put up the exhibition. I know they’ve been worked to the bone. I know it so well. I want to congratulate them and tell them how amazing they are. I want to meet the artists whose portfolios I studied a few months ago. I want to buy my former colleagues dinner and tell them I love them. I want to see the exhibition. I’m not sure if I can do it. Not today, anyway. Tomorrow, day after, sure. Any day but November 2nd, please. I know I’ve been specially acknowledged in their exhibition thank yous and I think it would make me cry. Not because I’m touched-though I am-but because then I will have to think about why I left and I am so good at not thinking about it.

I left so pigheadedly and I don’t regret it. I think there’s a timeline for everything and mine was nine months. A good gestation period to make me a grown-up. I know the real reason I would have loved to put up this exhibition myself, besides of course the satisfaction of finishing what you started, is that I crave some credit. It makes me cringe to admit it to myself. After a year of hard work, seeing a finished product, seeing it all come together, having something that’s tangible and admire-able, that’s what I want. I want the pat on the back and sigh of relief. It makes me think that the path I have chosen for myself now, in a school, is so different from the one I was on. What will I ever have to show for my work now which will get me a pat on the back? A line of students whose activities were successfully coordinated? Neatly stamped report cards? A file full of internship information I compiled?

This is why, for the first time today, I truly believe there was a reason I had to leave CAP. I’ve been telling myself there must have been a reason, but now I can see it. If I am going to work in education, awareness or social work, I need to give for the sake of giving. My friends at CAP, the ones who stayed, the ones who have worked day and night on today’s exhibition, can already do that. They’re amazing people. Me? I try not to be selfish or egotistical, but of course, I can be. Learning to perform service because I love it and truly want to do it is my challenge. The past five years have thrown things at me that have forced me to learn hard work, but this year has thrown things at me that’s forced me to learn hard work for rewards that aren’t always gratifying. I feel thankful for realizing this. I’m still sad, because it will always hurt to know that things that mean a lot to you can be always be taken away. But I’m bigger than that, because it’s November 2nd and I’ve come a long, long way since this time last year.

64.

2011-09-27T12:42:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, I thought there was a ghost in my dorm room. Yes. Go ahead and judge me. I was and still am convinced that something creepy was happening after dark, in my side of the room (my amazing Guyanese roommate had her side pasted with religious stickers which were supposed to ward off these troublesome things). There wasn't much left of the semester. It was already snowing outside. For as long as I stayed in that room, until I moved out and left it behind me, I was terrified of falling asleep in it. I would curl up in a corner of the bed, knees against the wall, reciting whichever random religious verses popped into my head, trying to remember what they meant and guessing from familiar sounding words. I was too afraid to turn around, literally paralysed with fear, thinking that this has to be the worst feeling in the world.

Don't ask me why it happened or where the fear came from. It just happened. Inevitably, I would fall asleep and wake up screaming, only to find my roommate hovering over my face, waving one of her lucky stickers over me frantically. Being afraid of ghosts or spirits or whatever you call them is not like being afraid of rats with their beady red eyes, or airplanes, or whatever. It's terrifying because you're not even sure what you're scared of. Imaginary apparitions, if you will, can do anything because your imagination is limitless.

Being here makes me think about fear a lot. I tried putting it on a scale to see which is the worst kind. The time we were teaching at summer camp and heard gunshots but didn't get hurt? Didn't really care. The time your students didn't show up to class because so many kids were shot dead in their neighbourhood? Gut-wrenching, but not frightening. The time you saw your old school half blown to pieces on TV? Soul-crushing, but it happens. The time, every single day, when you call someone you love to check if they're at work yet, left work yet, home yet, stuck in a riot yet, safe yet? That is terror, every day, twice a day. The bogeymen who no longer occupy my nightmares are out to plague waking life and their imaginative strength seems to feed on my fear like a parasite. Hear a door slam and you think "bomb blast." See two guys on a motorcycle stopping for a cigarette and you think "shit, we're getting mugged."

You can call me a bourgeoisie pig, but in the past year I have spent enough time venturing into Karachi's seedy underbelly and the schools it houses for it to haunt me forever. I feel like a coward for even thinking it, let alone writing it, but I don't ever want to make an "Are you okay?" call again. It's made me fast forward to thinking about kids, and how I don't want to have any if it means sending them out to a warzone every morning, or raising them with a psyche as insanely messed up as mine seems to have become.

63.

2011-09-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

The news bores me to death sometimes. Not because the content is boring, but because every likely comment, debate, opinion, conclusion and recommendation that comes out of it has been beaten to death, resurrected a few months later and beaten again. Hell, if it wasn't for this blog I would have forgotten half the bad news I've heard in the past year or so. What is frustrating is when even feelings become redundant. "Oh wait, I've already felt that before," is the worst possible reaction to news-unless of course it is the kind of good news we have been hungering for for so many months.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter at all who is behind anything, or whether we win or lose. What matters is how many people defend the disturbing minutiae of injustice in defense of a greater good. I've heard a new world is coming and that her arrival will be punctuated by minor skirmishes. I've heard apologetic statements about bomb blasts and blasphemy laws and getting worked up over an Ahmaddi calling his mosque a mosque and not "place of worship." I've heard that all countries go through hiccups and burps and teething and various other infant-related analogies, and that Pakistan will develop kneecaps and stumble into toddlerhood soon enough. Oh well. Oh well. Oh well. Life goes on.
I used to analyse everything, but now I don't bother. At traffic signals and on street corners, I look at people and perhaps instinctively like them, but second-guess myself and wonder what filth may be found if I peel away the layers of normality. Hello, I love what you're wearing, are you a closet racist, classist, homophobe, Nazi apologist, imperialism-lover or Blackwater spy? I rather like the way your spectacles make your face look, I've always wanted frames like that. But I worry I won't like you once you start talking. You see, I am a bit bored of hearing cliched opinions, including my own, regarding the news. Because the news is all we will talk about, if I roll down my car window and make friendly conversation. Oh, you won't roll it down? Well, neither will I, because I am afraid of getting mugged, as are you. God, it happens all the time.
Allthetime.
It amazes me that I can write when there is nothing left to be said, or thought, or felt.

62.

2011-09-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

Here you are again, blank page, asking me to write about bomb blasts and death and wedding errands. I don't want to, because things will keep changing and things will keep staying the same and what is left to say about any of it? All I know is that life and death keep on happening. They don't give you warnings or a friendly wave or look both ways before crossing the street. They crumple up fear, mine and yours, like failed attempts at origami and throw it in the wastebasket, and miss. They wear faded lawn prints and the kind of shoes everybody owns. Sometimes they try to be profound, but end up creating mediocrity, waiting for an artist or poet to mould them into what they should have been. That's all there is to it.

That is why, when a blast rattled my window this morning, my first thought was simply "Blast."

There is a routine for things like this. Once the panic has subsided and all family members have returned home, shared stories and have been accounted for, you can start making calls to everyone else to establish how many degrees of separation are between you and this one. Three. Two. One. None. And then you switch on the TV and see your old school with its familiar walls and windows and parking spots replaced by six foot craters and ambulances. You spot the school van driver and your face lights up and you say Hey, that's Riasat Bhai! because it is always nice to see familiar people on TV, before you stupidly realise why they are on TV. And then you think what do they mean eight people are dead, who are they? And then the calls begin again. Throughout it all is a vague sense of guilt, of knowing that if it had been a big one near the city center, or the other side of town, it would have been easy not to notice. Then you console yourself and say well, if life and death are going about barreling into your soul without giving polite road signals, there is only room for so much care.

And later, you run wedding errands, because of that habit life has of keeping on happening. And while you choose the right shade of yellow, you check your text messages to find out which of your old social studies teachers is in the hospital. Part of you thinks two years ago I would not have been out shopping for yellow linen if this had happened, but most of you thinks two years ago, this would not have happened anyway. Between meals and naps and phone calls and work and sorting out student timetables and putting your files in alphabetical order and planning the welcome party for incoming students and giving advice on studying for the SATs, you check the news. Why news websites think it is in good taste to discuss how well-known socialities "tweeted their grief today" is beyond me, but I have worked at a news website, so then again it isn't.

And you think there will be no memorials, there will be no ten-years-later services, there will be no names attached to the security guards who died, there will be no TV specials or emotional Reader's Digest features about how someone's clairvoyant puppy saved them with photographs of smiling blond children and their healthy pets. There will be no special school assemblies and tomorrow parents will drive their kids to school like masochistic but level headed adults and enquire at the half-demolished gate whether the guard is alive and if he is, send them in and go home and perhaps run wedding errands for another child, or perhaps sit and worry, or perhaps give extra sadqa. And you know they are the ones who really matter, when people say "Ha it finally happened in Defence" and when people say "Let us mourn for those in Waziristan" and when people say "We are reaping the seeds we sowed" and when people say "When America leaves it will end" and when people say "I was right there when it happened" and when people say people say people say people say people say but life and death go on either way.

61.

2011-08-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

Hello, blank page.

You have so much potential.

Whatdoyouwantobewhenyougrowup?

I want to be a farmer dog whisperer tree planter yogi pilot detective mom cake decorator hot air balloon owner circus performer chimpanzee trainer author illustrator peter pan saint.

What do you really want to be?

A Taoist. Though I don't know very much about it. I just read an abridged guide to it, but it sounds cool.

Build me a library like the one the Beast built for Belle. I'll be my own personal librarian.

Find me an agent, I'll write for a living.

What do you mean, I'm not good enough?

Well. Prestige is overrated anyway. Maybe I'll be a hermit. Maybe I'll write, become famous and then go mad and hate people, like Tennessee Williams. Except that I can't write like him.

Anyone can have their own TV show, lawn exhibition and blog these days. Even me.

I realise that "even me" is incorrect grammar. I love and hate grammar. I love its order and hate its fascism.

I like that Urdu is arranged subject-object-verb. It forces you to hear the whole sentence. I like writing in this room. I in this room writing like.

Hello, blank page, trying to decide what to be.

Just like me.

60. (recycled from last year's writings)

2011-08-22T12:05:00.001-07:00

Genius. It always creeps into you at night, with characteristic bad timing that makes you promise yourself that in the morning, when your bed is less warm and your room less cold, you’ll write it all down, create a masterpiece. Of course, in friendly daylight nothing seems remotely as mysterious, interesting or complicated as it does at night, and the long words and lovely sentences curl up and arrange themselves ordinarily, uninterestingly. It makes you wonder what it was about the night before that made you believe in your own promise and talent.

Darkness does that. You can fumble around in it forever, believing yourself to be feeling and touching and experiencing something novel, something special, something profound that needs to be shared with the world. It also makes you miserable. The quest for genius can be melancholy. It makes you marvel at the loop-de-loop of your own thoughts, drives you insane when you try to follow them in a straight line (out of habit), forces you to consider answers to all the world’s questions before sleep takes over and the mundane tasks of your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday morning begin.

I like friendly daylight better though. Genius is alluring, but kindness is more forgiving. In broad daylight, you can’t be fooled into taking your own mind too seriously, because the rest of the world competes for attention. There are things to see outside of your own head, and they are kinder and happier than the things you conceive of when you are alone and in the dark. They may not create masterpieces, but I’m ready to believe that shrugging off the need to know everything, do everything and be everything is an art in itself.

I argued with someone about Taoism once, about how it’s not wrong to just be. Pooh just was, and he seemed considerably wiser than Rabbit or Owl, but without the Tao of Piglet book series these things are impossible to explain. I realize now that contentedly being is much more difficult than aspiring for genius, and it is considerably more aware of others and their happiness than the deluded nature of knowingness. I’ll go with the sunshine. Beautiful words and mysteries can wait for a darker day. My daytime universe is a friendly place and I fit happily inside it.

59.

2011-08-21T13:56:00.001-07:00

I've learned a lot of things about myself in the fifteen months since I graduated into the real world. For one thing, now I know why they call it "the real world." I knew college was a bubble, but that's not what people seem to mean when they said it's not "real." It's just different because it's full of safe spaces and people giving you multiple opportunities to learn. Post-college, nobody constructs safe spaces for you and nobody gives a shit what you learn. Anyway, I digress. I digress a lot these days. My own mind is like a train station. Things rattle in and rattle out. Shut up. Mind.

I used to think I'm ambitious. Dictionary.com defines "ambition" as "an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame or wealth." This confuses me. I have an earnest desire, but don't particularly want power, honor fame or wealth. I mean, they'd be nice. But I don't especially care. The desire and earnestness are in other directions.

People don't think I'm ambitious anymore. I say I work at a school and I get the Look, the quick appraisal of everything I am. Everything I am is supposed to be: unaccomplished, unexciting, unqualified, unable to find a better job, in it for the easy hours, waiting to get married. I don't blame anyone, really. That's what education has come to in this country. To care about it is to announce your credentials as a bored (soon-to-be) housewife who's doing it for the pocket money and emotional rewards. Well. Whatever. I can deal with that.

What I Want is to live my life. I don't know why it took so long for this realisation to arrive, but here it is. I want to live my life. I want to inspire and be inspired. I want to try new things and make mistakes and break my heart and learn again. I want to fly to another city on a moment's notice because I feel like seeing my grandparents, without taking leave from anybody. I want to finish reading all the history books in my room. I want to be the happiest, most educated and serenest version of myself. Excuse my language but I don't give a fuck if you think education is beneath me. You probably think being ambitious means wanting things. Well, I want Things too. The difference between me and you is that I will teach and learn on my way to getting them and you'll spend your whole life racing to an imaginary finish line.

In first grade, my teacher asked some question about plants, I don't remember it anymore. Everyone answered one way, I answered another. It was nothing important and I was wrong. My teacher took me aside and said well done, you stuck to what you believed even when everyone else was saying something else and I was as proud as a five year old can be. There's a reason I still remember that. Teachers matter. I might not stick around in a school forever, but I will never look at my highly-paid, professionally qualified friends and I wish I was a little more everything. I'll never save or defend lives, I'll never build anything you can touch and I probably won't ever be able to afford a beautiful house. My job doesn't take years to earn and impresses nobody. I admit this annoys my fat ego. But at the end of the day, no matter where I work or don't work, I'm committed to creating safe spaces and opportunities to learn because I don't believe in the real world after all.

58.

2011-08-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

Karachi I try and write about you but you're too fast for me.

Fast like those girls called me when they learned I had a boyfriend. Fast like the warden accused me of being when I snuck out without a gate pass. Her purple lipstick was smudged in the corners.

Stop killing each other.

I wanted to be a vegetarian once. I quit meat for three months. These days I tell myself I only need meat about once a week and avoid it on other days. I won't quit because I'm anemic and vitamin deficient. That's what I say, anyway. Sometimes I'm not sure.

I think it's probably a sin to eat meat that claims to be lawfully prepared but is a product of mistreated animals. I almost never say something is a sin.

Karachi give me back my sanity. I worry about vegetarianism and cry for beheaded chickens in your rivers of blood. Karachi, screw my sanity. Someone's gotta cry for chickens too.

I hate women who are self righteous about their chastity.

I hate righteous people in general. Like the ones whose only argument for not preparing meat ethically is that religion allows us to eat it.

God, why do I have meat on the brain?

Every time I say the word "hate" I feel guilty because my mother taught me not to think like that when I was young. I wonder if I'm still young. What does that even mean? Young enough for what?

When they interview people on TV whose children have died in ethnic violence, it hurts me physically. I say I'm desensitized, because that's what everyone says in Karachi. I don't think I am. Not yet. But it's easy to switch off the news.

Karachi I'm not angry. I don't know who to blame.

Sometimes I don't feel anything because I haven't thought enough yet. I think too much. Not in a smart way. Just in an overthinking way. My father says I have slow reflexes. I think he's right.

I don't drive because a palmist told me I would have a car accident. I can drive better than I let on. What scares me is that it doesn't scare me. My slow reflexes might cause me to kill somebody. Or myself.

Karachi your traffic is crazy anyway. What would I even do if I was stuck in a riot?

I'm superstitious by nature and rational by force. I go to palmists and tarot card readers. I believe all the good stuff and tell myself they're bullshitting about the bad stuff. It amazes me how I can lie to myself.

Karachi 35,000 people dead.

I wish I was a hippie. I would wear flowers in my hair, eat organic food and talk about love. Who can afford organic food though? Rich people who dress like they're homeless and talk about how money has no value. This is mostly not true for Karachi. Nobody in Karachi dresses like they're homeless unless they are.

Karachi you make endless poverty take the back burner to basic survival.

I'm very prejudiced. I think that's okay. Some people judge others for their race or religion or whatever, though of course nobody admits it. I mostly judge people for being unintelligent. I think that's okay.

I try not to hurt anyone's feelings or use the word "hate," like my mother taught me.

Somewhere inside me is a five year old who wanted to grow up to be "a nature lover."

Karachi you make me want to plant some trees. I can barely breathe for the lack of oxygen.

Who cares about nature when people are dying? Am I too old to care about trees or something? Too old for what? What does that even mean?

Karachi I could write all night but you're too fast for me.

57.

2011-08-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

One year, two jobs and a lot of experience ago, I started a blog. My goal was to write one hundred essays in one hundred days. For days on end, my life revolved around this personal project, which I had invented in an attempt to keep my creative juices flowing and give myself something to do in my lonely free time, since my working hours left no time for socialising back then. I didn't realise what this project would turn into, or what it would come to mean to me, or how many hours I would spend throwing around potential topics in my head the first few weeks.

I didn't meet my goal.

Once I realised I couldn't keep skipping days and thinking I'll make up for it one especially prolific weekend, I changed the name of my blog to simply "one hundred essays" and decided to see how long it took for me to get there. It's been a year and three days now and I am on essay 57. Not so prolific after all. Somehow, I'm not quite as let down by this failure than I may have imagined when I first set my goal. There have been good essays and bad essays, but every essay has a story behind it and I use the 365 days of published blogs, comments, drafts and discarded pieces as introspective tools. I never realised how much I had to teach myself until I started forcing myself to write-something I haven't been doing lately for lack of inspiration. Someone told me today to stop making excuses and "go find it again," so here I am. Finding it.

Last August, I wrote a letter to my country on the eve of independence day, wondering what could have gone so wrong in its history that I was writing it borderline abusive letters rather than celebrating it. Last August, I wrote about the dark humour that seems to belong to my generation alone, because it is easier to laugh at the twisted world than cry about it. Last August, I wrote about rain and the grief it brings my city. Last August, everything was the same and everything was different.

It is independence day again and I spent it looking forward to another new job-exactly what I was doing a year ago today, except perhaps my excitement at this new beginning has waned. I've tried on two potential careers and am embarking on a third and a part of me is ashamed and wondering why I tend to flit from one place to another. Most of me is lost. A few months ago, I would have passionately defended what I want to do in life and shouted down anyone who challenged me. Now, I'm okay with being lost. I trust myself to shrug my shoulders and let my way find itself for a while. As for 14th August, I am no longer in a position to write letters to my grief-ridden country, because I'm part of it and you can't write a letter to yourself. A year ago, I thought I knew Pakistan and was ready to announce how my degree in history qualified me to identify its problems. A few dozen books later, I've realised a true historian is always a little lost, because truth doesn't come in a three year diploma. This independence day, I sang the national anthem at midnight at the top of my lungs, said fuck you to the electricity and water shortage and stared at the flag decorating my house with muddled feelings. I read 500 pages of speeches given by politicians for and against Pakistan and received an email from an accidental Indian friend congratulating my country on its independence. I didn't write anything about it because I had nothing to say. And of course, it rained again this August. I let myself get wet and didn't switch on the news about deaths by electrocution and houses collapsing, because a year in my city has taught me not to watch the news too often. I shared dirty jokes with dark humour about our failing government and didn't pretend I know that this country will last only five or ten or a hundred years, because really, who knows? If I had known anything at all a year ago, this blog would never have happened. In 2011, confusion reigns supreme and for once, that's just fine.

Here's to new beginnings...and knowing nothing at all.

56.

2011-07-03T13:30:00.000-07:00

Comrade ML Khan was not the kind of man anybody noticed. He spent his days drinking chai under a whirring ceiling fan in a dark and almost defunct government office. His face was ordinary and he could have been of any ethnicity really, with his brown face, average nose and straggly moustache. He wasn’t a real communist, but he had read a bit of this and a bit of that and had briefly joined a Railway Workers’ Union because several of his friends had, before it was banned and communism died a quick death in the country. The “Comrade” bit stuck, at least in his mind, though nobody in the office actually referred to him as such-had he ever said it out loud, he would have been met with confused stares by the two other men who whiled away their time in there.

This particular government office was built on the same pattern as all official structures (Were there guidelines somewhere, in a dusty book of law?) It had a grand façade, complete with minarets and useless, once-beautiful balconies littered with pigeon shit and separated from the rest of the building by heavy, rusted grills. The same grills-geometrically patterned and painted sky blue (the favorite color of governments everywhere, it appeared)- guarded the windows along long corridors. Post-colonial, post -Communist, post-Islamic, post-bomb blast, post-concern, the entire structure had a confused air about it. Or a story to tell. Comrade ML Khan, having done one thing or another in the office for upwards of two decades, was part of the furniture, old enough to tell the tale of the building’s glory days but young enough to remember his own, though he was never actually called upon to do so.

He had not always been an old, graying sort of man. There was a time in his life when he had done more than sip milky tea under a slow fan and napped in his plastic chair between officious bursts of ordering around the peon. There was a time in his life when he had cherished notions of being a true comrade, of making fiery speeches about the bourgeoisie and reviving the Progressive Writers’ Movement, of moving audiences to tears in street theatre performances and publishing radical literature.

At seventy two, Comrade ML Khan sat in the decaying remains of an establishment office, lighting candles during the frequent power outages, plaintively bleating at the peon about the dust in the office in front of guests and obsequiously deferring to the wishes of the equally archaic Head of Department for his office. His official title was Editor for a publication nobody read anymore, although he enjoyed the comfort of knowing that although he had been serving a government institution since late middle age, at least it was in a literary capacity. One of the few things he did every week was to write the magazine editorial. From time to time, his pet topics coincided with urban intellectual fads and received a bit of attention here or there-wisps which he cherished as deeply as his past which nobody cared about. His last article on Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in particular, garnered attention from one or two visiting professors and was subsequently quoted by young, English-medium reporters who had not bothered to read it themselves. The irony of Faiz being championed by the uppermost echelons of society in discussion forums and conferences which cost thousands of rupees to attend was not lost on him, but he chose to ignore it. Comrade ML Khan had become very talented at ignoring things that made him uncomfortable.

Twenty eight years before his induction into the ranks of civil servants, Comrade had worked at one NGO after another, championing various causes along the way. After his failed tenure as an almost-communist, he tried his hand at many different things which satisfied his youthful desires. His first job was as a guide with an organization that sought to promote cultural tourism. His zeal for the protection of architecture, local art and handicrafts did not die, but his energy for showcasing them soon did. Several unsatisfactory years were spent showing around field trips of pubescent students flirting during field trips, large families who all talked at once, parents of small children whose main interest was locating a restroom and people who would pose for photographs and leave without actually taking the tour. Occasionally, there would be a foreigner or two. He liked foreigners-they were nearly always chatty, tipped well and made him feel both well-informed and exotic. When war, sanctions and a bad reputation began to ruin his industry, friendly foreign faces thinned out and eventually disappeared, leaving Comrade ML Khan with little option but to find a new career to feed himself with.

The second in the long line of NGOs that littered Comrade’s resume was a street theatre troupe for which he wrote contrived, one-dimensional plays about a plethora of social ills. Inevitably, his male characters would die noble deaths after standing up for the cause they believed in. Meanwhile, the women in his stories would steadfastly support their greater counterparts, rarely joining the action and almost never dying, unless they were somebody’s mother, in which case they would die of grief. The truth was that Comrade ML Khan knew very little of women beyond his purely carnal encounters here and there and he penned their roles doubtfully, sexism not being an ism he was at war with yet. This job was one that he loved, in spite of his lack of genius. The people his troupe performed for, starved for entertainment in a country where all outlets for it were rapidly closing down, appreciated their clumsy efforts at educating the public. The applause at the end of each act was not only heartening, it also remained a memory that he did not consciously try to forget as an old man and often returned to him in moments when he relived his imagined past glories.

Later, as Comrade ML Khan flitted from one cause to another, he learned a great deal about the world he worked in. By the time he was twenty seven, he was privately cynical about his own or anyone’s ability to effect change through art, so disinterested was the general population in his work. By the time he was in his thirties, he was all too familiar with the arrogance and insincerity of those who publicly championed the ideals he worked for. In his late forties, suffering from tuberculosis from years of smoking cheap cigarettes and determinedly trying to avoid a midlife crisis, he decided it would do him no harm to turn towards God, just in case there was one and he should die young. And that was how, at seventy two, Comrade ML Khan was not really a communist at all, or even a socialist, but simply an old man who had read a bit of this and a bit of that and possessed a good number of badly thought out ideas.

It was an oppressively humid day when the graying man in the dying government office decided to lose his mind. The presses in the back room were rolling out new copies of the magazine with no readership, with freshly written editorials about issues nobody cared much about anymore. When the pregnant sky finally broke, the force of the monsoon rain wrecked the fragile press room and water dripped into the rusty machinery, causing the painstakingly typed Urdu words to blur and the paper to become soggy. In a burst of literary inspiration, Comrade ML Khan saw the entire episode as a metaphor for his life, romantically giving it more meaning even as he forced himself to be honest. Everybody knew he lost his mind that day, but nobody noticed the spectacle of the old man floating up to the ceiling, being sucked through its cracks and coming back to down to earth as fat tears and acid rain.

55.

2011-06-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

I love and hate discussion threads under news pieces. They are fascinating, infuriating and so addictive that I once started writing my term paper for anthropology based entirely on YouTube debates, but changed the topic because it wasn't worth it to ingest that much stupidity for one paper. Take for example any music video from the subcontinent and glance at the comments below. Within ten or fifteen of them, someone will have raised the vital question of whether the musician/song/lyrics are derived from Hindu, Muslim or Sikh tradition. Within another five, there will be a lively discussion about people's mothers and sisters, with plenty of caste-conscious epithetsthrown in for good measure. I think YouTube comments are where I learned most about penny-pinching banias, sewer-cleaning chamars, homosexual Pathans, sand nigger Musalmans and "d1rty guRlzz"-though the latter are of course ubiquitous on the internet.

But back to my original point, which is not asinine remarks about whether Bulleh Shah would have been Indian or Pakistani, but burger babies such as myself and their comments on the daily news. I say "their" and not "our" because burger though I may be by virtue of my residence, I try to not fall into the trap of acting exactly as mummydaddy as Karachi might expect me to act. And here we come to today's news article: 40 people mugged at T2F. Comments? 67. Content? Along the lines of, "I am furious...We must organize a protest...Let's show these worthless robbers what we're made of...I am enraged that someone is targeting a space for artists...How dare they rob an intellectual space?!" Just add a lot more exclamation marks, pseudonyms and spelling mistakes and you get the picture.

People's anger is legitimate, but it is lop-sided. Another news story from today: "Peshawar blast kills three, wounds ten." Comments? 0. Along the lines of, "Another bomb story from the Taliban province." One might say the disproportionately angry reaction to the T2F robbery is because it is a new kind of violent incident, one that we're not used to-after all, a few bombs go off every day and all terrorism news is old news. But it's not a new incident-it is the oldest of them all. So many people in Karachi get shot, mugged, robbed and generally terrorised every day that when I worked for the crime page of a newspaper, we had to choose the top 15 incidents every day to save space (which brings me to the next question of why the paper gave two columns to this story when they don't even run other mugging stories). There is nothing novel about armed men walking into a crowded public space and stealing cash and mobile phones, except that they are more likely to hit gold if they are in Defence than in say, Gulshan-e-Maymar, or some other place off the radar for DHA bubbleheads.

I completely sympathise with those who are feeling wounded by the violation of a place they hold sacred, simply because T2F is one of those rare places where intellectual growth is encouraged. But if we are to be intelligent, we must first be honest. Pakistan wouldn't desperately need places like T2F if the people who patronise it weren't so quick to polarise themselves from the rest of the country and blow their own tragedies out of proportion. Are you really going to attend the Facebook and Twitter protests for this? Are you going to spend an hour, or maybe even two, whining to your friends about how your own neighborhood is under attack now? Please consider volunteering at a low-income school, teaching a child who can't read or patronising local booksellers instead. Honestly, if we are ever to combat intellectual poverty, we can't do it alone on the second floor, crying about how the "other" Pakistanis are coming to get us in the comments section of the Express Tribune.

54.

2011-06-13T10:55:00.000-07:00

"Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence. "I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything.

I know a lot of Rabbits, a lot of stupid people and a lot of people trying to be Rabbits. Now, no offense to aspiring scholars anywhere. I personally think Brain is the best thing you can have and I don't at all mind that Rabbit is very clever. The problem begins when you notice that most intelligent people you meet are so enamored by their own intelligence they can barely see through their haze of self-congratulation. This is especially true in Pakistan, where so many people who have everything seem to believe that success needs to come with a great deal of condescension.

Don't get me wrong-I'm all for a healthy dose of being critical of society, especially in a country where being thoughtful is a crime against patriotism. But when we seethe with anger at everyone else's stupidity, complacency or ignorance, when we laugh at the crazy theories spawned by paranoid hyper-nationalists, when we shake our heads at others' misfortune and think they probably deserved it, we are as useless as a Rabbit preaching to a silly old bear.

There is a great deal of intellectual poverty in Pakistan. What is difficult to understand is why so many who pledge to combat it think they can do it top-down, without engaging the very people they are trying so hard to change. Activists have the country's best interests at heart when they speak of economic inequality and will speak about it to one another at one-thousand-rupees-entry-fee events. Self-proclaimed liberals will propagate sexual freedom and liberation, will refer to their servants as "these people" and fire them for having affairs with one another. Society aunties will romanticise the past when people mingled freely in public parks and shudder at the thought of mixing with the awaam. Celebrities will defend their right to choose their genders and be accepted as queer and forget to mention the eunuchs that still dance on the streets for a living. Students everywhere will talk about undoing the mistakes of the previous generation and run their family factories and farmlands without knowing their workers' rights. The meek shall inherit the earth one day, they say, the meek will inherit the earth. They feel good saying it, thinking it. They oppose the right to vote because "the people" know no better. The people are never the people, the people are always those people.

You Rabbits want a Revolution. A revolution for whom, a revolution for what?

There is a lot of Brain in our upper classes. That is why we don't understand anything.

53.

2011-06-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

I had Chacha called from the kitchen because I wanted to interview him.
"Interview me? Nothing to interview me about! I'm just a cook," he protested. I needed to know about the 1971 war, I explained. About what happened to him. He must remember something?
"Remember nothing."
"Remember something? You couldn't have been that young,"
"Only seven or eight. Remember nothing," he insisted.
I gave up. Maybe he really did remember nothing.
Ten minutes later, while I was still seated at the dining table with the rest of the dinner guests, Chacha came back in, offering dessert.
"I remember one thing only. My father was in the army."
"The Pakistan Army?"
"Yes, he was a fauji. But they killed him." I was served a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
"Who killed him?"
"The army. I don't remember why. I think because he didn't speak Urdu."
I asked him again for an interview.
"Remember nothing!" The kitchen door swung behind him as he left. I followed him out, abandoning my dessert bowl on the table and pleaded my case for more information. Chacha smiled apologetically into his off-white apron and wiped his hands on it. All he remembered, he said, was that his father was an army officer who was killed for not speaking Urdu and his brother was a Mukti and became estranged from them and ran away to India and he's not sure what happened but now he's in Pakistan and he remembers nothing. Nothing. Of no use to Baji and her project. Just a cook.
Perhaps Bua could tell me more, I ventured? Chacha scowled. Of course she could. The useless aged woman had probably been old even back then. She must remember everything. From the corner of the kitchen, Bua smiled serenely back at us, not having heard or understood what we were talking about.
I repeated my questions for her.
"What happened in 1971, Bua?"
"War. Fighting."
"Who was fighting?"
"The army...and the other people," She followed me back out to the dining room, still smiling, still slightly confused.
"What did the army do?"
Silence.
"Was the army good or bad?"
She looked across the room at Dada, who was absorbed in thought. A once-fauji, now-Dada.
"I think maybe they were good."
Uncomfortably, I moved my spoon around in the bowl of melted ice cream.
"My brothers were shot dead when we ran, though," Bua added.
"Where did you run?"
"I don't know. Far. Very far. Maybe India. Maybe not. I had only one pair of shoes and they killed my brothers. We walked for a long time,"
Dada spilled ice cream on his shirt. Two people scrambled to find a tissue.
"What part of Bangladesh were you from?" he asked, unbothered by the spill. She told him. He cleared his throat.
Chacha stood behind my chair. I turned around and saw him scowling at his kitchen nemesis. He told us that Bua was senile anyway.
"Life was very difficult," Bua continued. I waited for the story. Instead, she sighed, then gave a bright unexpected smile and shuffled out of the room back into the kitchen.

52.

2011-05-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

"I'm afraid that sometimes you'll play lonely games too. Games you can't win cause you'll play against you." Dr Suess said that. Ever since I read "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" to my younger brother, I can't get over how this master of rhymes and proponent of eating verdant eggs has charted out my life in a twenty page book. Read it. He's probably charted out yours, too.
Seems like I'm always playing against me these days.
This week brought on carpal tunnel syndrome, allergies and the flu. Somewhere around Wednesday (which is neither here nor there, a quality of Wednesday I can't decide if I love or hate), I walked out of the office to take a phone call and give my injured arm a rest. I had been uncomfortable at my desk because of the stiff splint on my left wrist, growing pain in my right and the irritation at knowing my antihistamine was wearing off. I hate being sick. Once I walked out though, I was almost immediately drenched in sweat, since it is late May in Karachi after all. Maybe it was Wednesday, maybe it was the series of physical ills that have bothered me for the entire nine months since I started working, but I just felt like kicking something. This can't be what life is about. And this is where I clarify-to myself and to my audience-that I actually like my job. I like collecting oral histories, I like teaching, I like researching, I like the rush of working towards exhibitions and events, I like having a routine, I like having my own money and knowing my days of scrimping on shampoo to buy a textbook are over. But parts don't equal whole and whole is exactly what I am not.
It was after kicking the wrought iron chair outside, stubbing my toe and having this realisation that I went inside and wondered what it would be like to be free. I know myself well enough to know that my definition of free involves work and a lot of it. It sounds like a paradox, but it's not. I love work, but the moment any of it begins to lose meaning for me, the moment I feel that I am not putting my heart one hundred and ten per cent into what I am doing, I feel trapped. I am selfish. I will not leave my job because I enjoy the work, the people and the financial freedom. But I'm playing this game against myself. I'm swimming against the tide. The tide wants me to slow down, type less, read more, assume less, learn more and worry less about whether typing with one hand means I won't finish making this lesson plan by 6pm. The tide wants to leave me broke.
If this blog was a self-help book, a romantic comedy, an inspirational talk or a novel written by a woman going through a mid-life crisis, my next sentence would tell you that I am quitting my job, moving to an island with clean air and plenty of fruit (and wise, brown natives to complete the picture) and becoming a yoga master. But it's not. It's a blog typed with one hand by someone breathing through one nostril and lying in bed trying not to compromise but knowing for now, I'll probably have to. Maybe when I am thirty five-or even twenty five-I will have all this figured out. Maybe I won't. Maybe I will write a blog about all the solutions I have devised in my head. Or maybe I won't, because as much as I trust the people I meet every day, I know it's not a good idea to lay all my cards on the table.
Dr Suess says that if I learn that Life's a Great Balancing Act, I will succeed (98 and three quarter percent guaranteed!).
May I balance gracefully on one arm, a blocked nostril, a swollen lymph node, too many questions and a lot of heart.

51.

2011-05-10T00:03:00.000-07:00

Every day that I wake up to the broken world, I am not unhappy.
On some days, I am full of beautiful thoughts and compassionate feelings.
On some days, I am irritated by my lack of sleep.
On most days, I am preoccupied by my morning to-do list.
But every day, I am in a war state of mind. In my mind, this war began in 2009, when my consciousness absorbed the brokenness of its surroundings completely, like a baby ingesting food properly the first time.

Burning buses and TV buzz. Rape and arson and twitter updates. Newspapers, checkpoints, gunpoints. The miscellany of our lives being swallowed, but not whole. It travels down my tongue, into my throat, is pushed down my esophagus. It would be poetic to say I can't stomach it, but I can. I do.
Now that I have integrated our ugliest ogres, digested them with my breakfast, I am no longer embarrassed by them. People talk (wail, howl, cry) about how the images that we swallow have come to define us and how this definition shames us. I feel no shame. I look on, curiously, at what is unfolding. National embarrassment has no meaning for me. Neither does national pride. Neither does national. Or nation.
Dirty flavors can be found in every bag of jellybeans. Perhaps we have far too many, but you can only be shamed by what is your own. Rationally speaking, it is impossible to be embarrassed by the actions of your milkman, unless you believe the milkman represents some aspect of yourself. By extension, he can only represent some aspect of yourself if you allow him this representation.
That is why I can not be proud of the Pakistanis who I love and admire, I can only love and admire them as human beings. I can not be ashamed of Pakistanis who murder, I can only despise them as human beings. I can not be ashamed of Pakistan, I can only love it for the value we attach to the motherland. I can not be proud of Pakistan, I can only point out the truth in what I see.
I have no nation.
I have a country.
The only question left to be answered is how far my personal imagined community stretches and how much it is affected by borders, if at all. I'll get there some day.
For now, I am striving to be good and unbreak what is damaged. I want to create a place with a less exhausting state of mind. Not because it is mine, but because it is worth it.

50.

2011-05-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

Osama is dead.
Good riddance.
Then again, I don't care one way or another if he's dead or alive. Not because of any moral or political convictions, but because the game is far from over. Osama or no Osama, the stage has been set for Level 2 and as usual, ordinary people with ordinary lives and ordinary concerns will die in ways that have become ordinary. Reaching Level 2 is so exciting because the first part is over-and then you realise there's still a long way to go. I speak from my limited experience with Sega games in the 1990s. I assume the principles of video games, like those of power struggles, have not fundamentally changed in the last couple of decades.
Now that we have killed Osama, on to our other demons.

Let us target dictators who sell their countries for money and power.
Let us throw out democratic presidents who do the same for oil.
Let us condemn the educated who use their intellect to cloud their humanity.
Let us take action against the well-fed feudals who let their farmers go hungry.
Let us not believe what double speaking, power-hungry politicians tell us.
Let us question everything we believe to be true.
Let us not allow semantics to muddy true dialogue.
Let us cry out against the systems that indoctrinate impressionable children.
Let us never complicate what is simple.
Let us remember there are two sides to every story and we'll probably never like one of them.
Let us spend more time getting to know people and less time assuming we know what they are like.
Let us remind people that it is possible to end world hunger.
Let us retain our compassion when the hungry commit crimes.
Let us scrutinise our own decisions and know that they are biased.
Let us remain innocent enough to be surprised.
Let us not forget that we are not as intelligent as we think we are.
Let us not wallow in our apathy.
Let us not congratulate ourselves for being better than our neighbors.
Let us invest in children's futures.
Let us educate.
Let us hope.
Let us give meaning to our hopes.

We already know that one person's choices can bring the world crashing down. By the same logic, it takes one person's choices to change the world. Or, if you're less ambitious, it takes as much to change someone else's world.

The second part of the game might be starting, but only if you believe in the game. After all, if you don't believe in it, it doesn't exist.

49.

2011-04-20T00:10:00.000-07:00

The problem with being asked to describe two hours with the greatest man in Pakistan is that it is a bit impossible to do justice to. I was initially excited about the prospect of writing about my interview with Abdul Sattar Edhi. During our session, I made mental notes of all his inspiring quotes and decided I would focus on those alone. About ten minutes in I realized that picking just a few inspiring things he said would be even more difficult than describing him. So here is my sloppy attempt to explain what happened today.

We just walked into the Edhi office in Mithadar. We had no precise address and no phone number we could reach easily, but this didn’t turn out to be a problem at all. Every single person we stopped in the congested streets knew where Edhi sahib’s office was and they were able to direct us so accurately we arrived twenty minutes early. Nobody asked us why we were early or how long we planned to stay. We were ushered into a room decorated with posters from campaigns for a drug free Pakistan, a tolerant Pakistan, a compassionate Pakistan. Several honorary degrees were displayed under the glass top of a table we sat on (a table we learned was “older than this country”). A large red sticker was on the door behind me. “LOVE HUMANITY,” it proclaimed in gaudy yellow lettering. I wondered at the man who had stuffed honorary PhDs under a glass top and chosen to frame and display a sticker like that. That’s all you can do with Edhi. Wonder.

I was nervous about meeting him. I’ve wanted to meet him since I was eight years old. I doubt there is a single man alive who commands as much respect, trust and gratitude as Abdul Sattar Edhi. Beggars, dacoits, philanthropists and society aunties alike feel safe depositing their zakat, their sadqas, their khairat, their earnings, their bread into his fund, knowing that it will reach whoever needs it most. Personally, I am not an especially spiritual person, but when I think of prayer I recall being nine years old and trying very hard to send blessings to the mysterious Edhi who seems to be keeping our country afloat singlehandedly. I don’t know what I expected of him today, but I did not expect him to walk into the room while we were all setting up our equipment and hearing him say “Assalam Alaikum” unassumingly, as if he wasn’t Edhi himself but simply a random person strolling into the room.

Once I had recovered from being tongue tied and begun the interview, I learned many things I didn’t know about Edhi, but many more I hadn’t realized about society. I learned that he describes himself as a Sheikh Chilli who never dreams small. I learned that he despises maulanas who choose Islamism over humanity, but equally disparages those who despise criminals without understanding their motives. I learned that his inspiration for placing a cradle outside every welfare center was his experience of picking maggot-ridden babies out of the trash and seeing an illegitimate infant stoned outside a mosque. I learned that he deeply loves his wife, doesn’t understand why people don’t choose to adopt daughters and employs mostly women because he believes they do God’s work better than men. I learned that he has met Gandhi and befriended Bacha Khan in his youth. More than anything, I learned that nothing disgusts him more than people who see humans as anything but humans. “Insaniyat” is the only religion, he told us. I asked him what inspired him to start working for all of us the way he does. “I am a Muslim and I do what God has asked me to do. The only message of religion is that humanity is one. Nowadays, the world has become so big that we find ways to divide it up, but that’s what destroys us-divisions, divisions, divisions.”

I don’t think any of us knew that Edhi has worked for humane causes in no less than 73 countries. I don’t think any of us expected him to well up with sadness when he told us that India, the country of his birth, is one of the only two countries in the world that has denied him a visa for his work. That alone speaks volumes about who and what we are today. A world which denies the champion of transcending divisions a visa to cross the border.

I’m not sure what exactly it was that Edhi radiated in that room as we all sat and listened to him spellbound (until he woke me up with “Ask me more questions, are you tired already?”). It was something like a sense of boundless possibility. If a man of almost ninety who started with nothing can start and run the world’s largest volunteer ambulance organization, rescue 36,000 abandoned babies, feed the hungry every day, give every unclaimed body a decent burial, convince the most bloodthirsty amongst us to choose love over arms and build shelters where injured animals and birds are cared for, he can probably do anything. His humanity doesn’t know any bounds and in the face of all he has done, the photograph of a rather pompous ex-prime minister handing Edhi a little medal made me want to laugh. It was so grotesquely inadequate.

While even the most well-meaning of us execute our vision for humanity cynically-by crying ourselves hoarse about misgovernance, angrily criticizing the idiots who don’t do a better job and howling with fury at the corruption and crime we face daily, there are others in Pakistan who achieve greatness with complete trust that people will choose to do the right thing.

Edhi recounted a time when he was accosted by bandits on his way to Quetta. They recognized him for who he was, safely escorted him to his destination and on his arrival, presented him with two crore rupees. Other hardened criminals have been known to put down their guns in the middle of street battles when the Edhi ambulance arrived on the scene. Beggars who spend their days collecting ten rupees at a time have dropped five hundred rupee notes into Edhi collection boxes. What is it about his personality that makes us want to keep on giving? “You call these people bandits, dacoits, thieves. But think about the society that has produced a system where some remain wealthy forever while others have to shoot for bread and then tell me who is wrong. If you’re letting this happen, tell me who the thief is.”

I suppose that’s the answer to my question. Here is a man who will give us everything-who has already given us everything-simply because we are all human, whether we are criminals of one kind or another. It would be a challenge to find a single person in Pakistan who hasn’t been connected with the Edhi Foundation in some way. Everybody knows someone who has donated their money, called an ambulance, adopted a baby or had their Eid meat distributed by Edhi. There is a reason his number is pre-saved in the most basic models of cell phones under “Emergency contacts.” The truth is that the only emergency threatening to destroy us is that we can’t distinguish this common thread of humanity-and need-that runs in all of us. We all give to and take from the Edhi Foundation. We all need his services and yet our principal activity is pointing fingers at who landed us in this mess. Divisions, divisions, divisions.

48 (posted one day too late)

2011-03-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

There's a woman who left her home in her early twenties to run a school. She didn't want to be someone's daughter-in-law when there was work to be done and children to be educated. So for sixty years, she has worked. Worked and worked and worked till her bones could no longer carry the weight of her burden and her real name was forgotten in favour of respectful titles her awestruck employees bestowed on her. Her bedroom-which is on campus, directly across the computer lab that offers free technological training to young women-is furnished like the room of any other octogenarian. A walking stick, a few cushions, a framed photograph of someone's daughter and son-in-law. A television set and a locked box full of newspaper clippings about educational programs. A menthol smell and a gaudy blanket. A stash of books under her pillow. She told me she wrote them. I am sure she did.
There's a woman who left formal education hanging like a question mark when she decided to start a family. She raised several children and taught hundreds more, picking up wisdom and experience along the way. She marks school books with generous tick marks and smiley faces, leaves notes in loopy cursive for the parents of wayward students. Listens admiringly when others talk about accomplished women, women with real jobs, women who balance children with full-time careers, women who complete PhDs. She reminds herself that she has done no less, but sometimes forgets. Sometimes she questions and sometimes she believes them when they say she never achieved much.
There's a woman who lives in her own world of books and authors, in an intellectual utopia of her own making. She is constantly surprised to find that others don't know the things she does, or that the trivia she considers terribly important is considered less so by others. People look down on trivial trivia. They laugh at it, laugh at her bewilderment that the world is not more learned. Her horror at their ignorance is never condescension. She always thinks that people who don't swallow encyclopedias are in a minority and her faith in humanity never truly wavers.
There's an angry woman who is happiest when protesting the injustices of the world. She quotes revolutionary poetry, saves trees from being bulldozed and supports grassroots campaigns for the oppressed. She is as disgusted by drawing room debaters as she is sympathetic to the underprivileged. Her twinge of guilt at avoiding her family to spend time with fellow activists is defensively explained away for the greater good.
There's a nanny who loves other people's children to support her own. She left her country soon after her husband proved to be an alcoholic and chose to make the most of her homeland's reputation for grooming excellent caregivers. So she gives care, for a small price. She bathes and rocks and feeds for the money, but counsels and fiercely loves because she can't help it. Her own children grow into strangers as she keeps telling herself she'll go back one day, but she finds herself weeping at the idea of being separated from her wards, who will never love her back quite the same way.
There's a woman who works as a nurse because her parents asked her to. She was never inclined to study much and would have preferred to have married into a comfortable life, but she knows her education has afforded her something her mother and grandmother did not have. Kind, well-meaning people tell her it's important to learn, to be different, to know her rights. Less kind people taunt her on buses, stand a little too close in crowded public spaces and occasionally seriously frighten her. She considers it part of the package, part of being a modern woman. She remembers her married sister is not much happier, anyway.
There's a woman who loves to dress up. She loves jewelry, loves makeup, loves feeling beautiful. She scoffs at people who say women buy into brand-sponsored ideals of beauty, because she knows people always turn around to look at her. She also knows she is more than that, because back in her day, girls were taught how to speak and when to argue, how to cook and entertain. The idea of looking ungroomed-or worse, undignified-repulses her. She doesn't wear tacky clothes or switch to ugly shoes as she grows old. She moves into it with unexpected grace, retaining her diva-esque charm long until the day she dies, knowing she will be remembered as beautiful forever.
They will be remembered, if only once a year, if only by some, if only by us.
Happy Women's Day everyone.

47.

2011-02-23T03:57:00.000-08:00

There was a woman who worked in the kitchen at the campus center in college. Her name was Denise, and she was old, with white hair under the navy blue Dining Services cap we both wore. She was assigned to train me for the 10pm-1am shift washing dishes. On my first day, she let me wear a real apron, instead of the plastic bag with cut-out armholes that I later adopted. I always associate those days of dining services with repetitive Christmas music, even though it was only October when I began.
The regular workers, the ones who weren't students, the ones like Denise, who laboured there from morning till late night, spent that last shift looking forward to going home. I spent it dreading the part where I would have to clean out "the grease trap"-a piece of machinery as charming as its name. I sang songs under my breath while I waited for the last few dishes and pots to come in and picked some kind of beans out of the drain with my yellow gloves. "You can sing out loud here, honey, I like music," was what Denise had told me, but I've never had a good singing-out-loud voice. Occasionally, someone I knew would return a dish at the window and wave to me before they recycled their glass and plastic. I thought it wasn't a bad place to work, for seven dollars an hour.
Towards the end of the night, the cooking surfaces were dismantled and sent to me to be scrubbed down and run through the dishwasher. I hated this bit from the start. The longest board was taller than me and I thought it ridiculously cumbersome to stand on my tiptoes and stagger backwards to get it vertically into the sink to be scrubbed down. I felt even more ridiculous when I realised there was no way to avoid getting sloshed with water when I tried pushing it through the sanitising machine (that was when the wisdom behind the plastic aprons became apparent). Three boards later, I was in a foul mood, that first time. Then the last one came. We called it the baby white surface. It was mercifully shorter than me, lighter than the rest and still smooth enough to be wiped down easily. I didn't notice any of these things, if truth be told. It was Denise who looked delighted to introduce me to the piece of equipment and say, "This is my favourite part of the night! Isn't this one all nice and clean? I just look forward to it all day," as she hoisted it into the dishwasher with me.
Denise must have been at least sixty five and that was a generous estimate, for someone so small and wrinkled. She told me she lived alone. I read her name in an article three years after that night, commemorating college staff who had served for decades. I wondered what she had done before she became the cheerful trainer of disgruntled work-study students in a dining hall kitchen. I wondered a lot of things.
I suppose nobody expects to be sixty five and looking forward to washing a five-foot long cutting board at midnight. No child will ever dream of growing up-or growing old- to know about all the secrets of getting a drain unclogged, or the fastest way to scrape burnt cheese off a pizza pan. At the time, it broke my heart a little to know that somebody who had so tenderly advised me on how to get through my daily shift as easily as possible saw dishwashing as the best part of her day. I'm wiser now, because I know that if a time ever comes when life throws soggy beans floating in sink foam at you, there will always be things to celebrate.

46.

2011-02-17T09:27:00.000-08:00

Every day, I meet people. People who are intriguing, inspiring, strange, ordinary, humble, pompous, awe-inspiring, beautiful, revolting. People who make me wish I was a better storyteller, if only to preserve them somewhere safer than memory. So many people, so many stories I don't know and can't tell.
There's a twelve year old girl in a class I teach. I don't know her name, because in my class of fifty she is not one of the few who speaks up or lingers after class to make conversation. She has enormous green eyes, like a cat. She told me her father works in China. She doesn't know what he does or what part of China he does it in, but she knew he was going to come home after three years, two hours after I dismiss class. She didn't know where China was. She wasn't sure what Asia was, either. None of my girls know about continents yet; as much as I try to stretch their geographic imaginations to encompass the entire subcontinent, we rarely make it beyond Sultanabad.
There's a woman who sweeps floors in my old school. She always remembers my name and asks after my mother. Every now and then, she asks me if my mother has an old sari for her. She's Hindu. I never thought about it when I was in school, but I wonder now. I wonder if she lives in Lyari or Ranchore Lines or somewhere else entirely and how she makes it to Phase 8 every morning. By bus? In a sari? Under a burqa? I wonder if she takes off for Diwali.
There's a eunuch by the railway lines in Clifton. I hadn't realised Clifton even had railway lines. He was sitting, with his scarlet mouth, with three decidedly unfeminine men, perched next to a container of diesel, smoking and talking and gesticulating. They looked like they might be friends. I realised I've never seen a eunuch sitting in the company of men, the way someone would with old acquaintances. He didn't clap or beg or promise me twin sons. He was engrossed in his conversation, his cigarette.
There's a teacher who works at a school run by a nonprofit. The school is in a squatter colony bang in the center of one of the richest parts of the city. I could have lived there my whole life and never turned the corner and known it exists. I suppose it was an accident that we met. She's never turned the corner, either. She proudly told me she's finished twelve years of school. Her father doesn't believe in girls leaving the neighborhood, but he's very open-minded about education, she asserted repeatedly. She knew a great deal about things beyond the colony. She told me she reads whatever she can find in the library and is on the third Harry Potter book. We talked about minority rights. I said there aren't any in this country, she disagreed. Then she deferred to my opinion, saying I must know better, because I've been outside the neighborhood, all the way to America, and she's never known a Pakistani Hindu. I feel small and silly. We change the subject and talk about our mutual passion for education.
There's a boy who I run into in the bazaar at least once a week. He does different things on different days. Sometimes he sells tissues or pencils, other times he might wash windows or fetch cigarettes and mobile credit for people waiting in their cars. I bought him bread, milk and juice at a grocery store once and since then, he's managed to recognize my car every time I'm in the area. He has a younger brother who he talks of sometimes. On days when I'm in a hurry, I guiltily avoid him. There are days when I don't want to buy useless things from him just to be friendly, but I wouldn't want to offend him with money. I have a growing collection of pencils topped with Dora the Explorer erasers, cheap yoyos and scented Chinese tissues in my purse.
There's a group of girls in another one of my classes. They sit in the same corner of the classroom every time, where they chatter throughout my lesson. It amazes me when they regurgitate information I present to them, because I have no idea when they listen to me. Inevitably, one of them pokes the other with a pencil every time we have a writing activity. They call each other Nehru, Gandhi, Quaid-e-Azam and Allama Iqbal. As a joke, they tell me. I feel proud to have taught them material they are using in inside jokes. Later, I tell them off for misbehaving in class when one hisses at the other "You just wear a stupid loincloth, because that's what Gandhiji wore," but it's difficult not to laugh. They offer me various kinds of biscuits and dubious looking packets of Balle Balle paan masala. They are offended if I refuse, so I line my stomach with their snacks in breaktime.
There's a man who works at a government library. His clothes are nearly always stained, one bare foot on his chair, the other leg lazily sprawling across the dirty floor. He slurps his tea noisily and always asks me if he can fix my problem. I always tell him I have no problem, I'm just here to work, followed by whatever request I have for archival information. He looks bored and tells me that is a problem, that's what he meant. I'm told I'm free to look through the trash in the attic for my "archives," but they really can't guarantee I'll find anything. This is nearly always followed by a talk extolling the many virtues of his extensive library records. He has reminded me the last six times I met him that one time when our organisation came with their 'problem,' he was very accommodating. He reminds me that there are even women in my organisation and he even offered them chairs once. I generally avoid him, as I have learned to do most government employees.
To borrow from Vonnegut, so it goes. So it goes.

45.

2011-02-10T08:31:00.000-08:00

Exhausted. Exhausted so my teeth and tongue ache as badly as my legs and arms. Exhausted so that my brain hurts with the effort of defending what I believe in and my mind is alternately on fire and numb. Exhaustion like a fever, fatigue like a toothache that won't let you sleep. Like thoughts that won't switch off and a forehead which is conscious of furrows. Like toes that move with nervous energy and joints that must be cracked. Like talking to cover up the feeling of impending collapse. Sounds like working at an NGO, sounds like Pakistan. Sounds like a hundred and seventy million souls screaming themselves hoarse and feeling like victims and conquerors.
Listen to me, I'm yelling out for God's sake. Listen, listen, wait I have something to say but don't interrupt me, interrupt, interrupt. Feels like work, feels like home.
At some point the debates, the rationale, the idealism starts fading into an automatic stream of thought, a never switched off conversation of justifying, qualifying, quantifying to prove yourself. Screaming, screaming, screaming to be heard-literally. Switching on the mic, fiddling with the controls, absorbing yourself in lectures and handing out erasers. Write down the answer for me, should we love or should we hate? Was Jinnah right or wrong? Can we protest without killing? Just tell me what you think, there is no right or wrong, there's no correct answer in this abyss, just express, express, express yourself and no copying please.
Folded into a car with seven other tired souls, coming back and logging entries into archives and wondering when they'll be used, dreaming of a day when happy researchers say a prayer for your soul every time they find exactly what you have painstakingly spent an hour typing up. Wondering if the kids forgot what you taught. Telling the reporters no, we are not from the CIA. Telling people not to speak to reporters. Pleasing and thank youing and salaaming to get around roadblocks so that angry parents and principals don't suspect you're from the wrong side of some warped ideology they believe exists. Trying not to be a caricature of your own social class, trying not to fall into the neat little categories the press loves to use. Signing in and out. Twelve hours today, nine tomorrow.
Tomorrow, tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll try again. Tomorrow we'll wait for someone to say hey, maybe you are just trying to do the right thing, maybe you're doing it because you love your country, maybe you're doing it for the kids, maybe you just need to clock a 9-5, maybe you do what you're told, maybe you want to educate, maybe you want to stop shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting shouting
Please, please, be quiet, I'm exhausted.

44.

2011-01-09T21:38:00.000-08:00

The faculty of critical thinking is one that expired long ago in Pakistan. While the country may be peppered with individuals who attempt to question everything, they remain individuals and not representatives of a greater movement. In some ways, this is true of all societies; if critical thinking were encouraged on a mass level anywhere, the mechanisms of the nation-state would fail. However, no society can be as intellectually impoverished as one that forgets its history and ours is such a society: one that lacks the ability to put anything in context.
The study of history, I have been told many times, is among other things, a waste of time, redundant, irrelevant, useless, self-indulgent and-this is my favourite-"ladylike". For the macho stalwarts of progress, the custodians of religious law and flag-waving urbanites, remembering where we have come from is unimportant, because being Pakistani means rising above history. Being Pakistani means letting go of our shackled past. Being Pakistani means forgetting.
Those who advocate questioning the framework of our nation-state or the shaky foundation upon which it was built are treated as starry-eyed, soft-hearted "liberals" who need to cultivate some true patriotism. At worst, they are considered heretics. The conflation of religion and nationalism is disturbing on so many levels that it amazes me that it is still allowed to occur. As our country goes up in flames, nothing could possibly be more important than understanding how and why this is happening. It is like trying to hear sound in a vacuum, or analysing a language without having studied linguistics.
I have recently begun teaching at low-income schools and can attest to the fact that some of the most disturbing trends in Pakistani thought are the products of our national snobbery towards the subject of history. Students who advocate murdering Shias because Jinnah intended Pakistan to be a true Muslim state are unaware that Jinnah himself was a Shia. Students who believe their mother tongues will never be official languages have no knowledge of the language movement in the 1950s. Students who believe that Mohammed bin Qasim’s arrival in Sindh centuries ago was somehow directly linked to the creation of Pakistan have no knowledge of how the European construct of the nation-state was invented in the twentieth century.
In an ideal Pakistan, we would study, understand, criticize and accept our history-even those bits that wound our school textbook sanctioned national pride. We would move forward with the knowledge and understanding that our country needs to be defended not because we desperately need to justify its existence, but because safeguarding human lives and property is intrinsically worthy. Only then could be abandon our collective myopia, moral bankruptcy and downward spiral. For the love of our country, for the love of sanity, we need to crack open history books more often.

43: The KC chronicles, part 1

2010-12-29T23:49:00.000-08:00

It started with the Kinnaird College admission test my future roommates and I took "for fun". Going abroad had proved to be an expensive idea, LUMS had disappointed and the Karachi University promised us a few bullet wounds and bomb threats along with our B.A. degrees, which disturbed our gentle souls. Noor traded in her thin pure Urdu accent for Punjabi songs, Maryam momentarily gave up hope of art school and I convinced myself that the famous English program must really be worth it. Thus started our adventure in the alternate universe of Kinnaird College for Women Punjab, which has given us enough stories to entertain our grandchildren with for most of their lives.

The first mistake was probably wearing a polo shirt and cargos to the admission test. The second was not wearing matching bangles with the shirt. The third was finding my pen had run out of ink and asking a student for a pencil, only to be snottily told "This isn't LUMS, where we just hand out free stationery."

Fast forward about six days and there I was, not in LUMS with free stationery (I had until the test been unaware of this virtue of the other institution), but in the dorm room that I would live in until the following April. "It's very big!" said Maryam. "The building is very nice," said my aunt. "Hai! Is this what they meant by 'cot'?" exclaimed poor honest Noor, pointing to the three chairpais arranged around the room. Yes, it was what they had meant. We also had a rickety table and a closet partitioned into three. Like real troopers, the three of us set about making our room feel like home.

With the beds made, floor swept and a gigantic mattress precariously balanced on Noor's tiny chairpai ("I don't like the idea of bedbugs crawling into this ropey stuff"), we were officially KC hostelites. It's sweet how innocent we were that day, unaware of the experiences we would share over the next few months-or minutes. The hostel meeting that night cleared up any hope that may have lingered in our fluffy little heads about our college experience. We were summoned to "the fountain", where our warden would be briefing us about hostel rules.

"Karachi say ayee hain!" was the first thing I heard, from the girl standing behind me. I wondered whether to politely introduce myself. The next sentence decided that for me. "Karachi girls are very mod-squad" was the whisper to my left. "Alam Channa was from Karachi. Was he mod-squad too?" someone's friend queried. I resisted the urge to ask her if Alam Channa was the only thing she associated with Karachi. Besides mod-squad behaviour, that is. I quickly learned there were in fact many other things associated with Karachi: "fast" girls, hot weather, Muhajirs who didn't understand Punjabi, being spoilt, A Levels. Somehow the fast girls, hot summers, parallel education system and Urdu speaking population in Lahore was above censure, or off the radar. Oh, well.

The warden's lecture was even more interesting than the conversation taking place behind me. We were briefed about "blue cards" which would determine which female visitors we have permission to receive, gate passes, which would only be issued on Wednesday and Thursday nights at 9pm, bedtime (which we were told was 10pm but we learned in about five minutes nobody cared about) and the dress code, which led me to make a panicky phone call home and shelf my jeans and kurtis away for a year. Meanwhile, Noor made long, weepy calls to her mother and Maryam despairingly dove under her blankets, where she remained for the rest of the year. It was a promising start to a ridiculous year.

42.

2010-10-20T12:37:00.001-07:00

Every time Karachi bleeds, people scramble around looking for something to believe in. Once again, with almost 70 people dead in three days of violence, there are articles insisting that Karachi’s spirit, tolerance, pride and resilience will carry it through. Insisting that it will survive. Insisting that it will come out stronger.

I like to read hopeful pieces as much as the next person, but as much as I appreciate the feeling behind them, I’m getting tired of the sentimentalisation of Karachi and all its problems. People here aren’t resilient because of their fierce pride in their city. They’re resilient because they don’t have a choice. They are proud because they feel defensive about a part of the country whose problems are too often treated like they don’t belong to the rest of Pakistan. They are spirited because if you abuse and batter anybody’s home for long enough, they will eventually fight back. As for the tolerance-I don’t really see who can honestly call this city tolerant. It is tolerant of many things, but considering that most of the metropolis has been soaked crimson in ethnically-inspired killings, I wouldn’t ever call Karachi a place where we welcome outsiders with open arms.

There are beautiful things about this city, yes. Love for Karachi is love in spite of everything else. You will want to come home to Karachi simply because it is home, even though you know you won’t have electricity, running water or security at any given moment of the day. I’m beginning to wonder whether this is good enough anymore. Is it enough to be hopelessly, helplessly attached to a place while you watch it go up in flames? Do the people on the other side of the city, the ones whose children are being murdered and homes are being looted on an almost daily basis, feel this love? Or do they simply feel gut-wrenching, all-consuming grief?

Our sadness and our sentimentality will only take us so far. I say this as someone who has been sheltered on the “safe side” of this city. As someone who always maintained that the city will indeed bounce back. No, it won’t-I realize this now. It won’t bounce back, because it is too broken and too battered. Half of the city has been affected by the violence, while the other half have convinced themselves it is part and parcel of life in Karachi. The divide remains, between those who are hopeful and those who can’t afford to be. There is no great change coming unless the entire class structure-both literal and geographical, in this city-is altered. Until then, the best we can do is acknowledge how Karachiites who lost loved ones and protest on the streets every day are hurting-and acknowledge our privilege in not experiencing the same.

41.

2010-10-20T12:04:00.000-07:00

In all nation-states, history is distorted to create convenient narratives. Our country is suffering not only from the usual propagandisation of the past, but also because its fiction is being ignored as a source of both art and inquiry. The truth in the works of Faiz or Manto might be uncomfortable for us to face, but responsible education should be structured around seeking truth rather than obscuring it; understanding history rather than ignoring it.

Saadat Hasan Manto is one of the best-known fiction writers from the turbulent period during which the subcontinent gained independence and was partitioned. His stories focus on the sense of dislocation caused by the Partition, were popular in his time, and remain so today, although rarely at an institutional level. “Mere Sahib”, a comparatively little-read short story by the author, raises questions about something that many Pakistanis have asked themselves-who was Jinnah? Based on conversations with Jinnah’s ex-chauffeur, the story provides food for thought about 1940s India, a period we frequently shelf away as the “before”.

Alternately funny and moving, the story is a refreshingly honest appraisal of Jinnah the man, rather than Jinnah the politician. Azad, the chauffeur, offers bits of his own psychoanalysis as well as glimpses into the everyday quirks of the man. It is perhaps as much a description of Jinnah as it is a portrait of the fan following politicians had the potential to attract, as well as an extremely honest picture of the interests and passions that moved individuals to participate in the Pakistan movement on a personal level. While Manto bases his story on an interview, it is through his literary lens that we meet its characters. The chauffeur’s viewpoint, while intriguing in its own right, is ultimately a literary device which the author uses to illustrate his own feelings about Jinnah and his legacy.

Manto describes Azad’s support for the Muslim League as enthusiastic and youthful and driven by his age more than anything else: he was young and wanted a revolution, he enjoyed the thrill of marches and protests. But as he mentioned himself, “it was a time when Hindus did not try to kill anyone who uttered the word ‘Quaid-e-Azam’” He candidly describes his obsession with seeing the Quaid in person as well as the reason he believes he was selected to be chauffeur: Jinnah liked healthy, good-looking men, he said, perhaps because of his own physical weakness.

Some points that raised the most important questions were the ones about Jinnah’s connection (or lack thereof) with the average Indian Muslim. Manto provides comic scenes where Azad imitates Jinnah’s attempts to speak Urdu, which are astonishingly terrible for a man who insisted on championing the language as a uniting factor for all Indian Muslims. His legal acuity, which is never questioned, is depicted through his pool game: “He would spend a long time in his analysis. From this angle. From that angle…but if another angle come to his mind, he would stop, think, make sure.” Manto also allows Azad to throw in his own opinions generously; how Jinnah was as careful in the game of politics as he was on the pool table, how he loved his shoes “because they were always at his feet and moved according to him.” He paints a three dimensional picture of his sahib: intelligent, generous, disinclined towards small talk, bitter, lonely, removed, admiring of physical strength and beauty. What stands out most for the author in his conversation with Azad is the last question he asks him: “Did you ever hear Quaid-e-Azam say I’m sorry?”, and the answer he received: that if such a thing did ever happen, Jinnah would have removed those words from the dictionary forever. For the author, this “sums up the entire character of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah” as far as he was concerned.

This bitterness is emblematic of Manto’s work about Partition, but its popularity in the 1940s and 1950s illustrates that it was a bitterness that many readers empathized with. Though I am aware that historical inferences through literature can be risky, I believe that “fiction…has provided an intense window on the personal experiences of 1947,” in the words of historian David Gilmartin. Fiction such as Manto’s cannot be taken for its factual value, but its popularity underscores the psyche of those who appreciated it. In a time when history, literature and art are all crying for their fair share of attention in Pakistan, Manto is only one example of an author who is largely ignored in formal education. If we really want to create a society where people are encouraged to think, inquire and above all, read, reclaiming authors who write in the vernacular languages would be a wise step to take.

40.

2010-10-20T11:44:00.000-07:00

A Mount Holyoke College brochure arrived in the mail today. For once, a college envelope was for my sister, not me. I admit I stole it-for a while. I took it to my room and stared at every page for a long time.
It was strange to think that I held a version of the same booklet a few years ago. It was strange to flip through it and see familiar faces, familiar places. It was strange to see a place you consider home being advertised to you. The whole experience of half an hour (yes, I spent that long on it) was a bit surreal.
There was a photograph of a group of students sitting around a professor in a politics class. I stared at that one for a long time. The round room, the long windows, the professor's face, the bottles of vitamin water on someone's desk-it was all so real. So rememberable. So rememberous. But it felt a million years away. It was the first time I thought "wow, that was a long time ago" even though it's barely been half a year.
Karachi has a quicksand quality about it. You fall in and you can't get out. I don't mean this as a bad thing, but once you're in it, you're hardly going to worry about what's outside it. It doesn't allow you to. I wonder if a few years from now, I'll look at photographs of Karachi and stare at them, because they are advertisements for a place I call home. I wonder if I'll recall the smell of gasoline, salt and warm air and long for it, the way I suddenly recalled the smell of falling leaves and my dorm room. When will I see something from my home right now and think-that was a million years ago?

39.

2010-10-20T11:08:00.001-07:00

It seems that for every step we take forward, we take two steps back. Pakistan has been unsuccessfully struggling with the concept of land reform for decades. As other Muslim societies move forward, ours is still debating whether or not the concept is Islamic.

The Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan’s recent condemnation of the MQM land reform bill is unsurprising, but frustrating.

Keeping in mind that our constitution is not secular and religious hurdles to legislation will always be present, religious debates over certain issues have outlasted our tolerance for them. As long as our religious parties are populated mostly by political stakeholders, rather than Islamic scholars, their statements will be difficult to swallow.

It may well be true that Islam - narrowly defined as what was practiced during the lifetime of the prophet and ignoring all the religious scholarship that has been undertaken since - does not put a cap on how much wealth an individual can own. However, in the same vein, “Islam” in such a narrow context also does not have an opinion on modern farming practices. Or the MQM. Or feudalism in South Asia.

The list of things that Islam does not expressly forbid simply because they may not have existed 1,500 years ago is endless. It is vital for the JUP, or any political party for that matter, to advance beyond their present rhetoric and allow for deeper and broader interpretations of religious law. Simply saying that a law does not exist is not enough; certainly not when millions of Pakistanis are bonded labourers or languishing in the personal prisons of wealthy landowners.

Unfortunately, a resistance to either the bill or its detractors is likely to be turned into a brawl with bias and name-calling from both sides. The debate about whether Pakistan was intended as a secular or Islamic state rarely progresses beyond the simplistic allegations of “what Jinnah wanted” and turns ugly far too quickly.

With our (lack of) land reforms preventing economy or society from progressing, it is high time that creative dialogue is initiated on the subject. Until then, it is likely that the discussion about vitally important developments, such as breaking the backbone of feudalism, will remain mired in accusations of being either extremist or godless.

back.

2010-10-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

I FINALLY HAVE INTERNET AT HOME.
For anyone who still bothers reading this, I haven't been able to upload a thing for weeks. Now to get to the actual writing (and uploading stuff that's been getting published elsewhere in the blogosphere).

38.

2010-10-01T15:05:00.000-07:00

The Ayodhya verdict that was delivered yesterday showcased considerable maturity on the part of the Indian judiciary. I won't get into the specifics of how justice could be achieved on the issue of Babri Mosque, simply because that requires a discourse on Indian domestic politics from the 1980s onwards. Politically speaking, however, the decision to divide the land, and the manner of division, made absolute sense. Had the courts made a decision in favour of either side, there would have been violence and rioting, to say the least. A pro-Muslim decision would have been like gift wrapping more votes for the BJP, while a pro-Hindu decision would have spoiled the Congress' supposedly left-of-centre image and caused riots across the subcontinent.

My only objection to the verdict is the some of the issues on which it was based. The first question the court considered was whether Ayodhya was truly the birthplace of Ram. What business is it of the judiciary to be making statements about whether or not someplace was the birthplace of a god? It firstly assumes a belief in the divine, which strictly speaking, a secular state can not do. Secondly, it presupposes that such a divine figure had a physical birth place. Even if the court was making this decision based on theological advice from religious authorities, there is still no absolute way to prove where anybody was born, least of all for a court of law.

Secondly, it asked whether the Babri Masjid was built according to the tenets of Islam. Islam forbids the building of mosques on desecrated religious sites, which the spot in Ayodhya may indeed have been in the fifteenth century. On that count, the mosque might have been un-Islamic. However, the motivations of the Sangh Parivar in wanting to tear it down were certainly not the preservation of the true Islamic character of the mosque, so the issue should not have been treated as such. Also, it plunges the present Indian judiciary into the murky territory of litigating issues that arose literally centuries before the birth of the modern Indian state. How far back can one possibly litigate? Does this mean crimes committed in the colonial era are also for the Indian and Pakistani courts to decide on today?

The issue of Babri Masjid was deeply symbolic, and the judges in Lucknow did a good job of providing a reasonable verdict keeping mind the charged nature of the problem. However, if it had been treated like a case of disputed territory from the very beginning, rather than the ideologically-based struggle the RSS had hoped it would become, a great deal of communal tension might have been defused years ago.

37.

2010-10-01T15:04:00.001-07:00

I am so sick of the Dr Aafia case. I refuse to read a single more so-called news item about yet another politician jumping on the shewasinnocentUSAhatesmuslims bandwagon. She probably was innocent of the crime of which she was convicted-shooting a soldier. She probably was guilty of the crime of which she wasn't convicted-supporting Al-Qaeda. I doubt it matters one way or another whether her story is fabricated or not, since the courts have refused to try her for the terrorism allegations. The only thing worth mentioning in the entire case is that the United States ignored due process.

The fact that she was tried in a court of law although her arrest and detention were illegal and overseas shouldn't have been overlooked-by U.S. residents. For Pakistanis to be screaming themselves hoarse about a miscarriage of justice is ludicrous on several levels. For one thing, no amount of screaming in this country will make any difference to the American judiciary. For another thing, if due process for our citizens is really what anyone cares about, they should probably begin by standing up in defense of Pakistanis who have been languishing in prisons around the world since 9/11. They should probably demand that America return all the other people from this country who have suffered in the war on terror and been kidnapped or tortured by intelligence agencies without trial. They should probably make a hue and cry about all those who have lost everything at the hands of justice systems but haven't been lucky enough to be afforded the title of qaum ki beti.

Really, is this the only beti our qaum could find? Notwithstanding that Aafia Siddiqui might be innocent, this country has thousands of "daughters" who deserve justice a great deal more, by simple virtue of being Pakistani citizens and residents. However heartening it is to see our backward leadership supposedly making a stand for women's rights, it would be far more heartening to see them carry the fight to prisons where so many women are awaiting justice in our own obscenely sluggish courts. It's convenient how governments in both the East and the West decide to care about women's emancipation when it suits them; even more convenient when they find a single figurehead who will symbolize their good intentions. Not so convenient for us ordinary citizens is how quickly we are all forgotten. Do all women and illegally detained prisoners in this country need to be on the CIA radar to get attention?
The Pakistan government had a right to demand that Aafia Siddiqui be tried in court as a U.S. citizen (which she was) and be sentenced accordingly (which she was, whether anyone likes the verdict or not). The angry protestors on the streets, led by opportunistic politicians, however, have an obligation to be true to their supposed values and fight the good fight in the name of all torture, all sexism, all miscarriages of justice, all illegal detainment. We are tired of hearing the same old nonsense, and selective campaigning just won't do anymore.

36.

2010-10-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

I don't know anybody my age who has ever had faith in Pakistani democracy. It's a sad but true fact that those of us born post-Zia, having grown up watching the Benazir-Nawaz Sharif-Musharraf merry go round, can place little faith in concrete change. At any rate, things to seem to be getting progressively worse. It is rare to find a country where children are born to parents who remember a more liberal and tolerant society, but we are living in one of them and are used to our elders' reminisces about What Used To Be. Why do I find myself looking forward to the 2013 elections then-if they ever happen?

For someone who came out of the womb feeling cynical about our leaders, I am excited at the thought that I might be able to exercise my vote to throw a government out. Whether or not this happens remains to be seen, but the prospect is exciting. The last time the country held elections and made the tragic mistake of bringing the current regime into power, I couldn't have cared less. I was newly eligible to vote and couldn't find a single contender I wanted to see in office. This might be the case again. I'm just curious to see whether anything new comes up in the next three years. I'm curious to see whether our collective national frustration will be exercised in the voting booth rather than on the streets with bombs strapped to chests. I wonder if this is what people in real democracies feel like-do they look forward to exercising their right to try and kick someone out, rather than bringing someone in?

Sure, it might not work. Sure, the next guy might be worse, who knows. Something tells me though that Pakistanis have had enough, and no matter how hard we try, we can't ever as a nation seem to give up our obsession with politics. Bring on the elections; I think more of us might want to vote this time. We might actually have Zardari to thank for something after all-he's inspiring us to have hope in democracy long enough to see his sorry ass leave.

35.

2010-09-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

When I was twelve, I would tell people that when I grow up, I'm going to plant sunflowers all over Karachi. I thought of starting a campaign that would leave the streets clean and tree-lined, with flowers bursting out of every corner. I imagined I would do it, because I was sure of myself, sure that my plan would succeed. I imagined the idea would be embraced by all Karachiites, because who wouldn't want to look out their car windows and see the upturned faces of bright yellow flowers?
I dropped watermelon seeds into some dirt once, waiting for a plant to grow. It didn't. I put it down to my black thumbs, but looking back, it probably wasn't my thumbs, only my innocent desire to believe I had so much control over the unyielding patch of dry earth.
In Karachi, "sore eyes" takes on a whole new meaning. I feel as if my eyes are literally aching for a hint of beauty. I stare out my car window when I pass through Saddar and Old Clifton, trying to absorb the finer points of the architecture and old trees through the ugly structures surrounding them. Last time, I scanned the roads for a place, any place, where I could scatter a few seeds, in case I ever launch my plan of so many years ago. I couldn't find one that hadn't been trampled on by tar or cement.
The thought that there is no place for anything to grow makes me panic a little.
The thought that Karachi's soil has become hardened, hostile, disbelieving. An earth that questions why I would even want sunflowers.
I'm not someone who hungers for natural beauty or simply likes to see a lot of trees around. Trees would be lovely, but I would take anything at this point. I smiled a little when I saw that someone had installed pretty little lights along one road which happened to have electricity. Then I noticed all the lights were shaped like the Kaaba. There is nothing wrong with expressing your love for the Kaaba, but is a religious reminder the only reason anyone will do anything anymore? What happened to beauty for the sake of beauty, lights for the sake of lights?
Beauty might be low on the list of priorities for this city's residents, but I think a few flowers might do us all a lot of good.

Disclaimer

2010-09-29T12:24:00.001-07:00

On some days I write essays that I choose not to share with the world. This doesn't mean I'm not writing one every day, it just means I won't blog it. I'm going to keep numbering the ones on the blog in order though, cause I like the way it looks.

34.

2010-09-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

I can never recall what day it is, where I kept my cell phone or what I had for breakfast this morning, but I have a ridiculously good memory for irrelevant things that happened very long ago. Unfortunately, I wasn't bestowed with the gift of an incredible short-term memory, so I can't ever really pride myself on remembering things. I do, however, take the phrase "ringing a bell" to a whole new level. Bells go off in my head about five thousand times a day, as random smells and colours and comments remind me of something that happened when I was two or six or eleven.
It's usually instantaneous. I can never explain this to people who don't have a good sense of smell or an olfactory memory, but the smell of the air can take me back in a second to another day fifteen years ago which had the same smell. If there is a slight breeze which smells like traffic, chances are I will have a flashback to opening my car door in 1992. You can probably imagine how I spend most of my time having tiny little flashbacks. I've tried telling people I'm not spaced out or anything, I just keep remembering things. Nobody gets it. If you get it, please share it with me.
The other day, something literally rang a bell. The tiny ghungroos at the bottom of someone's window blinds moved and instead of the usual clear flashback, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it reminded me of. I remembered something round, something silver, something to do with a spoon, something to do with my grandfather, a yellow toybox, a room with high ceilings. It took me longer than usual to piece together the irritatingly disconnected rememberings into a coherent aha moment. Someone gave me a real silver rattle when I was born, which lay around our house for a long time. It made the exact same sound as the tiny ghungroos on the blinds.
What amazing satisfaction it gave me to remember.
This means I don't really have an amazing memory. I just remember what I rehearse, and thanks to my sense of smell, I've rehearsed every stupid moment of my life because it corresponds with smelling something. Apparently, back when I had silver rattles, I paid more attention to sound than smell.
Since I'm a would-be historian and not a would-be psychologist, I have no idea what this says about the human brain, but it says plenty about the past. No wonder I'm obsessed with the past when I return to it (on a micro-level) so many times a day. It just takes me one step closer to my time-machine fantasy.

33.

2010-09-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

Let me first say, I will obviously not manage my goal of one hundred essays in one hundred days, thanks to my ten-day hiatus from the blogosphere. In a hundred and ten days, maybe. But not a hundred. The disappointment of this was preventing me from jumping on my laptop and writing an essay yesterday, while I was still in my "what's the point if I don't get a hundred in a hundred" funk, but I got over it. I usually get over things pretty fast.
So...I'm back! And how I missed my daily exercise. Contrary to what you might believe, it was neither laziness nor lack of inspiration that kept me away from writing. Still, the break was good. It taught me a lot of things, one of them being that I need to write simply because mental notes do.not.work. They just don't. When beautiful ideas go floating past you in your sleep, there is absolutely no point in telling yourself you will wake up and record them, because by morning, all you'll remember is the missed opportunity.
I also learned that a break can provide enough time to think of all sorts of essay ideas that were missing before. Where ten days ago I was pestering everyone I knew for whatdoIwriteabout? tips, my brain is suddenly exploding with ideas. I don't think I'll be able to stop when my hundred days (or hundred and ten) are up. Every day that I skipped an essay, I felt anxious and unsettled, like I hadn't put on the right underwear or had forgotten to brush my teeth. I also felt guilty. There are stories demanding to be told in the world, and I haven't been telling them.
It's good to be back.

32.

2010-09-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

When I go to watch a movie in Karachi, I am willing to overlook all the things that are common to the city. I don't complain about the electricity going in the middle of an interesting scene, the terrible print, the bad bhangra songs that blare in the intermission, the fact that there is a 20 minute intermission at all...none of it really bothers me. The only thing that seriously does is the ridiculous number of babies that people bring to watch movies that are rated R for language, sex and violence.

You might think it is cringeworthy to watch embarrassing scenes on TV with your parents or grandparents, but think again. There is nothing as cringeworthy as hearing someone on a big screen say "Suck my dick, asshole!" before slitting someone's throat, while parents and their toddlers happily share their popcorn. You might think I have no right to judge, but honestly, some people just shouldn't reproduce. I don't care if they can't afford maids or nannies and don't have anyone to babysit. The quality of the cinematic experience in Karachi isn't so amazing that you can't live without it until your kids are old enough to either understand the movie or stay home.

For a country that has adopted an extremely prudish attitude towards sex, some people seem remarkably cool with kids absorbing inappropriate sexual references with their baby food. Do you really want to shush your five year old when he asks "What does he mean he took off her clothes?" in a packed theatre? Can you really enjoy any film knowing that your 3-foot-high genius is going to tell all his friends what the F word is? Do you really want to spend 500 rupees on giving your children this educational experience?

My anxiety at the sheer amount of bad parenting and stupid life choices around me prevent me from really enjoying any movie. Yes, I am easily distracted. You try to passively pay attention to a screen when a week-old baby is wailing its lungs out because its parents have brought it to a war movie full of people's heads being blown off. You try and have fun on a night out when you wonder why someone doesn't realise that their nearly naked infant is probably howling because it's freezing in the theatre. It's like tolerating child abuse for an hour and a half straight.

Then people wonder why so many idiots make it through our educational system. Look at how they're being raised! I bet Zardari also enjoyed his little family night at the Bambino cinema. It obviously did wonders for his personal growth. This is where it all begins. Age 1.5, seated at the Seaview Cineplex, watching Cameron Diaz sexually proposition Tom Cruise before one of them is shot.

And you thought Uncle Sargam was a little creepy.

31.

2010-09-13T12:53:00.000-07:00

Being an adult sucks. I'm not one of those people who just wakes up one morning and panics at the realisation of responsibility. Contrary to what a lot of people might believe, I'm almost always responsible. I almost always have been, to a thoroughly boring extent. That's why I can't believe how difficult it is for me to adjust to the daily grind of a steady job and no school.

I've tried in vain to find something very wrong with my job. I've tried criticizing it from every angle in the one month I've been employed. I've overthought my general lack of excitement and happiness in the past few weeks. There is no good reason for it. I'm just bored. Adulthood is boring.

I terribly miss my own time. I had planned to do so many things once I have time. There are so many things to do. There are so many things to do before more responsibility sets in. Theoretically, I have more time now than I did in college, but I know now that being an "adult" isn't about doing what I want. It's about learning that I usually can't. That I usually won't be able to. That there really isn't any such thing as my own time.

I used to pack my day with so many things to do I barely had time to breathe and literally didn't have time to sleep or eat. I thrive on pressure. On productivity. What is it about sharing my life with others again that has slowed it down so much? Suddenly, I have gone from nonstop action to far too much waiting around. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting to learn patience, waiting to be able to do what I want. It terrifies me that a time like that might never come. I hate self-help books that tell you to seize the moment, the time is ripe, blah blah blah. It's not that easy, I want to scream. On what planet do people with work and loans and families and curfews suddenly take control of their own lives one fine day?

Is growing up about giving up? Is it about finding a place in what they call our collectivist society and falling into it? Is it about cutting back on what you want to do to accomodate everything else? Because it can't be. The past few years of my life can't have been an isolated bubble. I know I can do five thousand things a day, and not being able to drives me INSANE.

Wish me luck. I will either abandon adulthood or my sanity, because I'm not giving up.

30.

2010-09-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

Dear Punjab government and censorship authorities,
While we all know that the prosperous, peaceful times we live in must leave you all with plenty of free time on your hands, your latest act of stupidity belies that you might be a tad overpaid for sitting around debating nothing. Of all the inane things to do, you have decided to ban the one Hindu cartoon that airs in Pakistan. The one program in the plethora of absolute crap which we are forced to bear on our television screens, which was the easiest possible target for you. After all, with only a million or two Hindus around, you can easily avoid the tire burning brigade that you would ordinarily come up against.

I was a bit confused when I first heard that one program on TV is supposedly going to corrupt our children's pure Muslim morals, go against our Pakistani culture and encourage citizens to fraternize with the enemy. I suppose if I'm fair, you might have a point though. Watching an animated Ganesh or Hanuman dance across a screen for 30 minutes a week can in fact brainwash our impressionable youth into believing they should renounce Islam, cross the border, double-cross the ISI, sell their souls, etcetera. After all, we have already observed how Dora the Explorer has duped our kids into believing that they are Hispanic, and Sesame Street into forcing us all to think we are hairy muppets and should refer to ourselves in the third person. I suppose if you give a decent amount of thought to the topic, it can be inferred that Hindu cartoons will cause mass conversion to Hinduism. The fact that your faith in Islam or what you call your Pakistani culture is quite so delicate that it requires censorship to maintain is irrelevant, I suppose. To each his own, but at the rate you are going, oh holy ones, I'm afraid your souls might need more saving than the children who misguidedly watch animated shows about mythology.

I might have to put the (lack of) logic in the actual desire to censor aside for a minute though, since God knows censorship is awfully arbitrary these days and I have no control over what you choose to make your issue of the day. However, I am compelled to point out a slight problem with your definition of "Pakistani cultural heritage". I dislike mistakes; I think if you are going to make a point and defend it against all odds, you should at least do us the service of getting your facts right. You might have skipped eighth grade (chances are, with your fake degrees you probably did), but um-we didn't actually inherit our culture from an alien land. The lines that were drawn across the subcontinent in 1947 did not unfortunately erase about a millenia of heritage that we got from being-don't shoot me-Indian. I hate to break it to you, but some people across the border (the Hindu kind) actually speak the same language as us, not to mention other equally unfortunate similarities. A little deduction will lead you to the conclusion that we might share a little culture in common with Hindus. I hate to break it to you, but denying that Hinduism and its mythology plays a part in your pure Pakistani culture would require that you stop eating biryani. Immediately. It's not our cultural heritage. From now on, you might want to consider a ban on all food that doesn't originate from the holy land, because it doesn't fit too well into our culture and all.

I know that was hard for you to hear. I know you probably stopped mid-bite to consider the misery of giving up your God-given right to enjoy the best parts of your culture. I know you are reconsidering your obsession with being Arab (and therefore a better Muslim by your own definition). But please, don't let me distract you. You have to get back to business. I suggest that you start by banning a certain fake cleric whose show advises your children to kill Ahmaddis in the name of Islam but spare chipkalis in case they are really jinns in disguise. Then you might want to move to ban news shows which barge into the tents of flood survivors who observe purdah and terrify them into sharing their stories because misery sells. Maybe when you're done with all that, you can spare a glance for a Hindu cartoon. You know, the one that a few thousand Hindu kids who can afford TV like to watch so they feel like their cultural heritage isn't being ignored. While you're at it, feel free to eliminate TV shows with yourselves airing your moronic opinions, because I am afraid that being exposed to such content makes me think in expletives that are not becoming to a Pakistani Muslim at all.

Yours sincerely,

A still-Musalman who watches TV.

29.

2010-09-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

There are plenty of negative things people associate with living in Pakistan-security concerns, loadshedding, food poisoning. One item which really needs to be added to the list is uncertainty. Uncertainty dominates life in this city, if not the entire country. Our government loves to surprise us: we never know for sure if we will have electricity or not, if schools will be open or not, if buses will be running or not, if roads will be flooded or not, if tomorrow is Eid or not. I won’t digress by going into the macro-level uncertainties of whether the judiciary is independent or not and whether parliament is supreme or not, I’ll save that for another day. The last of my micro-level concerns (is it Eid or is it not) is my favourite one on the list.

Well, is it? I sometimes forget that we see the same moon in Pakistan as people in Saudi Arabia or America or Indonesia. You would think that each Muslim country is apportioned its very own special moon, with varying levels of brightness and visibility. Kind of like a lucky-draw system: who’s going to get the visible moon this year? Joke’s on you if you’re the one commissioned with an extra day of fasting, but your moon didn’t really cut it this time. Somehow, southern Pakistan is always the team with the no-show Eid moon every year, with our fairer-skinned brethren up north joyfully declaring it a day before everyone else, almost traditionally. Apparently, the north-south divide can’t even agree on the date anymore. Peshawar will continue to gallop ahead into Shawwal while Karachi will freeze its shami kebabs and kheer for an extra day.

It’s not the actual fact of it not being Eid which I’m classifying as irritating. If anything, the country’s failure to decide if it wants to celebrate Eid or Jummat-ul-Wida is just funny, and since we’re only 29 rozas in, one can’t really complain. The irritation lies in the perpetual what-if game this country plays with your head all the time. Can someone just offer us a tiny bit of certainty around here? Maybe not a macro level, but please, please, on a smaller level? Just figure out a way to decide if schools will be closed after bomb blasts or not. Start quantifying how terrible violence needs to be for the city to shut down. Maybe even be super-efficient and announce load-shedding schedules in the newspaper? How about ditching the Ruet-e-Hilal committee and following a country which has less controversy around celebration?

At the end of the day, it’s the little things which save (or compromise) your sanity. Larger problems can be dealt with on a crisis-basis, but the smaller ones whittle away at your patience and make you wish some things could just be set in stone, for once.

28.

2010-09-07T13:12:00.000-07:00

Living in Karachi, watching the news every day and trying not to spend too much time dwelling on the possibility of watching this city-or country-imploding is exhausting. Trying to quieten the noise in my head, sometimes I feel as if I might collapse along with this bleeding metropolis.

It makes me wonder how you break a city, a state. Does the world break cities the way it breaks men? Is it a violent tearing to shreds, or is it a slow erosion? Or is it all in my head? Perhaps it's just the buzz in my brain. It confuses me.

What is it about this city, this country, which leaves us so unhinged by its grief? A friend from another country asked me once why I want to go back home, why I don't try to make a difference to another country, another people. I told her the truth: because it's home. She didn't understand.

You can hear the dying pulse of this country, like a soundtrack from a bad hospital-based soap opera. You can put your finger on it and it feel it throb slowly, feel its heart struggling to keep pumping blood. You can wonder why you have such a visceral attachment to a set of borders you profess not to believe in. You can wonder why you believe it is important to live and die in a place just because you're told it's your own. You can wonder why people who leave continue to follow its politics obsessively and donate to it generously.

You can wonder.
But you can't get away.

27.

2010-09-06T14:16:00.000-07:00

It was Nano's house, but it wasn't really. I only thought it was. It's important that I thought it was, because I wasn't the only one-we all thought it was. My aunt was making us sleep on a gigantic psychedelic blanket. It was tacky and fuzzy and had Disney characters all over it and I thought it was odd that she gave a strange, high laugh and said almost manically, "How cheap!" even while she asked us to like it. She pointed out Mowgli, from Jungle Book. There were so many guests-all my parents friends, even though they didn't belong at Nano's house at all, and one carried around a baby and asked me about daycare practice. When the table was laid for dinner, there was a secret plate of biryani on a chair, just for me, just because I had asked for it. Suddenly, I remembered I needed to go to class and ran to the kitchen with my plate of food to hand it back to the cook. Everything in the kitchen was black and white, no colour at all after the insanely bright colours indoors, but I cheerfully foisted my plate on the grouchy cook and continued running. "Class" turned out to be geology class, and it was inside a salt mine. I had a long, long conversation with a science student who asked me about my research. I told her finding original sources for history papers is basically time travel. It was a while before I remembered, with a kind of longing, that my biryani was still waiting for me at home, that Nano's house was full of the people I loved. I ran again, this time through Mount Holyoke. Ran through the familiar campus, ran past the familiar buildings, ran smelling the familiar winter-smell. I stopped only to appreciate the familiarity and laugh at the sheer brilliance of running in the cold through a place that feels like a home. I wondered what it would be like to be a horse.

The inside of Nano's house was black and white, but I was in colour. I was real. The table was still laid, but abandoned. It's then that I realised everyone is dead. Everyone died before I was born. The people I loved only existed in time travel; they had lived and died and I had never known them but through my sources. The chairs were really graves. My brother's grave had his face on it and I almost died of shock. It said 1947-1955, and for some reason I thought, so he died only five years before me. I woke up, but I remained insane for the rest of the day.

Disclaimer: I had this dream in April. Please don't worry about my mental health.

26.

2010-09-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

I've been asked by a non-Pakistani to give American college students a reason to care about Pakistan. A reason to care. A reason to care? Can you give anyone a reason to care?

The fact that this is considered a legitimate question is disturbing. This is not to say that it is an irrelevant question: on the contrary, it is one that people around the world are asking so often we have become used to it. People need a reason to give a damn about Pakistan. Why Pakistan, they ask, when there is so much need in so many places around the world?

I admit this initially left me stumped.

Then it hit me that the reason I am stumped is not because there is no reason to care, but because apathy is not something that can be addressed through logic. I can make any number of political arguments as to why the average American should consider donating to the cause of flood relief, but this is not a political crisis (for once). It is not connected to the war on terror (for once). Therefore, it logically follows that neither of these things should play a role in one human's desire to help another.

I already said there was no point in logical arguments though. The only plausible reason I can give would-be philanthropists is this: if your parents had drowned, your home had collapsed and you were watching your child die a slow death because you have no money left to afford malaria treatment, you would hope to God someone would help. You would hope to God that someone wouldn't waste time asking why they should. You would hope that someone wouldn't think twice about giving your child a shot at life because your president is an asshole.

Did anyone ask why they should care about Haiti? Sri Lanka? Kashmir? Russia? None of these states have avoided either corruption or political instability. It seems there are only questions in response to this question. They are disbelieving questions. I can't believe the world has come to a point where humanitarian aid is considered on the basis of the strategic value a country has.

On a different, but important note, the argument about terrorist groups winning hearts and minds if the United States does not step in is overrated. I think it is extremely doubtful that if Mullah Omar inadvertently saved my life by donating a pack of biscuits when I am starving, I would join Al Qaeda. I think it is even more doubtful that flood survivors who are being forced to fast and pray by relief organisations will be inclined to become suicide bombers. I won't even try and make that case for Americans to care about the crisis in Pakistan. I don't think I ethically can. If winning the war on terror is the only reason you have for donating to a cause, please don't.

Which leaves me with nothing to say again. Need I try and say more? Your question is offensive and if you are asking me to give you an antidote for apathy, I'm afraid nobody has found one so far.

25.

2010-09-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the last straw that broke the camel's back. I've been picturing it a lot. I wonder what my last straw is, what it will be. I wonder sometimes if I already broke my back, but forgot to notice. I know I've broken it a few times already and it feels like every year there are more occasions, more days, when I am left broken, exhausted.

Usually, if I wake up less than happy, it's a sign that the last straw is coming right at me like a flying cockroach. It makes me wonder how often we collapse, how often we need to collapse to retain our sanity. There is the kind of hurt that puts your teeth on edge, and then there is the kind of exhausted hurt that crumples you like a worn-out tear-stained pillowcase.

It makes you wonder if being adult requires a regular dose of anxiety.

We should all allow each other to breathe more often. Being adult (but not adult enough) feels like not breathing and exhaling once every ten days or so. It feels like balancing on a narrow curb like you used to when you were a child and suddenly remembering you're not a child anymore and you're just...balancing. On worse days, last-straw days, it feels like a dream in which you suffocate.

It's probably the only way to appreciate a good night's sleep I suppose.

24.

2010-09-04T14:01:00.000-07:00

I wondered today why I keep coming back to this blog, day after day, forcing myself to write an essay whether I'm in the mood or not, whether I'm exhausted from work or not, whether I have time or not, whether I have anything to write about or not. I've never had trouble with commitment, but god knows I've never been this diligent or dedicated to anything else before. The truth is, this project has come to mean much more to me than I had ever considered it would. Now that I'm finishing the first quarter of my goal, I already find myself wondering what my next project will be. What is it about one essay a day that keeps me awake writing even through a bout of gastroenteritis, a ridiculously long week at work and personal commitments that leave me busy till midnight?

It's true what the self-help books say about setting goals for yourself, but writing every day is less about keeping myself busy and more about proving to myself that I can do whatever it is I decide to do. When I fail to write, I fail myself, not because what I am writing is important, but because if I can't even manage to do what I love for one hundred days, how will I ever do anything else with any amount of dedication?

Writing-and writing publicly-forces me to be an even tougher critic than I am on an ordinary basis. I constantly put myself down over the content, style, length and frequency (I don't always do one a day, sometimes I skip days and make up with more than one on an extra-creative day) of my blog. It's a way for me to censure and congratulate myself in equal measure, to feel like I am doing something that matters, because I'm doing it without anyone asking me to. As much as I would like to believe some anonymous syndicate likes to privately follow my blog and will call me Day 100 to offer me a job, I know it won't happen. What will happen though, is that I will have proved to myself in one hundred ways that I can do something just because I can.

23.

2010-09-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

For the past forty minutes, I have unsuccessfully tried to write an essay about something other than how much I miss college, but I've failed. Clearly. Nobody should ever spend that ridiculous an amount of time to come up with a first paragraph, but since I have, I may as well write what I keep going back to. Otherwise, I'll just sit here and stalk my friends on Facebook and wish I was sitting on my bed surrounded by piles of clothes and semi-unpacked luggage, making plans for a reunion pizza dinner with them.

Let me first clarify that I don't actually want this. Actually, all I want is to find a place where I can have constant intellectual stimulation, beautiful surroundings, friends who live next door, a non-long distance relationship, family nearby and a real job. In other words, I want to be back in college without leaving either the people I love, or the financial security I am coming to love. I had already weighed all these pros and cons in my head about a million times before I left home for college and then again before I graduated. It would be wrong to say I didn't know how much I would miss it, because I knew exactly how much I would miss it. But oh, how I miss it. So much.

One thing I deliberately avoided thinking about before I left was that saying goodbye to Moho was a different kind of goodbye. It wasn't like saying goodbye to anyone or anything else, because I don't know if I'm ever going to see it again. I can hope to see it again, but if I do, I don't know when it will be. And when I go back, I don't know if it will mean anything to me anymore. I've never been so fiercely attached to any other place before and I've never knowingly left something I won't get back before. I know this is standard: people don't usually hope to go bounding back to college right after they graduate. I miss who the place let me become. I miss it because it was the first place that was just my own, with everything on my own terms. Perhaps I got used to being selfish, but it's a heady feeling to be used to. That's why, when we drove to Bradley Airport for the last time through the campus, I pretended I was going back, or I would have gone crazy with the private goodbyes to the only place where I have ever really been alone.

It's wrong to say alone, though. I was never alone and can hopefully count on never being alone. I hope one day, I am like a member of the class of 1940, who attended their seventieth reunion in all their ancient glory, all five of them who are still alive. I hope one day, I do see it again and it does still mean something to me. For now, I seriously need to grow up, but I do hate goodbyes. So much.

22.

2010-09-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

I am completely obsessed with lists. I love lists. I love making them, reading them, counting items on them, crossing things off them, putting little check marks against them. I know this makes me a hopeless dork. Every essay I write comes after an inner battle not to write in entirely list form. It's not my fault I think in bullet points, after all. Nobody believes me when I say that, but it's true. I think in headings, subheadings and bullet points under the subheadings. Putting things eloquently isn't a talent of mine, but at least putting things neatly is. Today, I decided to give up the battle. I've proven my resilence, I've shown the world I can try and be all creative and flowery paragraphy with 21 normal essays. It's time to break out the lists. Here is my Great List of Why I Love Lists.

1) You never forget what to buy at the grocery store. There's never any "oh shit I went to the supermarket and I didn't pick up shampoo". There is only the satisfaction of making a comprehensive shopping list and checking things off it. Not only does it save time, it also helps prevent the "I went to Target to buy scotch tape and came home with a throw rug" conversation which is so apt to come up at least several times in your college career.

2) It makes writing papers (or essays) ten times easier when you have a mental list of what to say. In the case of academic papers, it also makes it much easier to pad your work with bullshit, because it's evenly distributed across the list of relevant stuff. I've noticed non list-makers tend to write very pretty papers, but their bullshit distribution can be a little off-all the nonsense tends to be concentrated towards the end, when there is a struggle to meet the word count.

3) You can start your daily to-do list with things you already did, or that you know will get done anyway (breakfast? Print homework?) just because it makes you feel awesome when you cross them off. In other words, there's nothing like a (fake) list to start your day off right.

4) It's easy to keep track of pretty much everything in your life. I have made lists of places I want to see before I die, things I need to do this week, books I will never read (*cough* Twilight *cough), 90s trends that need to come back and ways I would change my face if I was a Metamorphmagus. In case I or anyone else ever need to refer to these things, I've got it covered. Think of me as your grandfather's gigantic filing cabinet with all sorts of useless crap in there, but very well-organised crap.

5) It makes you feel productive. I have to admit that there were days when I went to the library, thought very hard and produced a brilliant list of everything I need to study. I don't mean jotting down all my homework, I mean a truly epic list, with suggestions and charts and all sorts of embellishments. By the time I'm done with this list, I feel like I deserve a break. Who doesn't like that glow you get when you know you absolutely deserve the nap you are taking?

6) Lists can go on forever. I can occupy myself endlessly making lists of just about anything. There's no getting bored when you have a list-maker in your head. There's also no running out of writing material. If you ever get tired of constructing paragraphs but still have a point to make, a list just might save your day.

21.

2010-09-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

I don't think there is anything our nation loves more than a good conspiracy theory, except perhaps biryani and cricket. Of course, when conspiracy theories are discussed over biryani while watching cricket, you have the formula for happiness. I doubt any of us are completely immune to the temptation of believing that either Israel or India is behind everything wrong that happens to this country, but some of us are worse than others, and some conspiracy theories are more creative than others.

One of my current favourite theories is that the Indus flooded because India made it happen. Bund breaches and badly-built dams aside, the idea that the Indian state was doing some kind of incredible rain-dance imploring us to have exceptionally heavy monsoons is brilliant. Clearly, Indians' ability to make it rain at will has not helped them irrigate their own land or feed their own people, but it's just so typical of Hindus to be interested in nothing but our downfall. What's more, they are able to infiltrate the ranks of our hardworking NGOs and play a sneaky double-game in which they offer 20 million rupees in aid while conspiring to kill flood survivors. Since India possesses such great supernatural powers, perhaps we should ask them to target specific militants the Pakistan army is after. That way, it will only rain on the bad guys, and everyone will be happy.

It's not just Indians who are out to get us, though. The Israelis want us all dead too, but I suppose that goes without saying. As a nation of unified Muslims, we are the Palestinians' greatest resource in the intifada. Our material assistance is of no importance, because what the Israelis really want is to eliminate our support for Hamas. That's why they decided to go for the jugular and defame our cricket team. Cricket=happiness=good national morale=sense of brotherhood=concern for our Palestinian brothers=nuclear ally for Hamas. Trust Jews, who have done nothing but persecute us since the very birth of Islam, to engineer false allegations against our national heroes through the media that they obviously control. Because remember: every powerful media company is owned by Jews, and every Jew is an Israeli, and every Israeli is a Zionist, and all Zionists want Pakistan to suffer. There's a page out of Zaid Hamid's book if you lack the patience to sit through one of his lectures. That is really all you need to know to be a fan of the guy.

Then, of course, there was America to blame for everything. Unfortunately, we are one conspiracy theory down because their role in our misery is not only obvious and therefore uninteresting, they've already acknowledged it publicly and are giving tons of aid in guilt-money. However, we need to remember that aid is never just aid. How do we know it's not being filtered to CIA employees, who spend their entire lives trying to convince us all that Al Qaeda exists? Our aid money doesn't just go into Zardari's real estate investments, it also goes into the bank accounts of Americans who are being paid to get OBL lookalikes to make fake videos about how he is hiding in Pakistan, just so they can remain in our country on an extended vacation. Obviously.

Don't get carried away in your hatred of all non-Muslims just yet. It turns out that our religious compatriots are in on the conspiracy to destroy Pakistan too. I heard only today that it's not Pakistani Sunnis who are blowing up Shias. Pakistan is in fact the site of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Iran is trying to convert all of us to Shias, while the Saudis are venting their anger at a Shia nation becoming a nuclear power. This is also evidenced through the sense of love and brotherhood that has existed between sects in Pakistan since the 90s, when Shia doctors and professionals were being targeted by Saudi agents.

Understanding and accepting this world view is vitally important for adding spice to otherwise boring discussions in which we would otherwise have to engage in the dull task of introspection. I strongly suggest that if you don't already know these theories and at least a few more inside out, you get with the program. Remember: while you fool yourself with your feel-good, lets-change-ourselves-and-be-a-better-nation ideas, the world is trying to blow us all up.

20.

2010-08-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

Answering people's polite queries about what I studied at college is something I'll probably have to deal with for the rest of my life. I'm trying to get used to all the ways I can explain and/or defend my choice when people give me the split-second blank stare when I say I studied history. South Asian history specifically. There are so many predictable ways that people respond to this I think it merits several essays, but I'll try and condense them all into one.

1) "Why didn't you study European history?"
I think it goes to my credit that I have never, ever replied to this with a lecture about post-colonial complexes or Eurocentric world views. As badly as I have wanted to, good manners prevent me from telling people that if they try very hard, they might be able to get past the idea that the only history worth studying is that of England and France. In the event that they succeed in doing this, they might even ponder whether students in Europe are ever asked "yuck, why did you choose to study your own history, you should probs learn about Latin America first". I should add that if I flip it around and say I studied how colonial policies influenced South Asia and therefore admit to having learned about British history in a slightly roundabout way, most people are relieved that that I didn't just study "Pak. Studies". Oh, Pak. Studies. I want to say more, but I'll save it for another day.

2) "Why did you waste so many years studying history? It's over. You could have become a doctor or something instead and done something more with your life."
This is not an adaptation of a likely question, these are the exact words I have had to hear from several people on different occasions. As sorry as I am that I didn't have the interest or the stomach to go to medical school, I resent the notion that I am doing nothing important with my life. I like to believe that educating idiots like above-mentioned questioner is a very important goal to have. Also, for future reference, history is not over. Just the fact that people are able to say that makes me cry a little on the inside and wonder what the world is coming to. Of course, I have a slightly better idea of what the world might come to than the askers of this question, because they are most probably too busy congratulating themselves on having picked a practical field to actually think about anything.

3) "Why do you like memorising dates?"
I don't. I haven't had to memorise a date since tenth grade, which was long before college majors came along. I have never satisfactorily answered this question though, for one that's so common. It leaves me completely baffled as to what people think History majors do. Do you really think we all sit with our little timelines and memorise a comprehensive list of when everything happened in the world, ever?? Perhaps you think my final papers for my classes read like a chapter from an almanac, in which case I completely forgive you for wondering why I studied history.

4) "Why would you study South Asian history in America? Isn't it all biased?"
No. Contrary to what you might believe about all Americans (Indians? Jews?) having a hidden agenda to teach us the "wrong" history, it's not nearly as "biased" as the nonsense you're taught in South Asia. In fact, doesn't the whole idea of bias get negated when you're studying something through a neutral third party-in this case, Mount Holyoke College, which couldn't care less what I believe Pakistan's true place in the world to be?

5) "What are you going to do with your life?"
This is probably the only response out of the entire list of Why-did-you-study-history queries that actually makes sense, and the only one I can answer. Oh, I have no idea what I'm going to do with my degree! Then again, dear Economics and Political Science and Biochemistry majors-do you?

19.

2010-08-30T03:23:00.000-07:00

Coming hard on the heels of what has been a terrible year for this country, the Pakistan cricket team's match-fixing allegations seem like a great cosmic joke being played on us. There is very little we can do about floods, bombs, corruption and war, but when our national sports idols decide to make complete asses of themselves on the world stage, it feels like a kick in the gut.

Although I usually argue against the concept of national embarrassment, this is an instance where it is difficult to blame either Zardari or Mother Nature for the latest reason the world has to hate Pakistanis. Because you see, sports idols represent us in more ways than the government does. We may not elect them, but they are one of the few examples of social mobility in this country. They are looked up to because they are supposed to have earned worldwide respect through sheer talent. There are very few professions left in this country which children across all social stratas believe they have a shot at, and this is one of them. Who on earth would dream of being on the Pakistan cricket team now?

Aside from the completely unethical nature of what the team has done, I think they should personally apologize to every child who feels betrayed by them. I don't care about their careers and don't know enough about the sport to wonder what repercussions this will have for it, but I do care about disappointed hopes and hurt children.

Really? I mean really? I thought the national morale couldn't possibly get any worse than it is now, but perhaps we should thank the cricket team for showing us a lower low can always come. When other countries announce that cricket matches being held for Pakistan flood relief are being canceled for fear that our team will deliberately lose, it leaves you lost for words. This was really all that was left for us to hear on the news this week. Cricket seemed to be the only time Pakistanis could be flag-waving fanatics without being either violent or insane, but it seems we've been robbed of that small pleasure as well. It may not surprise us when the government lets children die, but when our cricketers let little boys' dreams get crushed for a few thousand pounds, the sense of betrayal is disproportionately greater.

18.

2010-08-28T13:28:00.000-07:00

My name is Achee Beeja, and I am a ying twing. When I watch the part in Lion King where Simba and Nala look into the elephant graveyard and say "whooaa" I think of chicken corn soup. I shout embarrassing things loudly on airplanes flying out of Lahore and whenever I clean my room, I refer to how Julie Andrews did it in Mary Poppins.

If none of that made sense to you, that's okay. It shouldn't. There are very few people in the world who it should make sense to, and this essay is dedicated to them. More specifically, it is dedicated to people who will not stare at me like I am crazy when I play Monopoly and shout things like "Sit with monk and be a donk!" It is dedicated to people who make terribly ironic music playlists called "lymph". It is dedicated to almost 23 years of inside jokes, reliability and thinking it is absolutely normal to use The Sound of Music as a general guide on how to live life.

Sometimes, all of us need someone to write poems to that contain lines like "agar panties made of jean hain, unn pe discount thirteen hai". Because you see, that brilliant verse holds the secret to my entire childhood. Literally. It's the translation of our well-guarded password to being admitted to our very exclusive club. I'm only sharing it now because that exclusive club will remain that way forever. We finally realised that we never needed a password. A couple of decades of sharing blankets and toothpaste and crayons can easily suffice instead.

I wonder sometimes about girls who say they don't have close female friends. I guess I'm lucky enough to not be able to understand that. I have many groups of amazing female friends, and my membership in all of them relies solely on my experience with my first companions, the ones that taught me I can experiment with being pretty much anyone and always have a home to come back to. A home where I can pick up the phone and ask someone which of my sweaters is the googliest and if we can play a board game that says "the angel, is lington" and get a straight answer.

Friends and schools and jobs come and go. They float up and they float away, and they take away whatever you put of yourself in them. That's when you need to call people who will remind you that the fat man who floats up to the ceiling while singing "I Love to Laugh" didn't achieve that by being sulky. That's when you realise that one day, you will write at least an essay, if not a book, about how much you love them.

17.

2010-08-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

Dear Irresponsible Journalists,
The recent trend of Pakistanis lambasting the entire nation for the tragic events that transpired in Sialkot last week is getting old already. It is true that when public lynching becomes possible-even probable, given the current state of anarchy we are in-a country is in a sorry state. It is also true that events such as these should inspire outrage and force us to question who we have collectively become. However, good journalism should rely on more than sweeping generalizations, however crowd-pleasing they may be in certain sections of society.

I would like to remind you that most of the so-called liberal intellectual elite of this country will staunchly maintain that there is no such thing as the "average Pakistani". I'm going to have to agree with that. There isn't. Unless you share anything besides a green passport with your chowkidaar/doodhwala/resident beggar, you can't possibly claim that there are any over-arching similarities between all Pakistanis. Therefore, it logically follows that all Pakistanis are not somehow to blame for every tragedy that falls on this troubled region.

Similarly, dear writers, please keep in mind that although your self-righteous anger and hatred of our uncivilized nation may extend to all Pakistanis, there are people in this country who have far more worthy things to do in times of crisis than point fingers at one another and insist that we stop "indulging in Facebook activism". Thanks to the global trend of hating this country and everything to do with it, a trend you so wholeheartedly espouse, we are in a position where most Pakistanis have become aware that nobody can help us as much as we can help ourselves. Please remember dear journalists: while you indulge in newspaper activism and seethe with anger at why we are not all wringing our hands, hanging our heads in shame and crawling into tunnels to die, there are tens of thousands of ordinary Pakistanis risking their lives and livelihoods to reach out to our flood-affected compatriots. There are tens of thousands of volunteers who drive ambulances, distribute food and pack relief supplies for victims of terrorism. For every mob that silently watches a crime being committed, there is another "mob" that will stand on the street and protest it, however futile they know it will be.

You are right about one thing: we should be ashamed today of the crimes we let happen. We should be ashamed that we are painting the mother of two dead boys with the same brush with which we paint her sons' murderers. We should be ashamed that we consciously edge out the unsung heroes that prevent this nation from imploding to indulge in seriously passe government-bashing. You are right about that I suppose, but I think you and I are talking about a different kind of shame here.

We have not collectively become a nation of anything, least of all cockroaches or Maula Jutts or whatever it is that the cool kids are calling us now. We have not been a collective nation in a long time. Today, crisis after crisis is encouraging (most of) us to put aside our petty, pseudo-intellectual babble and work towards a Pakistan that people like you will not be applauded for brushing aside in disgust. Your mid-life crisis may prevent you from seeing it, but every young Pakistani I know has done something for their country this week, whether it is mindless Facebook activism that you are so derisive of, going to Peshawar to work with displaced people, calling attention to the plight of minorities or spending their savings on medical supplies for the needy. Every single one, dear bitter journalists. Perhaps you are unaware that roughly 75 nation-states today are displaying barbaric acts of varying intensity as they struggle with the concept of unity and nationhood. Perhaps you are mistaken in believing that the genetic makeup of everyone between Balochistan and FATA encourages a love of gore.

I am going to explain something before I leave you to meditate on your disgust of all mankind in peace. I am in no way suggesting that Pakistan is either morally superior or more prone to acts of charity than any other nation on Earth (I know that this attitude is a pet peeve with you lot). I am only suggesting that in the name of responsible opinion-sharing, you retain your venom for a moment and consider the concept of balanced reporting on events that are too terrible to be shoddily covered. Perhaps what Pakistan needs isn't for all of us to jump in the Indus and commit national suicide, but the ability to think like rational, empathetic human beings, rather than bellowing Maula Jutts.

Yours sincerely,
A fellow writer.

16.

2010-08-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

There is nothing that causes me to panic more, or more often, than my nonexistent sense of direction. This includes creepy rodents with hairless tails and difficult math questions, and both of these things cause me to panic substantially. Thanks to the fact that I don't live near open sewers and also own a calculator, my (lack of) sense of direction is a considerably larger barrier to my sanity than anything else at this point.

Nobody really understands my predicament. I promise I am not mentally challenged or completely zoned-out all the time. Even though I admit I may never win prizes for being observant, I am not a complete space cadet, though I am frequently accused of it. In fact, I am a reasonably intelligent, competent human being in other areas of my life. The fact that I am having to defend myself against the cruel accusation of being slightly stupid however, should tell you something about how often people doubt my IQ when I am asked to direct them anywhere.

People have attributed various reasons for my handicap: not bothering to read maps, not looking out of the window often enough when I'm being driven around, not knowing how to drive myself, having an underdeveloped left brain. None of these are (entirely) true. I do in fact read maps, and I try my level best to make sense of them. It completely escapes me as to why they should make any sense to me. Roads are never empty lines, no matter how I try to see them as squiggles and curves on a piece of paper. After studying a map of where I need to go, I can convince myself that I am capable of finding my way, until I am actually on the road. You see, real roads have cars and trucks and donkeys and pedestrians and billboards. Maps don't. I've been told I'm imaginative, but I cannot, cannot imagine a place in order to effectively minimize it and place it in a larger context. The debris of real life gets in my way and prevents me from doing it.

Another accusation I need to battle on a regular basis is that I am oblivious to directions because I am not a true Karachiite; I am simply a product of a sheltered suburb who chooses to ignore the rest of the beleaguered city. This doesn't make any sense if you really think about it. You see, I am as capable of getting lost in my own neighbourhood as I am anywhere else in the world. Also, thanks to a job that requires me to file city crime briefs for eight hours a day, I promise you I probably know more about what goes on in this city than you do. Just don't ask me to map the damn crimes, whether they happen on one side of Kala Pull or another. That's what specialized software is for.

Today I was absolutely sure I should not rely on my own senses to direct me to my own workplace, so I decided to use my mother's directions. That was a bad idea. My mother has slightly more confidence in my intelligence than others, and she seemed to assume that I can tell left from right and know one road from another. I can't. I don't. Not that I don't know where I work. It's where the DHA Bachat Bazaar signs end, across the street from the girls who are collecting donations for flood relief, near a Remaine billboard, where there are usually a few trucks and tankers and a lot of traffic. There is usually also at least one police officer harassing an old man or two there, and a big bridge which I can't name because I think of it as The Big Bridge, and knowing names of places never got me anywhere, anyway. Unfortunately, the vital flaw in my plan for remembering directions is that nearly everything I use to orient myself is movable. Is it my fault others are so unreliable?

I admit it might be a good idea to learn the name of the road across the street from where I live, just for the sake of general knowledge. The only reason I haven't bothered with that yet is because I couldn't put it on a map for you if you wanted, and I can easily direct you to my house because of the luckily unmovable mosque very close by. Please don't ever ask me abstract questions such as "so if I'm coming from Clifton Beach, would I take a right or a left from X road to get to your house?" Please spare me the humiliation. I know that this handicap/phobia/stupidity of mine is not commonplace and not understood by the average person. Nothing makes me feel as small and stupid as having to answer these difficult queries. Nothing makes the panic rise through my stomach and into my throat as fast as knowing that in a minute or two, any credibility I had as a capable adult will be destroyed. Just don't do it to me.

Also, don't worry about me. Don't suggest that in the absence of a vital understanding of roads and maps, I will be lost and floundering in the Real World like a sorry little girl who can't find her way home.

After all, the people and bazaar signs and police officers are almost always there when I need them to be.

15.

2010-08-25T03:11:00.000-07:00

When I grow up, I am going to be a spoilt, bossy know-it-all. I am going to do everything exactly the way I want to. I am going to insist that my way is best-that it is the only way. I am going to live just the way I want to live.

I am going to grow so many indoor plants my house will look forested. I'll have a bouncing castle installed in one bedroom of my house and use it as a personal gym. I'll spend my evenings bouncing and falling on my behind in this new room. I won't let anyone tell me I am too old for it.

Every month, I will stock up on sugary breakfast cereals, not whole grain muesli. I'll eat breakfast for dinner and dinner for breakfast. I'll collect glow-in-the-dark stars and plaster them on my ceiling. I'll colour-code my wardrobe and alphabetize my books. I'll disinfect my doorknobs and label all my drawers. There will always be a notebook and pen by the phone.

I will have a swing in my backyard. I'll have a petting zoo of baby animals, and when they grow old, I'll build them homes to retire in. I'll have a library of my own. My books will be stored on sky-high shelves, and I will have a sliding ladder to reach them. There will be poufy armchairs scattered around. Not the orthopedic, ergonomic ones. Just poufy armchairs.

I'll have tents built around all the beds. At night, I'll zip up mine and forget where I am. My bed will be suspended from the ceiling, like a hammock. When I sleep, it'll swing by itself. My guests will come especially to sleep in my swinging tent-beds.

My house won't have a house-smell. It will smell like starched linen, or warm vanilla, or freshly-baked bread. The bathrooms will have tubs-germ and mildew free. The tubs will have claws. There will be a constant supply of bubble bath and Crayola bath pellets, the kind that turn your water blue or pink or turquoise.

There will balloons floating around at all times. I won't wait for a celebration. Helium balloons around my ceiling and regular balloons on the floor. There will always be a slice of cake in the fridge.

When I grow up, I will be lovably eccentric. Or perhaps I'll just have a lot of children and say they designed my life.

14.

2010-08-24T03:42:00.000-07:00

There's a place in my head that is much nicer than the place we are all in now. I like to believe it's the remotest place on earth, although the actual remotest place on earth is an island somewhere off the coast off South Africa, and this place is not that island. It is simply antithetical to the place Pakistan is today, and it's a lovely place to create, to add details to, to colour in. It makes me wonder what kind of a place the country has become for it to be antithetical to an imaginative ideal. Watching Pakistan spiral out of control is like watching a close family member slowly wasting away. The waiting. The waiting for something to happen. The waiting for death. The guilt. Is this a genuine concern for the world, or is it a failure of my imagination? Is it a failure on our part to not be able to see a way out of this dark hole in our lifetimes?

People say that a new era will come. People talk about revolution, about glorious change, about an awakening of the masses. People talk about great progress around the corner. It makes me wonder whether it is only possible to imagine such brilliant outcomes from a position of privilege. From a position of being Sunni Muslim, wealthy, secure. When our great awakening happens, will it happen to all of us, or will the poor and the disenfranchised lag behind a century or two, as always?

Pakistan is a place where the social contract between citizens and the state no longer exists. This country has failed its Shias, its Ahmaddis, its farmers, its Hindus, its Christians, its women. An allegiance to the state from these groups can be either sentimental (I was born in this country and I love it) or defensive (just because I am not a Muslim doesn't mean I am disloyal). It is heartbreaking that this should be the case. It is heartbreaking to think that anyone should search for reasons to feel like their own country still belongs to them. When people speak of a day that will come when our country is on a better path, I want to know who this day will include. The top-down system of governance/wealth distribution/general privilege has grown tired and is creaking under the weight of injustice. Politics will continue, governments will come and governments will go, but the Proud to be Pakistani stickers that pop up around 14th August will remain a commodity of the wealthy, educated, clothed and housed population. People talk of how much this country has given us, how far behind we would be if we had not had it. This is true. Perhaps we would be far behind. Perhaps we would be persecuted. But it is difficult to rejoice in "our status today" as a DHA signpost proclaims, when our privilege is at the expense of everyone who is not exactly like us.

Forcing myself to imagine an idyllic remote island in place of this nation of tragedies is a failure of the imagination. Believing that great progress will occur and it will not be either bloody or unfair is even more so. Blessed are those who can afford to ruminate about change at a time like this, or escape to better places, even if they are only psychological. Unless our discourse about change and overcoming hurdles includes those citizens who have been traditionally disadvantaged as the foremost recipients of this positive change, our hopes will always be hollow.

13.

2010-08-24T03:20:00.000-07:00

Writing one hundred essays in one hundred days is like chemotherapy for writer's block-it forces it out in the most aggressive way possible. Sometimes it has painful side effects (self-doubt, blank-page syndrome, obsession). Sometimes, it doesn't work. I think that's called writer's block. While I was worrying about this creative dead-end and my goal of ninety-one more essays, it occurred to me that the only logical way to treat writer's block would be to write about it.

I suppose not knowing what to write for a little while is not necessarily a terrible thing. It makes you notice things you might not have otherwise. Over the course of today's stupor, I learned that my living room fan is very noisy, I need to file my nails, there are some great recipes for cookies online, my blue kameez needs to be fitted, there's a lizard behind the picture frame near the computer, Thomas Jefferson was a Deist and it is possible for me to hum distractedly and loudly enough to get glares from my neighbour at work. Normally, when there is a blank page in front of me, I am too busy writing to observe, think or look up these things. It's amazing how much you learn when there is nothing else to do. 

Ironically, writer's block has also given me something new to write about. When you really stop to think about it, the frustration of not knowing where to begin or how to say something is as describable as anything else. 

It feels like having your head wedged between two rocks. It feels like one of those nightmares where you have to take an exam and realise you haven't studied. It feels like spending the whole week looking forward to Sunday and then having to cancel all your plans when it finally arrives. It's like rain at the beach, like wet sand and a cold breeze that makes your teeth hurt. It's a sinus infection that leaves you unable to move your head because of its heaviness. It's a mosquito bite on your ankle when you're wearing skinny jeans. It's a ketchup stain on your favourite white T-shirt. It's sitting down to watch a movie and having the cable go off. It's like a math test you don't understand.

It's the feeling that everything you want to say has already been said. It's the tea-coloured hue of life that's no longer interesting. It's the toe-curling irritation of wanting to write about something so badly you just can't. It's having a tune stuck in your head and not being able to remember where it's from. It's that face on the news you don't recognize. It's having something to say to someone you love and not knowing how to start. It's finding out your brother ate the last bit of Jell-O in the fridge. It's the now-what? feeling before graduation. 

It's about 600 words of revelation. It's a kick-start to writing about more important things than the inability to write. It's the frustration that makes you want to do better next time. I suppose it's an essay in itself.

12.

2010-08-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

Of all the disturbing things girls say and do that betray the general trend of low self-esteem amongst our sex, the one that annoys me most of all has to be "I'm so fat." It ranks number 1, even above "She's such a slut" (female solidarity anyone?) and stupid statements made deliberately to sound fluffy and cute in front of the opposite sex.

"I'm so fat" doesn't annoy me because I am inherently opposed to healthy BMIs or an interest in maintaining fast metabolism and a healthy heart rate. It annoys me precisely because girls and women who complain about their bodies are least concerned with general well-being and most interested in achieving the frail, about to keel over and faint any second look. More and more often, I find girls who are blessed with naturally fast metabolism and dangerously low fat indices counting calories and trying their level best to resemble twelve year old boys. More disturbingly however, I find otherwise intelligent women pointing at well-built, well-endowed women who dare to pop up in the toothpick-dominated media and reviling them for being "fat".

Somewhere in the past decade or so, it became every woman's greatest desire to resemble nothing more than a coat hanger; a frame for hanging clothes off of without the slightest hint of normal female anatomy. I have several objections to this trend. Firstly, I am going to agree with our grandparents' generation and point my finger at the evil West and say They Did It. They may not be responsible for the degradation of the entire human race, but their values and fashion industries are most definitely responsible for our rejection of what comes most naturally to us-having breasts, developing hips and reaching for the breadsticks at dinnertime. Secondly, it irritates me how the ideal of feminine beauty today is to look like hairless, weakly-developed men. Finally, this seemingly universal quest for the ultimate size-zero, flat-chested appeal not only denies and rejects the enormous range of possible shapes and sizes the human body can come in, it makes girls like me feel like King Kong even while wearing size 2 jeans and maintaining generally good health.

Yes, this has become personal. Stop calling me "fat", because when you call yourself fat, you skinny cow, you are actually calling me fat. I've gone from being someone who never worried about weight or counted calories to someone perpetually worried about why my chest isn't flat and my thighs don't look breakable. The craziness of this hit me only recently-why on earth have I begun to wonder why I don't look like a boy?

The whole phenomenon of naturally curvy girls desperately trying to eliminate their waist-to-hip ratio and naturally slender girls desperately counting calories is beyond saddening. We're not just rejecting fat anymore-we're rejecting what was traditionally seen as the positive attributes of being feminine: warmth; desirability; fertility; motherhood.

I'm sorry to break the code of being a good girlfriend, but unless you are a girl trying to make healthier choices in life, I won't help you go on whatever crazy diet Oprah just endorsed. I will break out the tubs of full-fat ice cream and tell you men love a little extra padding. I will most likely do anything to avoid helping you nurture your insane obsession with being five foot ten and a hundred pounds. Just remember this: I, unlike the fashion industry, prefer real friends to coat hangers, and am therefore a reliable source of advice. You, meanwhile, should give yourself a break, allow yourself to eat breakfast, and stop calling me fat.

11.

2010-08-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

With The Rest of My Life stretching out before me endlessly and a New York Times article demanding to know what is wrong with twenty-somethings and why they don't settle down already, confusion and frustration are reigning supreme. Confusion because I am determined not to be one of those twenty-somethings who are unable to handle responsibility, and frustration because the less preachy side of me is sadly acknowledging the end of an era.

I'm not talking about the end of selfishness, or freedom, or college parties. I'm talking about the end of a life where your friends push you through every crisis. Because let's face it; post-college friendships are never quite the same. The lines between friends and family become less blurry and the inevitability of everyone going in different directions becomes more apparent. It's now that I am starting to be assailed with panic at the silence at my door and windows: the sound of friends not knocking. What can I count on anymore-and will it ever be the same again?

Knowing that those of my friends who haven't already scattered will do so soon leaves me feeling oddly rootless. Knowing that I thought of myself in relation to several groups of others leaves me feeling oddly inadequate. How much can we matter to one another when we no longer need one another?

I know, of course, that growing up doesn't mean you stop needing your friends, or that you somehow become self-sufficient, cold-hearted recluses, but I also know that they are not-or should not be-your lifelines anymore. While we all make individual commitments-to careers, passions, romantic partners-we slowly sever ourselves from the Before, without much idea of what comes After. I used to like knowing what comes After. I like to pretend I revel in uncertainty now, I like pretending I am completely in control of my smooth transitions from one phase into another, but the truth is, I can't stop worrying about how much I will miss having someone's room to walk to in the middle of the night when I think my room is haunted. I can't stop expecting to see a face in my window, or a note on my door inviting me to share instant noodles. I can't stop worrying about how I will deal with this facade of being a put-together adult with my friends on about thirty different paths. I can't stop worrying about whether I am the only one worrying. And I worry about how much sadness, how much alone-ness comes with this supposedly exhilarating new phase of my life.

What is there to say? I can't get over the irony of how navigating adulthood would be so much easier if we were all doing it together.

10.

2010-08-20T13:27:00.000-07:00

Like most Pakistanis who read the newspaper every day, I cringed when I read that the UN has attributed the lack of flood relief funds coming in to the country's "image deficit". That is an extremely diplomatic, albeit irresponsible statement for them to make. What a nice way of saying nobody likes us enough to care if we drown! The irresponsibility, of course, lies in the fact that the UN should be making such claims based on entirely anecdotal evidence. Yes, we all know the country's popularity ratings may not be soaring globally, but assuming that UN officials are educated to at least the undergraduate level, it can reasonably be expected that they know never to use information that can't be cited.

My gripe with this statement is on several grounds. Firstly, as mentioned, the obvious inability of quantifying an image-or its "deficit". Secondly, shrouding the cold fact of a lack of humane sympathy with diplomacy, rather than exposing it for what it is. Thirdly, the fact that the response to it in Pakistan has been a shrugging-off and acceptance of the fact that the global attitude to the crisis is Pakistan be damned, it's full of terrorists anyway.

Since there is very little I can do to help the UN spokespeople recall Speaking and Writing 101 where they learned to make statements they can qualify to be true, I'm going to leave them alone for now. Pakistanis however, I am more capable of speaking to, and one thing is for sure: if we are ever to pull ourselves out of this permanent state of crisis, we can't do it without first shedding all our internalised doubts about our own worth as a people. We defend the plight of the flood victims (it's not their fault our country produces terrorists) in the same breath as we agree with those who point fingers at us (it's true that we are a nation of terrorists).

Rightly or wrongly, nationhood entails a feeling of belonging that elicits both national pride and embarrassment, depending on the instance. Both these feelings are completely nonsensical in their own way. Whether someone chooses to train as a suicide bomber and blow himself up on either the Pakistani or Afghani side of the border should be immaterial. Whether the crime rate soars in Karachi or Delhi should also not matter, except as far as concern for one's safety. Whether Zardari makes an ass of himself or not should be a non-issue. Nationhood and nationalism should only be relevant as far as our own understanding that the nation-state and its mechanisms influence outcomes. Beyond that, situations which are out of our reach and control should not be valid cause for embarrassment-the will to act should be borne out of our humanity, not our nationality.

I fail to understand why I should be personally embarrassed about our venal, eminently hateable government(s) or the terrorism this country spawns. I detest them on the grounds that they are unethical; not because they are unethical and Made in Pakistan. The flood victims and tireless aid workers should not have to live and die beneath the petty concerns of how pretty or progressive Pakistan looks to the foreign media, and neither should we. There is nothing pretty and nothing progressive about this nation, but we need to move past our favourite hobby of cringing over how ugly we look, as if we were a twelve year old pre-pubescent adolescent, and so should the rest of the world. Until then, people are drowning in the ugliness of sentiments such as national embarrassment. Literally.

9.

2010-08-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

Doris Lessing called nostalgia “that poisoned itch”. To me, nostalgia is less of a skin ailment and more like a head cold that comes on slowly, one symptom at a time. If you’re careful enough, you can kill it. If you’re not, you’ll spend hours or even days nursing the aches and pains, the stuffy sense of something being wrong with your insides. The thing about a head cold-and nostalgia-is that it insists on happening no matter how healthy you are, how physically or emotionally stable, how satisfied with your present. The past always comes back in irrelevant pieces and infects you when you least expect it. In fact, it has nothing at all to do with what you really want-it seems to be more a case of perpetual rehearsal in your brain, in case of sudden memory bankruptcy, in case of forgetting.

And we do forget. We forget so quickly that the smell of a familiar tree or feel of a certain T-shirt can surprise us with how recognizable it is. My conscious may know perfectly well that I have no desire to return to a particular time or place, but the number of times I revisit that place in both sleep and wakefulness would suggest otherwise. Nostalgia demands that we remember, and that we remember with a certain longing, which is why it is both surprising and annoying when I come across the all-too-familiar logo of federal financial aid services and find myself missing it. Not because I want it, but because I don’t have it anymore. I only want it because I don’t have it, not because any (sane) part of me would prefer to go back to haggling with financial aid officers. It’s the same with rain in dreams-I don’t enjoy rain. Or rather, I don’t enjoy getting my feet wet. But when the old head cold visits me in dreams where my socks are wet, you would think wet feet were a great love of mine, the way I cling to the feeling.

It’s been said that when you leave a place, you don’t miss the place as much as you miss who you were when you were there. That is the most plausible cause I’ve heard for being infected with nostalgia. I may not miss the physical roads or walls or stones of places I’ve left behind, but I do miss myself. That’s what nostalgia does-rudely remind you of how quickly you lose yourself in a time and place, or to put it positively, how much you give of yourself while you are there. I suppose head colds have a purpose too, if they shield us from forgetting who we were and how we felt before we had them.

8.

2010-08-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

Every August and every December, Karachi rains. I don't mean it rains in Karachi, I mean Karachi rains; rains a flood into streets, rains riots into highways, rains fire into power plants, rains insanity; rains like the hot, dusty, violent rest of the year is crying to be forgotten.

There used to be a magic about Karachi rain; it left us along ago. Rain used to be getting off early in the first week of school to slip around outdoors and get soaked. Rain used to be singing on rooftops and sticking out our tongues to catch raindrops. Rain used to be our much-awaited relief from the heat before we all had generators. Rain used to be a good thing.

Somewhere along the line, rain became another bit of Karachi's grief, pouring into our homes and schools and TV sets. I suppose we grew up. Nobody ever wants to slip around outdoors anymore; nobody in their right mind smiles at the first fat drop. Any child over ten will tell you the rain will bring its annual unwelcome guests: power outages, burning tires, floods, collapsed billboards, death by electrocution. I suppose Karachi grew tired. Nobody wants another tragedy weighing down this city full of them.

Now, we just want the rain to stop. Watching it rain is like watching a tired episode from a sitcom you used to love and can't stand anymore, because you know it inside and out, because you have criticized it from every angle. Now, we just need the rain to leave us alone; to give Karachi a minute to grieve over one loss before embarking on another. Perhaps we grew up. Perhaps our city just grew tired.

7.

2010-08-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

The post-colonial world, since achieving independence, has struggled with problems such as shaky or puppet democracies, corruption, poverty and civil war, all of which contribute to massive and frequent violence in many post-colonial nation states today. While the existing world order tends to favor Franklin D. Roosevelt's idea that "all good things go together", or the concept that decolonization, rising literacy and economic progress will automatically bring liberal democracy, the truth is that these very developments have often created illiberal and often violent states.

Popular nationalism is a two-edged sword; while it has its obvious benefits, in many cases it can be used to rally the energies of a majority group at the expense of a minority. This has proven true in the case of both India and Pakistan. In India, Hindu nationalism rose and led to the election of the extreme right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party in 1998, while in Pakistan, democratically elected governments have both allowed and incited violence against the Ahmaddiya, Shia and Christian communities, to name a few. Part of this is due to the challenges of maintaining a "national" identity that a vast, multilingual, multicultural body of citizens can identify with. Civic nationalism in societies which for centuries before independence were ruled largely by structures of class, caste, language and ethnicity is a difficult idea to generate and maintain. In a newly democratizing society, debate about who fits into the "true" national identity-and who does not-is both likely and common. Promoting unconditional freedom of debate, while an important ideal, often proves divisive.

The institutions of democracy, already weakened by a colonial legacy, class disparity and communal animosity leftover from Partition days prevent the theoretically great qualities of provincial autonomy and popular elections from being successful in practice. In an environment where democracy is not backed up by strong law and order, an efficient judiciary and other luxuries that post colonial states are generally unaccustomed to, debates about the status of Pakistan’s religious minorities, the rights of India’s Dalits and Adivasis and secessionist movements in both states can easily go wrong. The pogrom against Indian Muslims in Gujarat is only one example of the horrors that can be perpetrated in a democracy. In 2002, millions of Muslims were murdered, raped and looted under the watch of BJP member Narendra Modi, who is still serving as Chief Minister of the state. A free media fueled rumors about Muslims setting fire to a train carrying Hindu passengers, public debates allowed political parties to rally support for their cause of "Hindustan for the Hindus", and a democratic system allowed the government officials who had orchestrated the massacre to be elected back into power. This kind of “murderous cleansing” is not an atypical circumstance in a multicultural, post-colonial democracy. Arguably, it is a very modern phenomenon; it is a common aspect of the only acceptable form of government in today’s world. As Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy said, “is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of "progress" is also poised on the threshold of genocide?”

While democracy, decolonization and political autonomy are the most sacred of today’s political ideals, they are rarely questioned for the violence that they tolerate, support, and sometimes engender. The dark side of democracy in pluralistic, post-colonial states should force us to question Roosevelt’s outdated assumption, challenge the unrestricted power of majority communities in newly-democratic societies and create more effective protections for the status of minorities against whom violence is most often directed.

6.

2010-08-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

Leaving a women's college-that reminds you every single day that women are changing the world, women need to fight for their fair share, women should be strong and confident, women need to help women-and then entering the "real world" is severely overrated. So much so that I needed to write about it. So much so that nobody bothers to voice the difference between that environment and the kind we are in back home. Although I am too tired of defending the choice to attend a women's college, I am going to expound on my favourite misunderstandings about the experience.

No, we are not all lesbians. And even if we are, it's really none of your business. In fact, if you are male and enjoy the idea of girl-on-girl action, please take a moment to relish the irony that women who like women are most likely not interested in you. Moreover, those women who do opt to be with other women do not make this choice out of "frustration", as delightfully egotistical men love to believe. On the contrary, finding men at a women's college is much easier than you would think; they turn up at the slightest hint of a party.

This brings me to the second myth: it is not like being in a nunnery. Though at times being locked up and forced to pray may have done wonders for our GPAs,it never actually happened, nor will it ever happen in any institution that prides itself on women's ability to make intelligent decisions. We did not have "house mothers" or nurses or wardens or whatever you may call them monitoring our every move. In fact, we had nobody but one another for wonderful, dependable company.

Wonderful, dependable company. Delightfully female company which did not end its sentences in question marks? You know, like we're not sure what we mean? Or we don't really mean what we say? Or we just think that being feminine requires a certain amount of uncertainty? That didn't happen very often, either. In fact, there were professors devoted to the cause of making sure that when you say something, you sound like you really mean it, because you have nothing to apologize for. Professors who were capable, accomplished women-not bra-burning feminists (coming to that one in just a minute)-or wonderful, enlightened men.

People should really get over the bra-burning image already. Honestly, why that should ever have been an issue in women's history is beyond my limited understanding. Bras are uncomfortable, maybe one woman and her friends did burn theirs. Why exactly should this symbolize an ideal which states, and very simply so, that women deserve equality? I'm not too sure either. I doubt anyone will ever figure out why braless-ness is such an enormous threat to the fabric of society, but my point is (and as a History major I feel the need to be specific) that bra-burning was never a popular activity amongst feminists, and even if it had been, an objection to it would have been completely irrelevant.

Lastly, and this is one I feel the need to constantly explain: receiving an education geared towards female empowerment does not mean we all nourish hopes of sterilising ourselves, abandoning the possibility of marriage and motherhood and shooting on sight every male CEO that gets paid 25 percent more than a woman in the same position. Nor does it mean that we all believe in or uphold the same ideals of feminism or femininity. What we do share, however, is the experience of having known what it is like, for a few years at least, for everything to be about us. We shared the education of learning from others how many ways there are to be successful, how many definitions we can give to equal rights, and how many ways there are to deny that being at a women's college was ever anything to regret.

5.

2010-08-15T12:55:00.000-07:00

There are so many reasons to quit Facebook. Old people, parents, employers and technophobes all love to expound on the many reasons to just bite your lip and rip off the Band-Aid and be done with it forever, but most of us don't really care. I'm going to be honest-the usual reasons people give for why social networking is such an insidious villain to the average twenty-something don't matter to me at all. I don't really feel that my "true character" is being compromised in favour of a Facebook-friendly version of it, I don't have any secret sex tapes or otherwise questionable content floating around cyberspace and I don't at all mind having grandparents as Facebook friends. In fact, I love having my grandparents as Facebook friends, and since that is the prime concern of most people my age-older relative stalkers that is, not grandparents specifically-I think I should be golden. Golden and free to stalk and be stalked forevermore, or as long as these things last. There is however, one serious issue with what I believe to be an otherwise harmless site, and it looks something like this: "LOOKING FOR MUSLIM SINGLES IN YOUR AREA?"

Creepy dating site commercials aside, there is a whole world of Facebook adverts that invariably manage to insult you in several ways at once. "ARE YOU A YOUNG WOMAN LOOKING TO SELL HER EGGS?" is a personal (and recurring) favourite. Why yes, I am a young woman, and why yes, I am quite broke with a liberal arts degree and no lucrative job prospects. Hey, thanks for the great idea, Facebook!

Of course, I am hopelessly behind the times in this critique. Facebook no longer simply implores me to give the gift of life to infertile couples and date men of faith, it also asks me to "like" things. This shouldn't ordinarily be a problem. I already like many things I am asked to like, such as sleep, food, weekends, national holidays, real fruit jam, T-shirts, organic cotton dresses, bottled water, scholarships, my country, other countries, free shoes, pink Macbooks, cool deals on electronics, God, Islam, posters, king-size mattresses, cheap wedding photographers, designer jewelry, discounted airfare, cute babies, chick flicks, tea, coffee, grandmothers, clock radios, vitamin water, days where I stay in my pyjamas all day, affordable dorm buys, good banking services and cell phone charms.

The only problem is, I can't just like them. I have to like them. Publicly. This makes me wonder two things. Firstly, why on earth would anybody advertise food, sleep, their religion or flipping the pillow to the cold side at night? Secondly, why on earth does Facebook know so much about me?

No, really. Why does Facebook know I need scholarships? Why does it think I might wear organic cotton dresses? How does it know my favourite colour is blue, or is that just another creepy coincidence? Strictly technologically speaking, some kind of software must be matching our name/sex/age/relationship status/hometown/religion to what it thinks we like, but somebody must have programmed it. Somebody must have sat down and thought that if you like real fruit jam, why of course you like 100% organic cotton sundresses, which naturally means you are a young woman who might also want to sell her eggs! It's pure brilliance, not to mention strange and extremely distracting from the practice of getting in touch with my friends, which is (or was) Facebook's original purpose. I suppose the corporate sellout was inevitable. I just wish the man in the Facebook sky didn't know so much about me.

4.

2010-08-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

There are several armies in this country. There are of course, the regular Faujis. They're a dependable lot; one can generally rely on them to own vast amounts of land/clubs/hospitals, produce decent quality corn flakes and stage a military coup every decade or so. Then there is the army of God, as they see themselves. This is a versatile lot-they function as terrorists, loony ideologues, charitable organisations, scapegoats and fodder for dozens of conspiracy theories that fuel drawing room conversations. Lastly, there is the great army of liberal Pakistanis who represent enlightened moderation.

Oh wait, just kidding.

Let me rephrase that: lastly, there is a miniscule group of elite Pakistanis who believe that by going about their daily lives in the manner most convenient to them, they are waging some kind of war on the dark forces at work in the country. Art is no longer art, fashion is no longer fashion, great food is no longer great food. It is all part of Showing the World The Real Pakistan, Challenging Extremism, and similarly lofty aims. Yes, it does sound a bit ludicrous in writing, doesn't it?

This is not to say that the elite should live their lives differently, or conform to ideals they can't relate to. It is merely an attempt to call attention to the cowardice and delusion of statements littering the English media about how liberal Pakistanis project a good image of the country abroad, how Pakistan Fashion Week is a slap in the face for extremists, how throwing amazing parties showcases the progressive values of the hosts. Let's be serious now. Nobody outside of Pakistan really cares about how the elite live their lives here. The evils that plague the rest of society will continue to plague the rest of society in spite of the beliefs or behavior of a few hundred Pakistanis, and unless the Taliban are being invited to enjoy and tolerate Fashion Week, it will have absolutely no bearing on extremism in the rest of society. It is here that I will come to the most important and most vexing point of all: wild parties do not a progressive thinker make. Wild parties are fun, and progressive values are very important, but the assumption that there is a natural causal relationship between the two is bordering on idiocy. Somewhere along the line, the idea that one must be well-read or strive for education, tolerance and humanity was lost in the average socialite's definition of enlightenment.

So fight on, brave armies, but don't squabble with one another over influence. Continue to stage coups/enforce Shariah law/throw parties, but for the sake of rationality, don't fool yourself into thinking your cause is any more noble than it really is.

3.

2010-08-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

People keep asking nowadays how the terrible things that keep happening are allowed to happen "in this day and age". This strikes me as extremely strange. Was there ever a day and age worse than this? Was there ever another time, another people, another generation with the same ability to swallow violence with such casual irony? Of course, we all know the answer is yes. Having lived only a couple decades or so, I can hardly speak for other times or people or generations. However, one thing I know we can proudly claim as our very own special prize as children of This Day And Age is dead baby jokes. Yes, I said it. Dead baby jokes/nuclear war jokes/apocalypse jokes, these brilliant artefacts of 2010 are most certainly ours and ours alone.

Assuming casual, dark humour isn't a trait reserved for hipsters who like to wear irony on their T-shirts (in a way that is subtle yet in your face, note the double irony of wearing irony), we are all party to the guilty appeal of laughing at the grotesque. I'm not going to condemn this; in fact, I fully support it. Parental horror aside at the crude jokes that drive home baby boomers' fears that we are indeed a depraved lot, it's only human to laugh when it's clearly futile to shed tears.

Perhaps the images we are constantly bombarded with on the ubiquitous media that it is so in vogue to criticize nowadays really have desensitized us. Actually, there's really no question about it; the media uses grief to sell products. We do distractedly note the merits of Surf Excel washing powder versus "Ordinary Brands" while we wait to hear the death toll of the most recent tragedy; we do acknowledge the refreshing taste of Limopani with the irritating ding of the timecheck before the news. Horror is a sellable commodity on the news, and it is as open to being poked fun at as anything else we buy. How can you cry at human loss when it is packaged for you with your favourite brand of tea or toilet paper?

I believe I am digressing from my support of morbid humour, but the reason I am getting at is not that shock value or depressing content desensitizes us, but that it humanizes us. Talking endlessly (casually, but endlessly) about the chaos we are spiralling towards, texting about the most recent evidence of corruption and joking about dead children is not evidence of callousness, but a desire to possess it. Who among us wouldn't want to be completely immune to fear, to not smell it's sickening stench or wonder where we will go when Things Get Worse, as we wait and plan for the time when everything is so wrong we Must Leave? It's like crying until you laugh, or laughing until you cry, until you can't tell the difference anymore.

2.

2010-08-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Failed State,

What is really left to be said regarding your supposed Failure? All the usual things have been said: goodbye law and order, hello false democracy, fuck you Mr. President, etc. etc. In strictly statistical terms, of course you are a Failure, dear State. But don't make plans to blow up into nothingness (however good you are at Blowing Things Up) just yet. If one wants to be fair about it, it's not you, it's us. In fact, let's begin at the beginning: Attempts at forcing Nation-Statehood is a pretty stupid idea to begin with, and it's never been a good colour on you. Of course you failed at it.

Let's be responsible about this analysis of where you went Wrong. There are several places we could start:
a) 1600, when the East India Company decided to arrive
b) 1947, when you were born
c) some point between 1947 and now, TBD by various squabbling factions.
I'm going to scratch option (a) for now, because that merits a separate letter about your origins, and truth be told, we never really explained to you where you come from. I'll also have to dispense with option (c) because I'd rather not get political and point fingers at any of our Great Leaders, none of whom I would choose to lead you again. I think it's time we acted like two adults here and talked about birth.

You weren't really what anyone would call a planned birth. You were more of a pleasant surprise, even if the labour was long and hard, even murderous, one could say, and even if your parents were going through a period of confusion about who they want you be and how they would like to raise you. Your father made a speech 63 years and 1 day ago about freedom of religion at the same time as he made one about the Triumph of Islam, at the same time as he championed the poet-laureate who had brilliantly political ideas of his own, at the same time as he accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan which never really wanted you anyway...you get the idea? The truth is hard, and the truth is, there is none really. Or if there was, it's been dead for 62 years, like a joke from another decade, being dredged up years later by people going through mid-life crises and attempting to relive the great trends of their youth. This is not a cynical explanation, dear State. It's simply the kindest way of saying, nobody knows who or what you really are and the collective confusion this creates has led to your multiple personality disorder today.

What matters now is that you understand and accept yourself who you are-a badly explained idea with a series of poor choices under your belt. What matters even more is that you quit trying to understand how you ended up this way, make better choices and choose to take your disorders with you to rehab. You may not have made your own bed, or at least not all of it-saying that is like saying your toes should suffer because someone flicked you in the eye, but you can make it easier to lie in. Rhetoric about democracy/dictatorship, enlightened moderation/religious guidance, fuck you Mr.President/fuck you Mr.Prime Minister/fuck you Mr. Chief Justice may be fun, but it's just so last year. I suggest you come out of your long stupor by beginning to think more (but not overthink, it is a guaranteed migraine), talk less, for God's sake talk less, and move beyond the circumstances of your birth into the hopefully wise sexageneranian you should now be. It's not (entirely) your fault, and we don't mind that you already Failed in the eyes of statistical evidence. Unless the world really is ending in 2012, there is endless time to right wrongs, provided of course you become less of a whiner and more of a doer.

Happy (Almost) Birthday, remember to have fun and try to be good.

Sincerely,

Your Citizen

Acknowledgement: Thank you to Zehra Nabi for writing the first letter :)

1.

2010-08-11T23:33:00.000-07:00

Four years ago, I acquired the frequently distressful habit of recalling every single one of my dreams first thing every morning. It was all part of a desperate bid my parents made for me to understand my subconscious better. For one week of my life, I opened my eyes to my parents' unblinking, anxious faces, asking me what I had dreamt, what it felt like, what I felt like, what colour it was, what it could have meant, and I would dive back into the murky recesses of REM sleep...a car...a dog...a dog biting off somebody's leg...a long drive. And so it went, until I learned to dive in and out of dreams, coming up for air with broken recollections and holding my breath to remember farther back, with the talent of a seasoned swimmer. By now, there's hardly any diving required; I weave in and out of dreams while going about the mundane tasks of my weekdays, occasionally confusing something I saw or felt or smelled in the otherworld for something that happened in my realworld, straining to differentiate one from the other.

The otherworld is a dangerous place to indulge for too much time; it's where all your longings and fears and hopes mesh into a wild chase, or a film-grainy horror scene, or the paraphernalia of your childhood, and they pop up and distract you from correctly squeezing the toothpaste tube or closing the car door. They beg you to stay, they ask you to try and go back, but you won't ever find your way there once you've lost it.

There was a warm paper bag in my hand, rain in my hair and dampness in my boots, my fingers rubbed against the magnetic stripe of my card, bits of grass stuck to the soles of my shoes while I walked home in anticipation of dry clothes and the smell of winter-approaching hung about. There were children too, all seven my siblings, and a chimpanzee...and how happy we all were together. Sometimes, I know already how terribly I will miss the people I meet in this world, and I float out of it reluctantly and spend idle moments trying to recreate them, or hoping I meet them again. It's strange how a week of practice opened up my whole being to this otherplace, stranger still how it feels like home, how the tug of nostalgia lends itself to figments of my sleeping imagination. I still hope to be reunited with my seven siblings again; my chimpanzee; my wet hair; my warm paper bag, my home.