Drumbeats

If you read this blog every once in a red moon (I know it is blue, but humor me), then you know I am on Twitter now. I jokingly blamed a friend in Pakistan for my finally deciding to do this, but really, it is his fault. It is the best way to keep in touch with him and news from the old country, at this point. And more up to date . . . .

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My mother repeats stories from her childhood. I am not certain what made her retell this particular one, but we were talking about Pakistan. She told me that she was born in India, and always has felt connected to it. I replied, "Yes, you were born in India, but we were born in Pakistan . . . well except for the youngest, who was born in the USA."

She began to tell me about her school days, and the songs they sang at assembly. Apparently she was picked to lead in song because her voice rose a few octaves (was it good? I did not ask), and two songs that she remembers singing: the one about lalkaoing from the choTis of Himalaya ke hindustan humara hai. And then the other song was also nationalistic, saare jahaan se achha. Hindustan humara."

She added, "We sang these songs to get the British out of India." I nod, "I know." My mind lingered on the second song. The poet Iqbal, whom we know as Allama Iqbal wrote that, and it did become an anthem of protest against British rule.

I thought about that Iqbal who wrote about Hindustan. I thought about the Iqbal who praised secularism, Nietzsche and Mussolini. I thought about the Iqbal who read a poem of his in honor of King George V's coronation, and I thought of the Iqbal that certain Islamists wish to reclaim as in this article, here

"Iqbal wrote that." I pointed out to her.

"I know." She replied, muttering things about him that were far from complimentary. We acknowledge that Iqbal was a very good poet. I am not certain how we, who have lived with Iqbal's great works like Bal-e-Jibreel and Bang-e-Dara, and read him in our Nawa-i-Waqt every day for years, have seen him in terms of his politics.

Like many men, and women, Iqbal was a heap of contradictions, and if the hard-core mullahs wish to misappropriate him, well then may they go with Allah, but no one can fully reclaim Iqbal, and no one should. What else can we take, distort and twist, and throw out there as the way to rebuilding a better nation, when all it does is get us stuck in the same damn Groundhog Day?

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There's a reason I have been avoiding topics like this in previous blogs. And I just remembered what it was.

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Twitter was all a-buzz today with the news that the Pakistani ambassador to the US, Hussain Haqqani has been recalled to Islamabad. There are murmurs that his job is on the line, and that he is the wrong Haqqani to go after.

Hussain Haqqani certainly has been one of the most articulate representatives Pakistan has had in a while. So I hope this gupshup is all it is, gupshup. The defections from the PPP, the braggadocio of the Tehrik-e-Insaaf party of Imran Khan. Dhol baj rahe haiN ji, Dhol!

From The News:

ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani Monday decided to call Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s Ambassador to Washington, to Islamabad to brief the country’s leadership on a host of issues impacting on Pak-US relations and recent developments.

The decision was taken during a core committee meeting, held at a time when Shah Mehmood Qureshi said goodbye to the PPP and resigned from National Assembly membership. The meeting was called to discuss the political impact on the party of Qureshi’s decision.

According to sources, the decision to call Haqqani was taken to defuse the situation arising from the memo allegedly written by President Asif Ali Zardari to Admiral Mike Mullen, and recently denied by the government as well as Mike Mullen. 

The PPP core committee on Monday decided to continue the path of the reconciliation politics and will respond to political opponents politically rather than through confrontation. A detailed discussion on the political situation in the country also came under discussion in the Monday meeting.

more, here

Paalitiks shmaalitiks

It is not that I really like following politics. It is that the alternative is unthinkable. When you are living in a world where the few have control over the many (trying not to digress into Mr. Spock's words to Captain Kirk in Khan), you have got to know something about what is happening to your choices, your livelihood, your future or the future of a beloved. You might wish to know how restrictive certain laws are, even if your own life is not directly impacted by it (and chances are it is). And if you want to live in a world where you feel everyone should have access to the same rights and or privileges, politics is inescapable.

So yeah, you could say fuck politics! But politics fucks you.

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We are approaching an election year here in the United States. So is Pakistan. I still try to keep up with what is happening there. It is a little easier now with all the technologies available to us, but still, there is a sense that leaving Pakistan and its twisted politics and policies meant leaving all that behind.

Pakistan today is much better than it was thirty-two years ago in some respects. In others, it is not. Sixty-four years later, various factions are still raging about whether Pakistan was meant to be a secular nation or one based on religion and religious laws. And while they have yet to figure that out, there are those from various generations born in Pakistan, those who remember nothing about what it was like when General Zia ul-Haq turned things upside down and all around, who are questioning the remnants of his dictatorship.

And that is a bloody good thing. It indicates that there is still hope. But hope needs to be within the purview of all Pakistanis, which includes Ahmadis, Christians, Hindus, and all oppressed populations. Was it Albert Einstein who said You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. Well you cannot simultaneously prepare for a return to more democracy and prevent a small percentage of the population from being equal partners in said democracy.

It was therefore, incredibly disappointing, when the government itself said that it was no longer going to continue a dialogue re: blasphemy laws. It was too much of a security risk, after the murders of Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti. Meanwhile, shia mosques continue to be attacked in Pakistan, and Imran Khan who wants to be the next prime minister of Pakistan talks about how he will stop terror groups in Pakistan. How will he do it? What will have to be lost in order for terror to end not just in Pakistan, but beyond. The specifics are still vague, but promises are made, and as always Pakistanis want to believe that something good, better is right around the corner.

There is an episode of the series Law and Order where a former military man has killed a suspected terrorist. In his closing statement, Jack McCoy, the ADA and prosecutor, in reiterating what the respected, decorated man has done asks a question, something to the effect of how much of ourselves as a nation are we willing to succumb to terrorism?

It is a question that has not left me since I watched it.

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The more I listen to some voices, the more I wish they would go beyond words, or beyond the simple yet really effective words of Aaloo AnDay. Before the Beyghairat Brigade, there was Junoon. Junoon, the pulsating "sufi" rock band who came out with songs like Talaash, Ghaflat, and Intesaab.

Now you have Ali Azmat, former Junoon rocker, in the darbar of Zaid Hamid who would rather blame Taliban bombings on a conspiracy between the CIA, Indian agents of RAW and *gasps* the Mossad. And no one is making this up. Not even the supposed beyghairatoN who are supposedly aligned with the West. And as one who was a fan of Junoon, I think, bloody hell! What has happened to zehni ghulaami se honge kab hum azaad? One might ask where is the ghulaami as far as Zaid Hamid is concerned. Another will question the azaadi that Hamid and his friends and followers, including Imran Khan want.

It makes me think of that scene from Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause, where James Dean so powerfully and emotively cries out to his parents, You're tearing me apart!

Pakistan has been torn apart enough over the years. There has got to be a way for the rang baranga fabric to be put together again. And it can be done by Pakistanis themselves, many who are still waiting for that dawn to arrive. Waiting and hoping involve greater action. I hope that it goes beyond a song, out into the streets, out for freedom, secularism and justice.

All some of us can do from the sidelines is watch, wait and hope. Those of us who don't have the loads of cash supporting their interests, that is.

The rain of stones is finished

From the Express Tribune:

He added that Nasir was born in 1928 to an aristocratic family of Hyderabad Deccan and became a communist while studying at the University of Cambridge. He became a member of the CPP soon after it was formed and banned after the 1951 Rawalpindi conspiracy. As a result, the government started a crack down on leftists. In 1954, he was in and out of jail and was also exiled for a year. “He went to Deccan when he was exiled but managed to return to Pakistan the day his sentence was over,” he said. “Nasir’s commitment to the cause was commendable.”

By 1957, he joined the National Awami Party where he flourished as a communist leader. He was last arrested on August 2, 1960 and killed in a cell at the Lahore Fort in November at the age of 32.

I knew nothing of Hasan Nasir before I read Faiz Ahmad Faiz. It was in Agha Shahid Ali's translation of Faiz' ghazals/poems in a collection The Rebel's Silhouette that I read khat'm hui barish-e-sang - the rain of stones is finished. There is an epigraph right before the poem in Urdu, and its translation:

(for Hassan Nasir, tortured to death in the Lahore Fort, 1959)

which conflicts with the date given in the above report. Memory plays tricks where time is concerned, as I know from listening to arguments about births and deaths in the family.

The image of someone being tortured in the Lahore Fort is a visceral one. Torture is that, as it is, but I had been to the Lahore Fort a number of times as a child, and wandering through the halls of the old Mughal edifice, it never occurred to me that this was a place where people were tortured in the twentieth century.

Reading the poem with the knowledge that it is about a man who was killed, makes it even more poignant. I can post it here in (roman) Urdu, but I am not finding an English translation.

Na gahan aaj meray taar e nazar se kaT gaye

TukRay TukRay huay aafaq pe khursheed o qamar

Ab kisi samt andhera na ujala hoga

Bujh gaye dil ki tarah raah e wafa meray baad

Dosto qaflai dard ka ab kya hoga

Ab koi aur kare parvarish e gulshan e gham

Dosto khat'm hui didai tar ki shabnam

tham gya shor e junoon khat'm hui barish e sang 

Khaak e reh aaj liye hai lab e dildar ka rang 

Koo e janan maiN khula mere lahoo ka parcham 

Dekhiye dete haiN kis kis ko sada mere baad 

Kaun hota hai hareef e mae mard afgan e ishq 

Hai muqarrar saqi pe sala mere baad 

It is a poem which describes nothingness. Everything in the heavens is scattered to bits. Nothing is in his vision any longer. There is neither light nor dark. Let someone else tend to the flowers. The noise of the crowds has gone, the rain of stones is finished . . . .

Reading this report here, I still feel I know so little about Hasan Nasir.

  

"Ooh that smell. Can't you smell that smell?"

I am not watching the Republican debates in their entirety. Even listening to a clip can be a torment at times, depending on who it is that is talking.

Ammi's house, last night, I have no clue why they were watching the Republican debates. I wander through the dark hallway to get to the kitchen, and the volume is cranked up. I hear Herman Cain saying something to the effect that waterboarding is not "torture" but rather "an enhanced interrogation technique", and that he would endorse that as president.

The applause to this remark was immense. I was sickened to my stomach. Then there was the whipping up of fear about Iran, Bachmann's delusions about Obama and the ACLU, all this in a span of less than five minutes.

It felt like those times when we were driving west on the highway, and passed by a town with a mill. From that mill, emanated such a putrid smell that lingered for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.

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Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn:

Take for instance how many of them responded to the UK court’s verdict on the three Pakistani spot-fixing cricketers. Last year when the spot-fixing scandal broke, positive thinking dictated that the cricketers must be supported because both international and local negative forces that are always relentlessly conspiring to blacken the country’s name were most probably behind this event as well. And thanks to many of our positive media personnel it seemed that for a while, Salman Butt, Muhammad Amir and Muhammad Asif, were about to become the male equivalents of Aafia Siddiqui (remember her of the ‘I shot the sheriff’ fame?).

But, alas, a little more than a year later when the three were proven guilty in court and sent to prison, all hell broke loose. No, there were no rallies against the ruling or condemnation of the verdict like Ms Aafia’s (another convicted felon in the US).

Instead, people began burning the three stupid cricketers’ effigies, cursing them for blackening the country’s name.

So the negative old me decided to tweet a question: How come there are stones and curses for a spot-fixer but rallies and rose petals for a killer? By killer I meant you know who.

As the positives came rushing in (on Twitter) to condemn my negative question, I kept on wondering. Wondering how come so many Pakistanis and the media are ready to pour out and passionately demand that certain corrupt cricketers or politicians be lynched, but then the same people shower praises on self-appointed defenders of the faith who commit murder, or look the other way when some other self-appointees in this respect go about their business of blowing up mosques, shrines, schools and markets?

But, then, I understand. Why disturb one’s healthy positive aura and vibe with awkward questions. Why complicate things. I mean, all this might lead to negative thinking thus cynicism, unpatriotic thoughts and perhaps even atheism, no?

Read his opinion piece here