History Repeats in Mysterious Ways

The following excerpt is from an article written by Ardeshir Cowasjee in the Dawn newspaper. Cowasjee held Government posts in the Bhutto-era, which brought him in contact with Bhutto. And Zia, after the latter shoved Bhutto aside.

Anyway, I think the following applies pretty damn perfectly to the never-ending Mush situation our country faces.

THE date, Aug 25, 1977; the place, General Headquarters, Rawalpindi; the man in the high chair, President Gen Ziaul Haq, jet black hair heavily pomaded, mascara surrounding his eyes, moustache bristling, confidence oozing from every pore.

Sitting on the opposite side of the table, next to me, was the soft-spoken mild-mannered and ever faithful Gen K.M. Arif, taking notes, gathering up each pearl of wisdom as it gently dropped from the all-powerful lips.

“Mr Kovasji,” as was his interpretation of my name, “what can you do for the ports of Pakistan and its shipping in 70 days?” he asked. “General,” I replied, “what is so sacrosanct about the figure 70? After all, it took Phineas Fogg 80 days to circumnavigate the earth in a balloon. Why only 70?”

Came the answer, pat, convincing, “I have promised the people that I will march back to my barracks in 90 days, 20 days have since passed, so that leaves 70.” I countered, “No, General, you will do nothing of the sort. You will stay on, and on, for as long as you can.” Far from being annoyed, he laughed, “And on what do you base this premise of yours?” History, was my answer and I asked him if he had ever read Captain Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart’s brief but exceedingly wise book Why Don’t We Learn from History? (first published in 1944). One chapter that I particularly recommended to him is entitled ‘Pattern of Dictatorship’. Zia made a note of the book’s title, I subsequently sent him a copy, and he had it reprinted by the Services Book Club (later, in 1986, his editors chopped and chipped — but it did not change history).

Now, a quote from the relevant chapter: “We learn from history that self-made despotic rulers follow a standard pattern… They claim they want absolute power for only a short time (but ‘find’ subsequently that the time to relinquish it never comes)…

“On gaining power: They soon begin to rid themselves of their chief helpers, ‘discovering’ that those who brought about the new order have suddenly become traitors to it. They suppress criticism on one pretext or another and punish anyone who mentions facts which, however true, are unfavourable to their policy. They enlist religion on their side, if possible, or, if its leaders are not compliant, foster a new kind of religion subservient to their ends. They spend public money lavishly on material works... They manipulate the currency to make the economic position of the state appear better than it is in reality...” and so it goes, to the perfect pattern.

Sounds familiar?

'nuff said.

(Source: http://dawn.com/weekly/cowas/20080127.htm)

The Assassination of a Country's Dreams

They say that a country begins its descent into annihilation once immorality starts spreading like rot from the inside out. Pakistan has been walking this tightrope for decades now, running around in circles like a dog chasing its own tail. I have no intention of recapping history here - all the facts are already well known. I'm only thinking of my own future and the future of my family - what sort of a Pakistan will we see going forward? How much longer will I have to spend justifying whatever is happening in Pakistan to people abroad? My country is a plane crash that should have happened a long long time ago. The fact that it hasn't is a sign of sheer benevolence from the One above. He keeps giving us one more pass, one more chance to checkmate, one more opportunity towards redemption, and we keep throwing it away, chucking it into the fireplace. Sooner or later, He's going to stop giving…

We can't blame it all on our leaders though, can we? Sure, we can make the argument that no leader Pakistan has seen has had enough integrity and vision to carry this country forward. Zia assassinated Bhutto, crippled our chances for democracy through his never-ending martial law, fanned Islamic extremism and took the country literally nowhere. He had no intentions of a new direction either - it was only a bomb in his plane (God bless his soul) that gave the country a different direction.

Not that democracy was much of a new direction - the country's decade of elected leaders didn't give us much either did it? Apart from allegations of corruption, villas in Spain, Swiss bank accounts with the country's laundered money, the country pretty much stood stagnant during those years, rotting like water in a swamp. It took Musharraf's military coup to change the country's direction again.

Isn't it ironic that Pakistan's only hope of progress has been through coups and assassinations?

The fact is that I'm tired of my country's volatility. I'm tired of defending all messed up things our leaders do. And I'm dead tired of the looks I see on the faces of some people after they've read news of us messing up yet again. I hide my country's shortcomings like a father might stow away an illegal child, and yet the more I hide them, the more they seem to assert their presence.

But the fact is that I'm as bad as the rest of the Pakistani population, aren't I? I'm part of the clique of people that are all talk and no action - who love rhetoric but are too lazy to get off their asses. The truth is that nobody can blame it all on leaders - a country's leaders are only as good as its people, after all. This country's problems begin in the psyche of its people. Corruption always spreads from the inside out, whether it be a rotting carcass or a country in the process of decay. And I think symptoms of this are most visible to somebody who comes to this country from abroad - who has seen a different mindset and therefore has a more uninfluenced perspective.

One clear symptom is the Pakistani preclivity for outsmarting each other. While its prevalence differs among social strata, it's nonetheless engrained deep into the common man's psyche. The better man is always one who can outsmart the other, pull a fast one without the other even realizing what happened. That's what happens at the grassroot level, and if you think about it, that's pretty much what's happened with our leaders. If all the rumors of corruption and embezzling funds are even remotely true, our leaders have always put themselves before country, and they've done it in such a way that even to this day, they have a massive following. People came out in flocks to welcome Nawaz Sharif and Benazir, didn't they?

How much better can you get at outsmarting somebody?

Ishq

I'm sick of the type of conformity that results in helplessness. It kills original thought. Worse, it seizes you by the nape of your neck and drags you through thorns. Popular culture is a myth, a massive entity spun by the psyche's desire for change. So to hell with the chasm between romeo and juliet, heer and ranjha, sassi and pannoo - the chasm created centuries ago that has long since been morphed into a symbol of popular culture.

The biggest realization that I've been coming to terms with is that love is not ishq and ishq is not love. Ishq is not a blazing fire, a rising thread of mercury, nor a seminal spurt of emotion. For if it were, Ishq would be ephemeral, here one second and gone the next.

No, I think Ishq is slow, Ishq takes its time. Ishq has constancy, like land or baked sands...or maybe a song that never gets old. Ishq is massive. That mass makes it slow to start, but once it is moving, it is impossible to stop.

Love is a turbulent foam, enwrought with anxiety and ecstacy. Love is the ever-swinging pendulum, the screaming ride of extremes. Love is a high, its sorrow an addiction. But Ishq is not like that. Ishq is not like that at all. No sir, Ishq is no quick fix.

You can fall out of love. You cannot fall out of Ishq. It can be created, but not destroyed. And if it is destroyed, I don't think it ever existed to begin with.

And all this makes Ishq very rare. One place to find it would be in the hearts of mothers. But from what I've seen, lovers are usually just that - two people in love.

'Tis what I believe now anyway.

Remembrance

You want logic? I'll give you some - I'll step you through its snares and fend you from the snarling beasts of irrationality. Just lend me an ear.

Anxiety, depression, feeling gloomy, feeling old, feeling hollow - we've all been there, done that. In fact, it's been done to death. Sadness is one of the easiest states of mind to slip into and carries its own special kind of solace - an escape of sorts. Like a hug from somebody long estranged. In the end, mood is governed by state of mind. Similarly, how the world is perceived is also governed by state of mind. A joke you find har-de-har-har hilarious when you're happy is dismally irritating when you're pissed off.

Take any state of mind, and call it your baseline state. Your baseline state will be where you find yourself the most. A chirpy person will be pretty happy. A pessimist will have a more negative state of mind. I think most people I know have a negative baseline state. Myself included. Yep, I'm there, shoveling shit with the rest of them.

What makes a baseline state a baseline state? Why does the mind keep returning to it? A simply principle called negative feedback. A change in state is negated by the way you think, the way you've trained your thought habits. If you're a pessimist, even if you're happy for a brief amount of time, your paranoia or insistence in seeing things in a negative way is going to get you down again mighty quickly. Back to your baseline state you go, love. Negative feedback, right there.

So now coming to the crux of this post and tying everything together. How can one achieve a peaceful state of mind, where you are one with yourself and everything, where you aren't in a constant struggle with the demon called self...where, simply put, your heart is at peace? To do this, I think you need to know that there is a constant, immutable presence for which no problem of yours is too big or too small. A presence that is always there, no matter where you are. A presence that allows you to unburden your aching shoulders of all your troubles. A presence you can escape into, instead of trying to escape into sorrow, pessimism, love, self or the bottle.

When you were a kid, that presence was likely one of your parents. Things were just peachy then, weren't they? But grown-ups need something more. Maybe because of the realization that parents are, after all, as helpless as their children. As human anyway.

And there is something more, that ultimate force of negative feedback.

An Ayat in the Quran says, Verily in the Remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest.

It says it right there. And verily, every word of the Quran rings true.

I quoted that Ayat almost a year ago on this blog. I was reminded of it by a friend's poem. And I was appalled at how my remembrance keeps failing me over and over.

New Blog In Town

Presenting the blog of Aadil Farook...one of Usman's and my oldest friends.

http://aadilfar.blogspot.com/

Go on, visit his world - methinks you might not want to come back...

The Shanghai Chronicles

I don't have anything Shanghai-specific to write about today. Actually, I just wanna comment on one trait that's been perfected to an art among desis - story-spinning. Chorna, as it's called.

Tonight, I found my Indian chef friend again (from the last post). The first thing he said was, "Akram, what a cricket match last night! Congratulations on Pakistan winning!"

I thanked him, thinking that this guy really followed his cricket. "Afridi really came through for Pakistan, didn't he?"

He laughed and came clean. "Well, to be honest, I didn't actually watch the match. I only know what I read in the headlines this morning."

I laughed back. The truth was that I hadn't seen the match either - I only knew tidbits from a gmail conversation with friends from the morning. Afridi's name had popped up, so I'd decided to throw it out.

So at night, I was telling my mother all this. She started laughing and said, "Afridi kahaan se aa gaya hai? Kamaal kartay ho Hasnain. Younis ne match jitwaya tha!" I laughed back sheepishly, thinking that my chorna skills obviously couldn't face up to somebody who'd actually watched the match.

Well, it turns out she hadn't seen the game either - only overhead a conversation about it at lunch at some restaurant. A conversation at a neighboring table, no less.

This, my friends is classic chorna in action!

Nothin' Like a Good Meal...

I'm in Shanghai for a few days on a business trip. It's an amazing city - the new york of Asia, you could say. But for somebody who's on halal only, it's a pretty tough place to be in from a gourmet perspective.

As an illustration of this, I was discussing my food situation with a co-worker yesterday. He asked, "Can you eat beef or pork?" I shook my head. "Lamb?" Shook my head. "Chicken?" Shook the ol' noodle. "Eggs?" He asked, but he was smiling. I nodded happily, and he started laughing. "It seems your choices are a bit limited!"

So imagine my wonder when I walked into my hotel lobby, and by the entrance of the restaurant, saw what appeared to be an Indian wearing a chef's hat.

Just so I wasn't clear, he was a) Indian and b) wearing a chef's hat.

Well, that was it then. I literally ran up to this guy like a desert-blinded fool chasing an oasis. Felt around his face to make sure he was real. Felt his hat to make sure it really was a chef's hat and not some sick halloween costume. (And all this while he looked on patiently with a Colonel Sanders' smile).

He was real all right. And an awesome guy too. We chatted for a bit, shooting up the ol' desi breeze. He called me Wasim Akram.

And I had amazing Shrimp masala, dal makhani, vegetable curry, naan and rice for dinner.

Needless to say...BOOYA!

Weird Happenings

Last night, I fell asleep with the TV on, watching national geographic. My sleep was intensely deep, the type that's a surreal vat of blackness.

Until about the middle of the night, when I began having this awful nightmare that just went on and on.

I vaguely remember the details now, but do recall it was about a supernatural "presence" in my house. In one scene, one of my best friends in the dream (she was an african american girl, for some reason) was standing with me outside my front door. She told me my house was possessed after I'd been living there for months. I glanced into the window of the house, and actually saw a hazy shape moving in there, gliding slowly between rooms.

Anything that's mildly scary during the day is outrightly terrifying in the darkness of night. When I woke up, I was literally shivering.

...And I immediately discovered the cause of the whole thing.

National geographic was running a special on haunted houses.

As stewie would say...BLAST!

In the Name of Art...

By now, I'm sure everybody has heard of the cartoon drawn by one Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist. This cartoon depicted a very very insulting image of Islam's Prophet (SAW), and was published in a Swedish newspaper in mid-August. That makes the controversy a couple of months old, but I still keep seeing it crop up on CNN from time to time, so I decided it merits a bit of introspection.

I'm glad that, on the whole, Muslims have had a much more balanced reaction this time around, although there is still the matter of the fatwah issued by Iraq for the death Lars Vilks, as well as numerous threats by individuals on the life of the artist. I hope, to some extent, that Muslims have realized that violence does not solve anything. Not only does it fail to make a point (why the hell would the offending artist care about a McDonald's being burnt to the ground on the other side of the globe?) it's also plain wrong from an Islamic point of view.

Lars Vilks (and even the artist who drew the Danish cartoon) got this published in his home country. In accordance with Islam, the proper way to counter this would be to ask the Government of the country to take action against the offense, which several countries (including Pakistan) have done. If the Government does something about it, well and good. If it can't or won't, then that's it...this particular round is over. The bell's been rung. It's time to move on and think about what could be done so this doesn't happen again. Educating people about Islam might be a good start. Islam is a peace-loving religion. People still don't believe this - the other day, I saw Bill Maher commenting on how much mention there was of killing the infidel in the Quran. I bet he hasn't even read a page of the Prophet's (SAW) life.

But what you DON'T do is take the law in your own hands and think that murder and violence are going to solve everything. Even a five-year old can see that this will just fuel the fire and perpetuate the stereotype. The same principle would apply even if the controversy had happened in an Islamic country; the offender should be tried justly in a court of law, not slaughtered one fine night in his sleep.

Don't think I'm playing the Devil's advocate here though. Now that I've done with one aspect of the issue, let's tear apart the other one, shall we? In reaction to the publication of the cartoon, Lars Vilks said, "That's a way of expressing things. If you don't like it, don't look at it. And if you look at it, don't take it too seriously. No harm done, really." Of course! How the hell could anyone have been so dumb as to take offense, when the artist himself has provided the perfect solution! Just...don't...look...at...it! Turn the other way! After all, it's all about freedom of art, eh? The world's advanced by leaps and bounds anyway!

So tomorrow, if somebody draws a flagrant cartoon depicting Lars' mother as a seedy whore, I wonder what his reaction will be. After all, if he doesn't like it, he doesn't need to look at it, right? And if he is man enough to look at it, the last thing he should do is take offense, in his own opinion. In the end, there's "no harm done, really." Isn't that right?

But no, I don't think it's right. I don't think he'd turn the other way - he'd better not, if he has even an ounce of self-respect. Hell, I bet he'd drag the artist to court on slander and defamation charges. I bet he'd fume inside at the unnecessary indignity his loved one has been subjected to - indignity that doesn't contain even an ounce of truth. And I bet he'd win the case too.

I think that's exactly what should happen to Lars and all such people who offend huge masses of people in the name of art. Their rear ends should be dragged to court, and these cases should be legally realistic enough to be tried and won. What Lars has done is nothing short of defamation and slander.

Lars has claimed he's an "equal-opportunity" offender and has depicted Jesus as a pedophile before. Others also argue that such satire on Islam is justified because Christianity has been subject to it for ages now. I've never been able to understand this argument. By this train of logic, all the atrocities that African-Americans were subjected to prior to their liberation were "justified" because they'd been going on "for ages." Does that make any sense at all? How does one wrong justify another?

Freedom of art is a great thing - part of me is an artist, and I love our modern times for allowing it. But I guess our times are still not modern enough to recognize the borders of this freedom. After all, there's no clearly demarcated line, nor any checkposts with sentries standing guard. In the bigger picture, Lars Vilks is a nobody - just another artist who happened to get himself caught in crosshairs. The problem is way bigger than him. The problem is being able to identify and respect those borders.

After all, what fricking good is freedom of the artist if it winds up caging its audience?