Pak Tea House

We cheered as overweight underlings
cheerfully bulldozed our
friendly neighbourhood madrassa
into the ground, chanting risible slogans
in grammatically correct English
and flowery French, and even one that
Flash Rash coined in ecclesiastical Latin.

We jeered the terrified monkeys
who swarmed out of the
collapsing structure - gimlet-eyed mullahs
sporting foreshortened shalvars, scanning
the heavens for the saving grace
of a deus ex machina - and cockeyed,
delinquent chhokras in two-toned
rubber flip-flops, trailing a weeping,
one-armed nancy boy, whose
uncapped noggin reeked of
mustard oil even at a distance.

We cheered (more…)

This is a passionate and rather heartfelt piece from our young contributor Shaheryar Ali

Re-throne Iftikhar Chaudhry and hang Zardari, and sing all Faiz and Jalib on Geo. It will be the same. That’s the bitter truth…

“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary. Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent.” Frantz Fannon

The quotes from Frantz Fannon form the basis of my thoughts on the problem of libertarian politics in Pakistan. The problem that has been disguised in the fervor of middle class intelligentsia, civil society and the so called lawyer’s trade union “movement” to reinstate the judges who were “not called” to take oath under the PCO of General Pervez Musharaf.

The first casualty of this movement was “clarity”, quite understandably when middle and petty bourgeois classes and institutions of a post colonial state are the stalwarts of a “libertarian movement”. When I am writing down these lines the “count down” to the end of days is over in Pakistan. The serene voice of Iqbal Bano singing Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s epic revolutionary poem Hum dekhen ge is glorifying the “Judicial Movement.” The day promised by Faiz being the day the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of The Islamic Republic of Pakistan should and must be “re-throned” in his “Castle of Justice” in Islamabad.

This and this alone is the solution to all Pakistan’s problems. This and this alone was the goal of all libertarian politics of Pakistan, from Syed Sajjad Zaheer to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This and this alone was the meaning of all progressive discourse, from Manto to Faiz, from Jalib to Faraz. Any other view is treason, anyone suggesting an alternate view is a “sell-out.”

Pakistan Peoples Party and its evil leadership, its evil supporters have betrayed the revolution, the Messiah of liberation incarcerated for months in dungeons, the dungeon being official residence of the Chief Justice in Islamabad with his family. Mr Ten Per Cent spent 8 years in jail without conviction and bail, never saw his children growing up, enjoying a “married life”, half of which was spent in friendly imprisonment in the worst of Pakistan’s jails, where his back was broken and his tongue was cut!! (Bol keh lub aazad hein tere). Yea our Messiah of Liberation was manhandled during his long march from his palace to the court, the haircut was destroyed, the black coat martyred. And all in front of cameras.

Mr Aitzaz Ahsan, the Marxist lawyer, who charges six-figure fees and delivers justice to 80% of the people of Pakistan who earn less than 2 dollars a day, speaks, his voice crackling with passion over the fate of the children who were forced to live with their parents in their own house. Has anyone ever heard from him any names other than Balaj and Palwasha? Any names like Bilawal, Asifa, and Bakhtawar who grew up without a father, who were not allowed to see their father for years and years. Who were not allowed to live in their country. When they got their father, their mother was killed. Who killed their mother? Did anyone talk about any “countdown” to start a probe into murder of leader of people of Pakistan? Of course it’s the destiny of Asifa to live half her life without a father and the rest of her life without her mother. Destiny!!

The Glorious Judge:

A military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, imposes martial law, suspends the constitution and takes over. Army surrounds the Chief Justice House, arrests the Chief Justice. Our glorious Judge Iftikhar Ahmad takes oath of personal loyalty to General Musharraf accepting him as the “source of law”

The great Judge sits in 4 benches of the supreme court declaring : (more…)

Early in the morning with blurred looks,
The only clothes,the hardships and fate
In Sahara, where an ocean meets the desert
Sit three with wooden tablets and verses of Quran
Not much to lose, but enough to learn

As this ice melts when viewed from a distance
The only conversation is the old expression
Of wonder and resolve, as faces emerge
One day we will travel far,
From what we have learnt and seen
See you will not us but only the wall
The old protection, the only support

Travel far to this place, only in existence
What a pain this old desire to learn and to give
Far from our village as we make our way
From routines to remember to the needs of hunger
Work now resumes and different tools
The old skies and African deserts

Sit there these three children
With morning friendship and long references
In African sky and with verses of Quran!

Kashkin

By Ishtiaq Ahmed

In a debate article in the Dawn of April 30, 2008, Haider Nizamani seeks to dispel the widely held view that feudalism exists in Pakistan. He asserts that feudalism never existed in South Asia. To consider honour killings and exploitation of peasants by mighty landlords as indicative of feudalism he finds untenable because according to him, by 1999, 88 percent of cultivated land in Pakistan was in farm sizes below 12.5 acres. Just over half the total farms were less than five acres in size. “This would hardly be the hallmark of a feudal society,” he asserts.

This economistic argument is a legitimate one, but too narrow, mechanical and formalistic, because it presupposes that if the economic base changes cultural and ideological changes follow suit. In reality there is never a perfect fit between a mode of production and cultural and ideological forms, otherwise the thoroughly capitalised economies of the Middle East would have no place for tribal norms and behaviour patterns. Marx was acutely aware of the far more complex relationship between the economic base and the superstructure. He famously observed that Christian theology remained the reigning ideology much after classical feudalism had disintegrated and dissolved.

Classical feudalism emerged in Western Europe when the old city-based high cultures of the Greeks and the Romans disintegrated and the locus of social activity moved into local units headed by tiered nobility, which controlled their serfs through a range of economic and extra-economic coercions. The feudal vassals, in turn, rendered services to the superior lords, and that chain of services finally connected to the king, who was named as the “first among the lords.” He claimed a tribute or levy from the lesser nobles, who also provided him with soldiers.

The above description is, of course, an ideal one in the tradition of Max Weber. In reality no two feudalisms anywhere in Europe were the same, except in the essential sense of an agrarian economy providing much of the surplus, as well as the soldiers upon which the ruling classes built their leisured lifestyle.

Christian theology justified social hierarchy, and people knew their place in society – the rule was that the superiors were chosen by God and obeying them was a duty and obligation. (more…)

why couldn’t you have told me the night before
as we lay there sweating in our separate beds
me swearing undying allegiance
to machiavellian notions of honour
some tossing and turning
some sincere advice
some illicit ideas of noble intent
no less of a blessing for
black sheep who’ve always believed
in the sponsored redemption of servants of god
who may have been sinning idiotypecast savants
running wild on the kind of faraway isle
just recently pinpointed
by bed-wetting teenagers high
on broadband google earth ’n glue

minos - may 2008

Contribution by Isa Daudpota

The past 5 years have seen massive unsustainable ‘development’ in Islamabad. This has been spearheaded by its municipality, with the backing of the bureaucracy and military high-ups. No public input is sought or accepted. The character of the city has changed through ill-thought-out projects that have ruined the environment of the city and made it unmanageable.

Pakistan generally lacks the organizational and management skills to handle large cities and projects effectively, but one continues to see the proliferation of mega-projects up and down the country. From such adventures, various interest groups siphon off funds leaving the cities poorer for everyone, and more so for the majority who are financially poor.

The idea that “small is beautiful” is alien to city planners, top government functionaries and the military.

The video, from the Dawn News channel’s program “The Big Digit”, highlights some of the disasters specific to Islamabad but with relevance to most projects, old and new, in Pakistan and developing countries.

Watch the interview at:

if you were to clam up at that stage
i could remind you
of the rust and almond coloured ghagra that you wore
on the night of the good deed you did for me
and her
that i swore never to speak about
to anyone but you and my peek-a-boo partner
who’s waving to us as we speak
in thrall to all the pomp and ceremony
associated with
associated mind
with state occasions
and military shows of might
and right there in the heart of the city
laid bare
barren even
stands the statue of you or some
flighty aphrodite on a mission from god
wielding three-chord blusicology as a
way to weasel out of having to cough up for drinks at the booderbah
accustomed to being ribbed over buddhistic leanings
starvingly available for swimsuit layouts
on beaches where nudies can’t take anymore
of the lies and the greed and the
knee jerk deceit of everyone other
than my chachajan and her auntie G

minos - may 2008

Of what we are and how we see this world
Our lives and its portion, spent in to reflect
This old desire from years of its isolation
The words and its effect roam in its might
We all have stories from our granted lives
Of grandeur and of squalor, like days and nights
Of fiction and of poems, of prose and of rhymes
Sits there in the corner, my muse and its light
Of thousand years of travel in its flight!

Kashkin

by Tariq Ali found here

I never believed in God, not even between the ages of six and ten, when I was an agnostic. This unbelief was instinctive. I was sure there was nothing else out there but space. It could have been my lack of imagination. In the jasmine-scented summer nights, long before mosques were allowed to use loudspeakers, it was enough to savour the silence, look up at the exquisitely lit sky, count the shooting stars and fall asleep. The early morning call of the muezzin was a pleasant alarm-clock.

There were many advantages in being an unbeliever. Threatened with divine sanctions by family retainers, cousins or elderly relatives – ‘If you do that Allah will be angry’ or ‘If you don’t do this Allah will punish you’ – I was unmoved. Let him do his worst, I used to tell myself, but he never did, and that reinforced my belief in his non-existence.

My parents, too, were non-believers. So were most of their close friends. Religion played a tiny part in our Lahore household. In the second half of the last century, a large proportion of educated Muslims had embraced modernity. Old habits persisted, nonetheless: the would-be virtuous made their ablutions and sloped off to Friday prayers. Some fasted for a few days each year, usually just before the new moon marking the end of Ramadan. I doubt whether more than a quarter of the population in the cities fasted for a whole month. Café life continued unabated. Many claimed that they had fasted so as to take advantage of the free food doled out at the end of each fasting day by the mosques or the kitchens of the wealthy. In the countryside fewer still fasted, since outdoor work was difficult without sustenance, and especially without water when Ramadan fell during the summer months. Eid, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, was celebrated by everyone. (more…)

 by Khaled Ahmed

 Aap-Beeti/Paap-Beeti;
By Saqi Farooq;
Akademi Bazyaft Karachi 2008;
Pp176; Price Rs 300

Saqi’s gravitation to Habib Jalib was natural in a way too because he saw the anarchist in him where others saw a revolutionary, and the quarrels that took place were incidental to the way they related

You don’t know what kind of irreverent sinner you are up against in this book till I have told what he did in his earlier book titled Hajibhai Paniwala. This was also the main poem in the collection and Paniwala was not the shopkeeper who sold water but he was so called because there was water in his testicles. He sat squatting with his enormous waterlogged genitals in front of him covered with cloth like a table; in fact, he packed the spices on top of them.

What kind of animal is Saqi Farooqi? Reading his life of paap (sin) I am put in the mind of Henry Miller’s work. If he is a self-publicist showcasing his sins like Josh, then the difference between him and Josh is that he is a constantly self-deprecating picaro who insults because he doesn’t respect himself. In the process, he puts a two-pronged poker through Urdu’s tight sphincter and violently shakes up the contents of its clotted colon. The result is a lot of flatulence of platitudes through which Saqi walks with his nose tweaked in his fingers, followed by some very fresh explosion of funny expressions in the style of Perelman. (more…)

oh the dreams that i dreams
of one day dreaming sunday’s dreams
on fry day instead… break
the cycle so to speaking of
which do you know the witch
who went under the wire and
in between the howitzer and the
why it’s a (more…)

In a café, at the airport
In the corner
Sits there, Chillchinga
The young US soldier
With cigarettes and an empty look
Tired from those battles
Easily seen, the scars
Gained and given
From confrontations
In a distant land
The only desire now
To go home
To converse few words
In Spanish as he pays the price
For migration and adventure
In the distant time

Sit three in the corner
McMillan and Richardson
Spectacles on their tiny face
Turned away from scenes of horror
Of participation and of discussion
Away from those big monitors
News of Iraq and Afghanistan (more…)

by Khaled Ahmed writing in the weekly Friday Times

The lawyers are passionate, the retired judges are angry, and those who absent themselves from the country’s biggest display of righteous anger in history keep their mouths shut. The political parties are divided over how to interpret the phenomenon but are clearly grinding their separate political axes, looking for the right purchase on what the lawyers are up to. The anger of the wukla and the enthusiasm of the sahafi combined have not been able to create a consensus in parliament. And it is not a divided parliament, it is a house where everyone is everyone else’s partner in one thing or another.

Is the penny going to drop finally this week? At the time of writing nothing looked final and there were only two days to go for the deadline of April 30 when the National Assembly had to pass a resolution demanding restoration of the 60-odd judges fired on November 3, 2007. As the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) chief Mr Asif Ali Zardari rested in Dubai, the reports were that the two parties had agreed to restore the 60 judges and increase the strength of the Supreme Court bench to 27 from the old 17 to re-accommodate Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry & Co without getting rid of the post-November 3 ‘PCO judges’ that the lawyers have been boycotting. (more…)

Soniah Kamal

“Jane Austen was described by her contemporary, writer Mary Russell Mitford, as the “prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly ever”
rest here.

In Jane’s case the bimbo has brains. Unless the brothers were writing the novels and did not want to be known as the authors of husband hunting drawing room dramas Miss Austen Regrets is a film based on the letters Jane wrote to her sister and niece. The film takes us through the romantic ups and downs of Jane’s life until her death. I was braced for a corny movie but ended up enjoying it a lot–a smart and plausible script with excellent acting. I especially liked the scenes between Jane and her mother where the mother berates Jane for ruining them by not marrying and Jane reacts as only a caring yet hard headed daughter will: a stoic silence laced with guilt. Of course we don’t know if these scenes really occurred but chances are something akin to them must have for which mother won’t mutter away if her aging daughter lets a good prospect go even today not to mention especially in that day and age. I wish there had been more scenes between mother and daughter and who knows maybe someone will write a novel or pen script about the two! I wonder, would Austen be blogging today? What would her blog look like, or her facebook and my space page– pink and grey, yellow and white, would it have stars on it or stripes, or a cat, many cats or a dog, or black boots and henna, and which song would she download first? Would we even like Jane if she was flitting around today as the prettiest silliest most affected butterfly ever: remind you of anyone? Would Austen be writing what she wrote then now or would it be baby versus career and how to juggle the two if she couldn’t afford oodles of domestic help? Certainly if she was born in Pakistan she’d still be writing about women for whom marriage is the only career expected of them… though if Jane was Pakistani you can bet her mother would have made sure she married sooner or later because the typical Pakistani mother (imagine Mrs. Bennet on acid) is an expert at guilt tripping her daughters into getting married…

A brilliant photo from the Daily Times, Pakistan. A related story by DAWN’s Amir Wasim below:

Top leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party and Pakistan Muslim League-N ended their marathon talks in Dubai on Thursday with an announcement that they had agreed to reinstate the deposed judges through a parliamentary resolution in accordance with the Murree Declaration.

(more…)

BOOK REVIEW: A non-futile life in bureaucracy by Khaled Ahmed

 Fard-e-Hayat;
By AK Khalid;
Allied Press Lahore 2006;

He went on to do his MA in History and Persian, and collected those tough degrees in Persian and Arabic known as Adeeb Fazil, Munshi Fazil and Maulvi Fazil. A cowherd from Gujrat had come to Lahore with nothing in his pocket and had walked away with the city’s best degrees

Abdul Karim Khalid is a tall dapper man in his eighties who became famous abroad…pointedly, not in Pakistan…for writing the best critical book on the wrong imposition of ushr in Pakistan: The Agrarian History of Pakistan. He did that as a result of the expertise accumulated by him as member Punjab Revenue Board for ten years at the end of a hardworking career in the Punjab Civil Service. The autobiography is a proof of what you can squeeze out of an otherwise dull life if you have the memory of a genius.
(more…)

…never mind the flight
uptight
unendingly unbending
was the miserable bender
(never-ender)
always alive to the possibilities
open to men of hope and good will
but will not the flowers
will not the blossoming of
autumn’s auto-immune deficiencies
compensate for deadpan expressions
on the faces of mother figures
covertly ovulating as is nature’s
way of having its way
the way i almost had mine the other day

minos - april 2008

Khalid Hasan comments on the report by Washington Times citing a US election observer who was surprised by PPP co-chairman’s ‘almost total lack of bitterness’WASHINGTON: Asif Ali Zardari, according to an article published in the Washington Times on Monday, deserves much of the credit for not letting Pakistan descend into corruption and mismanagement following elections.

Thomas Houlahan, a Pakistan election observer with the Centre for Media and Democracy, writes that when he met Zardari shortly after the election and he was struck by a number of things, the most obvious and surprising of which was his “almost total lack of bitterness” considering that he had spent 11 years in prison on charges that ultimately were dropped. “A desire to seek retribution against the people who put or kept him there would have been understandable. ‘There are things that have to be done for Pakistan that need to be attended to immediately,’ Zardari said, adding, ‘I don’t have time for it’.” (more…)

Raza Rumi

Is it the case that finally the centuries old steelframe is getting irrelevant in the fast changing urban Pakistan. In a country of 170 million, there were not enough competent and interested candidates to fill up the vacancies for the competitive examination. If on one hand, this trend betrays the decline of institutions, on the other it spells doom for the future of Pakistan’s governance. There can be no compromise on a capable civil service to manage and implement policies. Singapore and many other countries attract the best and here we are, with massive unemployment, not finding enough people to fill the vacancies. Yes the private sector is more attractive and perhaps should be but what about state’s regulatory and redistributive functions?

CSS Exam fails to fill 100 vacancies - Daily News, 4/25/08
ISLAMABAD: The country’s Civil Services structure is facing an unprecedented downfall with educated youth losing interest in civil bureaucracy as the latest Central Superior Services (CSS) competition could not even produce the number of successful candidates against the available posts. Against the total 290 available posts, the number of successful candidates in the 2007 CSS competition was merely 190, leaving almost 100 vacancies unoccupied till fresh induction is made through the next CSS competition.

(more…)

Posted by Raza Rumi

An anonymous contributor at the Friday Times talks about how the murder of a family member raised painful questions about Pakistani society

When an incident occurs which should never have taken place – an anomaly, a tragedy – the first question that springs to mind is, who is to blame? It has been two years since my uncle’s body was found, decaying in his own blood, two years since he was murdered in his house, in his own sanctuary. I have had enough time to distance myself from the tragedy and view the events in a more rational way. But is there anyway to rationalise the murder of an innocent man, whose only crime was that he could not afford to live anywhere but in a small apartment in an unsafe area of Karachi?

As I sit safely in America and think about his murder, I am confronted with the question of my own identity. Who is a Karachiite? I strive to answer this question. To me, a Karachiite is a jaded individual, who invariably knows someone who has been the victim of a crime or is a helpless victim of fear and loathing himself. Yet tragedy and fear never strike hard enough until they hit home, and that is when you realise how real crime is. It’s not just some cool scene from a pyscho thriller flick. (more…)

By Ayesha Siddiqa adding to the debate on the changing Pakistan…

IN a recent article titled ‘Another kind of change’ Akbar Zaidi tried to make us believe in changes occurring in Pakistan without properly contextualising them. According to the writer, Pakistan is no longer feudal, traditional and rural nor is its economy agrarian. Although it is not stated in this fashion, the underlying tone of the article is that the country has moved to become a more modern society. Let us see if the arguments hold.

First, do the changes in the land tenure system and the separation between labour and capital, which is how traditionally feudalism is defined, make Pakistan non-feudal? Besides the economic dimension, there is the socio-political dimension as well. The structures of power remain the same. (more…)

Once before you knocked at my door,
while i stood outside in the pouring rain,
like i am today. Only
this time you don’t see me.
Perhaps cos the clouds are darker,
or your parasol more enchanting,
or my sorry state less pitiful.

Perhaps the smile on my face is
really actually yours at the thought
of losing me to Mother Earth, though
i’m not too sure what the old biddy
would have to say, what with
her trips to fertility clinics
proving unproductive thus far.

minos - april 2008

Come they all to see this land
Forgetful and distant, from its past
The long walks and adventure
In search for peace and comfort
Lend me your ears my friend
Let me recite words of freedom,
In ways different than yours,
From a distant land
As I write in its abate
Memoirs of mistakes!

Kashkin