Not Quite Lord's

Originally published in The Friday Times, February 2006, posted here with some rewrites and updates.

I am posting this today, on the morning of Pakistan's first Super 8 game of this year's edition of the 20/20 World Championships. This could very easily turn into a rant about the futility of having an annual world championship. It could also very easily turn into a lament of the fact that no international cricket has been played at the National Stadium Karachi in years, an exile that is not likely to end any time soon. 

I will do neither. instead, let this piece stand for what it was intended: a celebration of the spirit of the Pakistani; the ability to extract joy from the most difficult situation, the ability to be intractable and accommodating in the same breath, of rejoicing in the smallest victories, of letting passion always prevail over pragmatism and, more than anything else, being the eternal optimist, even when outwardly exhibiting pessimism of the worst order. 

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The crowds are surging, the Pepsi and pizza are flowing freely. The noise levels are at a crescendo as empty PET bottles of soft drinks are used as noisemakers, and every success for the home team is followed by a blast of music from the PA system that is accompanied by about 15,000 spectators singing along to the chorus. 

You would be forgiven for thinking that the scene is being set for the latest experiment in Twenty-Twenty cricket in Pakistan, but you will be sorely mistaken. The players are clad in white, and the encounter is set to last a maximum of 450 overs, not 40. 

This is test match cricket, Karachi style. 

If the headquarters of the Marylebone Cricket Club is the home of cricket, then this is the equivalent of the nightclub with scantily clad dancers where cricket would come to let its hair down. Figuratively speaking, of course. Not a stiff upper lip in the house and, once the initial euphoria of being at the venue had worn off, no polite applause for the successes of the opponents either. No prawn sandwiches in evidence (we prefer our greasy samosas), and keep slices of lemon away from our doodh patti, if you please. 

In Karachi, our test cricket heroes are made of different stuff too. The local favourite right now is Shahid Afridi, who is nobody’s idea of a typical test batsman. It is not that the crowd is not knowledgeable about the game, it is just that they have a preference for pyrotechnics and they are not afraid to show it. These fans will appreciate an Atherton-like attritional innings based on spending 15 hours at the crease to save a game, but we are a belligerent lot, and would much prefer a 15 over flaying of the opposition that sets the rules of engagement for the rest of the game. 

A boundary hit by the home team is not welcomed by grudging applause and a murmur of ‘Good shot, old chap’ here. Instead, like one, the crowd rises to its feet and proceeds to shout itself hoarse. The intensity of the cheering does not vary one iota either. Whether it is the first boundary of the day after losing 3 wickets in the opening over, or the runs that bring up a second innings 500 days later, the attitude of the crowd remains constant. 

And what a crowd, too. A far cry from the days when about 15 people saw Pakistan lose to England in the twilight in 2000/1. Several stands were full to capacity and, despite the tedium of the matches that had preceded it and the loss of 6 home wickets in the first session of the first day, continued to build throughout the day. 

It would be difficult to get a better cross section of Karachi society anywhere than there was in the National Stadium on that Sunday. There were the families, convinced by the children to spend their one day off in the week at the cricket, or having convinced their spouses that this is what the children wished, in any case. Then there were the students from all different parts of town, with painted faces and dressed in their Sunday best, hoping to have a few seconds of fame courtesy of imaginatively spelt placards urging television commentators to get haircuts. Best of all, though, was the older brigade, who had been present in the ground in the 1980s when Imran was steaming in from the University Road End at the peak of his powers. All these had been turned off coming to the stadia in Pakistan due to the lack of facilities for fans in the 1990s, and were now gleefully returning to the fold. 

Karachi crowds had also been alienated by the oppressive security that had accompanied international cricket in the city for years. And I for one was shocked and amazed at the ease with which we were allowed to the stands. No searching, no pushing and shoving, no parking cars half a mile from the actual stadium entrance. Not only was the security at the National Stadium much less intrusive than that which I faced at the England test match in Multan but, hand on heart, I have to say that I was subjected to more stringent security arrangements at Lords in the summer of 2001 when Pakistan last toured England. Believe don’t believe, as my Goan schoolmates would have said. 

Such was the laissez faire attitude of the local constabulary, that vendors of all kinds of goodies, from biscuits to soft drinks by way of ice cream and chocolate, were free to roam the stands to flog their wares at inflated prices to the assembled populace. And all it took to encourage a recalcitrant spectator who refused to sit down and thereby stop blocking your view was a few shouts of ‘oye boss!’ or a chana or three chucked good-naturedly in their general direction. 

At the close of day’s play we left the stadium with our ears ringing to the sound of plastic bottles used as percussion, a (really quite poor) song in our hearts and a spring in our step. The security personnel continued to be courteous and the parking lot emptied in an orderly manner. Miracle was rapidly following miracle, and top level cricket had returned to the city with a bang. Some will say I am a fool for choosing cricket over the Bryan Adams concert that took place in the city the same day, but I have no regrets. 

So when the summer rolls round again, and it is a Saturday evening in St. John’s Wood, and Freddie is steaming in from the Pavilion End to take advantage of the legendary slope and Old Father Time is looking down on Inzi facing him at the other end, the bat in his massive hands looking like a slightly larger than normal toothpick, you can be sure of two things: 

One is that the majority of the crowd will be genteelly getting into their first rendition of ‘Swing low, Sweet Chariot’ of the day, and the other is that, somewhere in the world, a small group of people will be jumping around, shouting at the television screen and singing, unfathomably to anyone who had not been there, “Eh oh, eh oh, eh oh aah, alley alley alley oh!” The Karachi Test Cricket experience is one that is sure to stay with you for a long time to come.

All’s Frere in Love and War

On a Monday morning earlier this year, the United States of America struck a major blow in the battle for equal rights among all men (and women). However, contrary to popular spin doctory, said blow was not struck through the storming of a compound in Abbotabad, and subsequent killing of a certain Mr. Bin Laden (or capture of his cryogenically frozen body, if certain conspiracy bloggers are to be believed). Instead, it was a true stealth action, and took place in the coastal city of Karachi, in two stages. 

I was driving down the Abdullah Haroon Road a few Sundays ago, and saw an amazing sight. A family was having a picnic on the grounds of the Frere Hall, complete with bedsheet, thermos of tea, and plastic bag of fruit. A child was doing laps of the bedsheet while his parents sat discussing whatever it is that parents of toddlers discuss when said toddler doesn’t need their immediate attention; probably the toddler (it’s sad how one dimensional most parents’ conversations are). I was gobsmacked, and nearly dropped my bag of chips, mobile phone, Coke and iPod. Good thing I had a pinky finger on the wheel, or the War on Terror would have claimed another to its list of victims in the shape of a lamppost. 

To those readers not familiar with Karachi and its various vagaries, this entire scene may not sound all that remarkable; after all, people hold impromptu picnics everywhere, and Karachi is no exception. I have myself seen dastarkhwan’s laid in locations as diverse as the grounds of the Karachi Zoo, the central reservation on Khayaban-e-Ittehad, and even the westbound carriageway of the Lyari Expressway and the General Ward aisle at Jinnah Hospital. It seems that as a city we are liable to break out the biryani ka pateela at the merest sign of greenery or a cool breeze. 

The remarkable fact, then, is not the act of the picnic, but the location. For years, since people decided that blowing up fellow citizens in the general vicinity of the consulate of what they consider to be the Imperialist Oppressor was a good way of spending their Monday morning, the grounds of the Frere Hall had been off limits to all except groundskeepers, security ehelkaars and sharpshooters. 

Long gone are the queues of US visa hopefuls that snaked around the said consultate, around the then Holiday Inn Hotel, across the road trampling over the verdant lawns that is now the Japanese Consulate and into Frere Park. The respect of orderliness and general discipline then on show by Pakistanis vying to shun their country for more disciplined and law-abiding pastures has always been an interesting study in the economic concept of incentives, and a stark contrast to their base state of fist-fights over jalebis at iftar food stalls and the jump-as-many-traffic-lights-as-you-can contests at Khayaban-e-Shamsheer. 

In a city where green space per capita is already in immensely short supply, especially for those who cannot afford the price of entrance into any of the exclusive “members only” green spaces dotted around, any such space which suddenly becomes inaccessible is a blow the magnitude of which cannot accurately be measured. That, coupled with the fact that for years the Frere Hall Sunday book market had been a happy hunting ground for that notoriously shrinking population, the person to whom reading is more than surfing the net for juicy Veena Malik / Rehman Malik tidbits, meant that the lack of access to this great Gothic edifice (apparently built by the same chap who also did the Merewether Tower) had rankled amongst a significant part of the population. However, with time, this too became the norm, and people adjusted to yet another infringement. Insidious, isn’t it? 

So why the change of heart? The fact of the matter was that the Uncle had moved house, meaning the security levels of this part of the world could be brought down a notch or two (one guesses that Japanese consular lives are a few billion yens cheaper than comparable US citizenry). As a result, a great blow was cast for eaters of aaloo qeema on picnic bedsheets all over the world, and another cut-price dating venue added back to the list of possibilities – these were innocent times, remember, before the scourge of Maya Khan was unleashed upon the green spaces of this fair city, and couples were free to walk, talk, and even (Shock! Horror!) hold hands in public spaces without fear of a flock of camera-carrying vigilantes descending upon them. 

This, in itself, though, is not the entire extent of the blow that was struck by the You Ess of Eh. Their new location, the exact contents and facilities wherein were a cause of great speculation in the early days (They have their own branch of Aghas! There is a cinema in there! A discotheque! A Starbucks! A Disneyworld!), is bang on the Mai Kolachi bypass. “So what?” I hear you say. At least it is no longer next door to KGS and the kiddies of the influential are not threatened by their manhoos saaya. Not to mention we can now drive to and from Sind Club in relative peace. 

All of this is true; however, there is on not-so-insignificant fact which needs to be considered here. A large part of the Karachi workforce, and almost all of those who work in the Financial Services industry, commute daily to and from the I.I. Chundrigar Road area, and large parts of the business community to and from SITE and Boulton Market areas. If you live on “this” side of the bridge, Mai Kolachi is the main route to get to and from work. For those on “that” side of the bridge, the equivalent route is a mix of Shahrah-e-Faisal, M.A. Jinnah Road, and now the Lyari Expressway. 

In the olden days, almost all anti-USA protests used to cluster around the Numaish – Tibet Center – Regal areas (and aspire to be hosted by the venerable Nishtar Park one day). This would result in traffic chaos all along the latter routes, with commuters being routinely stuck for 3-4 hours at a time, running rapidly out of both patience and CNG. Now, however, the tables have been well and truly turned. One side of the carriageway been truncated by over a lane thanks to blast protection barriers the likes of which have not been seen before, slowing down traffic on the homebound commute on a permanent basis. 

Not only that, the daily commute is now a permanent surprise. You never know which morning one side of the carriageway will be closed for no apparent reason, putting you in a tailback with nothing but inane radio presenters for company. And Fridays have become a complete lottery. All may be milk and honey in the morning, and chaos may ensue at lunchtime, or in the early evening. Many an executive has been held up for an hour or more on their way back from a Godless lunch, thanks to a sudden and catastrophic road closure just this side of Boat Basin. Verily, the shoe doth be on the other foot. Some have even been forced in to a detour that takes them through the mean streets of Shireen Jinnah Colony, a journey many of the ivory tower brigade are not quite prepared for. 

And there it is, the circle is complete. In one fell swoop, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Braves set free a major recreational center for the middle classes, made enormous strides in promoting reading among one of the world’s largest youth population, and also corrected the imbalance between commute times of those who live in Gulshan-e-Iqbal and those who live in Gulshan-e-Faisal. You can’t tell me all this was not meticulously planned and are just innocent by-products of a powerful nation selfishly annexing the best piece of land available to further its internal security agenda… 

The road to Freedom can take many an unexpected turn. In the case of Karachi, it was a right turn from MT Khan Road.

A truncated version of the same (edited for length) was published in Dawn in September 2012. The link to the published version:

http://dawn.com/2012/09/23/commuting-alls-frere-in-love-and-war/

The Week That Was, May 2007

In light of all that is unrolling across the nation today, I thought it might be appropriate to repost something that I wrote back in 2006, following on from three days of rioting after firing at a political rally. 

So why this piece, then? I guess it is to a large extent a damning indictment of myself and all other of the "comfortable classes", who are nicely bundled up in front of their computers, tablets and televisions right now, bemoaning the lack of cellular signals, thanking the Lord for BBM and Whatsapp and wondering whether Chairman Mao will be delivering tonight. 

Shame on us all, just as much as there is shame on the idiots who tried to set fire to the Peshawar Chamber of Commerce building. We will continue to live our insignificant little lives as idiots burn this nation to the ground. And all this while, the one being heralded as the Messiah of the Day addresses a political rally flanked by flags of various right wing Islamist parties. 

People keep saying that the life of the Prophet is an example for all of us on how to lead our lives. Well, as far as I am aware, he did not react with violence to offences being committed about his person while he was alive. neither should we. But react we must, for if we don't then it is inevitable that Karachi will turn into another Mogadishu. And we will adjust to that too.

Adjust. How I hate that word. 

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Talk about being out of touch with the man on the street.

The whole city was burning and here I was, catching up on my beauty sleep – at least I was not playing the fiddle, or whatever else Nero was alleged to have been up to, that misunderstood genius.

I have to admit though, that in theory I am extremely well-placed to comment on the latest head-rearing of violence in this fairly fair city, live as I do about 500 yards from the offices of a television channel that was besieged by a baying mob in all their gun-wielding, tyre-burning fury. But I have to admit that as I watched the drama unfold literally down the road from my apartment, I felt a strange disconnect; it was as if the pictures on television had nothing to do with the real world.

I have as much of a political conscience as the next guy, provided that the next guy has less political conscience than a newt. Actually, that my not necessarily be true. I don’t know how politically aware newts are. I do, however, have my own opinions, and they may not necessarily be based on what the talking heads on the many news channels, or the editors of the literary-minded publications have to say. I have certainly been living in this city for enough time to know exactly what event is going to spark what kind of backlash and what spin the various parties involved will put on the events.

So in one way I was not at all surprised at the events of this Saturday past. If anything, I was relieved that the events were not a lot uglier than they did get, and that the worst case scenario, of pitched battles along ethnic, not political, lines that could easily have taken place given the alarming amount of munitions floating around the city did not materialize to the extent that they could have. Although in time my worst fears do appear to be getting more and more likely; something I am praying subsides as quickly as possible.

And I do take strong exception to suggestions from some quarters that bemoan the inability of the residents of this city, or nation, as the case may be, to protest peacefully. I was in England when the anti-globalisation protests there got extremely ugly, and most of us remember the scenes from Seattle a few years ago. Not to mention the annual free-for-all that is the marching season in Northern Ireland. Although we do have a long way to go in terms of allowing people the right to protest, whatever their opinion, we must remember that outbreaks of violence at such occasions are not a problem limited to Pakistan.

And it must be said that some of the reporting on view at the various channels was pretty farcical. A case in point: a correspondent on one of the channels was reporting from the site of a recently-concluded gun battle near a bridge, and all that the anchor seemed interested in was whether the said correspondent was on top of the bridge, or underneath it! And on another channel, a high-ranking government official was dragged over hot coals – not for the content of his report to the press, but for the fact that a large portion of it was in English! I can only assume that either his report had nothing which could be held open to criticism, or that the correspondent found himself unable to decipher his heathen code. Yet another anchor referred to the 9mm handguns and Soviet vintage AK-47s as “the latest weaponry”; I guess he has not really kept up with the crime statistics of the city since about 1990, or maybe this says more about the Karachi mindset – we have been through a lot in the bad old days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the sight of a ‘TT’ does not even shock one when someone in the motorcycle next to you at a traffic signal is carrying one casually in his hand much like a mobile phone (this really happened to me a couple of weeks ago).

It is amazing though how the residents of this city manage to find silver linings in the unlikeliest places. One of the ways in which this manifested itself was that many people I have met remarked that, due to the trouble causing many offices and factories to remain closed, there was enough electricity for residential consumers to get by. Hence, in this city that it seems faces a perpetual electricity shortage, there was a spell of 72 hours in which most parts of town faced zero load shedding. A case of being thankful for small mercies?

A more likely explanation, though, is that the KESC staff responsible for switching off the power to various parts of the city could not make it in to work, to operate the said controls. The picture in my mind is a mixture of a console akin to that operated by Homer Simpson at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, and an elaborate command and control measures, complete with a briefcase of localities and outage times and timings, referred to by insiders as the ‘electrical football’.

The rumor mills, too, have been working overtime this past week. If the fruit seller is to be believed, the military is about to roll into town to take over proceedings. However, the same fruit seller did tell me on the best authority the day before that the bridge I drove across to work this morning had been blown up by miscreants, so I am not sure if his source, the vegetable seller, is all that reliable.

Maybe it is true that watching fictional violent images on television makes one immune to the real thing when broadcast on the same media, or maybe it is that things in this city have been a lot worse in the dark days of the 1980s/1990s. Either way, my abiding memory from this past inglorious week was not a scene of murder or mayhem, but this: on Friday night, at a local dessert joint that is normally the haunt of teens which too much time and money on their hands, there was barely enough room to stand as families packed in to take advantage of the impromptu extended weekend to grab a scoop of late night ice cream.

Perhaps the residents of this former city of lights, now a city of electricity shortages, are just increasingly fatalistic. Perhaps they grab any slice of pleasure where they can. Or, more worryingly, perhaps the gap between the two sides of the bridge is so great that events on the wrong side of the tracks do not even register on the radar of the blessed.

Originally published in The Friday Times, June 2007

Peroxide Nation

There is a saying, that one learns something new every day. My something new learnt for today is that this saying is true. 

My something new learnt for yesterday, though, was not so much a new learning as an epiphany. There are, in all probability, more blondes in the city of Karachi alone than there are in the whole of Sweden, and I have to thank my friend Silas the Albino Monk once again for putting so succinctly in words the thoughts that were on the tip of my head. 

This realisation came to me in a sudden flash of, what else, blonde. In this case, the flash came from the hair of a mother and daughter pair who were behind me in the cramped aisles of a local supermarket. Thanks to their overzealousness to reach the Slim Fast shelves, the daughter did her best to hack me off at the ankles, using her shopping trolley as battering ram. There is a time and a place to be run over by a blonde bombshell, unexploded or otherwise, and it is normally a desert island with a notable absence of things such as irate mothers with too little sugar in their systems; unfortunately, the main aisle of a crowded supermarket did not qualify for these, or any other less printable reasons. 

As I turned round to issue a mute protest at this, what I consider to be the greatest discourtesy that one shopper can do to another (except perhaps reaching over someone’s shoulder to grab that last bottle of peroxide blond hair dye from the shelf), I was literally frozen in my spot at what I saw, to the considerable chagrin of the diet-conscious duo; for what I saw was a sea of gold. I believe the industry term for this is ‘streaking’, which if you have witnessed cricket at Lords on a sunny Sunday afternoon, has a completely different, alcohol fuelled connotation. There were at least a dozen women in the aisle that goes from one end of the supermarket to the other, and all but one of them had some variant of flax in their locks. 

Flax! Thought I. It was like that (really quite average) movie Children of the Corn, with a town full of creepy blonde children with telekinetic powers that I saw in the Summer of ’96 just because there was a crackdown on pirated movies on my local video wallah and every release of Pulse Global got rented by default. And throughout my day, open as I now was to this new phenomenon, I saw they were indeed everywhere. From overzealous blonde streaks to full-blown Golden Sunrise and everything in between, it seems that our women are taking to the bottle en masse. 

I wonder what this growing trend can be attributed to. Not being of the female persuasion, I cannot claim any insights into a woman’s mind beyond those that one gets via osmosis through living in a house full of women all his life. I would like to think that I am neither a misogynist nor a chauvinist, but I do fear that some of what is to follow may result in the ashes of certain items of intimate apparel being delivered to my door. For I feel that this trend can be attributed to one of three things: frugality, insecurity or sheep-walkery. 

Frugality could be a reason, for grey shows up less when hair is of a lighter hue, thus entailing less frequent visits to the “beauty pall-er” – and pall-ers they are indeed, for their work is frequently quite ap-pall-ing. Insecurity with ones’ self image and the desire to follow an ideal of beauty that stems from the West is, of course, not something that is restricted to our nation, for the same is true most famously in Japan. The possible linkage between many Pakistani blondes being of “a certain age” and the quality of Scandinavian cinema intended for “mature” audiences in the era when their now-menfolk were in their adolescent years is not really a discussion for this forum. 

However, I feel that the most likely reason for this growing trend is the bhhed chaal mentality that a large part of all society, not just ours, has been cursed with. In the first instance, the women most likely to choose a lighter hue for their hair would be the ones who spend a significant part of their time in the West, the better to blend in. These ladies are the most likely to be the opinion leaders in the highest echelons of our society, and their preferences and trends would then filter through to the rest of the population. Their men also spend a lot of quality time in the west, so this could be a subconscious effort to keep the men on the straight and narrow but still give them a pale shade of a forbidden fruit. 

Whatever the reason, this tendency does appear to be spreading. Colouring of hair for reasons other than to stem the flow of time was, a few years ago, considered the preserve of the affluent ladies that lunch. No longer, though. Any salon worth its salt now has, I am reliably informed, a dedicated staff who deals with turning their clients’ coifs a lighter shade of pale. And it would take just one quick stroll round Gulf Shopping Mall to confirm that the recipients of these image transplants are getting younger. 

Of course, that is neither here nor there, for is it not said (often by the folically challenged) that one should never trust or do business with anyone who changes hair colour to hide their age; for if the person can lie to themselves, then they can do the same to you. 

In closing, I would request my female readers two things: firstly, please don’t send me any hate mail; my credit card bills are traumatising enough as it is. And secondly, before you reach for the bottle, consider the damage that you are doing to your roots, and I don’t just mean your follicles.

Originally published in Dawn, April 2008. The link to the edited article, as published, is below:

http://archives.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/080420/dmag6.htm 

…And not a drop to drink

If climate change is a sign of the impending Apocalypse, then it may be a good idea to give up the day job and take up residence at a convenient shrine, seeking absolution and enlightenment (but no longer in moderation) or, failing that, some good music and passable narcotics, and here is why. This summer monsoon has hit the City of Intermittent Lights well in the month of September fashionably late, much like a minor celebrity. This coupled with the fact that the Gulmohar was still flowering well into August are clear signs that all those B list Hollywood movies where the flipping of the magnetic poles / stopping of the flow of the core of the earth / cessation of the North Atlantic Current causes all manner of special effects are about to come true. 

It is a strange sight in this town to see people waiting for their morning bus wearing leather jackets that are so well endowed with tassels and zippers that they would put any Hell’s Angel to shame. And with the chill being precipitated by precipitation, the city’s traffic police take the opportunity to break out of the tedium of their normal uniforms, and sport trendy white rain slickers instead, with the kind of detailing on the sleeves that is seen either in Gaultier Couture shows or on dolls’ clothes. 

Here comes the hotstepper

And ‘tis a time for the policemen to be even busier than usual, for it takes the merest downpour to reduce city traffic to a post-apocalyptic state of quasi-anarchy not seen since the days of the Mad Max movies; indeed one would not be surprised to see a likeness of Mel Gibson adorning a city minibus any time soon, bearing down on the unrighteous with an expression of holy (and anti-Semite) malevolence. And even his credentials as a lethal weapon would be tested to the full, having to travel from Tower to Gulberg on the top of a bus, having been relieved of his cell phone and wallet somewhere on the way on the back of an equally lethal weapon put to his well-coiffured head. 

Even a couple of centimetres of water provide enough fodder for the population of this town to seek entertainment. Normally, this starts with many of the side streets of the city’s business district turning into sporting venues, where local children could participate in prestigious events such as the All New-Challi Short Course Swimming Championships and the Guru Mandir Steeple Chase. My perennial favourite, however, remains, the Motorbike Dressage event, where, in a supreme exhibition of man and machine as one, the protagonists assumes a variety of callisthenics-inspired postures atop his noble Chinese-engineered steed in order to avoid the spray from the soiled road soiling his attire. 

National Aquatics Center, eat your heart out

However, the hardy perennial Sidewalk Spectator does not seem to be deterred as easily, as could be seen by the number of people who spent a large part of their Monday peering over the edge into the city’s first, and most infamous, underpass. Not that there was much to see; the drainage problems that had led to it being dubbed the city’s newest municipal baths appear to have been alleviated. 

This being the peak of wedding season, the rains did manage to put a damper on proceedings for some, while those who had managed to book an indoor venue patted themselves on the back for their amazing foresight. For the terminally antisocial such as myself, this provided the ideal opportunity to beg off such engagements, citing the inclement weather as an excuse. Legend would have you believe that if you eat directly out of the pan, it will rain on your wedding day, especially if you scrape the bottom. I wonder how many grandmothers spent these past few days chastising their grandchildren with endless ‘I told you so’s’. 

It is interesting that we greet newly-married colleagues much as we would newly bereaved ones, with a half-hug and a forced rictus of a smile that seems to say that we do not wish to intrude upon their private grief(!) any more than we have to. The words spoken at such times are also as stereotypical, and have probably been unchanged for as many centuries. It is quite entertaining, I have to say, to be at the periphery of a wedding reception and watch the couple and those greeting them alike to fumble through platitudes, purses and pockets while they exchange good wishes and envelopes, it never being clear which of the two is the more welcome. 

I wonder sometimes if the stereotypical exchanges between people on such occasions are due more to their own preconceived notions than social norms. At a wedding I attended some years ago, the exchanges between his (Caucasian) bride and the wedding guests were probably the equivalent of a couple of undergraduate level courses in psychology and sociology, not to mention a study in how different generations interact. The oldest generation would speak to the American bride in Punjabi, and be completely satisfied with nods and smiles in return. The next generation down would speak to her slowly and loudly, as if making a transatlantic call on a bad telephone line. One generation further down, the conversation would begin in English and, thanks to her knowing a few Urdu words like ‘yes, no, and thank you’, would turn into a bit of a competition to explore the depths of her linguistic knowledge, while the youngest of the ‘grown-up’ generation stood by, their faces brimming with embarrassment at what their elders were making them live through. Pretty much a masterclass in what was once called the ‘generation gap’. 

Thankfully the wedding was not rained off, which is more can normally be said for the first working day after the downpours. After all, enjoying the rain with a plate of pakoras and a cup of steaming tea is one of those little pleasures in life that everyone can enjoy; for that time you don’t need to be worrying about whether the basement car park is getting flooded, or if the electricity is going to fail and for how long, or if you will have to wade to work the next day. For those glorious ten minutes, all that exists in your universe is a cup of tea to keep your hands warm, some rapidly cooling dumplings that must be consumed before they grow cold, and the sound of the rain, muffling the usual chaotic noises of a city going about its daily business and placing you in your own little oasis of calm.

Reason enough to pull a sickie

20 Questions (and random thoughts) that come to mind when driving on the streets of Karachi

Remember your childhood? That wonderful, sepia-coloured time when there was only one TV channel, which used to show one cartoon a day (at 5 pm), and Sesame Street on Fridays after Gillette World Sports Special? We didn't used to have PlayStations and social gaming back then, so we used to make up all sorts of games, for which the most advanced technology required was some paper and a pencil. 

One of those games was called kasauti, known in the vernacular as "Twenty Questions". One team would think of something (animal or mineral) and write down the answer on a piece of paper, and the other team then had 20 questions in which to guess what it was. Ever since then, the number 20 has held an almost magical quality about it for me, and for any list, especially of questions, to have occult significant, it surely must also comprise of this magic number. 

The first two of these questions occurred to me almost simultaneously a few days ago, followed swiftly on by the thought "Do these important existential conflicts keep others awake at night too, or is it just the KESC?" So I thought to jot these questions down, and lo and behold if I didn't come up with exactly twenty. 

So here it is, in all of its glory. The magical list of questions (and other thoughts) that dog you on the mean streets of Karachi. 

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1. Why is there always a bus parked on Khayaban e Shahbaz, on the corner of Shahbaz and Hafiz? 

2. What exactly is achieved by running a red light when the counter shows that it will turn green in four seconds? 

3. What part of “nahin karo beta” don’t you understand? 

4. Thank you for flashing your lights at me. If only they were tasers, I could have been vaporised and you could have moved one car length ahead in this queue... 

5. Why don’t people realise that driving with a high beam blinds oncoming cars? More likely, they don’t care... 

6. Why do you creep forward one whole lane when joining a busy dual carriageway? 

7. Ok seriously, if you park your car illegally, blocking off the road for dozens of people, does that affect the acceptance of your namaz? Why couldn’t you just have left home five minutes earlier? 

8. Is there a connection between lack of food / water / nicotine and the ability to see the colour red? 

9. How much does it cost to fix the brake light wiring of a motorcycle? Is it more than the price of a human life? 

10. Why must big cars be driven by even bigger assholes? Seems like there is no other point of commonality as this phenomenon spans all demographic boundaries. 

11. Khayaban e Iqbal (yes, I didn’t know of the name change either – the stretch between teen talwar and the underpass) is a red route (tow away zone, no questions asked). So then why do the four (on average) traffic policemen on duty there assist people in parking on the red route instead of towing their ass? 

12. Why is the least spot of rain like the precursor to a Noah-esqe deluge in the minds of drivers who use I I Chundrigar Rd? 

13. Why do parha likha people merrily drive up the wrong side of the road to avoid a 40 yard detour? If they turned left instead of right, there was a u-turn opportunity literally 20 yards down the road... 

14. Will people ever stop staring at me like I am mental when I give way to right at a roundabout? 

15. Why must you go up the wrong side of the road in a tailback, thus clogging up traffic on both sides for half an hour? 

16. What part of “No Entry” don’t you understand? (particularly for Zamzama, Shamsheer and Mujahid) 

17. Will the Jam Sadiq Bridge ever be in a good state of repair? (I dare not check the name on Google Maps for fear that has also been changed) 

18. Is that patch of road leading from Burns Road to Urdu Bazaar one way or not? 

19. There are few ideas that can be considered dumber than the Tariq Rd / Khalid Bin Walid Rd one way system. Until you visit Khayaban e Shamsheer. 

20. Oh, I am so sorry. I never got that memo about your father having purchased the road.

Pi in the Sky

My views on Booker prize winning books are quite well documented. With a few notable exceptions, they are mostly homogenous, following similar narrative tracks and quite often a sentence structure that can charitably be described as derivative. Many of the recent ones have featured sub-continental locations and themes, and have been by South Asian authors, and as a result that derivation is quite often from the author of the ‘Booker of Bookers’, by way of a certain Mr Garcia Marquez. As a result, I am jallofied from doodh, and avoid like the plague anything that has its roots in magical realism with an Indian flavour, when it comes to my reading. Therefore, picking up “Life of Pi” was a mistake on my part. 

This is a mistake that I made a few years ago, and am happy to report was one of the best ones of my life. Having had a couple of conversations about the book recently (and more on this later), I once again asked myself: How did Yann Martel take a premise which is laden with the promise of turgidity of Arundhatian proportions, and turn it into what I can only call an unqualified triumph, and also win the Booker on his way to it? 

The answer to both lies not so much in the story itself, but in the manner of its telling. Prologues can be a tricky proposition, but there is one to start of this book that has to rank amongst the finest ever written, when it comes to setting the tone for a novel, and getting a reader’s attention. Once you have piqued the reader’s curiosity, and established one or more characters that the reader would be interested in knowing more about, that in itself is half the battle. 

The second key is the believability. Strange as it may seem, somehow this story about the most improbable of things, a boy being cast away on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with only a Bengal tiger for company along the way does not, at any point, seem so fantastical a thing that it must be fiction of the sort that tries to ground itself in the real world, and fails miserably. The style of the narrative is again at play – when a novel is written in the form of a journalist taking down an eyewitness account then, once you have accepted this as fact, the rest seems to just be a natural progression. 

The third key, to me, is the pace of the narrative. Life of Pi is not a slender tome (although not in A Suitable Boy territory either), and yet the narrative canters along at a pace which does not give the reader much pause for wondering whether such phenomena actually exist in the natural world (most of them do, actually). Suspension of scepticism is key, and once achieved, your readers are then eating out of your hands much like a tame tiger would. 

Perhaps most importantly, though, this is the story of the indestructibility of the human spirit, even under the most appalling of circumstances. Thanks to the prologue, the reader knows that all will be (a few psychological scars aside) well in the end. And when you marry that to a sledgehammer of a final act, the masterpiece is complete. 

If you are going to take a risk with one award winning book this year, let it be this one. A word of warning, though: not all award winning books are this good (although some are pretty damn fantastic), so don’t go out and blow your entire personal extravagances budget for the month on other winners. Pick and choose, and you may find another star amongst all the derivative rubbish. 

Postscript: 

I have recently heard some worrying news: a movie adaptation is being done of the book. The worry is on two fronts. Firstly, I am yet to see a movie adaptation of a book that is as good as the original volume. Even movies which are great on a standalone basis (Jaws and The Godfather come to mind) have books which had a depth that could not be matched. It would seem, therefore, that a movie would need to be in the ‘all time great’ category to come close to the written word version. 

Furthermore, there are some books which, when you read them, you think must be unfilmable, and Life of Pi falls in that latter category, to my mind. After all, how on Earth do to make a film about a teenage boy cast away on a lifeboat with nothing but a Bengal Tiger for company? Having Ang Lee direct would help, in theory. He may have an inconsistent track record at delivering box office, but he does manage to tell a story well, and remain faithful to the spirit of the original. So I YouTubed the trailer  with some significant trepidation, expecting that kid from “Slumdog Millionaire”, improbable special effects, and some dubious liberties taken with the content. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Hjrs6WQ8M&feature=youtube_gdata_player

So far, so good. If the trailer is the only thing to go by (which it is, for me) at least I am not tearing my hair out quite yet. There is still a long distance to traverse in terms of expectations of quality, but on the basis of the available information, I am willing to let it slide so far. Only time will tell whether it can approach the peaks of The Godfather, or is destined for the scrapheap a la What To Expect When You Are Expecting...