From quality to quantity: the loss of symbolism

“…God citeth symbols for men to remember.”  (Qur’an, 14:24-25)

"We cannot pretend to culture until by the phrase 'standard of living' we come to mean a qualitative standard...Modern education is designed to fit us to take our place in the counting-house and at the chain-belt; a real culture breeds a race of men able to ask, 'What kind of work is worth doing?'"

                                                                  Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

"Value intensiveness more than extensiveness. Perfection consists in quality, not quantity. Everything very good has always been brief and scarce; abundance is discreditable. Even among people, giants are usually the true dwarves. Some value books for their sheer size, as if they were written to exercise our arms not our wits. Extension alone can never rise above mediocrity, and the misfortune of all-embracing individuals is that, wanting to deal with everything, they deal with nothing. Intensity leads to distinction, and to heroic distinction if the matter is sublime."  

                                            The worldly wisdom of Baltasar Gracian

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was a time when people in traditional societies said so less and meant so much. It was a time when things did not even have proper names, yet they were rich with purpose and overflowing with meaning. Now, men and women say so much, chatter non-stop---both online and offline--- and all that they say mean so little, if anything at all!  Everything now has explicit names, elaborate definitions, colorful labels and explanations, but lack meaning and purpose.

People did good acts without running around like some wound-up robot advertising their noble acts, shamelessly indulging in self-promotion and self-marketing. Virtues like charity were more practiced than displayed, praised or talked about: a kind act was just done, always for Allah’s sake, and then forgotten by the benefactor, or “thrown away into the river” (neki karr, darya mein phenk). When it came to virtuous acts like helping the poor and the needy, such was the quality of character of both the high and the low, the khawas as well as the awam, that the left hand was not supposed to know what the right hand was doing or had done, whom it had helped or had provided succor. Others’ faults and weaknesses were rarely discussed or criticized in public: disagreement, disapproval and reprimand were often subtle and indirect. Compare that to what today's uber-literate and "educated" people do on Facebook, Tiktok and Twitter etc. nowadays!

The time was when people, ordinary as well as the elite, serf as well as lord, had eyes and intelligences that could see the “picture that is not in the colors”. People who could neither read nor write---the illiterate or what we moderns slightingly refer to as “ignorant” (jahil and ganwaar)--- but who were often profound possessors and practitioners of insight, foresight and wisdom. Yes, they were illiterate as measured against today’s criteria of formal literacy and education, but they could tell month-long stories of wisdom and recite epic poems from heart. Above all, there was self-effacement and humility. People were certain more about what they did not know, their ignorance, than about what they could claim as knowledge. And when they did make such claims, they would often complement them with Wallahu Alam  (God knows best).

Now, we, the (post-) modern “chattering shadows of shadows” as the late poet Kathleen Raine once put it, don’t even see the colors in vividly painted pictures, let alone recite long poems or tell captivating, interesting stories. We are the progressive, “information rich” and knowledgeable people, over-confident about all and everything under the sky, and never failing to look down upon the people and the ways of the past, that "backward" time and place from which we have emerged, out of which darkness we have "evolved" into light all starry-eyed. We cheerily tell ourselves that we are more “advanced” and “developed” than our predecessors.  But, in fact, we are the overly literate and educated holograms, unreal and empty images constantly gossiping and telling inane tales that are often ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’!

One reason for this state of affairs is the loss of symbolism in our languages which is itself a reflection of our dull, simplistic thought patterns. Whatever else they were or were not, traditional languages were always symbolic. Symbolic language meant that its users were aware of and in communication with something higher than themselves, since the main function of a symbol is to connect the lower to the higher. A traditional/religious symbol helps us climb up the ladder of meaning, of purpose; it helps us transcend the mundane and the trivial, this going-beyond being the main purpose, the raison d’etre, of life in traditional cultures. Symbols are like memory pills in that they remind man (insaan) of what he has forgotten (his ghaflah, and this ghaflah being a major failing of a Muslim). Those forgotten things are the real things amidst whose reflections or shadows we live out our lives in this world, somewhat like the cave dwellers in the allegory of Plato. Symbols are like keys that help us open doors to divine mysteries that otherwise remain locked and inaccessible. Important to remember is that in the world of symbolism, height also means depth: one who climbs high above is also one who is going deep within to know his “self” or khud / khudi.

Education is also to be blamed. Modern education, to be precise. We just have too much data and information, we know too much but, paradoxically, remain unenlightened and unhappy as most of our social, economic and especially ecological indicators reveal. Or, we know a lot about things that don’t matter---the trivial and the accidental, always in search of answers for the how questions--- but almost nothing about what is essential, the why questions. Our instrumental reason, the reductionist rationality, while efficient, practical and useful in the abundant production of material products, nevertheless, destroys something deeper and qualitative that can be termed wisdom or hikma in Islamic languages and societies. This system of teaching-learning is so crudely quantitative that only what we can see, measure, control and predict is what exists for us. It teaches us to see everything with one-eye only.  It is like casting a fish net in the sea and what the net brings up to the surface is all that exists. Everything else that passes through the net is non-existence for us. Moreover, an education that is obsessed with practicality, is exclusively oriented towards the achievement of the quantitative and celebrates materialism and consumerism without any regard for non-material or spiritual values (iqdaar) “makes man a more clever devil” as C.S. Lewis once remarked. 

Waleed El-Ansary has argued that Muslims used to teach numbers symbolically to children, somewhat like this: One (1) means God/Allah, two (2) means man and woman, wife and husband, father and mother, night and day, three (3) means you, mother and father, or, God, The Holy Book and The Prophet (pbuh), four (4) means…and so on. We have come a long way from those times, the “dark and primitive ages”. We have become enlightened, progressed and developed ourselves to (symbolic) death! We have turned every form of quality to quantity. No symbolism. Just, sheer quantity. We no longer aspire to climb up, but are happy to dwell in dark basements of our being (wujud), our ego. Kids now learn their arithmetic as follows: One (1) means me, and only me, means 1 big house, 1 big car…, two (2) means 2 mansions, 2 iPads or 2 million Rupees or Dollars…, three (3) means three pairs of Nike sneakers… and so on. In the “Christian” west, this loss of symbolism can be clearly seen in the reduction and quantification of an essentially symbolic and qualitative event, Christmas, which is now reduced to crass forms of consumerism. Our own Eid, Eid al Fitr and Eid al Azha, for example, also seem to be following that trend.  I will end this blog post with this lament of T.S Eliot from his poem The Rock:

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries,

Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.   

                                                    (From T.S. Eliot, The Rock)

My surkha friends and their chacha Marx

"I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet."     
                                Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas

"Religion is the opium of the masses."                        Marx
"Opium is the religion of the masses."              Sheikh Murad  

It is a cliché to say that we live in strange times. The Muslim cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar has called this present age of incessant flux and confusion as “Postnormal times” or PNT. He describes it as, “in an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense." This is an age of uncertainty in which the confluence of info-tech and bio-tech seem to be presenting us with both utopian and especially dystopian scenarios. PNT, Sardar tells us, is defined by the three Cs: chaos, complexity and contradictions.

A main characteristic of this chaotic and mind bogglingly contradictory age is extremism, as can be seen in its different incarnations: extreme violence, extreme sports, extreme entertainment, extreme food, extreme love and hate, extreme politics and so on. Last time I talked about one type of these extremisms: that of the head-chopping and self-and other-obliterating religious fanatics. This time we shall have a brief look at another type of the species: the sloganeering-activist and armchair revolutionary, the secular-leftist--atheist extremist. In other words, the social justice warrior often in his or her most visibly radical garb: the socialist-Marxist! Yes, religions don’t have a monopoly on extremism and violence. 

In contrast to popular views, especially in countries like ours, atheistic-Marxism (in its authentic form Marxism is always atheistic) is not just a rational-scientific alternative to “backward-looking” and superstitious religion, organized or otherwise. Qualifiers like "scientific" and "rational" are, in fact, ideological masks. Marxism itself is a belief system, a rival religion or, more appropriately, a pseudo-religion or even a cult with all its attendant doctrines and elaborate rituals. More than half a century ago the historian and philosopher Karl Lowith was one of the first to identify it as such, when he said that this "Communist creed" is a "pseudo-morphosis of Judeo-Christian messianism". It has its own prophet, priests and saints, its own sacred texts and their hallowed and esoteric interpreters. There are its sacred sites, shrines and so on. But what really appeals to and attracts many who call themselves Marxists or socialists of the Marxist variety, is Marxism’s concern for social justice and its call for solidarity with the exploited and the oppressed. Marx is often portrayed as an uncompromising internationalist and humanist by his followers.

For many years now I have been debating these contentions with some of my “progressive” Marxist friends (the reds or “surkha” as they are known) especially those from Balochistan where I am originally from. Almost all of them think of Karl Marx as one of their old, bearded enlightened uncles who had nothing but contempt for religion, was the symbol of humanist values with deep compassion for the oppressed and victimized of the world, the proletariat, including its yellow, brown and black members in Asia, Africa and other places. They never tire of quoting lines and slogans from Chacha (uncle) Marx, from his The Communist Manifesto and his magnum opus Das Kapital in particular, to make those and other similar points. Sadly, many have never read Marx or have read him in poor and often misleading translations and because of which they carry this Santa Claus like image of him in their heads.

Marx was, first and foremost, a European bourgeoisie, a German to be precise, who thought of all non-Europeans, those without blonde hair and blue eyes (Nietzsche’s “blond beast”), as inferior beings, lesser humans. His works, especially his private correspondence with his colleague Engels and his journalistic articles are full of derogatory and racist terms describing and at times chastising non-Westerners and the non-white people of the world, Asians and Africans in particular. For example, when he and his colleague Engels talk of the poor working classes, they have the oppressed of Europe, especially of England, Germany and France in mind, and not agonizing about the darker nations of Africa and Asia. Following his master, the German Hegel for whom History (yes with capital H) ends with the ideal German State in his head, and which is nothing less than  a God-like “Absolute”, Marx thought of Africans in strictly Eurocentric and racist terms, even using the “N” word for the black people of that continent.  Moreover, The Communist Manifesto which many naïve leftist-activist types praise and quote often to make some superficial and reactionary anti-religious argument, is mostly about the virtues of capitalism as a dynamic tool for change that would eventually make the uncivilized non-Westerners (non-whites, that is) “civilized” or enable them to enter “civilization” as exclusively defined by Europeans like Marx and Engels.

In his tome, Marx condemns the Indians with their “lazy” ways and actually thinks of brutal British colonialism in India as a good and moral thing, as an “unconscious tool of [Hegelian] history” that will wake up the sleepy Indian!  The great Palestinian scholar Edward Said contended that Marx's earliest writings on the British role in India represent a racist view of the colonized, despite Marx's sympathy for the subjects of the British Empire. Edward Said wrote that "in article after article, [Marx] returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution." 

Likewise, Marx’s collaborator, Engels, initially welcomed the 1847 U.S. invasion of Mexico because it would introduce an uncivilized rural society to the most dynamic economic and democratic political system in existence around the time. Marx didn’t think much of Mexicans, either; for him, they were always "lazy Mexicans”. When the United States annexed California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico after the Mexican Wars, Marx sarcastically asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” This imperialistic adventure they, Marx and Engels, judged would be "in the interest of civilization" in general and in the interest of the conquered Mexicans themselves. Marx's earliest writings on India and China suggest that the Chinese were "timid" in the face of British imperialism, and that Indians succumbed to imperialism because India "has no history at all, at least no known history...[it is] an unresisting and unchanging society." Both supported the colonization of Algeria by the French and were in celebratory mood when the Sufi warrior, Amir Abdul Qadir, who led the resistance against colonization of his country, was arrested by the colonizing French. This is what Engels said then: “Upon the whole it is, in our opinion, very fortunate that the Arabian chief [Amir Abdul Qadir] has been taken…the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilization”

It is now a known fact that revolutions in general and Marxist revolutions in particular eat up their own children first. Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people in the twentieth century. But Marx and Engels must be read, especially by people of faith like Muslims, in order to understand the capitalist system and its catastrophic social, economic and environmental effects better and, more importantly, in order to understand them as they really were in their own words rather than as they are presented to us by their often uncritical, genuflecting followers, those so-called atheists and progressives in our part of the world. After all, there is the other cliché that if Marx were alive today, he would be the first to declare: “I am not a Marxist!”

-----------------------------------

Note: For the interested reader, please see the following from which the above cited material have been taken (among other authoritative works):

1. Moore, Carlos, “Were Marx and Engels white racists? The prolet-Aryan outlook of Marxism”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 19 (1974-75), pp. 125-156

2. Weyl, Nathaniel, Karl Marx, racist, Arlington House Press (USA), 1979.

 

 

On noise and solitude

On Solitude

"Solitude is a defense mechanism in a world that does not deserve to be saved."  

                                                                                  Robert Ferguson

"But if we don't have experience with solitude----and this is often the case today---we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness."

                                                                                       Sherry Turkle

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Our unhappiness arises from one thing only: that we cannot be comfortably alone in our room….That is why the pleasure of solitude is seen as so incomprehensible", said the French scientist-philosopher Blaise Pascal. With every passing day, we lose a bit of our quietude, a patch of our silent spaces to the deafening noise and maddening pace of new technologies and gadgets---the iPods, iPhones, tablets, HD TVs, smartphones, video game consoles, smart watches and smart this and smart that. With these come the conveniences, no doubt, but also accompanying them are the flat and impoverished lifestyles often cunningly packaged as miracle manna, with promises of bliss and fulfillment. The non-stop bombardment of online and offline propaganda tell us that nirvana and nijaat can be achieved and owned just around the corner where the new iPhone or some clone of it, after a super-hyped promotional bonanza, is being sold to the psychologically bruised masses, all of whom eagerly line up, as if they were in a free-for-all langar, to get their hands on the new gadget. This magical gizmo will soon become old, kicking in the same cycle of mindless consumption all over again. 

It is ironic that we humans make these anti-spiritual and, ultimately dehumanizing contraptions only to become slaves to them in a state of helplessness as they in turn shape control and eventually consume us. With every new “smart” device that promises liberation, we de-skill ourselves and lose our independence: as our technologies grow and become smarter and stronger, we shrink and become stupider and weaker. Recall what the convenient calculator did to the arithmetic ability of kids and what the computer keyboard or word processor has done to the reading and writing skills of both adults and children. Writes William Deresiewicz: “Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Webpage is considered an eternity.” Convenience and ease remain desirable but they also breed unhealthy, slavish dependence. When we shun effort and difficulty, when we by-pass what demands our long and deep attention, we also forego the opportunity to realize our potentialities, since it is in our painful struggles with what is strange and difficult that we often experience authentic joy and through them we achieve greatness. “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Every new gizmo triumphantly announces the shattering of yet another frontier and the arrival of a new age of progress for us, but in reality its essential victories are over our interior and spiritual life, that qualitative and meaning-rich domain that matters most for a truly meaningful life. It is yet another assault of the quantitative on the qualitative. The symbolic has been displaced and in its place the diabolic has been enthroned: no transcendence anymore, neither the comprehension nor the desire or the will to go beyond, to be what we are meant to be by fitrah.

Fifty years ago a technology critic like Lewis Mumford could say:  “Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.”  Not anymore. The “smart” machines are now everywhere: in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bedroom and in our beds, in the toilet, in our cars, in our offices and schools, in our heads and hearts. They have colonized our most private and intimate spaces. They have even invaded and desacralized our mosques and madrassahs. Today’s pious Muslims, for example, will not let go of them even as they circumambulate the House of God, the Holy Kaaba during Hajj in Mecca!  It seems that this conspiracy of noise, this modern project of maddening clamor, has but one aim: to continuously cannibalize our attention, to distract us from everything that has always been considered a societal and cultural good in sane and integral societies, things like deep thinking and meditation, prayer and self-examination in silence and in solitude. These ever-multiplying devices with their by-design centrifugal forces and tendencies (in the form of SNS or social media, for example) pull us outward, away from our inner resources. They have become the ugly clogs between what and who we are and what and who we could be.  Above all, they make silence and solitude very difficult, if not impossible. 

It is in solitude that we engage in a profound conversation with our inner and true self, realize our latent potentialities and thus become a moral, ethical and spiritual being. We become whole.  In a brilliant long essay written in 2009,  The End of Solitude, the critic William Deresiewicz, citing from different religious traditions, argued that no greatness can be achieved without solitude and that it is in solitude that the most profound self-encounters take place out of which arise great works of art, theology, philosophy and scientific excellence. “The still, small voice speaks only in silence,” Deresiewicz wrote. It is that mysterious voice that speaks to the hermit, to the sadhu, to the saint and the sage either in the solitude of a cave, or in the silence of a desert or a forest. The communicative depth of silence is of an altogether different quality and order. Our deepest passions are nurtured in silence, our respects for the dead are expressed in silence, intense love is shared and transmitted in silence and our profoundest thoughts and visions are experienced in silence as the anarchist John Zerzen reminds us. “The thoughtful soul to solitude retires,” Omar Khayyam has said, alluding to the importance of invocation in solitude. The prayer, and not just the Islamic prayer but all prayers in the different sacred traditions of the world, is meant to, among other things, interrupt the noise and madness of daily life. It takes us out of the chaos of this world, a chaos that is ever made worse by these distracting and disorienting modern machines and iGadgets. Prayer pulls us out of the prison of standardized time itself, and places us in the eternal or the timeless, so that we can remember (re-member) our forgotten, or re-collect our scattered, selves.

While silence and solitude have always been essential conditions for wholeness and spiritual well-being, they often strike terror into the heart of the digital “social” man and woman of our permanently connected or online times. This digital denizen who merrily and endlessly uploads and updates, texts and tweets and who seems to have proudly (dis)-qualified Descartes’ cogito, “I think, therefore, I exist” with “I update, therefore, I exist!” has eye on one and only one thing: the number of “likes” or the hits and listings on Google or the army of “friends” and followers in the dizzying networked matrix. The creature not only has no need for solitude, it is actually afraid of silence and totally clueless about the creative potentiality of idleness. This quintessentially modern condition was shrewdly observed by that “godless, jobless, wifeless, homeless” mad man of Europe, Nietzsche, more than a century ago. This is what he said:  “When we are quiet and alone, we fear that something will be whispered in our ears, and so we hate the quiet, and dull our senses in society.” Contrast this with “the still, small voice” that the sage, the sufi and the saint pine for! Progress, indeed! Let me end this blogpost with this apt observation of Abdal Hakim Murad on these "tricknologies of mass distraction": “Insan with the e-culture becomes insane” and “If the culture is sick, then your ease with it is a sign of sickness.”

Originally published in online newspaper Balochistan Voices.

Quetta in the 1980s: the battle of the Kawasakis

My love of motorcycles is old. It started in the early 1980s in Quetta. That’s when I got my first motorcycle, a Yamaha YB-100. I was in high school then and had been asking my father to buy me a full size bicycle since I had outgrown my old junior’s bike, a 14 inches red Sohrab. Instead, my father got me the motorcycle, which was a sweet surprise. The Yamaha cost us Rs. 13000, if I recall correctly. There were only two Yamaha dealers in Quetta then, both located on Jinnah Road. And it was the best-selling bike in Quetta, in fact, in the entire province then. In big cities like Karachi and Hyderabad in Sindh and in other populous cities in Punjab, the Hondas ruled, especially the unbelievably fuel efficient Honda CD-70, available only in black in those days. The “mighty black mules” they were called. The day after the purchase, my motorbike was registered at the nearest motor vehicle registration office and soon after that I received a brand new pair of number plates, for front and back, marked: QAB-5098 (Quetta-B). 

In the absence of the Internet, smart phones and the 24/7 on-line games and social media culture---Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc.--- it was either outdoor sports like soccer, cricket and field hockey or, motorcycles that were the rage among the young and the young-at-heart then. Those who could afford and were into music either had their Sony Walkman or the cheaper Sanyo, Akai or Aiwa clones of the popular portable music player---the iPods of those days. Like most things then, TV channels for example, there were not many bike models to choose from. There was also the strict government set limitation on the engine size or horsepower of the motorcycles--- the “CCs” as they were called. The allowed engine size was 200cc then.
The biker community in the city included people of different ages and professions, and its activities revolved around few well known personalities, mainly the mechanics and some daredevil types---the stunt riders, or the showmen. There were also the collectors, the loaded guys who waxed and licked their rare machines but hardly rode them! Among the mechanics, three or four stood out who were loved and respected by the bikers. They were all uncanny characters, eccentrics in their own ways.  There was the famous Haji Ustad whose repair shop was on Masjid Road. Anybody who had some kind of connection with the universe of motorcycles knew him, directly or indirectly. A short guy with a gentle demeanor, always smiling but with sparkling, probing eyes, this highly skilled mechanic was the wizard of carburetor tuning, which meant he had the magic in his hands to make a bike race-worthy or race-ready.  I don’t think anybody among the bikers knew his real name. He was just that: Haji Ustad. The waiting line of racing enthusiasts at his garage was as long as that of chronic heart patients at the posh clinic of Dr. Manaf Tareen, the most qualified, and therefore the most expensive, heart specialist and, if my memory is not failing me, the sole heart surgeon in Quetta in those days. Getting your bike tuned and test-driven by Haji Ustad was like getting a Fender (guitar) tuned by Eric Clapton or a Stradivarius (violin) appreciated and confirmed for its concert-readiness by Yehudi Menuhin!

There was also Munir “Cowboy” Ustad. He was a real character. With garage on one of the side streets off the main Suraj Ganj Bazar, this mechanic was never seen wearing a shalwar kameez. He always wore ragged blue jeans, soaked in engine oil and grease, and colorful T-shirts. He had long, scraggly hair, in the hippy style. Soft spoken and a real laid-back guy, he resembled the legendary folk-rock singer Neil Young, the Canadian grand-daddy of grunge music. He was also a sort of rival of Haji Ustad. Typically, the bikers gravitated around one of these two motorcycle gurus. Munir Ustad had an old but immaculately maintained Yamaha DT-100 Enduro and was also considered its expert. The Enduro was a particularly popular bike and what made a good bike of this model stand out from the rest was the booming sound from its exhaust pipe that neatly ran along the main frame under the seat, it being a trail bike. No disrespect to Muhammad Rafi or Talat Mahmood, in terms of acoustics the Enduro was clearly the Kishore Kumar of the motorcycles. I say Kishore because it was only Kishore Kumar whose voice had both the power and the resonance, especially in his joyous songs, a quality of sound also present in the Enduro and which set it apart from the crowd.   

Mention must also be made of Deedar Ustad, the youngest of these mechanics and who had actually migrated from Hyderabad, Sindh to Quetta. For a while he worked with Munir Ustad, as his assistant or “chotoo”, but later on he opened his own joint on the eternally crowded Abdul Sattar Road.  His expertise was in overhauling old engines in such a way that, in terms of speed and power, they would actually outperform the new ones!

While there were many places where we used to race the bikes, the best place was this straight stretch of road, about 3kms long, in Spizand on the Bolan national highway that went through Mach and Sibi to Sindh and connected to the highways in the Punjab province. Mostly used by goods transporting heavy duty trucks that usually came along in pairs every thirty minutes or so, it was a cruel stretch of asphalt, flanked on both sides by a wide expanse of barren land called the “dasht" (desert). The icy winter winds that blew in this dasht cut through the bones. This patch of land that is swept by Siberian winds every winter was once host to the migratory houbara bustard that made its grueling journey to it from that extremely cold northern province of Russia. Yes, the same near-extinct bird called "talour' in the vernacular tongues and which the royals of the Middle East so lovingly hunt in Balochistan despite the numerous warnings by many credible international environmental and conservation organizations. These unsustainable hunting expeditions have continued to this day, mainly because the ruling elites of this country, including those who now preach the mantra of "naya Pakistan", keep receiving compensatory hush money from these obscenely rich and spoiled Arabs, often in the form of "unconditional" financial packages. 

Back to our story. It was the Kawasakis that reigned over these races on this runway-like track. Two models were particularly fast: the swift 110cc road-bike GTO and the high saddled off-roader KE-175. The latter model, especially when tuned and raced by Haji Ustad, was unbeatable. These races were essentially the battles of the Kawasakis of different models tuned differentially by the expert mechanics, meaning different oxygen-gasoline ratios for optimum combustion and performance. The nearest rival of these quick Kawasakis was a beautifully styled Yamaha road racer with a buzzing sound, then newly introduced and called the RX-115.

There's an interesting little story about what happened on one such racing day. On a freezing February morning the racers, their friends and sidekicks crowded the starting spot on that desolate track in Spizand. It was a sunny day but the wind was brutal, as usual. The bikers were on their Kawasakis, their Yamahas (the RX-115s) and a couple of Hondas were there, too--those perennial CG-125s. Haji Ustad and Deedar Ustad were present but Munir Ustad did not show up on that day. The Kawasakis raced the other Kawasaksis and also the other bikes. For more than three hours the bikes were raced and tested with different riders. Then, towards the end of the day, something really interesting happened. A young guy named Zulfi was accompanying his friend, a proud Kawasaki KE-175 owner, on that day. This Zulfi, who was a resident of Nawabshah, Sindh and was visiting his grandparents in Quetta, had an old machine, a Suzuki GP-100, with a loose rear mudguard and a broken right side front indicator. The bike was a piece of junk, and it made a painfully shrill sound, like that from an embarrassingly cheap electric guitar played by some punk pretending to be a guitar ace for some heavy metal band! So, came along this young man Zulfi with his re-incarnated Suzuki---the engine had been recently overhauled by the one and only Deedar Ustad----and parked next to a screaming GTO at the starting line. There were six or seven bikes at the start line, all throttling and ready for the final race of the day. The slightly chubby Zulfi on his lowly red contraption---the only “untouchable” in the line-up of high caste machines---looked cool, chewing calmly on his shocking-pink sugary Mayfair bubble gum. The flag came down and off they went leaving behind a cacophony of putt-putt, vroom-vroom, and boom-boom sounds and quickly disappearing into a pungent cloud of bluish white smoke. It was usually a two way race. They had to race the 3km stretch and then return to the starting line to complete the race. After a few minutes of silence during which the chilly wind screamed into our almost frozen but attentive ears, we began to hear the faint buzz of the returning bikes. Then the small dots started taking form, with a red thing leading the pack. At first, the glare of nickel and steel reflecting off the polished wheel rims, spokes and other parts of the bikes made it difficult for us to identify the leader. But within the next few seconds, it was clearly Zulfi’s Suzuki that was way ahead of a second place Kawasaki KE-175, also red in color. That rickety jumble of scrap metal, rubber and plastic, the GP-100, had beaten the mighty Kawasakis! Among the bikers, it became the talk of the town for many months and years after that day. Zulfi disappeared soon afterward and so did the old Suzuki.

Although now I don’t own one, I still love motorcycles, especially the furiously fast Kawasaki Ninjas.  But every time I see a Suzuki on the road, I feel a cold shiver run up and down my spine. And as I recall that fateful February day in Spizand, a spontaneous smile appears on my face.  My wife and kids look at me, I point to the Suzuki on the road, and they also smile with me.

Originally published in Balochistan Voices.

----------------------------------------------------

Note: Deedar Ustad passed away recently. Apparently he was trying to fix some electric device and the shock from electric current was too strong. May he rest in peace in his final abode and may the bereaved have sabr and patience. 

Quetta in the 1980s: The Bikes!

Quetta: A different place

Quetta: It used to be different
October 29, 2018

Dervaish Ali

 

My late uncle, martyred in the war of 1971, used to say to us children: “Aab e Quetta, Shab e Quetta cannot be found anywhere in the world”.  “Aab e Quetta” and “shab e Quetta” mean the water and nights of Quetta. A summer hill station town in the colonial days and also known as Shalkot then, the town was famous for its crystal clear and, in the local parlance, “sweet “ or “tasty” water, and for its quiet, breezy summer and cool autumn nights. Seasonal visitors to the city would always tell their hosts, or write about it later, how they “experienced the town as if it was engulfed in a magical lull in the evenings”. On a recent trip to Quetta after a decade long absence, I found out that neither the water was sweet and clean anymore, nor the nights cool and peaceful. And not just that: in fact, it is an altogether different place for an old timer like me.

Just a couple of decades ago, Quetta was also known for its safe streets, its stable neighborhoods and for the relative harmony that prevailed among its diverse people who belonged to different ethno-linguistic and religious communities. Majority Muslims, both sunnis and shias, and minority Hindus, Paarsis, Christians and others, all different in their ways of life---in work and worship, in celebration and mourning---but all of whom shared the place and its resources in ways that are now all but part of some distant memory, even forgotten, unfortunately.  The schools that we went to had kids from all the communities. The shops we shopped at were often owned by those who did not look like us, did not talk or pray like us. Yet, there was intermingling, respect, civility and harmony and people got along fairly well.

The shops and schools are still there. Well, most of them are. The communities are there, too, and more or less they still do what they have been doing for ages, but what has changed is the way the communities now perceive themselves and the other, which has a direct bearing on the way they interact with each other. There is something not quite right in today’s Quetta. For example, walking around in the city these days, one cannot fail to sense an air of apathy or, depending on one’s situation and location, a free floating suspicion, and even hostility, towards the other. A climate of fear and suspicion engulfs the social fabric of the city. For anyone familiar with the history, even recent history, of Quetta and its people, this is the most striking change that has happened in the past few decades.

This deterioration in traditional value systems upon which were based the old norms of civility, for example the neighborly codes of conduct, this narrowing down of both the healthy intellectual horizons and the congenial physical spaces in and among the different communities of Quetta city can be explained in broad terms as an inevitable consequence of the arrival of disruptive modernity with its ethos of competitive individualism, unrestrained consumerism and a skeptical attitude towards anything old and tradition bound. But upon zooming in our analytical lens and looking at the details, it can be more coherently explained as a tragic consequence of years of ethno-sectarian brainwashing or programming of the vast swathes of the communities by different state and non-state actors and institutions, often in the name of religion and religious education, and at times in the name of secular nationalism, too. And this is very unfortunate.

The awareness of this transformation is particularly acute in those who belong to the minority communities that have been systematically and viciously identified as the “others” by a particular form of narrow and exclusivist consciousness that seems to have become dominant in recent years.  It is this intolerant and bigoted mindset that often through a deviously literal and one-dimensional interpretation of the sacred religious texts and tenets reduces a richly complex worldview to a one dimensional ideology geared towards the achievement of mundane ends. With all its modernistic trappings, the revolutionary rhetoric and the establishment of a utopian theocratic state for example, and its instrumental rationality, the political and sectarian entrepreneurs of this ideology see these “others” as unacceptable, sinful, apostates and blasphemous lesser mortals whose extermination then becomes the duty of the toxic ideology’s “true” and “pure” foot soldiers.

Quetta has been the scene of some of the bloodiest sectarian violence in the past couple of decades in Pakistan. Scores of innocent people have been butchered in bomb blasts and targeted killings. While the violence and killings have been indiscriminate, even directed against law enforcement personnel and institutions like the police and the legal community, the brunt of these killings have been born by the minorities, especially the shia Hazara community of Quetta. In every such act of ethno-sectarian violence, there are not just victims, but also beneficiaries, sometimes visible and often hidden. For example, there are economic interests involved; there are political opportunity regimes that benefit from such forms of violence. Crucially, these interests and opportunity structures often cut across ethnic and sectarian lines. One must, therefore, always ask the critical question: cui bono? (who benefits?). 

A healthy and functioning society requires a critically aware and socially and politically engaged citizenry. In such societies, the citizens are not isolated beings with exclusivist identities and always suspicious and fearful of its (often imagined and demonized) “others”; nor are they anomie ridden, amoral consumers that are churned out, like some factory product, by post-modern or late-modern capitalism. A city like Quetta in a country in transition may well not be able to resist the disruptive economic and cultural forces of modernity and modern technology in the coming years, arguably a mixed blessing, but what the different communities of this ancient land need to understand and remember is that their little town was once different and it is in that difference that they may well find the tools and resources for the renewal or revival of the humane and holistic ethos that once adorned all the cultures of the different communities of this place. We live in an age where we have been thoroughly conditioned to see everything new, the nouveau or the novel, as good, beautiful and true and everything old as ugly, cruel and barbaric. Any mention of the past is often attacked as “romanticism” as we are sold the modern panacea for all the ills of the world, real or imagined, by the vanguards of the new worldview. But this is a mistake. The past is not just a graveyard of discarded ideas and useless practices, but also a repository of wisdom, of hastily trashed ideas, concepts, or of unrealized modes of knowing, doing and being.

Originally published in Balochistan Voices.