The Music Centers of Quetta

The Music Centers of Quetta

Before there was MP3, there was TDK. Before there were Spotify and iTunes, there were Sangeet Palace and Odeon Music Center, Quetta.

Next to books, music occupies a huge space in my life. It also gets a significant chunk of my free time. And as in reading, so in music: I am an omnivore. I read across the genres and listen to many kinds of music. In this post, I am going to reminisce about some of the more popular and well-known music centers of Quetta, places that unfortunately no longer exist in reality but are very much present and alive in the minds and hearts of the music aficionados of the city’s old cassette tape sub-culture of the 1970s and 1980s.

I give the pride of place to Odeon Music Center. Others may disagree but as far as I can recall, this store had the largest Indian (and maybe Pakistani) music collection. Situated in the rather obscure and poorly lit Lalazar Market in the middle of Liaquat Bazaar, it used to be a double-sized corner joint with dark glass panels always adorned with huge, colorful posters that depicted famous Bollywood movies and actors: Sholay, Deewar, Dostana and Yarana with Amitabh Bachan; Anand, Amar Prem and Kati Patang with Rajesh Khanna; and, Aandhi and Mausam with Sanjev Kumar, and so on. And yes, the posters of the ubiquitous, lovely Zeenat Aman, the “sex symbol” reefer queen of the era dressed in hippy rags with her dazzling, alluring smile. Her posters were always among the big selling items of popular culture and her images could be seen everywhere, painted on the backs of auto-rickshaws and trucks and gracing the walls of college and university dorms. Even now, a predatory capitalist behemoth like Apple (the iPhone and iPad maker) cannot resist using her images for the promotion of their products. Odeon music center was equally impressive from inside, with wall-to-wall racks brimming with LPs, tapes and other music paraphernalia. It specialized in high quality stereo and echo recording and did not sell cheap pre-recorded tapes then. It had some of the finest recording equipment, big brand names like Teac, Kenwood, Onkyo, Sansui cassette decks, amplifiers and equalizers and Kenwood, JVC and Technics speakers. My father and my uncle Nasim always got their tapes from this store. All my father’s TDK and Sony Lata tapes carried the shiny silver and gold stickers reading “Odeon Music Center” on them. Recording of one’s favorite selections on a tape of one’s choice would take at least a week and sometimes even more.

Dum Maro Dum!
Zeenat Aman: The Poster Queen of the 1970s

Tip Top Music Center was in Fateh Khan Market on Jinnah Road. Although not as impressive as Odeon when it came to history, reputation and authority, it had its own charm and place in the music culture of the city. First of all, it was situated in a rather strange place, in a market that nobody then identified with tapes, music and colorful movie posters. Unlike the old and established arcade style markets in Liaquat Bazaar, the old Anderson, or maybe “Under the Sun” Bazaar---the “three big” being Liaquat Market, Hashmi Market and Sunehri Market---Fateh Khan was a relatively newer place with shiny shops selling cheaply produced shiny goods---fake copies of big brands---imported (smuggled) from the then newly emerging economies in South East Asia, places like Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore etc. This music center also had a different décor and atmosphere: no dark glass panels and especially no scent of vinyl mixed with the unmistakable mustiness that was a heady cocktail of tobacco, tea leaves, old carpets and aged timber. Or, in this place music not only looked differently, but it also smelled differently. But it was music nevertheless, good music. Like Odeon, Tip Top was also famous for its good quality recordings and it too boasted a huge collection of Indian/Bollywood music. But unlike Odeon, it sold pre-recorded tapes as well. My uncle Nisar was a regular customer, and so was yours truly.

Most of the pre-recorded tapes that I used to buy, and still have with me, were bought at Sangeet Palace on Abdus Sattar Road, Quetta. The owners of this old music store were three brothers, one of whom, Javed, was my class fellow for a while at Balochistan University. These pre-recorded tapes were the cheaper items. They were mostly manufactured in Karachi, Saddar Karachi to be precise, and sold all over the country, including at the music centers of Quetta, of which Sangeet Palace was the largest and the most famous. For a long time they were fixed at Rs. 25 per cassette. The tapes were mostly “Asahi” brand, and they were most probably Hong Kong or Thailand copies of the original Japanese Asahi. In the beginning, their recording quality was poor but over time they got better and better. Carrying miniature-poster pictures of Bollywood stars on the tape jackets and wrapped in cellophane, they weighed far less than the TDK, Sony, BASF and Scotch tapes. All cheap plastic, including the tiny screws that held the tape body together! For me, Javed was also a good source of information about music, about the ever-evolving music technology and what was new or latest in the industry then. Our Google then! Sangeet Palace did not deal in on-demand recordings. They only sold pre-recorded items but during the later years, in the early and mid 80s when VHS appeared, they expanded into the video business selling in mass quantities to smaller businesses which were mostly in the rural areas of the province. Sangeet Palace and other music stores like Bambino on Archer Road that sold the affordable pre-recorded tapes made music accessible to the masses. Not everybody could afford the high-quality Odeon Music, Disco Music and Tip Top merchandise.

Pre-recorded tapes from Sangeet Palace, Abdus Sattar Road, Quetta

Of all the recorded English tapes that I ever bought and still have, the majority are from Disco Music Center. This music house, situated in one of the smaller markets called Zulfiqar Market in Liaquat Bazaar, was the only one in the city that specialized in high quality English music recordings. It was a tiny, tiny place, so small that three people inside it would make it look and feel over-crowded. A kiosk, a cubicle, in fact. The owner was a mustached guy--a dandy who always wore strong perfumes---related to Haji Fateh Khan of Lodi Maidan, Nichari. I think he was his son-in-law. His younger brother owns and runs some kind of an adventure or sports club in Quetta, if I am not wrong.  Almost all of my Pink Floyd, Neil Young and Bob Dylan music is on Disco Music recorded TDK and Sony tapes, some on the more expensive Chrome and Metal tapes. English (middle-of-the-road-)rock and folk music---the two genres I mostly liked and often listened to in those days--- but especially the music of the 70s’ big rock bands like The Eagles, Jefferson Starship, Creedence Clearwater Revival, America, Toto, Led Zeppelin, CSNY, Cream, Journey, to name a few, required a different kind and level of recording skill on the equalizer and the amplifier. I mean a different use of settings than those required for the recording of Bollywood music. Since it was the age of vinyl, most of the famous bands and singers were originally produced on LPs from where they were transferred onto individual tapes and that required some very specialized equipment and recording studio skills. There were no programmed presets on the equalizers and amplifiers. They had to be manually manipulated and/or adjusted according to taste and demand. Tapes were recorded individually and it was a time consuming task. In Quetta of those days, Disco Music was one of the few places, if not the only place, where these tapes were made and sold. They cost a pretty penny then, more so when recorded on the high-end metal and chrome tapes for a more refined, sharper and bassy sound. My heartbeat would race, my mouth would always water, so to speak, as soon as I would step inside that rare, almost magical cubicle overflowing with the treasures of LPs and especially with the expensive equipment carrying brand names like Onkyo, Marantz and Nakamichi (amplifiers), Sansui and Technics (equalizers), Kenwood and JBL (speakers) and Teac and Denon (cassette decks). It was like stepping into a different world, a dream world.

Disco Music Tapes

Tapes from Off-Beat Music Lahore (TDK A Series)

In the early 90s a new music store opened in Shalimar Market, on Abdus Sattar Road. It was called Digital Sound. Like Disco Music, this store also specialized in English songs and music but its collection was limited. The owner, however, was very knowledgeable about Western rock and pop music especially about the bands and their legendary rock guitarists and performers: Eric Clapton, Roger Waters, Jeff Beck, Peter Green, Santana and Mark Knopfler et al. He had spent a quarter of his life in Europe and had first-hand knowledge about some of the music icons of the day.

There was also Gulistan Music House which sat on the corner of Suranj Ganj Bazaar and Jinnah Road. A huge art-gallery of a place, it was a strange music store, perhaps even not really a music house but a front for some other, darker business. There were colorful posters of show business celebrities---from James Dean and Frank Sinatra to Raj Kapoor and Amitabh Bachan---all over the place, on the walls, on the wide and tall window panes and even on the glass showcases, but the place just did not look like, did not feel like, and especially did not smell like music. It was on the other extreme end, the barren end, of Odeon Music or Disco Music, if you know what I am mean. It was a ghost house of a place, a haunted exhibition hall, as far as music was concerned, or as far as what I thought then what a music center should have been like. There used to be a few LP jackets taped or nailed to the white walls, a few tapes in the wide showcases running the entire length and breadth of the store and no signs of the real things, the treasures of a good music house: the Kenwoods, the Sansuis and JVCs, the Onkyos and the Technics. I don’t recall ever buying anything from there.

The superior stuff: A TDK metal tape

Virgin Air, Lahore cassette tapes (TDK B Series)

Years later after I moved out of Quetta and went to Punjab for higher studies, I amassed tapes from music centers in Lahore and some even from Peshawar. Among the famous music stores in Lahore was, of course, Off-Beat Music in Fortress Stadium. I still have many of their tapes with me. Off-Beat had a nation-wide presence and anyone who listened to English music knew about it. Then there was, sort of its rival, Virgin Air Music in Liberty Market. But not really. Another small place, also in Lahore, was called Kin Electronics. I still have some Paul Simon tapes that I bought there in the early 1990s. Some of my tapes were bought at Teen Beat Music, Peshawar, which was the Off-Beat of that city.

Pre-recorded cassette tapes. Price in the 1980s: Rs. 25 each

The Tape: TDK

TDK was the king of cassette tapes. At least it was in Quetta. In fact, quality music, good music, meant TDK. Period. It was a solid, jet black product made of opaque plastic with simple designs. The most popular was the “normal bias” “D” series tapes, especially the one-hour duration D60 with the decal printed in red, and the 90-minutes duration D90 with the decal printed in green on the black plastic. The two-hour duration D120 became available late in the 80s, or maybe in the early 90s, but was not that popular. The D series was followed by the screen-printed, transparent plastic “A” and “B” series tapes, which were not bad, but didn’t quite feel like the real thing, the legendary sturdy black D tapes. The competitors of the mighty TDK were mainly Sony, Maxell, BASF and Scotch, the last two being non-Japanese products. I liked the Sony and Maxell tapes, too. Sony Chrome II was a fine thing. Maxell black had the same heavy and sturdy look and feel as the D series. They were quality products as well. I got my BASF and Scotch tapes from my late uncle, Sikander Ali, who had brought them from Germany. They were also good products but not as popular in Quetta as the Japanese brands like TDK and Sony. Only a few stores sold them. The BASF tapes with their yellow and orange stickers on black background were very attractive. To this day, they remind me of the 70s superstars like the reggae king Bob Marley and especially Al Stewart and his catchy guitar tunes and songs. I guess it is because the first time I ever heard an Al Stewart song ---“Year of the cat” and also “On the Border”, for example--- was on a BASF tape given to me by my uncle.

The Mighty TDK D Series D60 and D90 Tapes

BASF and Scotch tapes

In the year 1980, the British new wave/synth-pop band The Buggles announced the death of audio, or of “the radio star” with their hit song “Video killed the radio star”. The age of MTV had arrived with a big bang. Music became “video music” or "music video". The prevailing zeitgeist was that it, or at least popular music, was no longer an aural-only experience but also visual, or more visual than aural. Arguably, like the modern waves of fashionable theories, discoveries and inventions spreading like jungle fire in other fields of life that were fast coarsening ethical and aesthetic sensibilities, dulling intelligence and killing imagination, or simply rapidly infantilizing the thinking and feeling habits of many people then, a phenomenon known as "dumbing down"---for example, first only children but later adults too were no longer able to find text-only books interesting, they got “bored” easily and quickly and started demanding books with more visuals, with more pictures and illustrations, to which the publishing market responded positively with books, including textbooks, carrying pictures on almost every page--- the new format music videos were doing the same with until-then a purely sonoral and aural art form of music. "MTV is to music as KFC is to chicken!" as someone snapped then (Lewis Black??). 

Now, some may think that when the MTV/video revolution arrived, the cassette tape disappeared. Not really. It is true that some of the iconic music centers of Quetta closed shutters and vanished into history, but many of them diversified and started selling VHS tapes and movies as well. I have already cited the example of Sangeet Palace. In such cases, “music center” gradually but surely morphed into a business that mostly rented out pirated Bollywood and Hollywood movies, first on Sony Betamax and then exclusively on VHS tapes. However, the cassette tape was still very much there. I think what really killed the cassette tapes, the unique sound of music on them, and the equally distinct sub-culture that had formed around them over the decades, was the compact disc, or the CD. This new technology changed the game entirely. It literally did “kill” the tape and that had profound implications, not just for the singers and performers but also, and especially for the fans, the millions of music lovers. After all, as the guru himself, the great Canadian media critic and sociologist/philosopher Marshall McLuhan, has said: “The medium IS the message” or “It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.” Change the framework, the worldview, the way we see, understand and feel things, and you change the very nature of whatever is captured in that frame. The gullible souls---totally ideologized, thoroughly conditioned, completely bamboozled----of course, will keep on babbling the manufactured mythologies and falsities that come neatly packaged with every new gadget and technology nowadays, inanities like, "It depends on how one uses it". No, it doesn't: An AK47 machine gun is not a screw driver just like a B-52 bomber is not a bicycle. But this point for another post in the future.

Try buying a cassette tape from any of the “music centers” of Quetta today, if they are still around, that is. They will probably think you are a Rip Van Winkle, a mad man, a crazy woman. The current generation, now known as the iGen, has never seen a real cassette tape, let alone used one. For them, both the medium and the message have shifted radically and there is no way to make them understand what the cassette tape once was, what it actually meant to a whole lot of people in a place like Quetta.

For more on similar topics, please click:

Bumper Stickers, On Solitude

The Rental Libraries of Quetta

First Post: Welcome to the Blog

Regal Cinema Quetta

The Battle of the Kawasakis

Harf e Dervaish (Urdu)

St. Francis Grammar High, Qta

Overqualified and Underqualified in Quetta

Bumper Stickers

 

Contemporary Pakistan through bumper stickers

"We  can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when adults are afraid of the light."   

Plato, circa 400 B.C.
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Pakistan is a South Asian country in the Middle East. It has four provinces whose names are as follows: Punjab.

The divine Plato once said that in a sane and humane republic either the philosophers will have to become politicians, or the politicians will have to become philosophers. In Pakistan, both the philosophers and the politicians compete with one another to become the favored janitors of The Vampires (of The System).

In other countries, political parties publish manifestoes before elections. In Pakistan, political parties publish biryani menus!

The fate of 220 million Pakistanis always hangs on sneakily recorded audios and especially videos of what their criminal ruling classes---the generals, judges, journalists and all the other jokers that make up the country’s perennially racketeering and totally depraved stratum----do with their reproductive organs.

Pakistan is once again teetering on the edge of crisis, and even collapse this time around, because a general or a judge was secretly recorded in the middle of an S&M like act probably with a Lollywood, a Coke Studio, or a TikTok wench.

Dear Pakistanis: The Vampires exist and continue to suck your blood dry because you are all afraid all the time. It's FEAR, your FEAR that gives the booted bloodsuckers strength and confidence. Shatter the hoary myth, end the violent farce, and get rid of this artificially constructed and cunningly instilled FEAR once and for all. "Those who don't move do not notice their chains" as Red Emma (Luxemburg) once said.

To the biryani-bribed and PSL-drugged awam: Only when you move you will realize that you have been tied down in khaki shackles all these seven decades. So, switch off the idiot box and Coke Studio, get off TikTok and Instagram, move your lazy and afraid asses, and redeem yourselves once and for all!

To the ugly, rotten maskharas (clowns) who insist that all must "respect the institutions” ("ادارے کا احترام کریں"), we say what the great and wise Spanish hakim Baltasar Gracian said four hundred years ago: “Those who insist on the dignity of their office show they have not deserved it.”

Don’t respect “the institution”: Criticize it, ridicule it! It is not, has never been, an institution at all but the ugliest euphemism for The System of The Vampires. Destroy it, only to save the country, to save yourselves. After all, there is such a thing called constructive demolition or "creative destruction". (after Joseph Schumpeter)

“All propaganda is lies, even when it is telling the truth.” George Orwell

To young Pakistanis: REMEMBER what they tell you to forget, and FORGET what they tell you to remember.

PTI "Long March" and what will/can happen:

The Vampires of The System clearly know, and they have always openly said and showed with their brutal acts that the rest of the people of the occupied regions of Pakistan, places euphemistically called the "provinces", do not really matter. As long as the people of Punjab are their criminal accomplices, their partners in, and the beneficiaries of, their crimes, however trivial those benefits are, they have no fear. And FEAR is with which The Vampires, the booted bloodsuckers, always maintain and consolidate their deadly hold on The System. Yes, FEAR. Until now, Punjab has never disappointed them and its clearly culpable people have always justified their crimes against everybody else, against the Bengalis, the Sindhis and the Balochis and everybody else. That is why the burden of delivering Pakistan is now squarely on the shoulders of Punjab and on the shoulders of the people of that only province that matters. Will they once again sell their mothers and sisters for a few dollars? Will they again opt for biryani, or will they for once listen to the voice of their conscience? Will they finally redeem themselves and deliver the country or not? All of that remain to be seen.

To young Balochistanis, or the people of the peripheries: Never listen to a single word of whatever they (the Center) say to you especially in the way of promises, but just look them squarely and intently in the eyes. Just look them in the eyes, never listen and never say a word, either.

There is no hope of real change for the awam in Pakistan, Insaf Khan or no Insaf Khan, as long as there is PSL and as long as there is Coke Studio.

Social Media in Pakistan: fighting EVIL with evil. But everywhere else, it is fighting evil with EVIL.

“I don’t know anything about good and evil, about right and wrong. In my line of work you don’t have to.”     A Pakistani politician

“Make them afraid. Make them very, very afraid. Instill fear in their hearts and minds. Tell them, tell them repeatedly, day and night, all year round, that the enemy is inches away from devouring us. The bogeyman---the Indian, the Yehudi, the Hindu, the Afghani---is absolutely necessary. Ridicule the naysayers, torture them, strip them naked and record their videos, abuse them with dirty slogans and especially with words like “traitor”, “separatist” and “terrorist”, blackmail the critics, disappear and kill the awake and the protesting ones. Only then we can have and keep our fauji cereals, our golf courses, our officers messes, our cantonments, and our DHAs.”          The Vampires of The System

Taken from the Pakistani Animal Farm manifesto (with apologies to the great man, George Orwell):

“All the 220 million animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

A newly minted atheist in Pakistan says, “When I told my people that I did not believe in God, a young, bearded man in the audience stood up and inquired, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Sunnis or the God of the Shias in whom you don’t believe?’”
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You want real---REAL---change in Pakistan, REAL Naya Pakistan? Yes? Then do the following:

1. Create more provinces---increase from the present  one (1) province to up to at least 25 provinces; (Japan is half the size of Pakistan, both in area and in population, and it has 47 provinces)

2. Cut down the size of the khaki bloodsuckers---The Vampires---to 1/5th of their current size; (a quarter of Pakistani children who are malnourished have stunted growth and have zero access to education and health services. They have been watering the lavish golf courses and have been sustaining all sorts of subsidized debaucheries at the thousands of officers’ messes spread all over the country with their blood for too long. This must stop. Period.)

3. End the artificially constructed and fraudulently sustained belligerency which only benefit the many mafias of the land at the expense of the people. Improve relations and trade with neighbors and regional countries;

4. Make local, regional trade and defense blocks; (Understand, and especially make the hoi polloi understand, that The Universal White Imperialists want and create EU, NATO, NAFTA for themselves, but promote and sponsor bloody balkanization through “color revolutions” in the rest of the world)

5. Pay the police more than The Vampires---overall the whole civilian legal system, improve recruitment and training standards, increase their authority, update their equipment;

6. Nationalize all DHAs and the entire commercial empire of The Vampires---ban fauji cereals;

7. Abolish the old racist, colonial special quarters, the ugly apartheid enclaves euphemistically referred to as “cantonments”;

8. Move the capital from Islamabad to Khuzdar, or Loralai, for at least 10 years (AA)*;

9. Amend the constitution so that the chief vampire and the chief hathora walla will never again be from Punjab (AA)*;

10. Ban cricket---for at least ten years; (only then Pakistan will start winning Olympic medals in other sports) (AA)*

Continued…more to come

*AA = Affirmative Action

For more, please click: The Vampires of The System

The System

The Hollow Men

Harf e Dervaish (Urdu)

Illuminations #5

Harf e Dervaish #7 (Urdu)

The American

Quetta: Hazara Ethnic Cleansing

Propaganda and Language

Overqualified and underqualified in Balochistan

Yaadish Bakhair: Zari Gul

Zari Gul of Spinzer Beauty, Liaquat Market, Quetta

Yaadish Bakhair: Zari Gul

"People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within." 

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

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One of my better childhood memories of growing up in Quetta is of Eid days. While it meant all those things that usually excite a child on these two traditional Muslim occasions celebrated across the Islamic world twice a year---new clothes, new shoes, Eidi money from elders, going to the fairgrounds with friends, eating specially prepared food and all---it was also associated with some faces, the faces of much loved people many of whom are no longer with us. This post is about one such person whose presence in my life is not just limited to the two Eid festivals, but it is impossible to think of Eid without thinking of Zari Gul.

Zari Gul was a good friend of my father's. He was not just a friend. In fact, he was more like a brother to him and a dear uncle to all us kids. He belonged to an old Ghilzai Pashtun family of Quetta. A few years older than my father, their friendship stretched way back before I was even born, at least six decades old. The eldest brother of three, he was a well-known businessman and socialite in the city with his main office, or shop, situated in the city’s old Liaquat Market. Called Spinzer Beauty, it started as an electronics store, one of the oldest in the city ---the first double-sized store on the right hand side as we enter the market from the main Liaquat Bazaar--- but over the years it became a kind of headquarter for all his commercial and social, and sometimes political, undertakings.

My father tells me that they first met in the early 1960s. My father used to run a wholesale business dealing with grains, sugar, open tea leaves and ghee in Qandhari Bazaar. It was called Shirkat e Biradaraan (brothers). It all started then. Over the years, they became not only good business partners in the many business projects they ran together, from clothes and crockery (dinner sets) to dried nuts and food grains, from electronics and car showrooms to big government contracts, but they also became very good friends. Zari Gul, always meticulously dressed with his fine wool Karakul cap and glittering, bulky Seiko 5 and Rado watches, was then a small trader in goods that were mostly brought into the city from Iran and Afghanistan and sold in the small arcade style Quetta markets of which Liaquat Market was one of the oldest and the largest. In the beginning, he had his shop near the old fire brigade, off main Liaquat Bazaar. Then he used to deal in cloth, especially the Iranian synthetic mixed fabric popularly known as “summer” in those days. This particular fabric was known for its all-weather toughness and ease of maintenance when it came to washing and ironing. It was very popular in Punjab and Sindh.

One of the first lots of this fabric was introduced in Quetta by some friends of my father who were Anglo-Indians. Many of the Anglo-Indians---Tony and Andrew were the most well-known in the city and with whom my father had gone to school, as had many other Quettawaal then----were mostly employed by the provincial police department in those days, particularly by its traffic branch. It was either Tony or Andrew who was then stationed in Dalbandin and who brought the first big load of “summer” to my father and asked him to store it in one of his godowns. These godowns were located on a backstreet of Qandhari Bazaar, around the old chakla. I think they were either on Alibhoy Street or on Thana Road. To digress a bit, those godowns my father had bought at a discounted price from none other than Jamshed Marker. But that story for another day.

My father often recalls this episode of the Iranian “summer” fabric and his meeting with Zari Gul with much relish and he never tires of telling it to us. This is how he often tells it,

“One bright sunny day in summer, Tony arrived in his old jeepster at the Qandhari Bazaar shop and took out a 30-yard bolt (a ‘taan’ in the vernacular) of the Iranian fabric. He said he had truckloads of the stuff. He was not sure what to do with it, not sure if anyone would be interested in buying the stuff. I was also unsure but I took all the fabric and dumped it in the godown. Tony disappeared and almost a month passed. One day, Haji Taj Muhammad, who was also one of the tea merchants in the city, and a neighbor, came to me. I showed him the fabric and asked him if anyone would be interested. He promptly said ‘Zari Gul. Give it to him’. And that is how I met Zari Gul for the first time.”

The Iranian ‘summer’ became a cause and catalyst for the start of a beautiful relationship that would last many, many Quetta summers, would continue and grow in strength for more than six decades.

Zari Gul was a big fan of cinema, especially of the old western and action movies that were regular fare at the iconic but now defunct Regal Cinema in those years. My father tells me that for more than 15 years Zari Gul would buy four tickets for his three friends and himself for every new movie, and that often meant once a week. The four were, my father, Noor Muhammad Sarraf, the Lehri sajji wala (Aslam?? his name escapes him now) and Zari Gul. He would take us kids to the movies as well. I watched many memorable movies with him and my father, movies with such Hollywood luminaries of the day in them: Jack Palance, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Gary Cooper, Sean Connery, Paul Newman, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, James Dean, Yul Bryner, Charles Bronson, to name a few.

Bibi Nani, Bolan.
Zari Gul (second from left), my father. Rozie second from right.

Zari Gul, alongwith Dr. Afzal Butt, Ghulam Hussain, Safar Ali and Gullai and sometimes others like Rozie (Zari Gul’s relative and also a good friend of my father’s) and Noor Muhammad were regular guests at our house on Eid days. For my father, Eid meant visiting the graveyard, offering fatiha early in the morning and then spending the rest of the day with his friends. For us kids also Eid was incomplete without Zari Gul's visit. They, the friends, would visit our house just before lunch and would stay till late in the evening, often watching Hollywood movies and sometimes playing cards or just chatting and joking while sipping tea. A very social creature, Zari Gul also loved good food and good company, just as he loved fine clothes and expensive watches, very unlike my father who still does not care much for what he wears and eats. His special request was always for the salty mutton dish (namkeen gosht cooked in salt and black pepper or in garam masala only) that my mother used to make for them. That particular dish would always be placed in front of him and he would do the honors of serving it to others. I remember this clearly because I was the one who would usually do the running back and forth, from the kitchen to the guest room, or to the mehmaan khana, first serving the dishes and then clearing the dastar khwan.

Zari Gul (wedding ??)

After I left Quetta, Zari Gul and friends continued with the tradition of the Eid day gathering at our place, but over time, especially when some in the group passed away and when the many vicissitudes of life started taking their toll on others, the gatherings became less regular with fewer and fewer members. I would make sure to visit him whenever I was in Quetta, but every time I met him and witnessed the same Zari Gul with his warm and smiling face, I also sensed in him a kind of aloofness or, to use a better word, an unease or even anxiety that seemed to be always growing and eating him from inside. I knew some of the causes for that state of distress which mostly had to do with the many business projects--- especially in real estate and construction--- he had got himself involved in. This information mostly came to me from my father and his other friends, but because I had moved away from Quetta and was not in touch with him on a regular basis like in the old days, I was not privy to the whole problem. Things went downhill for him from thereon.

Zari Gul with friends.

Sometime later, after my last meeting with him during his difficult and anxiety-laden years, the news of his death reached me through my father. He did not use so many words, but just said to me, "Zari Gul is gone!" and then went quiet. And I knew very well then what that silence meant. We both knew, he more than I. In that sad silence were buried more than five decades of friendship, many years of brotherly and fatherly love, of caring and generosity, of innocence, loyalty, simplicity and sincerity that were the traditional values embodied by not only men like Zari Gul, but they represented and meant old Quetta itself. They were values and virtues that cut across all barriers of language, ethnicity, religion or sect. The ugly, dividing walls, the rigid fences of bigotry, that have now been erected with the bricks of distortions and the mortar of hypocrisy did not exist then. These are the pathological distortions and corruption of all that once was true, good and beautiful in old Quetta.

Eid day comes every year and I usually make the salty--peppery mutton dish for my family, for my wife and daughters. As we sit to eat, I silently recall the old days in Quetta, the gathering of my father’s friends at our house, the cooking and the eating, the B-grade western and action movies on the Panasonic VCR, the black and green tea, the bandaar and loud laughter of men coming from the guest room and, above all, the happy face of Zari Gul enjoying his favorite dish with his good friends on Eid day. I whisper his name and smile as I chew on the salty meat.

Yaadish Bakhair. Khuda Biyamurza marhoom Zari Gul ra.

For more, please click:

A Lament, On Solitude

Regal Cinema, Quetta

Quetta, City of Karezes

Harf e Dervaish (Urdu)

Quetta: the cars

First post

Illuminations 3

Overqualified and underqualified in Balochistan

Overqualified and underqualified in Balochistan

"To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgement, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine."     

Zygmunt Bauman

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"So, tell me, did you also end up here as yet another escapee--- migrant, immigrant, refugee, asylum seeker, whatever---escaping Hazara ethnic cleansing in Quetta?", asked a curious Canadian friend, himself a Romanian emigre. "No, not really", I replied. "I did not leave because of the state-sponsored pogroms of Hazaras. I left because of something more mundane. I left because I was declared "overqualified" by a few inept and under-qualified pygmies who happened to be sitting in judgment on me and specially on my professional skills and educational qualification."

To provide some context. After graduating from the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, as an Agricultural Engineer, I joined the provincial Department of Agriculture (Balochistan) and soon went on study leave for further studies, to do my M.Phil in Water Resources Management at the Center of Excellence in Water Resources Engineering (CEWRE), University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. CEWRE was a premiere institute in the field of hydrological sciences and water resource engineering in the country and one of its kind then.  It took me three years of back breaking work in the field collecting hard data, talking to and probing different stakeholders, and intellectually draining work, spending hours and hours, days upon days upon sleepless nights inside simulation labs measuring, re-measuring, calibrating hydrological equipment and in computer labs coding complex computer codes for the simulation model that I finally developed. My focus was on the conjunctive use of water in arid areas where water is scarce and, therefore, precious. In addition to other features, my simulation model, coded in FORTRAN 77, simulated mixed use of ground and surface water for different crops. Conjunctive use models were then a kind of cure-all panacea for arid regions with agricultural potential, places like Balochistan. The results from different parts of the world, from arid Africa and Asia, had been, until then, very encouraging. Things may have moved on to other technologies since.

To cut it short, I was awarded my M.Phil degree in 1992-3. My dissertation was approved by my supervisory committee which included an American expert in the field who was well respected and widely published. Thesis in hand, I returned to Quetta and resumed work as Agriculture Officer, first stationed at Sibi and then at the main directorate on Sariab Road in Quetta.

If I am not wrong, it was either late 1995, or early 1996. My former supervisor from the Center of Excellence in Water Resources Engineering (CEWRE), University of Technology and Engineering (UET) Lahore had just visited Quetta.He had come to Quetta either to inaugurate a water resource project in the province or to offer his expertise to the then newly established Bureau of Water Resources inside the Irrigation Department of Balochistan. (I will simply refer to it as "the Bureau" in the balance of this blogpost)

Soon after its establishment, the Bureau started looking for qualified, relevant, or technical, people to work there. It was headed by one Mian Bashir.  From what I recall, he was a short man with curly hair and nervous, calculating, even shifty, eyes---a busy body, an ambitious but ambiguous character, in short. I never found out his real qualification, but I think he was some sort of a technical hand with background either in engineering or management sciences. One thing was sure: he was an outsider in the province, brought in from somewhere in Punjab. This was not an anomaly in Balochistan, not at least then. Many of the provinces' technical personnel, including bureaucrats, were often imported from Punjab, the most famous, and closer to my context, being the then Director General of Agriculture (DGA), the pompous and pompously named Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali Khan.

The Bureau advertised a senior engineer's position for which I applied right away, and did so with much interest and enthusiasm, confident that I would be a suitable, if not the most suitable, candidate for the position. The same enthusiasm was shown my by supervisor at CEWRE who also thought that I was the most suitable person for the job. Both of us knew, and so did Mian Bashir and others at the Bureau, that there were not many, if anyone at all, with that kind of qualification and research background in the province. I was, after all, the first person from the province to have had graduated from CEWRE with a postgraduate degree in the relevant field of water resources management. But most of all, it was my research work---conjunctive use of water in arid regions---- that made me a suitable candidate. My agricultural engineering background and several years of work experience were additional points that boosted my profile on my resume. So, it was with all that enthusiasm and confidence that I first awaited, and then finally appeared in, the interview for the SE (PBS 18) position.  

The panel of interviewers consisted of four members, three of which I clearly remember and will mention here. It was headed by the then provincial Senior Minister and Minister for Planning and Development Department, or P&D as they say in Pakistan, Mr. Jam Yusuf. The other member was the Minister for Irrigation Department (of which the Bureau was a section) Mr. Hamid Khan Achakzai. The third member of the panel was Mr. (Mian) Bashir, the technical member and also provisional head of the Bureau then. I think there were not many applicants given the novelty and highly technical nature of the position and the dearth of professionals with the required credentials. So, it was expected that the interviews would be done in few hours. I was soon ushered into the room on that day of judgment!

After we were done with the few formalities---name, address, bio-data check etc.--- the Senior Minister and Minister for Planning and Development, Jam Yusuf, who was sitting across the table from me and next to the Minister for Irrigation, Hamid Khan, asked to have a look at my M.Phil dissertation. I had my credentials binder and a copy of my hard bound thesis with me, placed in front of me on the table. I handed him the heavy tome, all 500 pages of it held securely between two solid covers. It had costed me an arm and a leg to get five copies of the work bound from one of the best binders in Lahore, the city of colleges and universities. He then did something that I will never forget for the rest of my life. In fact, I am actually writing this whole post here just to record that one act of this sorry individual, Mr. Senior Minister.

This man assessed three years of my hard intellectual and physical labor the way a village bumpkin tests a watermelon before he makes his mind whether to purchase it or to move on to the next one. He took and lifted the report and eyed it from all the possible angles, a 360 degree check, and finally after knocking his stubby and hairy knuckles on both the spine and the front cover of the thesis, he placed it on the table, midway between us. I think he did not sniff it. About that I am sure. But I guess sniffing is not needed in the case of watermelons as it is in the case of musk melons (kharbooza). He did not once lift the front cover, perhaps making sure not to give anyone a scintilla of evidence to accuse him of having at least read the extra large sized title written in gold on the navy blue front cover. There was silence, deep silence in the luxuriously wood paneled room and I was not sure what was going on. All four pairs of eyes were on me. I remained seated and calm, expecting that the other members would then have a look at the thesis, perhaps in a different and more conventional manner, which would then be followed by the inevitable grilling session. 

No such thing happened. Nobody after that touched the thesis as if it was something radioactive, something toxic that would burn the fingers of anyone who dared to touch it. The Senior Minister and Minister for P&D, Government of Balochistan, that useless load of flesh and fat, the sublimely slimy, jelly-like Jam of Lasbela, then opened his mouth and uttered his three ugly, cruel and heart-breaking sentences that have remained with me all these years, still clear and fresh even today: "Your work is nice. You have written a good thesis. But we are sorry, you are overqualified for this position." No sooner had he said it than a laughter erupted in the room. The three among the panelist roaring like mad men, more like mad dogs, wild jungle beasts, and Mian Bashir doing things with his eyes and body that was equally, if not more, disturbing. His eyes----those nervous, shifty eyes set on this small face----quickly moved from yours truly to the others and his hands and face twitching uncontrollably, belying the grin, that already unsure grin, on his face and that clearly lacked the arrogant confidence of the loud roar of the other three, the three "locals" of the land. But God knows what it really was, his confused expressions and gestures, even if I have tried to interpret it here. The laughter stopped and all eyes were once again on me. Expressionless, I looked at the thesis on the huge oval table and switched my gaze up at the panel, all four of them, calmly gliding it from left to right. I gently pushed the chair back, stood up and picked the thesis and my binder. Once again I looked at all four of them, fixing my eyes for a few seconds longer on the Jedi of Lasbela who, sprawled sloppily on the sumptuous armchair, resembled the freshly dumped entrails of a  butchered cow, and then walked out of the room which was then once again engulfed in silence.

What happened after that is rather blurry in my mind, and not important here. I learned, perhaps from the Mian, that they hired a University of Balochistan graduate with specialization in Chemistry, or maybe it was in Islamiat?? The lucky guy was an Achakzai, if I am recalling correctly, some relative or clansman of the Minister for Irrigation, Hamid Khan Achakzai. The whole thing had already been decided and the hiring and interview process etc. were a vile charade.

Now, in telling this story I want to emphasize that there is nothing unique or exceptional about it. It's the norm in that place, in a sense. These degrading farces organized, produced, directed and conducted by little men and women devoid of any intellectual, moral and ethical conscience, human-faced monsters with zero integrity and zero basic human decency, happen on a daily basis in that part of the world. They have been happening for decades now and the way things are, will keep on happening for God knows how many more decades. If there are any characteristics that define the province's and country's ruling classes, khaki as well as civilian------ their presiding "virtues", since The System is totally inverted, a system of Kali Yuga where the Shudras have usurped the role of the Brahmins----- they are the following: mediocrity, incompetence, nepotism, avarice and cowardice. If I were asked to qualify the evil I witnessed on that day with only one of these mentioned characteristics, I would definitely choose the last: cowards. I was in the presence of four cowards on that day.  

Those who have been writing about "brain-drain" from the "underdeveloped" South for years now are to a great extent justified in their analyses and arguments. The reasons and justifications are varied and very complex, to be sure, but there is no denying that many leave because they have given up or lost any and all hope in The System that is their country. On that very day when I was declared "overqualified" by a bunch of incompetent maskharas masquerading as state ministers and high ranking bureaucrats, I made up my mind about doing everything that was in my power to leave the country for good. I had lost hope. Had lost it completely. But that loss became fodder for something bigger, for a bigger fire within.  A year later, I was in Australia on an international scholarship doing my new Masters in Environmental Studies. From Australia, I went on to the UK and onwards to Canada for further education and work...

In 1996, a repugnant clique of Balochistan Government officials, four cowards intoxicated with transient power (for us mortals in this ephemeral world, is there any other kind?), arrogantly and unjustly rejected me because I was "overqualified" for a senior engineer's position; I rejected them because they were under-qualified, not only as referees and selectors, but more importantly, as human beings lacking basic human virtues of decency, integrity and courage. 

For more, please click on the link below:

A Lament for Quetta, Harf e Dervaish#1 (Urdu)

Quetta: A City of Karezes

Harf-e-Dervaish (Urdu)

Illuminations 5

Quetta Chawni (Cantonment, or Quetta Cantt.): Then and now

 Quetta Chawni (Cantonment, or Quetta Cantt.): Then and now

"All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." 

                                Herman Goering, Hitler's minister of propaganda

"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities."  

                                                                                         Alan Bloom

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It is early evening in late October, just before sunset when the shadows grow longer by the minute under the azure Quetta sky. The air is crisp, soon to turn even crispier, drier and colder with the approach of the night. The perennially dusty streets are littered with shriveled, reddish-brown leaves that are blown around, often in circles, by the gently whistling autumn winds. I look up at the exquisite, cloudless sky, trying to imbibe the vast, serene expanse of that ocean above with all my senses, and utter something that seem to gush from some secret crevice of my consciousness, the meaning of which is lost to me and to my companions standing next to me. “What? Did you say something?” one of them asks me. “Did I? Maybe, I did---I don’t know” I respond without taking my eyes off the blue heavens above us. Having lived in several countries on three continents, I can claim with some certainty that nowhere I have seen autumn skies as beautiful as in Quetta. But I guess this is just the prejudice of an exiled and nostalgic Quettawaal. We are all waiting in front of our friend Daud’s house for him to come out so that we can embark on our long evening walk to Chiltan Market in Quetta Chawni (Cantt.). As we wait, Daud’s father walks out of the door, smiles at us, and quietly informs us that his son will be out soon. A religious man with a long beard, he waves at us, and then walks in the direction of the local masjid (mosque) to offer his maghrib prayer. Minutes later, Daud appears. He joins us and we start our walk.

On most days, there would be the four of us on these all-season evening walks: Mehdi, Jabbar, Daud and yours truly. Sometimes a friend of Mehdi’s or of Daud’s would join us, too. We would start from Daud’s house, off Toghi Road, next to the Tel Gudam area, and walk some 5 to 6kms to Chiltan Market and back. Sometimes we would take the Jinnah Ground route, walk past the TV station building, turn right at the corner across the spacious compound that housed the huge pinkish and white communication tower, walk all the way to the roundabout over which loomed the giant concrete National Bank building, turn left and onward to Chiltan Market tea houses. At other times, we would take the uncomplicated route, via the beautiful, tree-lined Gulistan Road, turn left at the end of that long road and then all the way to the same National Bank roundabout. I enjoyed the autumn walks the best, something that I still do in the small town where I live now far, far away from Quetta.

Chiltan Market, Quetta Chawni

But more than the walk itself, or at least equally interesting and enjoyable as the walk, were our discussions en route to and at the chai shop where we would sip the steaming hot, sugary beverage as we indulged in arguments about subjects ranging from the strictly philosophical (existence of God and the truth of other religions!), to trivia such as Bollywood actors and singers. No matter what the topic, there was always enough disagreement to ensure that the discussions remained lively and generated as much heat as light. We would usually sit outside in the open area behind the old, concrete building of the market. The tea shops were in the rear and in the evening the place would be abuzz, the cheap plastic chairs fully occupied most of the evenings by people like us: civilians who had either driven or walked from different parts of the city to this popular spot in Quetta Cantt.

Except for Jabbar, the three of us would engage in long discussions, often without any meaningful resolutions and which would sometimes continue for days and weeks. Jabbar, because he was the youngest, and temperamentally a bit taciturn---- still a university student at that time----would intermittently jump in and ask something. His often irrelevant, and at times naïve, interruptions, however, had a wisdom-like function of their own: they would become necessary reminders to us that we needed to come to our senses, that we had gone off-track, or that we had transgressed the norms of civilized discussion and debate. Now that I think about it, perhaps they were moments when “the child is the father of man” as Wordsworth has aptly said. Or, perhaps they were even instances when what we usually look down upon as the pathologies of irrationality prove superior to the pathologies of rationality, rationality being something that we---the “educated”, grown up ones--- value and cherish so much that we often become blind to its partial and passionate nature. Modernity places this faculty of ratiocination above all else within man whereas traditional cultures have always considered it part of the passionate soul, as part of an inner hierarchy and below what the ancient Greeks called nous, and other (religious) traditions, Intellect or Spirit of which 'the heart' is the seat, hence the Arabic ayn al qalb, the Persian chashm e dil and the Sanskrit third eye. "The heart has reasons that the reason knows not of" as Blaise Pascal has reminded us.

A digression, but, oh, how I miss those days!

Gulistan Road, Quetta Chawni

That was then. Things are very different now. Quetta Chawni, as we knew it then----the location of so many of our best memories, from the weekend visits to, and swimming in, the famous Hanna Lake, picnics with family and friends in the cool Urak Valley and Wali Tangi, the bicycle races to Spin Karez, the motorcycle trips to Digari to eat the famous truck-driver tarka daal, and the long jogs and walks-----is no longer accessible, or not in the way it used to be, at least not to those of us who belong to that odd colonial category of mortal beings known as “civilians” in the godforsaken country of Pakistan. This often pejorative term, “civilian”, or its more civilized and politer version, “bloody civilian”, when used by a certain uniformed, booted usurper class gains more in crudity and ugliness in a brutalized and brutally neglected corner of the country, such as the city of Quetta in the internally-colonized province of Balochistan. On my recent visit to Quetta, I tried the impossible task of re-living those rather innocent bits of the past, for memory’s sake, for the good old times' and good old friends' sake. I soon found out the futility, if not the outright stupidity, of my intention of strolling over to Jinnah Ground in the Chawni area.

Pani Taqseem, Quetta Cantt.

Now, as soon as you walk off the Ajab Khan Pul (bridge), as we used to call the bridge that marks the boundary between the civilian and the military areas, you get stopped by a bunch of six-plus-feet tall uniformed men who demand from you, in addition to your usual IDs, four or five different kinds of “entry passes” before they allow you to cross the line that separates the two species of Pakistanis: the civilians and the wardi wallas, or the Chawni people. “But I live here, my forefathers, ancestors have lived and died here, have lived here for many generations, grew up here and this is our public area, our town, our land. Why do I need a pass just for an evening stroll?”, I protest naively. “Saab ka order hai” or “Ooper sei order hai, paas dikao” comes the dry, monotonous, machine-gun-like reply in a dialect that is an insult to both proper Urdu and Punjabi. Clearly, arguing with them is useless, even dangerous. After all, these brutalized, thoroughly dehumanized, deprogramed and then re-programmed, unfeeling automatons in uniform and boots are just doing their “job”, following their SOPs, as the jargon goes. They have “orders from above”. And it is that “above” that decides who can enter and who cannot, or who can enter with what kind of entry pass or parchi.

In some of my posts here on this blog site I have talked about glittering generalities, those sacred cows---words, expressions, concepts or categories of knowledge---that compartmentalize and colonize our imagination. They imprison us with narrow, suffocating intellectual categories that kill meaningful conversations, halt critical questioning, marginalize alternative worldviews, criminalize dissent, and which are often deployed as masks by hypocritical wielders of power against the powerless and the marginalized. Whether they deliver the goods that they claim to deliver is not the concern here; what we need to understand is that what else is carried out in their name. The political psychologist and cultural critic Ashis Nandy has argued that, "Today, the really powerful and the truly dangerous are those who justify themselves in the name of science, rationality, universality, equality, democracy and other such lofty Enlightenment values."

One such potent glittering generality is the term “security”, a convenient shorthand term used frequently these days for all sorts of nefarious and criminal ends. Like its siblings----development, progress, democracy, care, hope, humanitarian, sustainable, terrorism, social justice, stakeholder, community, empowerment, liberty and so on----security is now the demagogues’ word of choice the world over. For example, in the western world, but especially in the USA of post 9-11, this dumbing generality has been the most important justification, the raison de'tre, for the systematic erosion of civil liberties, for invasion of privacy, for demonizing critical inquiry and dissent, for the institutionalization of a pervasive and perverse system of surveillance that extends to peoples’ bedrooms and even toilets; in short, for the radical transfer of power from the people to the criminal oligarchies that lord over those lands and their peoples. Security is, first and foremost, about anxiety and fear. Fear, after all, is an effective tool: invent a hobgoblin, a boogeyman---the menacing other, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Yehudi, the barbarian at the gates---parade and analyze its evil nature ad nauseum on the mass media through obscene talking heads, all those rented anchors and hired pens that one critic has called "the presstitudes", make people afraid and then you can do anything you want to do to them. The more afraid they are, the easier it will be to manipulate them. Fear provides the most effective justification for silencing dissent and for oppression. Fear causes confusion and disorientation and nobody is more susceptible to control than a disoriented person. It is the oppressor demagogues’ favorite tool in his or her arsenal of control and domination.

Quetta Club, Quetta Chawni

It is in this context that one needs to understand what has happened, and is still happening, in certain areas of Pakistan, as well, and especially in a place like Quetta, Balochistan. In fact, in Pakistan as a whole, this one particular glittering generality---security---has been the epistemic category or methodological narrative framework of choice for the powers-that-be for more than six decades. The ruling classes, the masters of the country who have kept their deadly grip on the levers of power like a giant killer squid either directly or indirectly through their front men and women----those cowardly and opportunist puppets who always sell their souls and do Faustian deals with the most powerful or highest bidder----have perennially used “security” or “national security” as the main justification for the oppressive status quo and, therefore, for their illegitimate political experiments and adventures.

A relevant and close to home example of this “security”, “parchi” and “entry pass" culture is on display in Gwadar. As it gets fenced, gated and “secured” (secured for whom, from whom, one might ask?), the poor fishermen of Gwadar and surrounding areas, who have been fishing in the Arabian Sea for hundreds, if not thousands, of years now have to beg some low ranking, semi-literate sentry from Sahiwal, Sialkot, Cheecha Watani or Jehlum for a “parchi” so that they can do, even on a very limited basis, what they have been doing for ages freely, without any restrictions. This is, we are told once again, “development” for them----Chinese style, this time around! But it is already obvious, to those who have eyes to see, who is getting developed at whose expense. No multi-million dollar pizza franchises in western metropolises, no plots and luxury SUVs, no advisory and consultancy portfolios in high corridors of power for the locals of Gwadar, but more systematic marginalization, mini-genocides, violent exclusion from their own ancestral lands and resources.

Gwadar and "development"

One word: “development…a debauched word, a whore of a word whose users can’t look you in the eye” as Leonard Frank once wrote.

These excluded "stakeholders" of peripheral regions like Gwadar are lectured with the toxic rhetoric of "care", "empowerment", "charity" and even "social justice", and who "struggle towards their graves...listening to the lofty verbiage promising poverty alleviation, the right to work, development, progress, human rights and democracy...development has claimed more lives than outright war or race-based genocides in the twentieth century", say Ashis Nandy and Vinay Lal. The historian and cultural critic Vinay Lal has argued that, "Modern, largely invisible, holocausts are being perpetrated on significant sections of the world's population....there is every possibility that the twenty-first century might be richer still in other, hitherto still invisible, holocausts. Nothing furnishes more vivid illustrations of this argument than the idea of 'development', which remains indubitably the clearest example of genocidal violence perpetrated by modern knowledge systems on the integrity of human communities. The saga of Soviet terror originated in the brutal collectivization of Russian agriculture and in the impulse to industrialize rapidly, and consequently increase productivity, by the use of forced labour. Millions of deaths were achieved, not by superior forms of armament, but by coolly and rationally conceiving of these deaths as the necessary price to pay for development. In a similar vein is the Chinese Communist Party's heartless embrace of ruinous economic policies, the attempt by political functionaries to make the subjects of the state partake in the Great Leap Forward, and the consequence of this extreme folly: 25 - 30 million people dead from starvation." (The concentration camp and development: The pasts and future of genocide, Vinay Lal, 2005.)

One needs to observe that the fruits of this new variety of “development” in Gwadar is being distributed in a rather brutally asymmetrical manner among the “stakeholders". Given its ugly, violently exploitative and Eurocentric history, especially in the non-white South in the latter half of the ”century of terror” (Eric Hobsbawm’s term) that ended some twenty years ago, to say that "development is genocide" (as many cultural critics and historians have argued) would not be an exaggeration. It is now a thoroughly discredited concept for authentic human well-being----to the point that it is even seen as a form of racism. (See, for example, The Development Dictionary ed. Wolfgang Sachs, The Post-Development Reader ed. Majid Rahnema/Victoria Bawtree and Encountering Development by Arturo Escobar, among many others)

My friend Sardar Kharkaftar of Helsinki (another exiled Quettawaal who now lives up-north in Finland and who also laments the sorry state of the city of his birth) says that “Quetta is now more like a war zone, like a huge concentration camp”. In his last email to me, after I wrote to him about my recent trip to Quetta and the story of “entry passes”, he wrote back the following, and with which I am going to end this meditation on Quetta Chawni:

Cantonments, DHAs and other gated communities in Pakistan

“We need to see through these pathological charades like development and security. We especially need to understand the sick political shows that are staged every few years in the name of "elections" by the real masters of the land. The problem, the crisis, is decades old, structural and systematic and no amount of cosmetic whitewashing will do. For any real, humane and long lasting change to take root in Pakistan, and especially in its internally colonized and plundered peripheral lands like Balochistan, first and foremost, the decadent and humiliating colonial culture of batman and bungalow, officers’ clubs/mess, golf courses and gymkhanas, of lucrative allotment of plots, of the apartheid-like townships called cantonments, DHAs and Bahria Towns and all the other gated colonies and exclusivist enclaves that create demeaning hierarchies and divisions in society, for example, those between the intellectually bamboozled, morally corrupt brown sahibs that make up the class----the criminal cabal, the oligarchic Lahore-Pindi Shudra mafia often referred to with the atrocious euphemism of “establishment"----and the “bloody civilians”, the rest of us, that is, all these will have to be completely abolished because they are insulting relics of a racialist, colonial past, a past with which there should have been a radical break in 1947 but which has survived and even thrived in different forms in contemporary (both old and naya) Pakistan. A real, dignified and just Pakistan will be a place where there will be real justice and the rule of law, or more relevantly here, a place where you and I, civilians and others alike, will not need a parchi or an entry pass from some lowly sentry, or semi-educated uniformed chowkidar, in order to fish in our ancestral waters, to till our ancestral lands and to just go for a stroll in the public spaces of our towns and cities”.

For more, click: The Hollow Men , The Picture , A Lament

Quetta: Hazara Ethnic Cleansing

Illuminations 5