The Guardians of The System

Hathora Mafia: The "guardians" of The EVIL System

The Guardians of The System

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (Who will guard the guardians?)

"Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort."                                                                          Bert Murray

"We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, the press destroys information, religious leaders destroy morals, and banks destroy the economy."                                                                     Chris Hedges

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The System (in Pakistan) continues to thrive. It has elevated its rogue ways into a rigorous science, even a form of high art. It manipulates, it lies and deceives in ways that would make Goebbels or a committed Pravda editor look like naïve pygmies, like befuddled simpletons, were they alive today. Cold and completely alien to things like responsibility, guilt and remorse, and conscience, it brazenly disappears, humiliates, tortures and murders, and when caught red-handed, claims innocence, "neutrality" and even infallibility.  Venal and depraved to its core, the vampires--the uniformed and booted bloodsuckers--are working hard and full time to maintain their seven-decade-old murderous grip on the anti-people status quo, on The Genocidal System. Politicians of all stripes and colors---the usual, inbred, low life crooks of the land---remain on their leash; the obscene presstitude—the media maskharas, the perennially for-sale soulless talking heads and chatting bots, that most decadent class of hustling shysters in contemporary Pakistan---never tire of vociferously cheerleading for them; the bureaucracy---that shape-shifting, self-loathing cabal of brown sahibs gifted to the land by their departing white masters, the congenitally criminal class of entrepreneurs who, as an essential “stakeholder” have historically lubricated the gears of The Genocidal System---still remain their crucial partners-in-crime.

But it is that most important pillar of the state, the judiciary, the legal system---the so-called “guardians”---that has now been fully exposed as the most rotten and the ugliest element of The System.  The total collapse of the moral order in Pakistani society can now be clearly seen in this domain of the state. The judges, the most prominent lawyers and the legal fraternity in general---known as the hathora mafia--- all now stand naked in front of us. Elevated to the higher echelons of the state, to the high seats of judiciary, with the sole duty to protect the public interest, to promote the common good, and to guarantee justice for the weak, the powerless and the oppressed, they proactively abuse their powers in the worst possible ways; these "bitches of the rich" work against the people, obediently serve power and never heed the counsels of reason and conscience; they indulge in the most corrupt practices and commit crimes of the highest order. Instead of guarding the rights of the citizenry---what the constitution guarantees--- they have now become---have always been, in fact--- the committed guardians of The Unjust System. Dispensing justice and fairness is the least of their concerns. Unashamed and without any hint of a sense of duty or of self-respect and dignity, these wigged and robed shysters mock the people with their incessant indulgence in sickening piffle as the country teeters on the brink of economic collapse and society plunges deeper in anarchy and nihilism. Earlier, I wrote in another post, “The fate of 250 million Pakistanis 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 celebrity wench, or a Tiktok influencer.” 

For more, please click: Vampire Propaganda

Quetta Chawni (Cantt.)  Quetta Chawni

Pakistan through bumper stickers

Harf e Dervaish #8 (Urdu)

Overqualified and underqualified in Balochistan

A Lament for Quetta

The Hollow Men of Pakistan

Fun with modern philosophy

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

Indians: the barbarians at the gate

Illustration by ABRO.

Indians: the barbarians at the gate

“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, Nazi leader and war criminal

“Propaganda must therefore always be essential and repetitious. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

                                     Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister

"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence." 

                                                                      Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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

“It’s the Indians. The Indians did it.”, enlightens me a chucklehead---an old friend actually---and rather condescendingly, while I was discussing with him the disappearance and brutal murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of Baloch activists, students and journalists and the slaughter of Hazara coal miners in Mach, Balochistan some years ago. Such is the power of pernicious propaganda and indoctrination in a country like Pakistan where it is especially employed in its peripheral regions, for example, in the internally colonized “province” of Balochistan against its exploited and forgotten people who try to raise their legitimate voices of protest.

And now, some context.

In the late 1980s, when the country was under military occupation, or martial law (yes, again!), a somewhat funny but also very telling little anecdote used to do the rounds on the college and university campuses (there was no social media then, no Facebook and Twitter!). An official of the provincial board of education, some director or supervisor type, visited a far flung corner of that exploited, god-forsaken province to check how things were going at primary schools. It was one of the routine evaluation visits where the visiting dignitary would check on teachers and the schools and then report to the directorate of education or the concerned ministry for any needed “further action”, a notorious euphemism which in reality means either criminal procrastination or complete, and equally criminal, inaction and abandonment. So, this high-muckamuck visited a primary school, walked into a dilapidated classroom, randomly picked a student and put a question to him. He asked the little one who the man on the front wall was, pointing at the framed picture of Jinnah, the Quaid e Azam, or the great leader and the founder of Pakistan. In Pakistan, most, if not all, official buildings have a framed picture of Jinnah on the front wall in the rooms. Jinnah is sometimes accompanied by Muhammad Iqbal, the national philosopher-poet and another leader of the independence movement. I am not sure if it is required by law or just a convention and/or custom. Anyway, the boy turned his head and looked in the direction of his finger. After looking at the picture for a few seconds, he turned back to the official and said this in Pashto: “Da sarai Punjabai dee!” (English: “That man is a Punjabi” or “He is a Punjabi”).

I said a funny and telling anecdote above.

For those who have an honest inkling of the grotesquely turbulent seven-decade history of the country, all the way from the assassination of Liaqat Ali Khan to the racist plunder and rape of the Bengalis in 1971 forcing them to part ways, from the many murderous misadventures in Balochistan with tanks and gunship helicopters and the disappearance and merciless slaughtering of its legitimately protesting people, to all the unceasing crimes and wanton corruption of its filthy civil and military elites the majority of whom have names like Sharif, Bajwa, Kayani, Janjua, Khwaja, Raja, Rana, Dar, Cheema, Chatta and Chaudhry, there is something more than mere ignorance or childish buffoonery in the anecdote. The devil worshippers with pornographically totalitarian mindsets who make up the main characters of that sordid history of the country, people who always proclaim to be the absolute owners and overlords of the country to the exclusion of everybody else, it is their fascistic, vulgar faces appearing 24/7, all year around, in the mass media, on TV screens, in the newspapers and textbooks that inundate the consciousness of the illiterate and semi-literate populace forcing them to view the world like that child did. The child’s answer, therefore, can and will be interpreted differently by some, thus rendering the anecdote telling, thought provoking, sad and even alarming: he must have reasoned that anybody who is somebody in his country, who is important enough to be in an elevated photo frame on the front wall of his classroom, above the head and above the desk of his teacher, must be a Punjabi.

For the rest, it is an amusing tale at best and the faulty opinion of a misinformed and even tragically propagandized child at worst. This, after all, is the usual ploy of the culpability evading oppressors at the Center for whom the shameless name-calling and blaming of the victims in the peripheries always supersedes self-analysis, critical thinking, or being accountable and taking responsibility.

The Nazi supremo, Joseph Goebbels, the Fuhrer’s right hand man and his chief of propaganda, once said: “Let me control the media, and I will turn any nation into a herd of pigs.” While this nefariously powerful role of the mass media, especially now that it is in its hellish digital format, can equally be witnessed in a country like Pakistan as well, the problem there is much deeper, much more systematic and goes far beyond the blameworthy nature of mass media. To keep the arguments short and clear since this is a mere blogpost and not a proper academic investigation into this important issue, let’s give that Nazi propaganda formula a twist here. In the context of Pakistan, we can, therefore, modify Goebbels and say: “Let me control the textbooks, especially Pakistan Studies, history & geography (social studies), and Islamiat textbooks, and I will turn this nation into a murderous herd of jingoistic vandals, into bloodthirsty fatwa-baaz pigs!”. And that is exactly what the criminal rulers---civil and military, secular liberal fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists alike---have done to the country in the past few decades. They have turned a good chunk of the country’s 250 million people, mostly the unemployed and unemployable urban youth and the majority of the illiterate masses, into murderous vigilantes who constantly fume at the mouth, who roam the streets killing and lynching anyone who differs with their uncritically imbibed reductionist and simplistic narratives. They do so without any fear or remorse. Turn on the TV, join a social media group or forum, or pick up any newspaper in the country and you will read and hear without fail one of the following, often in ugly, shrill voices: “Traitor!” “Indian agent!”. “Kafir!”. “Yehudi agent!” “RAW agent!” “CIA agent!” “Terrorist!”

Traditionally, labeling others---from other provinces and parts of the country, or mostly the non-Punjabis, that is----with these ugly epithets has been the wont and prerogative of the Punjabi rulers and even of the Punjabi intelligentsia of the country, the greedy, usurping cadres of the only province that really matters. From Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his family and kin in NWFP (now KP), to G.M Seyyed, Rasool Bakhsh Palejo and others in Sindh, to Marris, Bugtis, Mengals and Achakzais in Balochistan----not to mention the Bengalis of East Pakistan until 1971 who, after getting fed up with the chauvinism of the criminal ruling gangs then, finally said enough was enough and parted ways with them-----nobody has been spared by the ruling cabal, always dominantly Punjabi. This vile and incorrigible clique of bigots always claim to be authentic patriots--- true-blue patriots by default, genuine Pakistanis!---no matter what they say and do. The many glaring contradictions in what they say and what they do, their heinous deeds spread over half a century, all of which are so clearly visible to the rest of the world, none of that bothers them at all! Perennially brazen-faced and undignified, these brutal maskharas pretend to be infallible loyalists. As my friend Sardar Kharkaftar of Helsinki says, tongue-in-cheek, ‘there seems to be a by-now not-so-invisible “P” formula in action, a kind of originally hidden assumption, even a secret contract which goes something like this: P for Punjab, P for patriotism and P for Pakistan; everybody else’s patriotism is fake and suspect!’  Let me borrow from the great Charles Mills (the author of The Racial Contract), but for a different context here, to try to put the Sardar's point in a different way without taking anything away from it. What both of them (Prof. Mills and Sardar Kharkaftar) are saying is that there seems to be an invisible contract at the highest levels of state and society in Pakistan, a kind of ethnocentric contract to which some or even many well-meaning Punjabis are not conscious signatories but from which they, nevertheless, benefit and have been benefitting all these decades. Privilege is often invisible to those who have it, as the saying goes; Punjabi chauvinism is "invisible" because it is ubiquitous. It is, however, visible, in plain sight for those who have eyes to see and who have critical minds to comprehend.

No wonder that some critical observers now insist that in the absence of a radical, a sweeping, revolutionary change, sooner or later there will be three more Bangladeshs and that it is not a question of “if” but only of “when”.

TRAITOR! 
What a loss and waste---of sweet and juicy mangoes--- in the skies over Bahawalpur in 1988!

It may seem curious, at least to the uninitiated, this rage and hatred of the Punjabi against India and the Indians. While it is true that hatred of India is part and parcel of being a Pakistani, a main pillar that supports the carefully constructed notion of Pakistani identity ----thanks to the cradle-to-grave propaganda of the state to which every citizen is forcefully exposed, especially through its mediocre and almost dysfunctional education system----no other nationality has this kind of deep hatred for India and Indians as the Punjabi has. There are many explanations for this anomaly, most of them based on history and psychology. For this writer, the most sensible analysis has been put forward by the Indian political psychologist and "street fighting intellectual" Ashis Nandy in many of his works, but particularly in two of his books titled The Intimate Enemy and The Savage Freud. According to him, this hatred---on either side of the border---is because of a rejection of the former self by the subject. Or, to be precise, the rejection of that part of the self that it now exclusively sees in the "other". The Punjabi in Pakistan and the North Indians on the other side of the border share this hatred equally; they are one another's "intimate enemies". Nandy is basically repeating, or reformulating in a new context, an old wisdom of the South Asian region that the most profound kind of hatreds are almost always reserved for those one knows and knows "intimately". Observe, and especially contrast, the attitudes of the majority of South Indians and the non-Punjabi nationalities in Pakistan toward one another and one will begin to understand the argument. For decades, the ruling criminal cabals of Pakistan, mostly the booted bloodsuckers from the largest province, have justified their ethnocidal violence especially in the peripheral regions of the country---Balochistan and the Northern parts--- with this offering of the Indian bogeyman---the familiar "Indian agent", "traitor" or "foreign hand" nonsense. The masses have often fallen for this vile propaganda and have believed them wholesale, none more so than the people of the Punjab, especially its "educated" and professional classes. But such is the nature of this irrational hatred for India and Indians that the Punjabi will not hesitate to fall line, hook and sinker for this pernicious manufactured conceit even when the victim is one his own.

Back to the textbooks. In Pakistan, the worst---actually, the most effective---example of propagandist indoctrination through textbooks, right from primary school to higher, university education, happened in the 11 year tyrannical rule of that mustachioed Jalandhari troglodyte, the fawji dictator Zia-ul-Haq. So deeply damaging his toxic propaganda tactics have been over the years that most of what is wrong, what is clearly harmful and outright evil in contemporary Pakistani society, especially the organized hypocrisy and the pervasive, systemic bigotry that now plague every strata of society, can be traced back to him. In particular, the education policies implemented via the thoroughly ideological textbooks manufactured during the reign of this deranged, fork-tongued fanatic in uniform and boots have done the most harm. For sure, not everything was perfect before this double-talking, Janus-faced bigot and his kangaroo courts with their compromised and accomplice judges with the help of whom all he murdered the civilian ruler of the country and usurped power, but anybody old enough to remember the years before 1977 can attest to the verity of what I am saying here. The period between 1977 and 1988 may well be called the darkest in the country's history. Pakistanis were exposed to evil like never before and many of them, because of their naivety or innocence, and because of their ignorance of modern instrumental, amoral politics actually embraced that evil to their and their society's detriment. The textbooks taught, still do in many parts of the country, intolerance and bigotry, especially in the name of a religion distorted by a particular, reformist interpretation which was imported from the middle eastern Gulf countries in the late 1970s and mid 1980s and institutionalized throughout Pakistani society with the lavish help of petro-dollars doled out by the Arab ideologues of that violent, head-chopping, self-blowing modern cult. They, the texts most of which were put together and printed in the USA, inculcated a culture of intellectual passivity, indolence, mediocrity of the worst kind and of outright cruelty. The textbooks, especially the revisionist history books, further confused the already muddled sense of identity of many Pakistanis, making them hate that most ineluctable aspect of their self---- the South Asian Muslim identity: compassion, beauty, wisdom and other similar virtues that make up any authentic religious identity were banished and they were replaced by a strict, wooden and blanched religious legalism that “faithfully” resembled the barren and harsh landscape of Najd in the Gulf from where most of these violently literalist and fundamentalist interpretations of the religion were first imported into the country. The culture of fatwa-baazi, of calling others “traitor”, "kafir" and “Indian/Yehudi agent” for example, also took deep root during this dark period of military dictatorship. But there is always a kind of cosmic justice, a compensatory mechanism in life. A decade or two ago, the “traitor” and “Indian agent” were almost always someone from outside Punjab, a non-Punjabi. Now, that sickening and abusive practice of name calling has become more democratic in a sense and even sacred names like Sharif and Bajwa are now being labeled with these ugly epithets---in my humble opinion, this time very rightly so. What goes around, comes around, as the saying goes. Moral: what you do to others, you eventually end up doing the same to yourself.

I started this blogpost with that rather dumb and chauvinist friend of mine providing me with that all-rounder, all-mighty explanation for the evil that is, has been all these years, done in a place like Balochistan by the criminal, booted vampires and their accomplice civilian mafiosi poodles, namely, "Indians did it, India is behind it..." or some such bumper sticker nonsense that the murderous security state has thoroughly fed these "educated" imbeciles for decades through its atrocious education system, its dumbing down textbooks churned out by semi-literate clowns pretending to be "historians", a la Nasim Hijazi and buffoons of his ilk. Every time I hear this kind of humbug in the way of argument or justificatory explanation for khaki violence in the peripheries, I think of the stupidest of the animals---the sheep---in George Orwell's brilliant satire Animal Farm, who never tire of bleating, "four legs good, two legs bad!" In fact, one needs to read Orwell's Animal Farm to understand contemporary Pakistan. Although written in a different time and place and satirizing a different fascistic and totalitarian ideology and its genocidal ideologues, it is the best go-to book to comprehend the sorry reality of contemporary Pakistan. For example, in chapter 3 of the book, Squealer the pig, the fast-talking and eloquent PR pig for the vanguard elite (the pigs in general and their leader Napoleon in particular) explains, and tries to justify the monopolization of the resources by the pigs, here the stealing of the best food (apples and milk), in this way: 

"Comrades!" he cried. "You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades," cried Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his tail, "surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?" 

Now replace Squealer with one of those khaki duffers (ISPR) who often makes a fool of himself in front of TV cameras by repeatedly enlightening the bamboozled Pakistani awam that they are "apolitical" beasts, or that they have "nothing to do with politics" and that whatever they (the pigs) do is for the good of the awam (all the other animals of the Animal Farm). Apples and milk (all the resources) are what they have been criminally stealing from the people for more than seven decades. Jones is, of course, India and Indians---or "traitors" from the rest of the country outside Punjab---that menacing "foreign hand" or "foreign agent", the feared bogeyman. Fear is, has always been, the uniformed pigs' prime tool of control and manipulation: "Let us keep sucking your blood dry and don't you dare criticize or object, because if you don't let us plunder and loot, India and Indians will come! And surely there is no one among you who wants to see Indians come for you!" Excellent book, a book for our dark times.

For more, click: The Hollow Men

Harf e Dervaish (Urdu) Harf e Dervaish (Urdu post)

A Lament for Quetta: A Lament for Quetta

On Belief: On Belief

On Simplicity: Simple People

Quetta: Hazara ethnic cleansing

Propaganda and Language

Overqualified and underqualified in Balochistan

The Vampires of The System (in Pakistan)

The Vampires of The System (in Pakistan)

Like an inverted, uglier version

Of the un-namable Tao,

The vampire that can be named

Is not the vampire.

A toxic chameleon,

A shape-shifting, liquid reptile,

Evil in all its

Colors and shapes,

"Shape without shape, form without form",

The booted bloodsucker

Is like a devilfish:

A poison squirting squid,

A killer octopus with many tentacles

That sucks the blood dry

Of the weak and the vulnerable.

The vampire has titles, it has names,

And yet it is,

Without a name.

They call it

"The taqatwar halqa";

They identify it as

"The khalai makhlooq",

The "handlers", the "qabza mafia".

It is "the establishment", and

"The Mehkama a Zaraat'.

A neutered, cowardly monster

Without balls and backbone,

It is also "the neutral".

Mediocrity, greed and ineptitude---

Impotence all around, without and within

Obscenely paraded as

"Faith, Unity and Discipline"---

Are the cherished "virtues"

Of the depraved devil.

The fish, they say,

Rots from the head down.

His subject steals ten

When the king steals one.

In The System (in Pakistan)

The bloodthirsty vampire king,

Rotten to the core,

Is perennially busy

Pilfering, plundering and raping.

Seventy years and more

Of oppression, violence and gore---

Of crime, betrayal and corruption,

Mass misery, inequity and deception---

Are the sordid gifts of this voracious boar

To the cursed and ever-blighted nation.

...continued

For more, please click on the link:

The Hollow Men (of Pakistan)

Harf-e-Dervaish (Urdu)

The Picture

The System

Quetta: Hazara Ethnic Cleansing

Propaganda and Language