What is Quettawali? Part 2: Community
( Part 1)
"I do not create; I only tell of the past." Confucius
"If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are."
Wendell Berry
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My friend Aamir, another Quettawaal who is also exiled like yours truly but in a different corner of the world, tells me stories of his dada, his grandfather. Just like his grandson two generations later, the dada was also born and raised in Quetta and was an employee of the government revenue services department. In the final years of his service, he was posted in Lahore, Punjab, against his wish. But as soon as he got his retirement---in 1960----he promptly returned to Quetta complaining that he could not live in a place where upon leaving the house one was not met and greeted by friends and acquaintances on a daily basis. That was then. Now, in today’s Quetta, one is not sure if one will return alive or not, let alone met and greeted by friends and acquaintances. This is the case for a big chunk of the city’s unfortunate residents, if not for all. I will return to this little anecdote and to our discussion of Quettawali with which I ended the first part of this essay later. For now, let me digress a bit.
In January this year I visited Quetta. To get a voltage converter for my mother’s food processor, I went to the old Suraj Ganj Bazaar (now also called Suraj Ganj Road by some) where all the electrical appliance and hardware stores are located. I was advised by everybody, especially by family and friends, to take a rickshaw but I took the bicycle that I had borrowed from my cousin for the duration of my stay there. I love bicycles, especially mountain bikes. The call for extra caution was because of the now decade old ethno-sectarian violence, the indiscriminate butchering and target killing of Shias, especially Hazaras----- a cancer, a murderous blight, that has become part of daily life for many of the residents of Quetta. I took the risk anyway because I wanted to observe things up close and what is the best way to do that if not on a bicycle, given the nasty traffic congestion in the city especially during rush hours, which, in fact, means all day long. With all the bike-riding skills that I have accumulated over the years riding bicycles in five different countries on four continents, it still took me about an hour to get to my destination. Total distance covered: not more than 4 kms!
Riding past one of the oldest hardware merchants of the city, K.M. Khan Hardware Store, I was happy to see the old watch repair shop next to it: The Accurate Watch Co. Still sitting there by that giant hardware store and with its mostly rusted and sun-beaten sign board faintly showing the painted letters that made up the barely legible name of the store under an equally faded picture of a Rolex (??) wrist watch, this kiosk-like store has a special meaning for me. Upon entering eighth grade in school, my grandfather gifted me with my first wrist watch, a classic ocean blue-dialed Favre-Leuba. It was a beautiful Swiss watch and I fell in love with it right away. Very soon, however, I had to pay my first visit to this iconic watch repair shop in Quetta City. The reason for that visit was that while playing outside with my friends, I accidentally broke the glass dial cover of the watch. I neither told my grandfather, nor my father about what had happened. Instead, I showed the broken watch to our beloved, sage-like home tutor, Mr. P.K. Ali who was also a watch lover and the proud owner of an Omega, or maybe it was a Rado. He strictly forbade me from taking the watch to any other place for repair. His recommendation was the one that was the most trusted in the city: The Accurate Watch Co. in Suraj Ganj Bazaar. We went to the store together where he introduced me to the owner who was not only one of the finest watch experts in Quetta City then but also one of her most honest citizens.
Anyway, I was looking for an old store, for something from the old days, for a name that would strike me as familiar. I soon found one: Modern Electric(al) Store, right across from the newly renovated Saif and Co. It was ten or fifteen stores down the street on the right hand side, going in the direction of Jinnah Road. No sooner had I entered it than a pair of old eyes affixed themselves on me, following me as I moved down the long aisle of the store scanning the marked boxes with voltage and wattage numbers and other similar information. From a dimly lit section of the place a middle aged man came rushing towards me and started looking at me with inquiring eyes. I told him what I was looking for. He nodded and disappeared again in that relatively darker corner of the store from where he had emerged. I turned around to face the old eyes which were still looking my way. An old man, probably in his mid-seventies or early-eighties, and most probably the father of the middle aged guy, was sitting on an old wooden nylon-knit rattan chair next to the cash register. He was wearing a white shalwar kameez and a greyish Qaraquli cap. A few quiet seconds passed, and with eyes still focused on me, he spoke: “Returned to Quetta after a long time?” “Yes”, I said. A few more seconds passed and then pointing to the chaotic mess of people, rickshaws, bicycles, cars, vans, donkey and man pulled carts and all the other moving beings and objects on the street, he said again, “So, how does it feel to be back?” I told him that a lot had changed and also that nothing had changed. It seemed that he ignored the second part of my answer and, whisperingly as if not talking to anyone in particular, confirmed the first part by saying “Yes, indeed. A lot has changed. A lot.” No other words were exchanged after that vague, elliptical comment. The middle-aged guy returned with my voltage regulator and after powering it up to make sure it was good, he made me a receipt. I paid the sum of Rs. 1500 and said my thank, salam and left. But as I was leaving, my eyes met again with the eyes of the old man with the faded Qaraquli. I smiled at him and without showing any expressions on his face but with the same sad firmness of gaze in his old eyes that had obviously witnessed a lot over the years, he said in a somber voice, “Bachay, apna khayal rakhna” (son, take care/be careful).
To return to our discussion of Quettawali----what it was (or still is), what iqdaar (values) underpinned it and how it used to get expressed through the day-to-day conduct or lifestyles of the different communities of Quetta----let me focus on some key words in this second installment. In part 1 of this essay, I mentioned some terms such as, values, virtues, code of life, worldview and especially community. I want to take up and say something about that last term first. So, let us begin with the question: what is a community? This word, or this concept, is nowadays many things to many people. It is, like many other words, much abused. It is like one of those “glittering generalities” that all kinds of vested interests abuse for their own worldly ends. Wikipedia defines a “glittering generality” in this way: “It is an emotionally appealing phrase so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that it carries conviction without supporting information or reason. Such highly valued concepts attract general approval and acclaim. Their appeal is to emotions such as love of [religion], country and home, and desire for peace, freedom, glory, and honor. They ask for approval without examination of the reason. They are typically used by politicians and propagandists.” Suspect words and phrases include: democracy, liberty, development, sustainable, human rights, humanitarian, science, progress, civilization, freedom, tolerance, well-being, wellness, care, hope (remember that mendacious Uncle Tom, Barack Obama and his fraudulent rhetoric of "hope" and “care”?), fundamentalist, terrorist, social and recently the most pernicious of them all, “entrepreneur”. Community is one such word, too.
A staple word, a stock-in-trade of the neo-colonial secular missionaries of the 1980s, 1990s and the noughties----the NGO cabals, those exploitative tentacles of the Universal White Imperialism operating in the “Third World”, or in the “least developed” regions of the country such as Balochistan and interior Sindh-----the use and abuse of this word “community” is now carried out by a much larger and diverse range of actors and interests, and is spread over much larger areas, both physical and mental, that is. It is no longer limited to the world of mendacious NGO operators with their fancy expressions like “sustainable community”, “grassroots community”, “community development”, “community support”, “community empowerment”, “community help” and so on, but has been, for example, lovingly and wholeheartedly embraced by the makers, promoters and users of digital technologies in their cyber spaces on the Internet and especially on the anti-social platforms euphemistically called “social media”. As critical scholars have long argued, Chris Hedges being one of the most prominent among them, those who want to control, exploit and dominate us first seek to corrupt and dominate our speech: “They seek to obscure meaning; they declare war on language” first, says Chris. Or, before the daisy cutters and carpet bombs are dropped on “evil” brown, yellow and black people in far-away lands, the target population is demonized 24/7 by the full-spectrum propaganda machinery of the corporate state, consent is manufactured in the insouciant home public’s consciousness through the manipulative and toxic use of language. The result is that war is rendered as peace, ignorance as strength, slavery as freedom, human wrongs as humanitarianism and human rights (remember R2P ?), to recall the work and words of George Orwell.
But to have a better understanding of this word “community” in the context of Quettawali we will have to work with a different, if not older, definition and understanding of such terms----understandings and meanings that now seem to be lost to those addicted to “tricknologies of mass deception”: this “trance generation” with its masturbatory approach to life includes people who tirelessly seek constant titillation and instant gratification and who, according to the political-psychologist John F. Schumacher, have “an insatiable appetite for any technology that can downsize awareness and blunt the emotions.”
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My friend Aamir, another Quettawaal who is also exiled like yours truly but in a different corner of the world, tells me stories of his dada, his grandfather. Just like his grandson two generations later, the dada was also born and raised in Quetta and was an employee of the government revenue services department. In the final years of his service, he was posted in Lahore, Punjab, against his wish. But as soon as he got his retirement---in 1960----he promptly returned to Quetta complaining that he could not live in a place where upon leaving the house one was not met and greeted by friends and acquaintances on a daily basis. That was then. Now, in today’s Quetta, one is not sure if one will return alive or not, let alone met and greeted by friends and acquaintances. This is the case for a big chunk of the city’s unfortunate residents, if not for all. I will return to this little anecdote and to our discussion of Quettawali with which I ended the first part of this essay later. For now, let me digress a bit.
In January this year I visited Quetta. To get a voltage converter for my mother’s food processor, I went to the old Suraj Ganj Bazaar (now also called Suraj Ganj Road by some) where all the electrical appliance and hardware stores are located. I was advised by everybody, especially by family and friends, to take a rickshaw but I took the bicycle that I had borrowed from my cousin for the duration of my stay there. I love bicycles, especially mountain bikes. The call for extra caution was because of the now decade old ethno-sectarian violence, the indiscriminate butchering and target killing of Shias, especially Hazaras----- a cancer, a murderous blight, that has become part of daily life for many of the residents of Quetta. I took the risk anyway because I wanted to observe things up close and what is the best way to do that if not on a bicycle, given the nasty traffic congestion in the city especially during rush hours, which, in fact, means all day long. With all the bike-riding skills that I have accumulated over the years riding bicycles in five different countries on four continents, it still took me about an hour to get to my destination. Total distance covered: not more than 4 kms!
Riding past one of the oldest hardware merchants of the city, K.M. Khan Hardware Store, I was happy to see the old watch repair shop next to it: The Accurate Watch Co. Still sitting there by that giant hardware store and with its mostly rusted and sun-beaten sign board faintly showing the painted letters that made up the barely legible name of the store under an equally faded picture of a Rolex (??) wrist watch, this kiosk-like store has a special meaning for me. Upon entering eighth grade in school, my grandfather gifted me with my first wrist watch, a classic ocean blue-dialed Favre-Leuba. It was a beautiful Swiss watch and I fell in love with it right away. Very soon, however, I had to pay my first visit to this iconic watch repair shop in Quetta City. The reason for that visit was that while playing outside with my friends, I accidentally broke the glass dial cover of the watch. I neither told my grandfather, nor my father about what had happened. Instead, I showed the broken watch to our beloved, sage-like home tutor, Mr. P.K. Ali who was also a watch lover and the proud owner of an Omega, or maybe it was a Rado. He strictly forbade me from taking the watch to any other place for repair. His recommendation was the one that was the most trusted in the city: The Accurate Watch Co. in Suraj Ganj Bazaar. We went to the store together where he introduced me to the owner who was not only one of the finest watch experts in Quetta City then but also one of her most honest citizens.
Anyway, I was looking for an old store, for something from the old days, for a name that would strike me as familiar. I soon found one: Modern Electric(al) Store, right across from the newly renovated Saif and Co. It was ten or fifteen stores down the street on the right hand side, going in the direction of Jinnah Road. No sooner had I entered it than a pair of old eyes affixed themselves on me, following me as I moved down the long aisle of the store scanning the marked boxes with voltage and wattage numbers and other similar information. From a dimly lit section of the place a middle aged man came rushing towards me and started looking at me with inquiring eyes. I told him what I was looking for. He nodded and disappeared again in that relatively darker corner of the store from where he had emerged. I turned around to face the old eyes which were still looking my way. An old man, probably in his mid-seventies or early-eighties, and most probably the father of the middle aged guy, was sitting on an old wooden nylon-knit rattan chair next to the cash register. He was wearing a white shalwar kameez and a greyish Qaraquli cap. A few quiet seconds passed, and with eyes still focused on me, he spoke: “Returned to Quetta after a long time?” “Yes”, I said. A few more seconds passed and then pointing to the chaotic mess of people, rickshaws, bicycles, cars, vans, donkey and man pulled carts and all the other moving beings and objects on the street, he said again, “So, how does it feel to be back?” I told him that a lot had changed and also that nothing had changed. It seemed that he ignored the second part of my answer and, whisperingly as if not talking to anyone in particular, confirmed the first part by saying “Yes, indeed. A lot has changed. A lot.” No other words were exchanged after that vague, elliptical comment. The middle-aged guy returned with my voltage regulator and after powering it up to make sure it was good, he made me a receipt. I paid the sum of Rs. 1500 and said my thank, salam and left. But as I was leaving, my eyes met again with the eyes of the old man with the faded Qaraquli. I smiled at him and without showing any expressions on his face but with the same sad firmness of gaze in his old eyes that had obviously witnessed a lot over the years, he said in a somber voice, “Bachay, apna khayal rakhna” (son, take care/be careful).
To return to our discussion of Quettawali----what it was (or still is), what iqdaar (values) underpinned it and how it used to get expressed through the day-to-day conduct or lifestyles of the different communities of Quetta----let me focus on some key words in this second installment. In part 1 of this essay, I mentioned some terms such as, values, virtues, code of life, worldview and especially community. I want to take up and say something about that last term first. So, let us begin with the question: what is a community? This word, or this concept, is nowadays many things to many people. It is, like many other words, much abused. It is like one of those “glittering generalities” that all kinds of vested interests abuse for their own worldly ends. Wikipedia defines a “glittering generality” in this way: “It is an emotionally appealing phrase so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that it carries conviction without supporting information or reason. Such highly valued concepts attract general approval and acclaim. Their appeal is to emotions such as love of [religion], country and home, and desire for peace, freedom, glory, and honor. They ask for approval without examination of the reason. They are typically used by politicians and propagandists.” Suspect words and phrases include: democracy, liberty, development, sustainable, human rights, humanitarian, science, progress, civilization, freedom, tolerance, well-being, wellness, care, hope (remember that mendacious Uncle Tom, Barack Obama and his fraudulent rhetoric of "hope" and “care”?), fundamentalist, terrorist, social and recently the most pernicious of them all, “entrepreneur”. Community is one such word, too.
A staple word, a stock-in-trade of the neo-colonial secular missionaries of the 1980s, 1990s and the noughties----the NGO cabals, those exploitative tentacles of the Universal White Imperialism operating in the “Third World”, or in the “least developed” regions of the country such as Balochistan and interior Sindh-----the use and abuse of this word “community” is now carried out by a much larger and diverse range of actors and interests, and is spread over much larger areas, both physical and mental, that is. It is no longer limited to the world of mendacious NGO operators with their fancy expressions like “sustainable community”, “grassroots community”, “community development”, “community support”, “community empowerment”, “community help” and so on, but has been, for example, lovingly and wholeheartedly embraced by the makers, promoters and users of digital technologies in their cyber spaces on the Internet and especially on the anti-social platforms euphemistically called “social media”. As critical scholars have long argued, Chris Hedges being one of the most prominent among them, those who want to control, exploit and dominate us first seek to corrupt and dominate our speech: “They seek to obscure meaning; they declare war on language” first, says Chris. Or, before the daisy cutters and carpet bombs are dropped on “evil” brown, yellow and black people in far-away lands, the target population is demonized 24/7 by the full-spectrum propaganda machinery of the corporate state, consent is manufactured in the insouciant home public’s consciousness through the manipulative and toxic use of language. The result is that war is rendered as peace, ignorance as strength, slavery as freedom, human wrongs as humanitarianism and human rights (remember R2P ?), to recall the work and words of George Orwell.
But to have a better understanding of this word “community” in the context of Quettawali we will have to work with a different, if not older, definition and understanding of such terms----understandings and meanings that now seem to be lost to those addicted to “tricknologies of mass deception”: this “trance generation” with its masturbatory approach to life includes people who tirelessly seek constant titillation and instant gratification and who, according to the political-psychologist John F. Schumacher, have “an insatiable appetite for any technology that can downsize awareness and blunt the emotions.”
One such understanding of community, as distinct from its postmodern incarnations hinted at above, is nicely articulated by the British philosopher and writer John Gray. Says Gray:
“We are who we are because of the places in which we grow up, the accents and friends we acquire by chance, the burdens we have not chosen but somehow learn to cope with. Real communities are always local-places in which people have put down roots and are willing to put up with the burdens of living together. The fantasy of virtual community is that we can enjoy the benefits of community without its burdens, without the daily effort to keep delicate human connections intact. Real communities can bear these burdens because they are embedded in particular places and evoke enduring loyalties. In cyberspace, however, there is nowhere that a sense of place can grow, and no way in which the solidarities that sustain human beings through difficult times can be forged.” (John Gray, ‘The sad side of cyberspace’, The Guardian, 10 April 1995.)
Places, roots, accents, friends, loyalties and above all, burdens or responsibilities. More words! Quettawali, as I wrote earlier, is not narrowly exclusive, not ethnocentric or ethnically defined, but a place oriented or community-centered normative code of life. It is a kind of worldview, or a weltanschauung in other words. “Normative” because it is underpinned by norms (values or iqdaar, or religious values in this case as I have argued in part 1). Worldview (weltanschauung in original German from where this word has entered the English language) means a total way of seeing and doing things, a whole perspective on things. For example, on a much grander level a civilization, and also above that a religion itself can be called a worldview because it has a total perspective on all life, from its origin to its end including its ends, or a nizam e zindagi, a mukammal zabta e hayat in Urdu. A parallel concept is paradigm coined by Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 1962). This is what the ‘wali’ in Quettawali can be understood to mean: worldview, life code, paradigm.
An authentic and organically formed community is held together by a set of principles, or values, just like a built structure is supported by a firm foundation, by brick and mortar, stone and concrete, by sets of columns and beams etc. In the case of the physical structure, remove the supports and the structure will come tumbling down, collapsing under its own weight into a pile of rubble. The same is true of communities which are also like structures, built with effort and care over long spans of time and held in place by the firm supports of human values and the glue of human relationships. A worldview is fundamentally defined by at least one idea, or some essential ideas, often called its “presiding idea(s)”. Like the central support of a tent, its mainstay, or the main beam of a building roof, the “presiding idea” is the core belief, the central idea, or the fundamental value upon which the structure rests more than anything else. Again, on a grander scale of things, think of “Tawhid” (Unity/One/Oneness) in the worldview of monotheistic Islam and you will get the idea of what a “presiding idea” is. What is left behind, if anything, if one removes this central plank (the first Shahadah or affirmation) from the weltanschauung of Islam? What will happen to the wider community of the adherents of the faith, the Ummah?
Now let’s return to the rather more mundane and local world of Quetta City and its communities. What then is the presiding idea, or the main ideas of Quettawali? Is there any one presiding idea, or more than one? In keeping with our metaphor, if Quettawali is a code of life for a mega-community made up of different communities and which draws both its tangible and intangible ingredients from a diverse pool of values of those different communities, then the question remains as to what those ingredients are, and how are they reconciled or synthesized, through what mechanism, dialectical or otherwise? The second question is more important since we have already differentiated Quettawali from lifestyles or codes of life that are ethno-linguistically centered, such as Pustunwali. These sociological and philosophical detours that I am taking are important to arrive to a better understanding of the concepts and terminologies involved in this essay on Quettawali. I realize that I have still not clearly identified all the ingredients of Quettawali, the mortar and brick of the structure. In the following parts I will try to do exactly that. Here, I have mainly focused on one of the ingredients, community, which is more like brick than mortar, more stone than cement----albeit, an important brick.
Before concluding, I want to return to the two anecdotes with which I started this piece, the one about my friend Aamir’s dada and the other about the old man in that electrical store in Suranj Ganj Bazaar. Both have something to say to us about the main topic here: community. In the complaint of the man in the first story, we can clearly see the importance of community into which one is born and raised: the significance of place, people, friends, loyalties, roots and burdens---all the essential ingredients of a real community as we read in the John Gray quote above. In the rather critical observation and advice of the old man in the second story we again see the importance of community but perhaps in a different way. The old man’s observation about the big changes in the city and especially his advice uttered in a solemn, nay, grim tone of voice can be understood not so much as a complaint but as a lament on the corruption, decay, even the demise or destruction of a real community.
To be continued… (see Part 3)
“We are who we are because of the places in which we grow up, the accents and friends we acquire by chance, the burdens we have not chosen but somehow learn to cope with. Real communities are always local-places in which people have put down roots and are willing to put up with the burdens of living together. The fantasy of virtual community is that we can enjoy the benefits of community without its burdens, without the daily effort to keep delicate human connections intact. Real communities can bear these burdens because they are embedded in particular places and evoke enduring loyalties. In cyberspace, however, there is nowhere that a sense of place can grow, and no way in which the solidarities that sustain human beings through difficult times can be forged.” (John Gray, ‘The sad side of cyberspace’, The Guardian, 10 April 1995.)
An authentic and organically formed community is held together by a set of principles, or values, just like a built structure is supported by a firm foundation, by brick and mortar, stone and concrete, by sets of columns and beams etc. In the case of the physical structure, remove the supports and the structure will come tumbling down, collapsing under its own weight into a pile of rubble. The same is true of communities which are also like structures, built with effort and care over long spans of time and held in place by the firm supports of human values and the glue of human relationships. A worldview is fundamentally defined by at least one idea, or some essential ideas, often called its “presiding idea(s)”. Like the central support of a tent, its mainstay, or the main beam of a building roof, the “presiding idea” is the core belief, the central idea, or the fundamental value upon which the structure rests more than anything else. Again, on a grander scale of things, think of “Tawhid” (Unity/One/Oneness) in the worldview of monotheistic Islam and you will get the idea of what a “presiding idea” is. What is left behind, if anything, if one removes this central plank (the first Shahadah or affirmation) from the weltanschauung of Islam? What will happen to the wider community of the adherents of the faith, the Ummah?
Now let’s return to the rather more mundane and local world of Quetta City and its communities. What then is the presiding idea, or the main ideas of Quettawali? Is there any one presiding idea, or more than one? In keeping with our metaphor, if Quettawali is a code of life for a mega-community made up of different communities and which draws both its tangible and intangible ingredients from a diverse pool of values of those different communities, then the question remains as to what those ingredients are, and how are they reconciled or synthesized, through what mechanism, dialectical or otherwise? The second question is more important since we have already differentiated Quettawali from lifestyles or codes of life that are ethno-linguistically centered, such as Pustunwali. These sociological and philosophical detours that I am taking are important to arrive to a better understanding of the concepts and terminologies involved in this essay on Quettawali. I realize that I have still not clearly identified all the ingredients of Quettawali, the mortar and brick of the structure. In the following parts I will try to do exactly that. Here, I have mainly focused on one of the ingredients, community, which is more like brick than mortar, more stone than cement----albeit, an important brick.
Before concluding, I want to return to the two anecdotes with which I started this piece, the one about my friend Aamir’s dada and the other about the old man in that electrical store in Suranj Ganj Bazaar. Both have something to say to us about the main topic here: community. In the complaint of the man in the first story, we can clearly see the importance of community into which one is born and raised: the significance of place, people, friends, loyalties, roots and burdens---all the essential ingredients of a real community as we read in the John Gray quote above. In the rather critical observation and advice of the old man in the second story we again see the importance of community but perhaps in a different way. The old man’s observation about the big changes in the city and especially his advice uttered in a solemn, nay, grim tone of voice can be understood not so much as a complaint but as a lament on the corruption, decay, even the demise or destruction of a real community.
To be continued… (see Part 3)
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