Our Post-Pandemic World: Some reflections

Our Post-Pandemic World: Some Reflections

"If we don't do the impossible, we will be faced with the unthinkable."
                                                                          Murray Bookchin

As I write this, the global number of people affected by COVID-19 and the deaths caused by the virus are 3,644,841 and 252,366 respectively (Source: Worldometer). In Pakistan, the numbers are 21,044 and 476 respectively (Source: Dawn.com ). In many places the lock down has been extended till the end of May. In some places, however, such as Australia and some East Asian countries, governments are relaxing the social contact restrictions and allowing firms and public facilities to re-open for business. Schools remain closed in many places. This pandemic is now considered as the most devastating affliction that has befallen humanity since WW II in the last century. No living memory can recall anything like it. While the political bickering and blame game continues to identify the cause and origin of the virus (Trumpola the Racist Buffoon and his Christian evangelical fundo Secretary of State Mike PompousPeo increasing their anti-China vitriol by the minute), there are now more urgent and important speculations as to what will come next. Importantly, there are debates about what will be regarded as the new “normal” in a post-pandemic world. 

"Chinese virus! Chinese Virus!"

This virus has punctured many myths the world over (myth as in the modern sense of something untrue and non-factual, and not in the traditional sense of something that is higher or “truer than the visible truth”). The biggest of these has been the one about the no-holds-barred neo-liberal globalization. It seems that the almost religious belief in the truth and goodness of neoliberalism has finally been shattered. There are now calls for the return of the state, all essential organs of which have been the focused target of attack by casino-capitalism that is the neo-liberal globalization project. Listen to what Financial Times, the biggest and the loudest of the cheerleaders for neo-liberalism and globalization in the past four decades, is saying in its editorial entitled “Virus lays bare the social contract”: 

“Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.” (FT, April 4, 2020 editorial Source: FT.com).

Hospitals are in a mess in the most advanced capitalist countries such as the UK, Spain, Italy and the USA. Medical supplies are running out. Firms are going bankrupt. State support for the most vulnerable institutions and sections of society in these model capitalist countries is not forthcoming. Interestingly, countries like China and Cuba, the most reviled nations by the neo-liberal Western elites, are sending medical personnel and supplies to places like Italy and Spain. Oh, the irony!

The rot began in the 1980s, for example, with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, that vile wonder woman of cannibalistic capitalism who notoriously claimed that “There is no society; there are only individuals” and who often repeated the mantra, along with the B movie actor-turned-president of the USA, Ronald Reagan who would chime in with, “The government is the problem" and "There is no alternative” (TINA) to this inhuman form of casino-capitalism. As these dedicated followers of Ayn Rand, the godmother of nihilistic individualism, and of the grand daddy of slash-and-burn economics, Milton Friedman (of the “Chicago Boys” fame), destroyed the most important organs of the post-WW II welfare state in the Western world such as health, education, transportation etc., they elevated a culture of unrestrained avarice, mindless consumption and smugly celebrated inequality everywhere. “Structural Adjustments” were touted as the cure for all the ills of economies. Their most sacred word then was "efficiency". Their policies essentially meant privatization (selling off public entities to favorite private businesses and corporations), downsizing (getting rid of workers in order to maximize profits), breaking trade unions (divide and rule), relocating manufacturing and also many essential services to places where labor was cheap and environmental regulations lax or non-existent among other measures, the effects of all of which are now becoming visible. “Trickle-down economics” it was called by both the ivory-tower theoreticians of neoliberalism and their neo-colonial shills in the media (exemplified by the NY Times’ imperial messenger Thomas Friedman and others of his ilk). The logic was that the rising tide that produced the uber-rich elite in every country, would also lift the poor and the vulnerable. In other words, there would be enough crumbs falling off the table of the greedy corporate CEOs, presidents and the like for the poor to lift themselves out of poverty. 

"Capitalist neo-liberalism: Greed is good!"

The same policies were enforced on the Southern world (the so called “Third World” or the developing countries) through the Bretton Woods Institutions (World Bank and IMF, the two deadly tentacles of the imperialist monster). In Pakistan, for example, both the Sharif and Benazir governments, and before them the regime of the dictator Zia ul Haq (of the West-funded Afghan Jihad, “Koray, Pansi, Martial Law” and Jabra Chowk fame) were dedicated neo-liberalists. Begging bowl in hand and kneeling down in front of their masters in IMF, World Bank and their other Western overlords, and always playing the double game in a country where nothing seems to be as organized as hypocrisy, the decades of 1980s and 1990s Pakistan were marked with unprecedented corruption committed by them. Benazir, and especially the wily husband Zardari (the irremediably corrupt Mr. 10 percent) and the rogue Sharifs took turns to loot and plunder the economy as they built their own family empires in the Gulf and EU countries. Pakistan’s opportunity to be a sufficiently self-reliant, mid-income country was squandered by these criminally inept politicians and equally corrupt, double-dealing military generals. Today’s Pakistan is very much a product of the unwise policies and blunders of the past three decades. One is not sure whether Mr. Ego Man, PM Kaptaan Insaaf Khan, has corrected course, his bombast and grandstanding notwithstanding. After all, he sits in the lap of the very decadent forces of status quo that are the cause of all the mess that average Pakistanis find themselves in right now. 

In the White House: Yesterday's freedom fighters, today's terrorists!

This digression was to provide a necessary background. Let’s get to the reflection part about our post-pandemic world.

Welcome to the age of quarantine economy

First: what is the new normal going to be like? Will there be a normal to go back to? Will there be a fundamental change, a worldview or paradigm shift, in the way we live, conduct business, do politics, engage in all sorts of public activities like sports, entertainment, even personal conversation, etc., or will it be business as usual? The majority opinion is that most things will change, for example, businesses, education, health and transportation, international travel and tourism, social interactions and so on. The way we interact with each other will be transformed in many ways. For instance, what will become of handshakes and kisses on the cheek, two popular forms of greetings in many countries around the world? What about hugs? Will we invent new ways of greeting like waving, head shakes or even adopt something like the Japanese bowing? Will the mask become a permanent daily accessory, say, like a shirt and a pair of trousers, or like a shalwar kameez? Expect big changes in lifestyles.

More importantly, now that there are widespread calls from influential quarters for active state intervention and involvement and for taking into account the plight of the vulnerable and the neglected in society, will there be serious focus on social justice? Will the pathological inequality that is the most visible gift of neo-liberal globalization of the past three or four decades be addressed? Equally, if not more importantly, will there be a course correction with regards to environmental degradation and climate change? In short, will we overcome our collective madness and stupidity and move towards a socially just and ecologically sane world or will it be the same deadly status quo? Admittedly, there are more questions than answers at this point.

One thing seems to be certain: this pandemic will force a radical reform, if not the total end, of speculative casino-capitalism. The world economy that has been transformed from real manufacturing and provision of real services into pure speculative financialization (derivatives and all) in the past few decades will need a radical restructuring if we are to move in the direction of sanity. Not just costs, but profits also will have to be socialized; not just benefits, but harms also will have to be privatized. Since economies are now deeply and tightly integrated in the global system of finance and information, these will be the biggest challenges faced by the national and world leaders. Any level of de-linking or decoupling will be very difficult, if not impossible.

There is also a good chance that we will see the end of uni-polarity in geopolitics, what’s left of it anyway. This will essentially mean the end of US imperial power and reach, a power which was already showing signs of decline before the virus hit the world. For example, everything that Trumpola utters is a sign of the crumbling US Empire. Although it seems that China is already taking a leadership role by sending supplies and experts to all corners of the world, including the EU, there will be increasing tensions, both internal and especially external on the country threatening its stability, and that will be the greatest test of the China of Xi JinPing. 

There is even the possibility of a violent conflagration between a rising China and a declining US Empire, a possibility that has been there in recent years but which will become more marked in our post-pandemic world. Trumpola and his neo-con, evangelist Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are already beating the drums of war against China, just like George Bush did twenty years ago against the Muslim world. Clearly, China is now seen as the new enemy of the West (there is always a need for one, the modern West has historically defined itself in that manner, the eternally-Good vs. "the Evil One") and all the organs of imperialism, from think tanks to media to Hollywood are being activated to prepare the ground and prepare the Western public for a new confrontation. 

In short, we will see new re-alignments and re-groupings as globalization will come under skeptical scrutiny and may undergo radical transformations as a result of that scrutiny. As words like "global" and "globalization" increasingly becoming dirty, also expect a rise in nationalism, populism and demagoguery. Populists and ultra-nationalists everywhere are calling for de-globalization and re-localization.With protectionism as the ever-present alternative rushing in to fill the vacuum left in the wake of the collapse of liberal- globalist myths, these forces of reaction are the most visible candidates to provide support and justification for that alternative of the world turning inward. 

The sheer proliferation of conspiracy theories and disinformation on the internet is already overwhelming, and which brings into focus the role of the big digital technology firms, the Big Tech, especially the MAGFA giants (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon). Almost all of these giants have seen their shares rise in the wake of the pandemic. Power is accumulating in their hands and with that, as the old saying goes, comes the possibility of absolute corruption. In any change that we will see in the post-pandemic world, these giants will play crucial roles. A big question that many technology critics are raising is the question of their accountability. Governments everywhere are already seen to be helpless in dealing with them. For example, legislation is lagging behind or is absent on many new developments in the field. Technology writer Kara Swisher has warned us about the power of the Big Tech as to “what (their) unlimited power, Midas-like financial might, minimal oversight and very few actual consequences might mean for the rest of us.”. Writing in the New York Times she identifies some of the downsides of the accumulated, absolute power of Big Tech:” It’s not good that we have set up an epic system of haves and have-nots that could become devastating for innovative ideas and start-ups trying to get off the ground. Not good because too much of our data in in the hands of fewer. Not good because these fewer are largely unaccountable to those they serve and hard to control by governments that are elected by the people.” (The New York Times, International Edition, May 4, 2020). 

These are some reflections on our post-pandemic world. What will happen in a country like Pakistan? Since Pakistan is well integrated into the world system, the repercussions of any or all of these changes, in whatever degree, will be felt in Pakistan, as well. One important issue that I have not touched upon in this short piece is the role of religion in our post-pandemic world. What has the response of world’s major religions been to this crisis so far, and how will they cope with our post-crisis world? That in itself is a big issue, and will require a separate article which I intend to write in the coming days.

For more, click: The American

And:                   Who is COVID-19 ?

Please visit: Dervaish's Quetta Channel (Youtube)

Yaadish Bakhair: Muhammad Hussain (Mamo)

Muhammad Hussain (Mamo) of Hussainabad, Quetta

Muhammad Hussain (Kaka Mamo)

"The noblest form of mercy is to protect others from yourself."
                                                                           Abdal Hakim Murad
"The love we give away is the only love we keep."   
                                                                                    Elbert Hubbard

“And that’s how this tragic story ends. Having lost his “Kilander” (cleaner/assistant driver) in that gruesome manner, Neko, the veteran truck driver, never again made a stop at that dilapidated road side shack for chai, especially when he was driving by that cursed spot after midnight. The upper deck of his old “rocket” (pronounced "raakit", the bonnet-model of the classic flat-fronted Bedford truck) still has the brownish stains of the unfortunate Kilander’s blood, despite all the scrubbing. To this day, two years after the tragedy, he is haunted, and gets into fits whenever someone mentions that patch of highway near Jacobbabad, or the name of his dead Kilander.” Sitting in a semi-circle---- all ears, eyes wide open, mouths agape-----we, my siblings and I, would then slowly return to reality from the trance-like state into which we had been pulled in by this story-teller who was none other than our Kaka Mamo. “Kaka” means uncle in Persian, and in some other regional languages of Balochistan such as Pashto. His real name was Muhammad Hussain but for everybody in Hussainabad, Quetta, he was just Mamo.

A Bedford "rocket"

Long before I got introduced to master story tellers, both from the East and the West, especially in the genres of crime, true crime, horror and psychological-terror, we children would get our entertainment from family elders like Kaka Mamo. Years later, when I first read and then re-read Stephen King’s The Duel or watched the blockbuster movie The Hitcher, I would recall Kaka's stories with which we had our imaginations soaked during the long winter nights of Quetta. His road stories were the best. You see, he himself was a truck driver for many years. My grandfather, who was a coal man, had put him in charge of the trucks that used to transport coal to far flung places in the Punjab province and beyond. But he was not made for any kind of desk work. He preferred the seat behind the wheel to the one behind the desk in some dingy office in Mach Town where the coal mines were and where the business of coal was conducted.  His first love was the “rocket” (pronounced "raakit") truck. These were heavy duty lorries that were made by the British automobile maker Leyland-Bedford. He was a rocket fundamentalist and knew about every nut and bolt of that heavy road monster. He reluctantly started talking about Hino and Isuzu brands during the latter years of his life when these Japanese trucks were introduced in Pakistan. But his love for the rocket never died. Rarely have I seen someone so passionately attached to a vehicle. 

Dilip Kumar

His love for the rocket was matched only by his great affection and admiration for the Bollywood superstar of the day, the one and the only Dilip Kumar. It was Dilip who deeply inspired him and informed his sense of style, and even of person-hood. This was pretty much visible in the way he wore his hair: jet black, amply oiled, tidily trimmed at the back and curled-up in the front. He was also very particular about his shoes, especially the hand made chawwat  (locally made leather sandals). These sandals were of the special type—made-to-order----ones that made a rather musical squeaking noise when someone walked in them. Another feature of the chawwat was that they were worn in such a way that the heel would protrude half way out, as if one was wearing a two sizes smaller shoe. That was the style and fashion then and nobody exemplified it better than Kaka Mamo. He knew almost everything about Dilip Kumar and his movies. He would recite the movie scenes with Dilip as the hero and his famous dialogues like a child would recite his or her multiplication tables. He was especially knowledgeable about the perennial rivalry between (the Muslim) Dilip and (the Hindu) Raj Kapoor, the other megastar of the Bollywood of that era. About that particular topic he was the Encyclopedia of Britannica. But what usually amused me was that after all the Raj Kapoor bashing that he would indulge in---and that was often-----he would utter something like this: “But yaar, we have to admit that nobody can play that role the way Raj Kapoor does, not even Dilip. Raj Kapoor ko salam hai!” 

Raj Kapoor

And to talk of Bollywood and not mention songs is like talking about South Asian curries without mentioning spices. For Kaka Mamo, the spice of the curry was, of course, Muhammad Rafi, the great crooner and balladeer of Bollywood for more than three decades. Rafi “the king” as Kaka would call him. Rafi and Dilip made the best pair then---Dilip the uber-actor and Rafi the super-playback singer-----just like Rajesh Khanna and Kishore Kumar would in the 1970s and early 1980s. While listening to Binaca Geet Mala on the radio (popular late night Radio Ceylon broadcast that played Bollywood songs) he would tell us the movie name, producer, director, the lyricist, the composer, the year the movie was made and especially the scene in the movie that was the background for that particular song. His knowledge of movies was immense, just like his knowledge of the rocket trucks. 

Muhammad "the king" Rafi

A short man with a solid body set on a solid frame, Kaka Mamo was not a loquacious man. A simple man, he was quiet, rather shy in some ways. In fact, he had a sort of serenity about him. I would even say that he still carried that innocence about him that many of us lose on the way to adulthood, as we embrace, wittingly or otherwise, the ways of the world and lose ourselves in worldliness: a sort of repose that one sees not just in children but also in God’s loved ones, those who are near and dear to God. We must recall the saying of Hazrat Isa (Jesus Christ, may God's blessings be upon him) that in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven we must be like children. Muhammad Hussain Mamo kept to his business most of the time and was always ready to help out, especially in the community that was the Hussainabad of then. People knew him and he could be seen at most of the community events, be it weddings or sad occasions like funerals. After I left Pakistan, I hardly had any contact with him and then he left us all for his final abode. I was in the U.K. (for my studies, or maybe it was Canada) when my mother informed me of his passing away. The story-teller to us kids, the lover of old rocket trucks-----those perennial mechanical mules on the decrepit and deplorable highways of Pakistan----the admirer of the great Dilip Kumar and of the equally great Muhammad Rafi, and the man of style especially when it came to hair and footwear died while I was away from Quetta. I was not able to attend the funeral of Kaka Mamo but he is always with me whenever I read a good story, especially a scary road story, or when I listen to my own old collection of Bollywood songs, but above all, when I see a Bedford truck. 

Yaadish Bakhair.

For more, please click:  Hussainabad, Qta: The Place, the people and their values
And here:  Regal Cinema Quetta: The Old Turkey Buzzard

Please visit:  Dervaish's Quetta Channel (Youtube)

Stray crumbs #1

Stray crumbs #1

"So this is the white man's strange wisdom", he exclaimed. "He cuts down the forests which have stood in pride and grandeur for centuries; he tears up the breast of our mother the earth and befouls the streams of clear water; without pity he disfigures the paintings and monuments of God and then bedaubs a surface with color and calls is a masterpiece."

(The reaction of a Sioux (Indian) chief on being shown an art gallery with lots of paintings on its walls, quoted by Charles Eastman)

"The earth is bleeding from wounds inflicted upon it by a humanity no longer in harmony with Heaven and therefore in constant strife with the terrestrial environment."

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

"How we see the world depends above all upon how we see ourselves. Our model of the universe---our worldview---is based upon the model we have of ourselves, upon our self-image....Having in our own minds de-sanctified ourselves, we have de-sanctified nature  as well.
Philip Sherrard

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Perhaps the famous simile of the Buddha applies most appropriately, aptly, to contemporary "de-sanctified" humanity than to that of any other era: "like children asleep in a burning house."

Modernity and modern people: the quantity and matter worshiping tribe of beings who insist that their shrouds also have pockets and who never tire of lecturing others about the wonders of their reductionist knowledge system (scientism) and philosophy (euphemism for miso-sophy), about how only they see and comprehend all of reality through their bamboo tube visions (to put a spin on old Yiddish and Japanese proverbs). “I can’t jump, therefore, there is no such thing as the sport of basketball!” said Immanuel Kant (not exact words, but his philosophy in a nutshell), one of the founders of this dying worldview upon which the entire juggernaut of modernity rests. These are Plato’s cave dwellers, the neurasthenic creatures who dwell in the dungeon of the lower self--- that suffocating cage of the corporeal self----creatures who gaze at the sky from the bottom of that dark well of nafs, and utter such inanities as, “There is no God!”, “Where is your God?” or, “God is dead!” 

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ILM and Riding the Tiger (of Modernity)

“Ignorance is the greatest tragedy.”                          Imam Ali (AS)

The great sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov once wrote that “if knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.” The problem of modernity is essentially a problem of knowledge: it is an epistemological problem. Or in other words, it is about the conception, acquisition, accumulation and categorization, and application of knowledge. The correct ethos and attitude needed to live an authentic life in the modern world, therefore, is to possess ILM (hikma or wisdom) which means to know how to ride the anti-spiritual tiger of modernity that we all are mounting. By “authentic life” is meant a life that is rooted in humanity’s ancient (religious) traditions that are essentially True, Good and Beautiful, and only accidentally ugly and evil (to paraphrase Seyyed Hossein Nasr). In the modern world, where we are told day-in and day-out that God is dead and the Sacred nothing but delusional or wishful thinking of a child, or even a joke, an awake and aware person is like one who knows that he is riding the voracious tiger of modernity and is never complacent. One must learn to ride the beast because one cannot dismount it alive. This is an imagery that has its source in ancient Eastern traditions, also employed by the Italian critic of modernity, Julius Evola, but from a different perspective and for a totally different purpose. The “sophistication” of modern life can only be countered with the sophistication of the life of faith. Charles Upton pins it down when he says, “Simple belief, unless one is fortunate enough to retain a real simplicity of soul, to be among those we call ‘the salt of the earth’, is no longer possible for many today….The only remedy for the disease of sophistication is a greater sophistication, which finally returns to simplicity. Where religious relativism has destroyed faith, nothing but metaphysical understanding can restore it.” 
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Man is born to dominate and to transcend his own being, to go beyond himself. That is the goal, the purpose, the raison de'tre of existence. Therein lay the path to nobility and holiness, as Isa Nur al Din has repeatedly reminded us. That is the meaning of being Allah’s khalifa (vicegerent) and Allah’s abd (servant). That is what distinguishes us from animals and other creatures. The desire for transcendence is natural, since it is in our primordial nature (our fitrah). Says the poet Robert Browning: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” 
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"Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Then, only then,
Will you find that money cannot be eaten."

                                                                      (Cree Indian Prophecy)

The anti-ecological modern consumerist lifestyle: we are like the ever-thirsty people who drink water without ever thinking about the spring from which the water that quenches our thirst flows, ignorant and forgetful of the very source and origin of that which sustains our life. We cut the very branch of the tree of life on which we sit and from the fruit of which we get our nourishment. And we celebrate this madness, this stupidity as “civilization", “progress” and “development”!

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"There is nothing like deprivation to excite gratitude for small mercies" says an old Spanish proverb, an appropriate saying for the strange times we live in. Three things we must never forget and must never fail to observe: Sabr, Shukr and Tauba.

Wallahu Aalam.

Chief Seattle's Speech

For more, please click: Two Perspectives

Visit: Dervaish's Quetta Channel (Toutube)

Short, Short: On Belief

Short, Short: On Belief

"Credo ut intelligam."  ('I believe so that I may understand.')

                                                                             Augustine of Hippo

“The conspiracy theory of society comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘who is in His place?’ ”                                Karl Popper

"Atheism is like excrement: when enough builds up in the body, it has to come out....The New Atheism is built on three pillars: human ego, priestly pederasty and  the Wahhabis of Mass Destruction (WMD).                                                                                  Abdal Hakim Murad

In the final analysis, there is only belief; we either believe in one God (tawhid or unity, oneness), or in Mickey Mouse, Taylor Swift, chicken biryani, Hollywood, Bollywood, progress, development, democracy, socialism, Marx, Darwin, Freud, evolution, science, nationalism, Gucci, Rolex, soccer, cricket, basketball, Ferrari and BMW, McDonald’s, iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and so on (shirk, takthir or multiplicity, the opposite of tawhid). Those who say “I don’t believe in God” are also believers of a kind; their contrary claims are nothing but a form of belief. Modern sentimentalism aside, "Humanly, no one escapes the obligation to believe in order to be able to understand" says Sheikh Isa Nur al Din (emphasis added). Given the limited and self-referential nature of human reason/rationality, the anti-God “non-believers” also end up with belief: eventually, they believe that there is no Creator of all that is created, including themselves. To the discerning, however, it is clear that theirs is nothing but an imitation religion with its own myths, idols and ideologies, its own pseudo gods and prophets. Said G.K. Chesterton once: "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing; they then become capable of believing in anything." 

Thinking never happens in vacuum. We don’t speak from no-where; we are embedded creatures. We are grounded in extra- rational, or supra-rational ontological presuppositions of one kind or another. Knowing and knowledge are but things in the foreground of much important, but hidden and unexplored, axiomatic background. Thought is always implicated and rooted in deep, metaphysical assumptions that are not the exclusive result of “objective” and universal discursive processes or, of them only. What is presented as utterly rational, universal and objective is but a kind of subjective will, a product of a particular paradigm, often arbitrary discursive formations of a mundane, power hungry and power driven cultural worldview or weltanschauung, as Foucault, Derrida and others have irrefutably demonstrated. Change the deeper, metaphysical assumptions---the profound, axiomatic (back-) ground of thought---- and you get a new, equally “universal”, “objective” system of knowing and being. Man, because of who he is, cannot live without an “idol” to worship, without a myth to give meaning and purpose to his life: what is destroyed, dethroned, demythologized or demystified by the ultra-rational mind is soon replaced with other myths and mysteries, often of inferior quality. Or, the pathology of irrationality is soon replaced by the pathology of rationality with horrendous consequences as recent human history has shown.

To the lost souls---the uprooted, the unmoored and disoriented, the bamboozled who fall for appearances and fail to see "things as they really are", the sarr gardaan---says the Sufi sage Fariduddin Attar in his Conference of the Birds:

"These thoughts have made you stray

Further and further from the proper Way;

You think your monarch's palace of more worth

Than Him who fashioned it and all the earth.

The home we seek is in eternity;

The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,

Of which your paradise is but a drop.

This ocean can be yours; why should you stop

Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?

The secrets of the sun are yours, but you

Content yourself with motes trapped in its beams.

Turn to what truly lives, reject what seems --

Which matters more, the body or the soul?

Be whole: desire and journey to the Whole."

And, he beckons them back to their Centre and Source:

"Come you lost atoms to your Center draw,

And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:

Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide

Return, and back into your Sun subside."

The step out of your "self"

For more, click: The Two Perspectives

Fun with modern philosophy, Uncle Marx

From quality to quantity

Bandagi

Visit: Dervaish's Quetta Channel (YouTube)

Who is CoronaVirus?

Who is CoronaVirus?

Strange question, you say? Not at all, I say.

The “what?” of CoronaVirus, now commonly referred to as COVID-19, is important and of interest to this blogger as much as it is to everybody else, but so is its “who?”, or in other words the increasing number of  identities that are now getting assigned to this new plague the origins of which remain hotly contested. The president of the USA, Trumpola the Racist Buffoon, continues to insist that it is a “Chinese Virus”. Many others of his ilk, the noisy demagogues, the populist charlatans in his own country and around the world, have called it the “Wuhan virus”, the “foreign virus”, the “Asian virus’ and even the “Yellow virus” (read “Yellow peril”).  Many Chinese----and Chinese-looking people-----have become victims of xenophobic abuse, some even physically attacked.  The plagues of fear and loathing follow them everywhere more viciously than the actual pathogen itself.

In our own part of the world, Pakistan, the discussions and debates, both in the corridors of power and especially in the country’s cacophonous electronic-digital media that is infested with an army of obscenely partisan talk show hosts, maskhara (comic) experts and script-reading, hired-gun  “anal-ysts” are not lagging behind in giving the new virus regional, ethnic and sectarian identities. It seems the blame game is in full swing in order to ascertain the irresponsible (the criminal and “sinful”) agents for importing and spreading the disease in the country. While the top authorities in the government (including the president of the republic) of the vindictive ego-man, PM Kaptaan Insaaf Khan, and the discarded, corrupt rabble-rousers in the dysfunctional opposition, tout, almost on a daily basis, that the Pakistanis infected with COVID-19 have no Chinese links, have no history of travel to that friendly country (CPEC, billions of dollars in aid, soft-loans and investments----all understandable), they don’t waste a second to target and blame other communities, peoples and even particular countries for the spread of the new influenza virus in Pakistan. They, these people in positions of power, may or may not have any chauvinistic intentions but in a country ridden with all sorts of inequities, where the nature of power relations between the dominant and the dominated, between the center and the peripheries is what Roger Garaudy once called "a relation of the sick and the deceived", the identities of these blamed people who are often from the minority and historically maligned and marginalized communities are bound to become nastily entangled with any such pathogen and the blame discourse bound to quickly morph into that of biological racism. Recent history is full of such cases, whether in the modern West or elsewhere in modern-(ising) Asia and Africa.

In one such toxic strain of this ugly discourse, the contestants are battling it out in public, one side arguing that the virus came to Pakistan from the Wahabi kingdom---the Saudi kingdom of clown prince MbS---and the other side arguing, equally if not more ferociously, that it was brought to the country from Shia Iran and spread by the returning zaireen, the Shia pilgrims, that frequent that country all year round. Khwaja Asif, a gaffe prone opposition stalwart from PML-N, has actually openly accused the special assistant to the PM for overseas Pakistanis (SAPM), the shady Zulfi Bokahri, for allowing these zaireen to return to their homes in different parts of the country without proper screening and testing for the virus at the Pak-Iran border town of Taftan in Balochistan province.  Bokhari has now sued the loud-mouthed khwaja for defamation and for endangering his life.  Like most other things in the country, ethno-sectarian bigotry has now been injected into this discourse, too. In Quetta, for example, the minority community of Hazaras, targets of decades long indiscriminate killing, victims of terrorism at the hands of both non-state and state-sponsored agents and who are already ghettoized in two neglected wards of the city, have strongly objected to the officially sanctioned policy that was announced by the rather gauche chief secretary of the province in a press conference a few days ago, a policy of quarantine and “social isolation” that the Hazaras see more as another act that will only exacerbate their economic, political and cultural marginalization and ghettoization than a reasonable precautionary measure in the fight against the new virus. As I write these lines, new groups are being identified and blamed as the super-spreaders of COVID-19, such as the Deowbandi Tableeghi Jamaat in Sindh and Punjab.

The CoronaVirus, or COVID-19, has no nationality or ethnicity. It is neither religious nor secular. It is not a Sunni, Shia, Deowbandi or Barelvi pandemic; nor is it Chinese, Iranian, Indian, American or Arab. Although some of my leftist-Marxist friends, with whom I have always disagreed on many things and this is one more of those things, have said to me that this virus does have a “class” in the sense that it will kill mostly poor people (the proletariat) than rich (the bourgeoisie), I think the facts so far are not completely supportive of their arguments, either. This virus is not a friend of some and an enemy of others. It is not some foreign enemy----the different, the strange and unfamiliar, the alien, fearful “other”----that has declared war on me, on my family, my sect, tribe, nation and people, or on “us” only. If we must use such militant or war-like terminology, then let’s try to understand that this essentially modern plague is a threat to, and the enemy of, the entire species, of all of US: us human beings. We are now increasingly using terms such as “social distance” and “social isolation”. The unfortunate thing is that the “distance” in these terms often gets filled with fear, hatred and prejudice----especially on what is called, ironically, social media. The real challenge for all of us, but especially for us Muslims, is to learn to fill it with understanding, love, care and wisdom. We can do it. We should be able to do it relatively easily because we are heirs to (and we never tire of  bragging about this!) a long and illustrious tradition of love, patience, perseverance and, above all, of hikmah (wisdom). 

Wallahu Alam.   

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St. Francis' Grammar High School Quetta: Class of '83

"Our ignorance of the few things that matter is as prodigious as our knowledge of trivialities."                   Charles le Gai Eaton

"Tum tata log bilkul isstudy nahi karta hai!" thundered Ms. Nathaniel at Manzoor and Jaffer, two of the several Hazara boys in her class. It was either 1978 or 1979. Years later, after I had graduated from St. Francis' High, whenever I thought of her she reminded me of the many colorful, and at times devilishly conspiratorial, Anglo-Indian characters in the short stories of Saadat Hassan Manto, probably the greatest of short story writers that the Sub-continent has produced. The boys at the receiving end of Sylvia Nathaniel’s trademark rage on that day had not done their homework and were getting a dressing down by her.

The word “tata” was often used for Hazara students at the school and most of the time it was more of a marker than anything else, with not much special meaning, either positive or negative, attached to it or implied by it. As is the case with all such words and labels, the contexts in which it was used-----the people, the relationships, situations, the tone of language used, gestures etc.-----were more important than anything else. Change the context, or the parameters that inform that context, and what was once a term of endearment will quickly become a poisonous insult, a vicious slur on identity, an odious gibe about some weakness or disability and so on. Imagine a man calling a stranger a monkey (bizzo or bandar), a grasshopper (malakh, tidda), a kitten (pisho or billo), a puppy, a gorilla, a pony or even a donkey (khar, kharro or gadha), motay, chotay, thothay and lamboo etc., terms that he uses daily for his children at home. Ever wonder why many best friends use the most abusive of terms for one another? They do it not because one wants to insult or degrade the other, or even the other’s mother or sister in some cases, but because of the great love that they have for each other. Among Hazaras themselves “tata” can mean any of the following: a tradition-bound old man, an elder; an ordinary, no-frills dude; an honest, hard-working fellow who minds his own business and does not care much about the world around him, somewhat like the takari of the Baloch and the Brahvis.

Wikipedia tells me that St. Francis Grammar High School “was established in 1946 to provide education to the elite of Baluchistan and Sindh.”  A Roman Catholic missionary school situated on the famous Zarghoon Road (formerly Lytton Road), it is one of the oldest educational institutions of Quetta and has produced many luminaries from a former prime minister to army officers, politicians, writers and ambassadors. There is not much available online on the history of the school and I will not dwell on it since that is not the subject of this blog post anyway. Christian missionary schools were everywhere in Pakistan in those days and there were at least six or seven of them in Quetta at the time we matriculated---in 1983. The “we” here refers to my class-fellows (classmates), some of whom I clearly remember and will introduce them to the readers in the following paragraphs of this post. 

A lot has been written about the sins of Christian missions and missionaries in the global South, or in the “darker” world, dark in both senses of skin color and as opposed to “light”-----the "light" of modern (Western) “civilization” or that of Christian “salvation” that would pull the “heathens” out of the darkness of their false customs and traditions; I say "or" because the one is always difficult to separate from the other especially after the dawn of secular modernity in the West some centuries ago. Most of this critical scholarship has been carried out by the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist historians of the global South-----the anti-racist intellectuals of the non-Western world. So much so that the Nobel Laureate bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa who was also, alongside Nelson Mandela and others, on the forefront of the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements in colonized Africa once said this of the Western (white) missionaries:

“When the white missionaries came to Africa, they all had the Holy Book (the Bible) in their hands and not much else. To the black Africans who did not have that Holy Book but who owned everything on the continent----the land, the animals, the resources, the riches-----the missionaries said: ‘Let us close our eyes and pray to the Lord.’ We Africans did so; we closed our eyes and we prayed to the Lord. And when we opened our eyes, we saw that the Africans had the Holy Book in their hands and nothing else; the white missionaries now had everything that once belonged to us: the land, the animals, the resources, the riches of the continent.”

I think this is an apt evaluation, given the tainted history and the many ignoble activities of the Western Christian missionaries in the peripheral Asiatic and African worlds. The missionary educational institutions, for example, may have done a lot of good in the colonized lands but one of their main aims was to produce a clerical class of natives----the ”babu” class----to serve the empire. The function of this class was clearly described by that champion of colonialism, the racist Lord McCauley, in his notorious  “Minute on Education” of 1835.  But just as the wise Tutu pronounced his verdict as a Christian clergyman-----conveying to the world that he and millions of others like him had embraced the sacred message of an authentic, revealed religion while identifying the profane and ugly interests that used that original message for worldly material gains as it was being transported to the far-off lands-------let us also acknowledge, even if we don't go though the process of conversion like Bishop Tutu did, some of the good things that have resulted in our part of the world, thanks to the long presence of the missionaries there.

In short, the fault did not lay with the divinely revealed message of Christianity-----a sister religion of Islam in the monotheistic family of faiths----- but with the imperfect world in which it was received and especially with the ways in which it was, and still is in many places, often preached and propagated by its less-than-perfect followers. Perhaps we should also heed the words of another twentieth century sage, M.K. Gandhi, himself influenced by Christianity (especially by the sermon on the mount) and who once said about it that, “Christianity was a good religion before it went to Europe!”. Just as we Muslims are quick to differentiate between Islam as a revealed religion, as a deen and a sacred worldview, and Muslims as its imperfect followers (as to what they say and do, their words and deeds that often do not live up to the standards and ideals of their religion), it is only fair to accept the same kind of reasoning offered by our Christian neighbors. What the late American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said about religion that “Religion is good for good people and bad for bad people”, can be modified to read, “Good people who see the truth, goodness and beauty of religion are always mindful of the consistency of means and ends, while bad people will always abuse religion, will use it instrumentally, as a means to their own evil designs and ends.”

Fr. Joshua, Sister Cecilia, Sir Sultan and the boys

So, missionary warts aside-------the proselytizing, the bringing of “civilization” to the barbarians, “light” and “salvation” to the heathens and all------ institutions like St. Francis Grammar High School in Quetta have been significantly beneficial to the locals, providing quality English medium education for decades now. It was, after all, the top school in the entire province of Balochistan around the time we were there and for many more years after that. During the early years, the principals and some teachers, too, especially those teaching English, came from European countries. For example, there was Fr. Joshua who, I think, was an Irishman. There was Peter, a pipe puffing eccentric Dutch man, who used to ride his old Norton motorbike all the way to the assembly area and park it next to the old gymnasium. During the later years, just before we graduated, the principals and also many teachers either came from places like Sri Lanka and Southern India or from the bigger cities within the country, places like Karachi and Hyderabad. 

The school staff with Sister Cecilia

Of the teachers that I still remember clearly the following must be mentioned: The Hon. Sir Sultan, our PTI or PE instructor for many, many years; Mrs. (Sylvia) Nathaniel, Mrs. Rehana, Sir Behram, Sir Allahyar, Mrs. Rauf, Sir Munir, Sir Naveed (Asghar) and Sir James (both PTIs), Moulvi Sahib (Islamiat), Mrs. Roshan, Mrs. Jawad and Ms. Mary.  A tall and stout man with an upright posture, Sultan was (then) a traditional disciplinarian (what we now call 'old school') with a booming voice that scared the crap out of the boys, especially the ones who were lazy on the field. He was also the boy-scout master of not only the school but of the entire province at one time, if my memory is not failing me. During PT or hockey and soccer game breaks he would show us some of his magic tricks. For a long time (grade 4 or 5) I was mesmerized by this thumb trick that he used to pull on us kids. Facing us, he would put his closed fists together with the thumbs tucked in. While keeping the half bent left thumb covered with the four fingers of that hand, he would open the four fingers of the right fist so that the half bent right thumb would become visible to us boys in such a way that it would look like an extension of the half hidden left thumb. He would then slowly move the right fist away from the left creating an illusion of the left thumb coming off at its mid joint without any blood! Eventually, he showed us how to do it. I do the same trick for my kids now, but they are more skeptical and less patient than the kids back then. Sir Sultan’s assistants were Sir Naveed and then Sir James. Naveed left after only a few years to take up a full PTI position somewhere in Loralai, I think. James remained and eventually took over from Sir Sultan when the latter retired.

Fr. Joshua, Sir Sultan, Imran Achakzai, Shuja Kasi and others

Sir Behram, the Parsi teacher and the brother of the former Chief Secretary of Balochistan, Mr. Poonigar, was another long serving, popular teacher. He loved to knit and as a class prefect, I and another fellow student often carried his knitting gear to the staff room during recess. Behram was a tall man with a big smile and often talked with a repetitious intonation, in a sing---song, sing---song manner. Mrs. Rehana (Rehman) taught us in fifth and/or sixth grades. A woman with deep eyes set on a face with a permanently serious expression, she was one of the best dressed teachers in the school. She was a strict instructor and once slapped me on the cheek, for what I do not recall. But I am sure it was the reward for some mischief on my part.

It was a different time and place, really. Words and concepts like “harassment’, “abuse ”, “violence” and so on had not yet entered the social and pedagogical lexicons. Education had not yet morphed into a mere “service” and students were not pampered and mollycoddled in those days like they are nowadays. Teaching was still a proper vocation, a calling, and not just a "job" then and because of which schools did not over-indulge the students and their hypersensitive, helicopter parents, treating them like spoiled “customers”. In other words, the “customer” was NOT always right then. Teachers were teachers first, and only then “facilitators”, “communicative” or “participant" observers etc. Effective reprimand in those days meant both persuading verbally AND disciplining physically. It was punishment that was realistic and an effective way of initiating the child into the hard realities of that terrible thing called life! After all, it is through pain that we often come to see the authenticity of life, as many sages have said. Great human achievements often come from the love of difficulties and through struggles and the overcoming of hardships. Our unhealthy obsession with convenience and comfort nowadays is the negation of all these time tested principles and virtues and we can clearly see what it has done to us, especially to the young. God knows what hells many of those kids of the 70s and 80s would be in now were it not for those slaps, pinches, those finger twisters and knuckle knocks on the head, caning and even punches and kicks that they used to receive from their teachers! You see, it was the intention behind all that “violence” that mattered most.  

Sir Behram

Moulvi Sahib with principal J.J. Edward

Then there was the perennial Moulvi Sahib, our Islamiat teacher. I don't think anybody knew his name or even if some did, they never mentioned it. To us, he was just Moulvi Sahib. Islamiat used to be a separate, stand-alone subject until 1978-1979 after which it became Islamiat and Pakistan Studies for a while. That happened because of the “Islamization” policies of the military dictator Zia ul Haq who seized power after declaring martial law in 1977 and whose politics have done big time damage to every aspect of Pakistani society from which it has yet to recover. That politics can best be described, to modify Henry Adam's observation, as "the systematic organization of prejudices and hatreds on ethnic and sectarian lines". Moulvi Sahib was a quiet and humble man who taught his subject (who practiced his faith, we might as well say) equally quietly and humbly. I don’t think it was because of the fact that he was an Islamiat teacher in a Christian missionary school, but was partly because of his personality that had the beauty and perfume of spirituality which always implies wisdom ("Beauty is the splendor of Truth" as Plato tells us) and partly because religion, mainstream Islam as understood and practiced by the average believer, had not yet taken the strong literalist and sectarian color that it would in the following years, with tragic consequences for many. That unfortunate reductive process started in the mid-1980s, again thanks mostly to the divisive policies and manipulative politics of the dictator mentioned above, something about which I have written elsewhere, in some of my other blog posts. 

Mrs. Jawad

Mrs. Rehana

During our final years at Grammar School-----classes 8th, 9th and 10th-------we were taught, among others, by Mrs. Jawad, our English teacher. Mrs. Jawad made us write and write, made us do grammar drills, and gave us loads of homework. I still have some of the light brown notebooks (with the school logo on the front cover) filled cover-to-cover with English drills of grammar points and composition pieces. Some of the finer points of language use in formal writing that she taught us, such as the use of the passive voice and the different clause types, have stayed with me and have benefitted me all these years. She used to sign our report cards and notebooks with a huge “I. Jawad” often scrawled across the page at an angle. What that initial “I” stood for, I never found out.

Of all the principals that we had, Fr. J.B. Todd was one that needs special mention here. He was someone that I will never forget and I am sure that feeling is shared with me by many of my class-fellows. In fact, our time at Grammar School coincided with the tenures of three principals: Fr. Joshua, Fr. Todd and Sister Cecilia. Fr. John Baptist Todd arrived at Grammar High School in the late 1970s or maybe early 1980s. He was a well-known figure of the Christian community in Pakistan, especially in Karachi and in other big cities in Sindh province. At St. Patrick’s High School Karachi, he was even teacher to the former military-dictator-turned- president Pervez Musharraf in the late 1950s. According to Pervez Musharraf, Todd used to give him a good caning whenever he misbehaved in school. Obviously, Principal Todd did not cane and discipline this particular pupil of his enough, for years later he (Pervaiz Musharraf, the murderous goon, the yet another uniformed dunce!) ended up as a nuisance to the nation, and who is now, and will be forever, remembered as the murderer of a Baloch elder and senior political figure of Balochistan, Nawab Akbar Bugti.

A word about Fr. Todd and his legendary cane. Meticulously dressed in his formal grey suit and with neatly combed hair soaked in a liter or two of the finest hair tonic available then, he would make hourly rounds of the corridors with his trademark flexible cane in hand. Upon seeing a victim, a potential prey, a punished student asked to wait outside the classroom by his teacher for some mischief or bad conduct, Todd’s pace would pick up, become brisk, and an impish smile would appear on his face, an expression that could be interpreted in only one way: “Aha! Gotcha!”  But during his time as principal, the school did see many improvements, especially in the disciplinary department and in the overall quality of education. And then tragedy befell him. He was shot in the leg but luckily survived. Suspicion fell on one of our class fellows, a boy named Taufeeq or Tanveer (and I think he was originally from Karachi?). I don’t remember much else about that incident. Soon after that, Todd left and was replaced by Sister Ceclia. After Todd, everything changed; things were never the same again. Having taught, tutored and disciplined thousands of pupils over a period of six decades, Fr. John Baptist Todd-----the man with the cane----left this world on December 4, 2017. RIP.

No mention of Grammar School is complete without recalling Haji. Haji was the bell guy, the postman, the assistant, the helper, the peon, the security guy and so on. Always in a waistcoat and with a turban on his head, this handyman was an institution within an institution; he even lived on the school premises, in a small house on the far side of the lower playground, next to the school carpenter’s workshop. The carpenter, whose main job was to repair broken desks and chairs, was another permanent fixture at the school. Already an old man, he was there when I entered Grammar School in 1972 and had not changed a bit when I graduated in 1983. People like him and Haji seemed to be time-resistant! Haji's sidekick, Meeru (or Khairu??), was a different character, mainly because he was of a different generation: younger, ambitious and embodying all the new tastes, desires and values of his generation, many of which were antithetical to the old virtues of which Haji and the carpenter were the prime examples. Of course, I say this now with the benefit of hindsight. On the opposite side of that playground, across from Haji’s quarters, was the canteen which stood like a large sized gazebo under the shade of the huge berry tree. That canteen served cream buns, cream rolls, qeema and aloo patties through the holes on all but one side of the structure to hordes of rowdy, hungry boys during recess.

Class of  '83

Of  my class-fellows (then the word was always class-fellows and not class-mates) I can recall the following with some clarity (getting old!): Aamir Raza, Kamal Hashim, Shahid Malik, Saadullah, Sikander, Shabbir, Manzoor, Jaffer, Arshad Ali, Arshad Zubair, Mir Javed, Akram Lodhi (of Malik Autos), Wahid Achakzai, Wasim Baran, Goshi, Jahanzeb, Wajid Ali, Farooq Faiz, Suleman Lodhi, Furqan, Iftikhar Ahmed, Ejaz ul Hassan, Tariq, Janan, Raja, Fazal, Nisar Dogar, Athar and Azhar (twins), Nasir and Asghar (the syed Shah brothers, also twins), Dawood Almas, Ibrahim Afridi, Maroof, Hassan, Jahangir, Liang, Khurram Shehzad, Ataullah. There were others, friends who were either junior or senior to us, for example, Adil (Sir Sultan’s son), Khalid Sultan, Shujauddin Kasi, Joshua (Dawood’s cousin), Imran Achakzai, Godfrey (the runner). With only few of them I am still in touch, though. Some of the boys went to Sixth Standard for their University of Cambridge GSCE/A-levels after class 8th. Some lived in the same ward of the city as I did, in the different mohallas along Toghi Road: Goshi, Jahanzeb, Shahid, Kamal, Sikander and Ejaz. 

Class of '83 (Sr. Cambridge students)

Athar and Azhar, the twins, lived close to the school, near or inside the T&T residential colony. With them, and their younger brother Sarwar, I shared another common acquaintance in the person of Mr. P.K. Ali who was my private tutor for some years. Mr. Ali was a retired T&T employee who used to teach me math and science after school. Fazal and Nisar Dogar (of Nisar Electronics) were close friends, always together. Fazal was the top sprinter of the school for a while. He was a short guy with fast legs and he even talked as he ran, very fast! Nisar was his opposite, often quiet and soft spoken. Goshi, who was thin and all legs, was also a good athlete. And so was Maroof. Maroof was everywhere on the field on annual sports days. Liang Usark (?) was the local Chinese guy and, if I am not wrong, he was good friends with Shabbir and Sikander. His parents had a shoe store on Jinnah Road. Raja was the one with long hair and green eyes. I think something happened to him in a big accident after we graduated, or maybe it was in our final year, class 10th. Tariq, Saifullah’s younger brother, was close friends with Janan and Wasim and was one of the more active and cheeky boys, sometimes playing tricks on others. Ejaz ul Hassan, my neighbor on Toghi Road, was once obsessed with body building. I wonder if he is still lifting those heavy dumbbells! 

Iftikhar Ahmed used to live on Fatima Jinnah Road and whose house I visited often. His father (uncle?) was a lawyer and my grandfather----and later on my father-----was his business client, if I am not wrong. I think Iftikhar also became a lawyer later on. And there was also another Ejaz, Ejaz Akbar. He was often with Imran (Memon?) and the twins, Athar and Azhar. Imran was also close friends with Mir Javed. I also recall Arshad Ali, the scrawny guy with loads of curly hair, as someone with the sharpest wit and always ready with a humorous quip.  Farooq Faiz, the son of a high ranking police officer (SP? DIG?) in the city, was the big guy with hearty laughs. There was also another Farooq (Farooq Ahmed?) who used to live on Patel Road, and was my neighbor for some years when we were also living there. He disappeared just before we entered class 9. I think he moved to some other city with his parents. Some from the batch of 1983 were with me at college and university as well: Amir, Saadullah, Shahid and Dawood. These are some of the sketchy memories of the old days in St. Francis Grammar High, Quetta, a past that I carry around with me in my head, and especially in my heart, and which I try to preserve, however imperfectly, by talking about it, often with old friends and relatives.  It's a battle, I know---I hope not a losing one!---a battle against cruel time that never fails to put holes in a man's memory. So, like the rest, I will also just say,  "those were the days, my friend those were the days...." as the old song reminds us!

Note: In these musings on the past, I have mentioned many people, places and events; I have also quoted some of those people. Given what time does to man, and especially to his memory, it is very likely that I have gotten many things wrong, have omitted certain names, dates and other important facts or have committed many mistakes in recalling and writing about things past. I accept the mistakes, take responsibility for the omissions and the commissions, and offer an apology in advance to all those readers who may feel discomfort by the partially correct or factually incorrect information. 

For more on similar topics, please click: Regal Cinema, Qta

Quetta: The cars in the 1970s and 1980s

Quetta: The City of Karezes

On Books: The demise of the rental libraries of Quetta

Hussainabad: the people and their values

Simplicity and simple people

Quetta: Then and now

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