Yaadish Bakhair: Zari Gul

Zari Gul of Spinzer Beauty, Liaquat Market, Quetta

Yaadish Bakhair: Zari Gul

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

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zari Gul (wedding ??)

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

Zari Gul with friends.

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

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

Yaadish Bakhair. Khuda Biyamurza marhoom Zari Gul ra.

For more, please click:

A Lament, On Solitude

Regal Cinema, Quetta

Quetta, City of Karezes

Harf e Dervaish (Urdu)

Quetta: the cars

First post

Illuminations 3

Indians: the barbarians at the gate

Illustration by ABRO.

Indians: the barbarians at the gate

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

                              Herman Goering, Nazi leader and war criminal

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

                                     Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister

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

                                                                      Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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

And now, some context.

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

I said a funny and telling anecdote above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more, click: The Hollow Men

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

A Lament for Quetta: A Lament for Quetta

On Belief: On Belief

On Simplicity: Simple People

Quetta: Hazara ethnic cleansing

Propaganda and Language

Overqualified and underqualified in Balochistan

The Vampires of The System (in Pakistan)

The Vampires of The System (in Pakistan)

Like an inverted, uglier version

Of the un-namable Tao,

The vampire that can be named

Is not the vampire.

A toxic chameleon,

A shape-shifting, liquid reptile,

Evil in all its

Colors and shapes,

"Shape without shape, form without form",

The booted bloodsucker

Is like a devilfish:

A poison squirting squid,

A killer octopus with many tentacles

That sucks the blood dry

Of the weak and the vulnerable.

The vampire has titles, it has names,

And yet it is,

Without a name.

They call it

"The taqatwar halqa";

They identify it as

"The khalai makhlooq",

The "handlers", the "qabza mafia".

It is "the establishment", and

"The Mehkama a Zaraat'.

A neutered, cowardly monster

Without balls and backbone,

It is also "the neutral".

Mediocrity, greed and ineptitude---

Impotence all around, without and within

Obscenely paraded as

"Faith, Unity and Discipline"---

Are the cherished "virtues"

Of the depraved devil.

The fish, they say,

Rots from the head down.

His subject steals ten

When the king steals one.

In The System (in Pakistan)

The bloodthirsty vampire king,

Rotten to the core,

Is perennially busy

Pilfering, plundering and raping.

Seventy years and more

Of oppression, violence and gore---

Of crime, betrayal and corruption,

Mass misery, inequity and deception---

Are the sordid gifts of this voracious boar

To the cursed and ever-blighted nation.

...continued

For more, please click on the link:

The Hollow Men (of Pakistan)

Harf-e-Dervaish (Urdu)

The Picture

The System

Quetta: Hazara Ethnic Cleansing

Propaganda and Language

The System (in Pakistan): an update

 

The System (in Pakistan): an update

The bloodsucking Vampires who are the designers, executioners and the owners---the dumdum evil overlords---of the seven decade old genocidal System in Pakistan have once again switched gears, and are now in the panic-overdrive mode, rapidly spiralling downward, in a devolutionary race into violent madness. Violence. Yes, violence. The inevitability of violence. History is about to repeat itself. Again.

They are committing blunder upon blunder as they try to hold on to, or preserve, the brutal, pornified status quo that is their beloved anti-awam System. Every murderous tool and every rotten trick in their made-in-Pindi satanic toolbox, from audio-video blackmailing to disappearing to torture and murder at secret locations to media blackouts is backfiring. With every one of these blowbacks, they get a little more exposed to the narcotized and bamboozled awam. Perception management is not working. The "positive image" propaganda is also failing, it seems. The ISPR financed mediocre circuses on big screens and on the idiot box in which paid jokers and bought marionettes excrete nonsense and vulgarity, and perform falsities of all sorts are now seen for what they really are. The jingoistic versions of the national anthem regularly piped out by coke sniffing Coke Studio marasis have also lost their charm and magic: the traditionally exploited, pathologically violated awam is no longer willing to exclusively identify the flag with the uniform donning Vampires and refuse to uncritically shove them up their... as they have been programmed to do all these years while singing along with the buffoonish ideologues of the The System. Even the majority culpable Punjabi unwashed---the people of the only province in the country, Punjab, always gullible, always the most jingoistic and accomplice par excellence in the maintenance of The System of the Vampires---is now showing signs of awakening and of seeing through the 75-year-old genocidal charade. Is there hope this time? Maybe. But maybe not.

For more, please click on the link below:

The System: Blackmailing

The System: The Vampires

Darktimes spirituality

Illuminations 3

Overqualified and underqualified in Balochistan

Overqualified and underqualified in Balochistan

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

Zygmunt Bauman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more, please click on the link below:

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

Quetta: A City of Karezes

Harf-e-Dervaish (Urdu)

Illuminations 5

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

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

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

                                Herman Goering, Hitler's minister of propaganda

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

                                                                                         Alan Bloom

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

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

Chiltan Market, Quetta Chawni

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

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

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

Gulistan Road, Quetta Chawni

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

Pani Taqseem, Quetta Cantt.

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

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

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

Quetta Club, Quetta Chawni

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

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

Gwadar and "development"

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

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

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

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

Cantonments, DHAs and other gated communities in Pakistan

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

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

Quetta: Hazara Ethnic Cleansing

Illuminations 5