THE G SPOT

Who Are We Fighting?

2011-01-04T12:52:00.003-05:00

It's incredibly shocking and tragic, even though I'm hardly Taseer's no.1 fan. Within the liberal democratic framework, I like PPP the best, because of their more secular or at least, less Wahabi stance and because of their pro-poor agenda. At the same time though, one must acknowledge the extent to which they work within the framework of global capitalism, neoliberalism, American imperialism etc.

Ahmed Rashid and Hussain Haqqani came on BBC to place the assassination within the narrative of the conflict between secular democracy and Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. This framing of the situation serves the purpose of reifying the idea of the clash of civilization in Pakistan, which thus legitimates greater intervention, more drones etc. Salman Taseer, business tycoon, is our martyr. I appreciate his stance against blasphemy laws very much, but I am saddened by the fact that the likes of Salman Taseer and Benazir Bhutto are the greatest martyrs of our generation. Benazir spoke out against the Taliban and was assassinated, the governor spoke out against blasphemy laws and met a similar fate. The conversation seems to be moving more and more to the right. It takes less and less to be controversial politically in Pakistan and the space for a politics that is both anti-imperialist and secular, which is both anti-drones and anti-Taliban, has become smaller and smaller. We're on a path where soon, being pro Taliban or being pro US intervention will be the only two options. As it is, nobody talks about class or oppression anymore.

The assassination comes at a very delicate moment as the government of PM Gilani faces the threat of a vote of no confidence from Parliament. Nawaz Sharif (who leads the majority PMLN block in opposition) had given them 3 days to fix the situation after MQM broke off, and now they have 3 more days for mourning and fixing.

Taseer was killed by his own security guard and the media is showing us smiling pictures of him after the event. Is it an isolated incident, was the guard motivated merely by personal outrage at Taseer's speaking out against the blasphemy laws? Are larger political forces involved? It's probably both. There's a huge religious right wing contingent in Pakistan that is vehemently opposed to the repealing of the blasphemy laws, and some of these groups are very militant. On the other hand, there's also many 'common folk' who would be equally in opposition of repealing the laws. It seems, and I may be wrong on this, that militant groups have a reserve army of people to do their bidding. If that is the case, the question is, who are we fighting?

Positionality, Secularism & Pakistan in the War on Terror

2010-11-11T17:51:00.009-05:00

Something I wrote after the blast in Karachi in November.

Violence in Karachi is pretty normal - some of my friends also from the city did not bat an eye over the last incident, for the reason that it happens all the time, even though this particular blast was much bigger than anything in the last several years. For us, violence is part of the general shittiness of Karachi, which provides the background to our particular bourgeois misery. The general shittiness of Karachi affects us to the extent that it might affect curfew negotiations with our parents and pose obstacles in our path as we scuttle from one coffee shop to the next on Zamzama or Shahbaz, where we mingle with our friends who are as bored, frustrated, Americanized, English-medium and generally as bourgie as we are. (Oh and similarly fashionable too; in the cut throat world of Karachi social climbing, the length of a woman's kameez, if six inches too long or short, can translate into social suicide.) At any rate, the point I wish to make here is that for us, violence is a normal and inevitable part of the background of our lives.

And yet, of course, everyone is embroiled in the discourse around violence and terrorism that is constantly blasted from the bullhorns of the media outlets. It makes us uncomfortable though. The idea that these people are terrorists and need to be eliminated. This discomfort is fairly well established - it is alluded to every time someone says Pakistan is not doing enough for the war, Pakistan is not committed to the war, Pakistanis are terrorist lovers and Jew/American/Indian haters, etc. Hell, people have come on air and explicitly said that this war is not Pakistan's war, it is America's war etc. I have to say here that I share that discomfort - and to be completely honest, it is only and exactly discomfort, not more and not less. It is this discomfort that I wish to explore here.

In the past year or so, there's many things that I have reconsidered. I've made a transition from being a secular, liberal/Marxist, anti-Musharraf, pro-democracy person to... something else, I'm not sure what exactly yet. I say 'liberal/Marxist' because there's much that the two camps share in Pakistan - it can perhaps be best summarized as an underlying commitment to rational, West-esque liberalism. In this camp, Marxists are mute on the subject of class and labor in the context of European and North American liberal democracies, which as Marxists, they should certainly not be. Democracy is heralded as a step towards socialism - this is a stance that the CMKP has taken in the past for instance - and so here there is clearly a teleology at play as the idea of linear progress is invoked. There is some camaraderie between liberals and Marxists also because of the similarity in their locations and positions. Their perspective on what is good for Pakistan is linked directly to their class/ language/ ethnic privileges, something that is true for all of us. But what is lacking with them is any sort of reflexivity about this. I am not implying here that reflexivity is an antidote to privilege, just that our normative arguments about Pakistan must always be qualified by an acknowledgment of our position.

I bring up positionality here because it has such a strong impact on our ideas about the war. Whereas the Leftist club has historically been against US imperialism in this region and others (for instance, I doubt any of them would argue that US intervention in Afghanistan or in the Americas during the 1980s was justified,) they play a different tune when it comes to the issue of the Taliban in Pakistan. This difference can be attributed to a commitment to secularism, which, for some leftists in Pakistan, trumps a commitment to an anti-imperialist politics. It is discomforting to say the least, the manner in which the progressives in Pakistan- intellectuals, English media consumers, drawing room uncles and aunties, coffee shop hotties - have totally bought into the idea that the war is something that is necessary, that the Taliban threat must be eliminated (through violence,) that these extremists are antithetical to Pakistan, whose pre-existing rational secularism they are violating. These attitudes are the direct product of secular ideals, of high-school type anxieties that make bourgeois Pakistani intellectuals want to be just like the cool First World liberal democracies.

I would like to burst a bubble here - we are not, and we will not become a secular liberal democracy like UK/ France/ what have you. Anyone who pays any attention to European or American politics will be able to point out the many ways in which this might actually be a good thing. But that is not the point here. We need to stop being delusional about who we are, we need to perhaps start by asking the question of who this 'we' is anyway, we need to see the way in which Pakistan, like other countries of the global South, present different faces of modernity, rather than being something other than modernity. The secularism of the Pakistani intellectual comes from a particular place - it comes from being indoctrinated from a young age about the superiority of Western 'modernity' as opposed to our local traditional backwardness. It comes from being the consumers of a private education system that provides a route, however steep or circuitous, to assimilation in the global North. Let us not pretend then that our vision for Pakistan is rooted in anything other than self-interest, or that it can benefit or even resonate with anyone other than us.

How than do we address the question of the Pakistani and American military operation?

Anti-imperialist politics has been completely hijacked by the military and the conservative groups with which it has been allied. I use the term 'conservative' here to connote economic conservatism, not religious. This is a devastating impediment to radical politics in the country. But that is apparently not a concern, because we no longer even ask the question of what a radical politics would look like in Pakistan.

These are terrorists, they are killing people, ordinary citizens. But the media serves to play up only this end of the violence, paying scant attention to the violence doled out every day by the state. this violence is a part of us, it is coming from us, to the extent that we believe in the idea of a Pakistani 'us'. I am saying here that maybe we can think of the Taliban as a part of who and what we have become. This is something that must be accepted as a necessary consequence of regional and national politics over the past several decades. Let us not forget that Pakistan was complicit in the Cold War, complicit in funding the most violent groups in Afghanistan. And now the chickens have come home to roost. This is not so much an issue of 'our war' but the fact that this is a part of who we are. It is as much a part of Pakistan as the military, the MQM, the Balochi nationalist movement, the PPP. Please let us not invoke, re-read and re-interpret Jinnah's words for the nth time to determine if this was on the plan for the Pakistan that was hastily drafted in 1946-7. (To think that there even was a plan, come on, who are we kidding here?) My point here is this - perhaps it is time to stop the drones and have a serious negotiation.

Disclaimer: I use the terms 'our', 'we', 'they', 'them' rather loosely. Identify with what/ whom you choose.

Karachi Blast- Who is it really about?

2010-11-11T17:20:00.003-05:00

This has to be the most ridiculous article about the blast that I have seen. It's basically about how the blast was heard 'far and wide' - that is, in areas that really matter, namely Clifton, Defence, Bath Island and Zamzama. People in these affected areas are said to have heard their windows rattling! Aur to aur, their Kashmiri servants thought it was another earthquake!

I don't really know what to say apart from WTF??? Why is this news worthy?

Recycled Spinoff - Not Whither, But Wherefore 'Pakistan'?

2010-11-04T17:04:00.004-04:00

Since I never know what to post here, I am just going to spinoff a point raised by Umair on his blog Recycled Thought (link on the sidebar to the right).

In his post "Jinnah's many last words", Umair makes a good point about how "collective identity emanates from the collective experience of obtaining or struggling for a common goal", because it points to why the idea of Pakistan and Pakistani-ness is fraught with tension. Independence and the creation Pakistan was not a collective experience of struggle towards a common goal - it was a compromise in the process of negotiation, as opposed to a clear goal that the different provinces struggled towards. Perhaps the reason it is difficult to locate Jinnah's true vision for Pakistan and how it applies to us today is because the Pakistan we have today, which is an independent 'nation-state', has nothing to do with the kind of Pakistan that Jinnah was negotiating for (basically a group of autonomous Muslim majority provinces reporting to a dual legislature at the center).

Since independence, the 'minority provinces' (i.e everyone except Punjab) have been marginalized politically, economically, culturally, etc, which basically means that for a lot of people, 'Pakistan' represents little else than the state that is exploiting them. Given this, I wonder, is there any merit in holding on to the idea of the Pakistani nation, or considering it more legitimate than the idea of the Balochi/ Sindhi/ Pakhtun nations? Should we bother to frame conflicts and politics in a way that keeps referring to the idea the 'nation-state', the idea that there is a single Pakistani nation that is subject to the state? It seems to me there is a specific function that these debates perform: on the one hand they will never be able to resolve the question of 'what IS Pakistan anyway?' but by continuing to ASK the question, they serve to reify the nation state. This is problematic for the reasons I've given above, but again, because the postcolonial state in Pakistan is basically a surplus extracting machine that derives its power from concurrently enabling greater integration of the economy into the global capitalist framework on the terms of the global North, such that peasants and workers in the area continue to occupy an extremely marginal position within global capitalism.

On the Election Today

2010-11-02T02:07:00.001-04:00

People in the US who are voting tomorrow, some sobering thoughts.

- War in Afghanistan

Unsurprisingly, Democrats in Congress have failed to ariculate a critique of American imperialism. On the contrary they have passed bills to expand the war in Afghanistan.This includes more money and more troops.

obama on war: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-28/politics/obama.afghanistan_1_ambassador-karl-eikenberry-afghan-president-hamid-karzai-afghanistan?_s=PM%3APOLITICS

congress on war: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/27/afghanistan-war-funding-b_n_661615.html

"A second bill that would see American military personnel pulled entirely out of Pakistan was defeated heavily by a margin of 372-38. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) explained his argument for voting against the measure by stating that a war resolutions bill should not pertain to areas where there are no ongoing hostilities." http://www.infowars.com/congress-extends-war-funding-for-afghanistan/

- Humanitarian aid for Pakistan after the floods has been a small fraction of financial aid extended to the military in pakistan, which serves the dual purpose of fighting America's war there and undermining democratic institutions.

- On 'Mozlums'

Obama backpedalled at rocket speed after initially making a statement endorsing the mosque in NYC. Around the same time, he made a particularly disgusting statement discouraging the pastor in FL from burning the Quran, arguing that it would hurt American troops in the Muslim world, without paying any attention to how incredibly offensive and racist it would be. It is incredible that this issue was framed in terms of how it will help/hurt empire and not how it would hurt people (yes, yes, "citizens" "residents" "immigrants" or other legally sanctioned Muslims in the US).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/09/AR2010090903014.html

-Profiling

The Obama administration's measures to make airport security more 'efficient' have increased racial profiling at airports http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/06/airport-security-measures-draw-accusations-profiling/

- LGBT Issues

It is important to remember that gay marriage isn't the only thing at stake here, not that that has received unequiovcal support from Mr. Prez. Congress and Obama have failed to address the structural inequalities and oppressions that are suffered by queer people, including employment discrimination. http://sdgln.com/news/2010/10/25/news-analysis-will-lgbt-voters-abandon-democrats-november

In Massachusetts:

- Over the past year, Democrats in MA have made it more difficult for illegal immigrants to get access to healthcare, education and a host of other public services. At the same time, democrats in congress are working ever harder to 'fix' the broken immigration system by reifying national borders.

- Democrat dominated massachusetts also has incredibly pathetic statistics on higher education, including money spent on higher education, compared to other states. According to PHENOM only four states spend less per capita on higher education.

- Also, Democrats in MA are openly anti-labor; for instance the graduate employees contract did not get funded until just last month.

I concede that there may be (subtle) differences between the Democrats and Republicans. However, I am afraid that by blindly falling into the trap of celebrating the false dreams of pluralist democracy in a self-congratulatory kind of way (ala Jon Stewart, for instance,) we are in danger of forgetting the sharp limits to gains that can be made within a two party system that has succesfully marginalized/ eradicated all radical critique and is inherently racist, imperialist, homophobic and anti-labor.

Sleep easy :-)

Kristof Reifies 'Muslim' Category and is Still a Douche

2010-09-19T13:06:00.004-04:00

Rant and Rave, Part n

So I came across this article by NYT expert on Pakistan, Nicholas D. Kristof. His writing on Pakistan always comes off a bit patronizing and condescending. For instance, an article about Mukhtara Mai - if I remember correctly, about a center that Mukhtara Mai had set up for women who had been sexually assaulted. It would be difficult to deny that this kind of violence is prevalent in Pakistan, but the exclusive focus in the article on the victimhood of Pakistani women was pretty messed up I thought.

Anyway, so now he's written an article that about Muslims. It is supposed to be an apology and starts off kind of on the right foot:

"I hereby apologize to Muslims for the wave of bigotry and simple nuttiness that has lately been directed at you. The venom on the airwaves, equating Muslims with terrorists, should embarrass us more than you. Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly, and I apologize for the slurs."

It gets better, as Kristof critiques a newspaper in Maine that apologized for posting a cover story about Muslims praying on Eid on September 11th (Eid was on Sept. 10 in the US this year):

"Must coverage of law-abiding Muslims be “balanced” by a discussion of Muslim terrorists? "

Good question, Mr. Kristof. Interestingly enough though, at many points later in the article, Kristof's own apology to Muslims is qualified and "balanced" by references to the extremist bad guys, seemingly suggesting that the events of 9/11 justify in part the violence that is doled out to Muslims in the US today.

One comment on his blog is given special importance, according to which “Catholics and Jews did not come here and kill thousands of people.” This person seems to be making the argument that whereas previous racism suffered by Catholics and Jews in the US was truly immoral, it makes sense to treat Muslims like crap today because, again, of 9/11.

I'd like to go off on a tangent here about the US and its obsession with 9/11. The BBC recently did a piece on Quran burning in the US (deserving of its own rant and rave section really,) around the time of the 9/11 memorial. It shows people at the site of the WTC, crying, commemorating etc. The event and its coverage by the media obviously has something to do with the construction of collective memory by the state and the media. As someone who is 'ethnically' a Muslim, I found this incredibly offensive because it belied the hubris of the empire. As if these 5,000 people were the only people to have ever lost their lives to political violence. As if the US hasn't killed hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq since and isn't continuing to do so. But there is no mention of empire in the footage, and there is no mention of empire in Kristof's discussion of the 'Muslims killed thousands of people' comment.

Coming back to Kristof, what is most problematic for me is this investigation into the category of Muslim - Muslims in Bangladesh, Muslims in Pakistan, Muslims in Afghanistan, Muslims in the US. Muslims, as opposed to Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Afghanis and Americans. This discussion of the various 'types' of Muslims - well, not various, just two, good and bad - presupposes the value in thinking in terms of the category of Muslim. In the act of apologizing too Muslims and citing their positive attributes to the world, Kristof is also magic-marking the boundary around that category and making it more real, making us more different and confirming us as the Other for today's America.

Orientalism 2.0 beta gamma phi

2010-03-10T23:16:00.006-05:00

So it might have something to do with the fact that I've recently moved to the US as a graduate student (and being a Pakistani in the US is an 'interesting' experience to say the least,) or that in an ironic turn of events postcolonialism and Foucault seem to have taken over the academe, but lately I'm seeing Orientalism everywhere.

Case in point: new Bhutto movie.

Granted this is only the trailer but it's bad enough. References to Pakistan as one of the most dangerous places in the world and "a place where women didn't matter" are really not going to win these people any fans, save for either Americans who don't know much about our sexy backward country, Pakistanny immigrants eager to be assimilated. Both forms exoticisation (other- and self-) can be found here. Of course, also problematic in this film is the glorification of Benazir Bhutto and that too from a perspective informed solely by America's (self-interested) 'Taliban Bad, Anti-Taliban Good' foreign policy in the 'Af-Pak' region. Incidentally, Duane Baughman, the producer of the film, reveals in an interview that he was a political consultant whose "firm was being vetted to be involved in Benazir’s third attempt at becoming Prime Minister". Somebody named Mark Siegel, political adviser to Benazir based in the US, worked closely with Baughman on this film.

CAUTION: RANT AHEAD!

On a personal level, I can't help but feel that this movie is emblemic of the chootia-fication of Pakistan by the US - for decades US governments have supported military dictatorships and their fundamentalist allies and have nurtured the very Taliban that they have now set out to destroy. In the process, in addition to the undermining of the democratic process and the liberalization of the economy etc, Pakistan lost Benazir, arguably the most popular democratic leader in the country and the leader of a pro-poor political party. (Please note that I am not saying here that Benazir was a revolutionary messiah come to earth to save our souls, just that she was the massively popular leader of a political party that does have a pro-poor agenda.) Anyway, what pisses me off is that after all this, some random American policy idiot producer who openly admits to not knowing much about Pakistan wants to make this chootiafication into a summer blockbuster and make a buck off of it. He says the aim of the movie was to be commercial and yet educate and entertain at the same time. He patronizingly goes on to say that "We understood that if education is medicine, that we had to give it to our audience in really small, easy doses". This line reminds me of that scene in the movie Reality Bites where Ben Stiller's channel murders Winona Ryder's indie documentary and talks about how it was meatloaf that had to be jazzed up in order to be made more palatable to children. (The movie was a lot less dreary and a lot funnier than I am making it sound here, but you get the picture.) My advice to people interested in learning about the history of Pakistan - pick up a book.

Name

2010-03-08T00:14:00.008-05:00

There is no land/soil, only the air and the sky which never leave and are always there , just a bit colder here than back home. Strange(?) how even the familiar can grip your lungs with ice fingers and say honey come on, let me love you.

Life here like reels of old movies where scenes pause and flash and frazzledly split-mark the line between then and now, bathed in nostalgic colours of winter sepia even as you live it breathe it feel it rush through your fingers. Touch it to feel its roughness; yes, this is a corrugated road surface, yes it is real, you are here. People speak kind words with kindness and touch my shoulder but who are they anyway? White black and even brown so unrecognizably that they may as well be rainbow striped.

One person was pink and white with big brown eyes and a torn heart that I touched with my hands and it must have been real but still it felt remote and alien-coloured. I heard him speak words that were my words and the words were the same. But inside the words there was a twisted turnip that was born when the roots took the earth by force.

I could make home into TV and then watch it here but then I would cease to exist and will smash everything to pieces until glass and granite turn to grey powder. Inside my old TV // Skipping channels at 3am in my home/town, dark living room, blue lit, floating in a misery that is fierce and family and true like nothing here is true. Here the colours are TV colours and the scenes as real. Whitewash all around, on the black bloodstained walls, on my Blue Sky, the dirty green swamp, dogshit on the road. Silver white steel granite glass. Here and there where they forced the earth to part for more concrete to commemorate how they erased us with violence and plain face. (The barbarians are coming said their poet.)

Home/Me/You. I saw it dance and spasm bold purple, green and gold on my eyelids while the storm was flash pouring outside But we were Warm Inside and I would never leave home again and never be for saken or lorn. I felt real when he touched me and so he felt real when I touched him and we pushed the wall of my tomorrow against the wall of my yesterday so I could see them both together without falling into the abyss in between. And I heard me tell myself I was alive and still t/here, whole flesh fat bones and blood, Ariel and her voice.

My dream was dark and the same midnight blue from before but the morning was a flood of the white-cold sun of here and there was a big plasma TV in this living room. I searched it to show me home but it wasn't there and I'd been home! but I was never there and it never was and

and these buildings are all there is left. And you must, must forget So you can join poor people in their wait to get jobs in construction. The buildings are strong, hard and infallible - save for when they are forced to remember and say the names of the dead.

I die and they make me into a building. Now I am strong and cannot be moved. They paint my memories and hang them in the halls for fond gazing. One day I talk to the sun after a long time and it is golden and yet:

From the window of the 24^th floor, a twenty four girl looks beyond the hills and is weeping.

Ali Haider Grows a Beard, Renounces Music; Amer Liaqat Continues Being a Choot on National TV

2009-11-02T22:15:00.003-05:00

This is a rather old clip, from July 2009, but I recently stumbled across it and found enough inspiration for a solid rant.

Somebody cuntpunt Amer Liaqat for me, please. Cash prize $500. Winners can expect additional remuneration in the form of feeling good about themselves for having done a massive service to the Pakistani people.

Highlights of the video:

Victims of drone attacks are 'shaheed'.
America is evil (duh).
It seems that Amer Liaqat has hired Shahrukh Khan as his elocution coach.
MOST IMPORTANT: Both Obama and Baitullah are terrorists in their own right, and we the Pakistani people must hold on to this truth unless we hope to confront the inextricable, inscrutable, hemorrhoid-inducing question of “where do we stand on this war?”
In order to stay mystified about this whole ordeal, it is also important to always remember that this is a religious war/issue, and not a political one, being fought between Christians/Jews on the one side and Muslims on the other.
This is so obvious that it barely deserves mention but I'll put it out there nonetheless: Amer Liaqat, seen here trembling with indignant rage K-K-K-K-Kirrrrann style at the killing of innocent civilians in drone attacks, was until 2008 part of the highly fascist MQM which itself harbored a not-so-narrow genocidal streak in its heyday. (He was later sacked by the MQM because he was going in a different direction with his Islamo-fascism as opposed to their Muhajir-fascism.) Chootiya.

And yes, it is true, Ali Haider has called it quits and so another one bites the dust. This is truly tragic. Pakistan is currently in desperate need of the symbols of a counterculture that can pose a resistance to this all-consuming logic that constantly pronounces the merits of blowing oneself up in the name of religion. Music and the arts are one of the most important forms of such a resistance and to denounce all music as sin is to undermine the very validity of an opposing point of view (the liberal, secular point of view, that is).

This is sad because although the likes of Amer Liaqat like to use the metaphors of struggles against an imperialist hegemon (while at the same time completely glossing over the real, material bases of the struggle), in fact, they perfectly perform the lines fed to them by the hegemon. Since 9/11, the people of Pakistan have worked hard at (re-)inventing themselves to fully embody the stereotype of the Mullah-Fundo that the neocons and the defense industry of the US would like them to become.

What's in it for them? In keeping with the Us vs. Them logic, the interests of our elites and their elites are essentially the same (so in that way there is no 'Us vs. Them'). Hence, it is not surprising that our elites (the military and its allies in the media) help manufacture this logic. As for the publikk that falls 'pray' to this bullshit, well these are a people that have been mired in shame and delusion for so long that they simply do not know any better... let's just say that the two-nation theory didn't really help matters and the anti-Hindu/anti-Sikh riots at partition were not a very constructive precedent.

Taliban Suffer Devastating Blow as Budget Dominates Headlines

2009-06-15T06:14:00.005-04:00

The operation against the Taliban is undoubtedly very important and highly deserving of much airtime and many columns in the papers. However, it has to be said that this whole shebang has taken away greatly from the development of a class-based politics with a focus on material issues in the country. Pakistan seems more and more like a conservative backwater of India, where political debate is so skewed to the right that political parties of the hard-left have become completely irrelevant. As my friend Erum pointed out, this is not the kind of Pakistan us would-be Commies had pictured for ourselves… whither the grassroots social movements, the haris processions, the strikes of the workers unions? Not anywhere in sight, that’s whither.

Both the war against the Taliban as well as the lawyers’ movement have served to relegate issues of poverty, income inequality and low human development to the peripheries of political discourse in Pakistan. (Gender and patriarchy are a different matter altogether – the question of women’s empowerment has largely been wiped off the board. Despite the politicization of women’s ‘virtue’ by the Taliban, a counter-discourse focusing on women’s rights and their equal citizenship has not made it to the limelight.) In that context, the 2009/10 budget serves as a reminder of what any government’s priorities should be in Pakistan and of the mandate under which the PPP came to power: poverty reduction.

This year’s budget amounts to a whopping total of Rs.2,897 billion, Rs. 735b of which (approx. 25%) has been allocated to the provincial governments. The biggest chunk of the budget (approx. 50%) goes towards ‘General Public Service’, which according to Mubarak Zeb Khan comprises of “debt servicing, transfer of payments and superannuation allowances”. The budget speech is full of self congratulation about the great strides the PPP government has taken to curtail poverty and how gender discrimination has come to an end because Minister Hina Rabbani Khar is the first woman to present the budget. Let’s see how far these claims are warranted.

The Good Bits

There is certainly an increase in pro-poor expenditures in this year’s budget relative to last year’s, as is evidenced by the following list. (The figure in the brackets refers to the proportion of the budget that has been allocated to a particular category.)

· Public Sector Development Programs (PSDP), federal + provincial: Rs.626 billion (22%); doubled from Rs.359 billion in 2008-9.

· Education: Rs.31 billion (1%); up approx. 50% from Rs.20.1 billion in 2008-9

· Health: Rs.23.2 billion (0.8%)

· BISP: Rs.70 billion (2.4%); up 200% from Rs.22 billion in 2008/9.

· Public Works Programs: Rs.35 billion (1.2%)

· Relief & Reconstruction for IDPs: Rs.50 billion (1.7%)

In addition to these funds, the government has also proposed the following measures:

· Health insurance for the poor and vulnerable, which will cover up to Rs.25,000 per household. However, there are no details of the total funds set aside for this, or of the number of beneficiaries this policy will target.

· Legislation for the social protection for haris to be enacted in the next year.

· Provision of residential land security to vulnerable populations, through the regulation of squatter settlements with the participation of resident communities.

· Replacement of the Ministry of Social Welfare with the Ministry for Social Protection and Development “in order to provide a common platform for safety nets and enhanced institutional capacity for social service delivery” [p.12]. This should provide some much needed coherence and intelligence to social service delivery mechanism in the country.

Women’s empowerment also features in the budget – the BISP is targeted exclusively toward women, as are microfinance schemes, which have also tripled in size.

Also, while not exactly a ‘pro-poor’ measure, the salaries of government employees and army officers have been increased by 15%. This is fair enough as inflation has been riding at 22% and government staff is kind of underpaid to begin with. (Not including rents of course.) This measure might also help the government in building bridges with the army and bureaucracy.

The Bad Bits

Budget Deficit

While the pro-poor measures are commendable, there is the slight problem of us not having the money to pay for all this stuff. The budget deficit – basically the difference between how much the government wants to spend and how much money it actually has - amounts to 4.9% of GDP (some Rs.722 billion). Part of this deficit is expected to be met by international aid, which leaves an effective deficit of 3.4% of the budget. In a rare case of foresight, the government has already asked the IMF to fund the deficit in case international aid does not materialize.

Instead of taking on more loans to fund the deficit, it might have been a good idea to attempt to broaden the tax base a little bit. Agriculture is the only sector that has done better than expected this past year, and the government is being idiotic by not raising taxes on this sector. Understandably, the decision to raise or not raise taxes on large landholders in this country will always be a difficult one and Shaukat Tarin sheds light on the complex realities he has had to factor in while making this decision:

‘Why you want me to be killed by someone after imposing tax on agriculture.’ (Quote courtesy Bubs at Five Rupees.)

Umm, Mr. Tarin, that’s not really much of an answer. Also, in the future, could you please not privilege your self-interests and the interests of the PPP so blatantly over the interests of the people of Pakistan, who your party claims to represent? It hurts my feelings. Thank you.

MDGs: MIA

It is interesting to note that while poverty reduction was outlined as one of the aims of the budget, no mention was made of progress towards the Millennium Development Goals in the speech. A quick Ctrl + F over the text of the budget speech reveals that income inequality was not mentioned even once, apart from a few platitudes such as this one:

“The previous govt pursued a policy of trickle down, expecting that the benefits of growth would automatically reach the poor. The flaw in this strategy was that the rich became richer and the poor became poorer. Our govt is tackling the issue of poverty by launching a frontal attack against it. Our efforts at poverty-reduction aim to eliminate poverty” (p.10).

Gotta love that last line.

Defense Spending Up

Somewhat disturbing is the fact that defence spending has gone up by around 16%, from Rs.311 billion last year to Rs.343 billion (11% of the budget) in 2009/10. I know we have a war going on, but let us remember that just the increase in the funds allocated to the military (Rs.32 billion) is greater than the total funds allocated to education (Rs.31 billion). An editorial in The News gives us some perspective on this policy decision:

“As for the PSDP allocation itself, while it does set aside funds (over 67 billion rupees) on priority areas such as increasing the country’s water storage capacity, other perhaps more important areas such as health and education continue to suffer. In this context the increase by 15.3 per cent in defence spending – to 342.9 billion rupees – seems substantial given that Pakistan continues to have one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, the lowest literacy rates for females and among the highest dropout rates for children studying beyond class five. We also have a ramshackle healthcare system which is far from reliable and even healthcare in the private sector is characterized by a complete abdication of any government regulation to ensure that patients are given the treatment paid for. On both these scores, 2009-10’s budget is a major – thought not entirely unexpected – disappointment. We need to be spending far more than we have done and continue to do on education and healthcare – countries like South Korea or even Sri Lanka (whose GDP per capita compares to our own) did not achieve universal literacy by ignoring education and in that sense the budge 2009-10 continues the state’s misplaced priorities in spending.”

The Tally

Historically, the Pakistani state has spent naught more than a pittance on human development, hence any small increase is bound to be great relative to previous years. For instance, even if the 2009/10 allocation to health is doubled from Rs.23 billion to Rs.46 billion, it would still account for something like only 1.6% of the budget while representing a 100% increase from the previous year.

There’s a long way we have to go as a country if we want to come anywhere close to achieving the MDGs, and baby steps are not really going to cut it at this point. The MDG Monitor tells us in cute little graphics that Pakistan is equipped to achieve six out of seven MDGs if only it were to make the right policy decisions. (This is before the military operation and displacement in Swat.) Similarly, Cyril Almeida argues that “people have long known what has to be done to nurse the economy back to health or even to become a middle-income country; what’s always failed is implementation.”

What has obstructed this implementation in the past has been the dominance of the military in the economic and foreign policy agendas in Pakistan. In the past, the military’s presence has been justified on the grounds of the threat of war from India, and today the war with the Taliban has renewed the importance of the armed forces. Unfortunately, this has come at the cost of the marginalization of the people’s issues both in the political discourse, and as has been demonstrated above, in the economic priorities of the country as reflected in the budget. Progress towards human development would require policy makers to make difficult and urgent decisions, but it is likely that these concerns will receive scant attention from the media or the government given the current political scenario. The large scale humanitarian crisis in Swat has served to further lower the citizens’ hopes and expectations for development with a human face – in the current climate, you have a lot to be thankful for if you’re not living in a war zone. The extraordinary nature of the crisis has caused the run of the mill, everyday, ordinary oppression faced by a hundred million Pakistanis to recede into the background.

The PPP government came into power on the basis of a pro-poor ideology and in order to keep the pretense of democracy going, it is important to check how far they have delivered on their promises. The good thing is that the PPP government has taken several steps towards human development in this budget, and has certainly accomplished a lot more than was ever managed by Musharraf’s regime. The sad thing though, is that that is not exactly saying much.

Books

2009-06-12T03:59:00.008-04:00

Here are fifteen books - both fiction and non-fiction - that I really like a lot.

1. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Love, sacrifice and the idea of penance. A story of the pain of love and of pointless self-inflicted tragedy.

2. Trauma & Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - Judith Herman
I've written about this book before and harp about it every chance I get because it is simply one of the most insightful books I've read in my entire life. Dr. Herman has made immense contributions to the study of complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (complex-PTSD). Particularly world-shaking are the parallels she draws between the psychological symptoms of war veterans and those of domestic violence victims. She discusses how truly horrific this discovery is - it basically entails that there is a war going on between the sexes. Another reason I really liked it was because it illustrated in great detail how our early and/or traumatic experiences have an overwhelming impact on who we turn out to be. So seminal is this author's contribution to psychology that she has been compared with the likes of Freud. Speaking of whom...

3. The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud
The truth about our emotions and our fears can be discovered through a free-associating reflection on the content of our dreams. I <3 (Despite the fact that Freud turned into a raging misogynist at the end of his career.)

4. The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein (currently reading this)
A very original account of contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism. Particularly 'shocking' was the author's well reasoned argument that the market can only thrive in societies where individuals are unfree in the psychological sense, where violence and fear are used to impose an ideology that people don't believe in.

5. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing
The ultimate feminist bible. (Click on the picture for a link to a forum where you can read and comment on the book with others.)

6. Othello - William Shakespeare
A play and not a 'book' but still. Man Othello was such a dumbass. If only he didn't have such low self-esteem on account of being a black guy, all that drama could have been averted. Another piece about pointless tragedy.

7. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
Again, not really a book, but had to put it in. Most important sentence: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

8. On Writing - Stephen King
Very inspiring; a how-to manual for writers with some elements of autobiography thrown in. Favorite line (loosely paraphrased): "If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write," full stop, end of paragraph.

9. The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Not as deep or as philosophical as other works on the subject, nonetheless a very interesting and well argued book. It served as a lifeline during a period when I felt I was completely losing my sense of self. So for that, thank you Mr. Dawkins.

10. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Man can this guy do magic realism or what. Favorite line: "Only God knows how much I loved you."

11. Orientalism - Edward Said
The Big Daddy of all post-colonial writing. Introduced me to the concept of how all literature has a political dimension.

12. Promises Not Kept - John Isbister
Initiated my love affair with dependency theory. Like most relationships it eventually came to an end, but it was incredible while it lasted and made me the person I am today.

13. Hearts in Atlantis - Stephen King
King's best work in my opinion. Five novellas bound together most beautifully and fluidly. The main novella (also called Hearts in Atlantis) is simultaneously a poignant love story as well as the best artistic portrayal of the Vietnam War and 1960s America that I have encountered. This is one of those rare pieces of fiction where the characters and the context both manage to tell their stories without overshadowing the other.

14. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
An essay about how women have historically been deprived of the opportunity to relate their narratives in both private and public spaces.

15. Kartography - Kamila Shamsie
I realize there's not really any South Asian stuff on the list so felt a bit compelled to put this in. But I genuinely enjoyed this book. The author made no effort to present a certain 'kind' of Pakistan that most people could relate to and that made it a very authentic articulation of a particular Pakistani identity. It is a beautiful and fragile love story set in the equally beautiful and fragile city of Karachi.

Of Violence & Shaggy Mountain Men

2009-06-11T05:20:00.006-04:00

This post is part of the exciting debate taking place on another blog Buggo Inc. maintained by nhakram. Here are the highlights so far:

Nadeem Farooq Paracha wrote an article about how urban women in Pakistan are not putting up a fight against men in the street telling them to put a duppatta on their heads, and are actually airheads who don't know how to appreciate their social and political freedoms.

Nhakram on Buggo Inc wrote a critique of this article on her blog. I congratulated her (rather effusively) on what I thought was a pretty unique way to think of what it means to be an empowered woman in Pakistan, and for taking account of the threat of violence that accompanies women in public spaces. I also added a few random comments of my own about feminism.

A commenter called OA then stepped in to defend NFP, claiming that (a) instances of women being told by men to cover their heads were just not happening, because no woman he knew personally had been approached thusly, and (b) that NFP was correct in his claim that the ‘shaggy mountain man’ in question is just a pansy who will never attempt violence, and consequently that women who do not stand up to these men are cowards. In a second comment, OA said that it wasn’t a big deal if a man told a woman to cover up, after all these ‘mountain men’ were also urging men of the cities to adopt more shareefana manner of dress/ appearance. He also implied that I had overstated the sexual violence that women experience in Pakistan, that men were not constantly preoccupied by desires to inflict sexual violence on the women they knew (partly because they had better things to do). What follows is my response to these comments.

OA:

Firstly, can you tell me on what grounds you have dismissed all the claims made by women about being approached by bearded guys to cover their heads? Are you saying that all the anecdotes related by women you know who have heard it from friends or friends of friends, or have written/read about it in the paper, are lies? Just saying “I don’t buy any of this” without providing any evidence to the contrary is not much of an argument.

Secondly, if you are so vehemently firm in your belief that women aren’t being approached by preachy men, why enter into a discussion about the best way to respond at all? Seems rather pointless to me. If I don’t believe in the existence of god, I will not get into a discussion on what the best form of prayer or worship is.

Also, in your second comment, you are glossing over a very crucial difference that exists between a man talking down to a woman, and a man preaching to another man. Of course there is no threat of violence in the latter instance – how many videos of a man getting flogged have you come across in the last few months? In general, violence backed my Islamic morality is predominantly inflicted on women and children, and not on other men. This is reflected in the fact that there were vastly more women imprisoned in Pakistani jails under the Hudood ordinance than there were men.

In contrast, the threat of violence is very much part of the dynamic when men preach to women, especially if those women are not accompanied by other men. Nowhere in my comment did I accuse all men in Pakistan of being rapists or harbouring rapist tendencies. I merely pointed to the fact that rape and other forms of sexual/physical violence are extremely prevalent in this country, and are directed (with minor exception) solely at women, both within and outside the home – women are routinely abducted if they travel without male escort, raped, gang-raped, acid-burned, honour-killed, forcibly married, what have you. This is an undeniable fact. Consequently, the fear/threat of violence heavily colours interactions between men and women in public spaces, including interactions where bearded men tell women to cover their heads or whatever. If in spite of this fear women stand up to those men, then they are indeed brave for taking such a risk. Given that there is a risk involved however, it’s very understandable if many women don’t. Since you seem to place great emphasis on personal anecdotes, perhaps you can ask the women you know if they experience this kind of fear, if only to reject their testimonies later. As far as my personal anecdote is concerned, I could not give the guy who told me to cover my head a proper yelling because he was a key respondent for an interview I was conducting, so I said “Jee bilkul” to him politely without actually doing what he told me to. I firmly stand by my decision to not bitchslap my key respondent, and I think any woman with a sense of professionalism would have acted similarly.

NFP’s argument is couched in a feminist framework (as is nhakram’s), so for him to gloss over this difference in the experience of men and women is really inexcusable. From your comments it does not seem that you’re coming at this from any real framework, but if you’re entering a debate on the meanings of feminism, the best way to start is not by denying the manifestations of patriarchy in everyday life.

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In a somewhat different vein, please find below the infamous How Can She Slap video, source of much amusement and controversy, and the inspiration for the title of nhakram's post. Comments are welcome.

On Happiness

2009-05-29T07:30:00.001-04:00

I stumbled upon Daniel Gilbert's blog after reading his recent piece in the NYT. In the article, Gilbert argues that it is the uncertainty of the future rather than a decrease in absolute living standards that is fueling anxiety and depression in the US at the moment. That is, if people knew for certain what the future would hold, they would find a way to accept it and be happy with it, even if what the future held was not exactly pretty.

Gilbert's book is called Stumbling on Happiness, and the excerpts I've read are really interesting and quite funny at the same time - he has a way of presenting a pretty complex theory in a very engaging and humorous manner. The crux of Gilbert's argument is that people end up being dissatisfied by what they accomplish because while working towards the accomplishment, they imagine the reward to be much greater than it turns out to be. The reward of course, is happiness. Or if you look at it another way, everybody makes incorrect assumptions about how much happiness a choice they make now will yield for them in the future. Many times, people overestimate the happiness that an accomplishment will bring them. Alternatively, we also tend to overestimate the grief that would be caused by any form of loss or disappointment. This inaccuracy is caused by the failure of our cognition to fully understand or correctly remember our emotional responses to similar situtations in the past.

If this is true, then human beings are in a way destined to be fundamentally unhappy. (Somewhat relevant here is Helen Fisher's fabulous work on the evolutionary imperative of love and heartache. Most memorable quote from her TED talk (loosely paraphrased): "We are not a species whose purpose is to be happy, we are a species whose purpose is to reproduce. Any happiness we want, we have to make for ourselves".) Coming back to Gilbert, I want to read the book to see if he has something to say on the evolutionary imperative of this unhappiness, or if not of the unhappiness itself, then of the inaccurate assumptions in the brain thing.

However, there is some hope for our emotional well-being, and apparently it involves depriving ourselves of choice. In his talk at TED, Gilbert argues that the more choice we have, the more unhappy we are likely to be. I can buy into this a little bit - I always end up wishing I'd ordered the other pasta, or gotten the other brand of cereal, or spent more time with those other friends instead of the ones I'm stuck with now. But Gilbert's research shows that people who have no alternative to Option A will eventually come around to really like Option A, whereas people with more choice will most probably end up thinking that they should have gone for Option B instead. On an objective scale - well, as objective as a measurement of happiness can be anyway - the no-choicers will probably be more happy than the choicers.

Clearly, given the correlation of more happiness with less choice/freedom, this research has some political implications, which I might get to in a little while (really should get some work done now).

Nepotism in the PPP

2009-05-18T02:12:00.008-04:00

What follows is a response to Ahsan's post on the same topic on his blog, Five Rupees. It was getting to be rather long for a comment, and since I have so much trouble coming up with stuff for the blog, I decided to make it an entry of my own. (Muahahaha.)

To start off with, I think you're right when you point out that Pakistan has bigger problems to confront than the PPP being treated like a family heirloom. (Needless to say, this is a sorry state of affairs etc.) However, towards the end of your post, you argued that nepotism and corruption can (and should) be addressed prior to dealing with the bigger woes of poverty and Talibanization etc. I disagree with this, because I believe that nepotism can be addressed and political parties made internally democratic only once democracy itself develops strong roots in Pakistan. If we see Pakistan as undergoing a transition to democracy - marked by the transfer of power from the military to political parties - then we must realize that this is an incremental process. The political party as a unit must first become a repository of real power (with respect to decision making on political, economic and foreign policy issues), as opposed to just being the front for a military establishment. Once we get there, we can start talking about making the political party more democratic itself. At that point, there would be a lot more at stake as well, and party workers and politicians would have a much greater incentive to rally for democratic structures within the party.

You also posed the question of why nepotism seems to be more apparent in the PPP rather than in PMLN or even the military, to which I have to say... dude are you serious? The military of Pakistan is the most incestuous, self-serving, self-perpetuating, self-obsessed, narcissistic institution to have ever walked the sub-continent (well post-1947 anyway). So what if they don't all belong to the same family? All of Pakistan - by which I mean large sectors of both the rural and the urban economy, not to mention government offices and revenues - is controlled by Major This or Brigadier That. I’d even go so far as to ask what the difference is between the PPP passing down the reins of the party from one Bhutto to another, and the military passing down the reins from one COAS to the next. Also, given the disparity in the extent to which both institutions control Pakistan, which is worse? At least the PPP is a political party elected on the basis of a pro-poor ideology (ok and partly due to BB’s martyrdom points,) and is on some level accountable to a wider constituency. Who is the military accountable to but themselves and the War on Terror gang?

As far as the PPP v. the PMLN is concerned, well you have two brothers running the show there in the latter as well, and it’s not like the PMLN as a political party is significantly more internally democratic than the PPP. However, there is the issue of Benazir actually passing down the PPP in her waseehat to Bilawal like it was a piece of furniture or something... I think that the Bhutto-ism of the PPP that we see today is a result of the assassination and perceived martyrdom of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – he was a genuine leader with massive political support and popularity, whose like Pakistan has not seen since. For the voters of PPP, maybe the closest approximation to ZAB is anyone else who bears his last name. I’m not saying that this is rational or justified, but maybe that’s how voters perceive it. Also, it’s not as if a leader as popular/charismatic/pro-poor as ZAB has emerged on the political landscape of Pakistan since, so maybe the voters see no better alternative than to just vote for the next best thing, i.e. another Bhutto.

Of course, the PPP is hugely responsible for this, because they’ve done all they could do to capitalize on the political capital created by ZAB, and then some. During the elections through which Benazir first came to power, the rest of the party probably thought it was in their best interest to put a Bhutto on the ticket because of the massive sympathy votes they would receive, and with Benazir stupidly getting assassinated and passing on the party to Bilawal, well it’s simply a case of history repeating itself. Maybe even members of today’s PPP thinks it is in their best interest to have a descendant of ZAB/BB as Chairman – from their point of view, it’s whatever gets them in government. As politicians, they’re only being rational here.

Why this is all extremely hateful is, of course, because political parties shouldn’t be getting votes based on the charisma/martyrdom of their leader of thirty years ago. They should be getting votes based on their performance in government and because of the ideology they represent, but clearly in the last elections, neither of those factors played a role. Prior performance was ruled out because Musharraf had been in power forever, and the actual prior performance of the major political parties of 15+ years ago was largely irrelevant. Political ideologies played a role only to the extent that the entire nation was screaming for change from military dictatorship to democracy – consequently, there was no room for debate for what kind of democracy the people wanted. Let's face it - both the PPP and the PMLN got in on a pro-democracy, anti-Musharraf agenda more than anything else. Rather than being an election based on ideology – as is the case in mature democracies – it was an election for ideology, for democracy itself. I’m guessing that this is what happens every time there is a transition from dictatorship to democracy in Pakistan, it’s the reason for why our democracies are so immature, and for lack of a better phrase, so undemocratic. This particular topic merits a much longer discussion in its own right, but I’ll save that for another day, seeing as how this comment has gotten so long as it is.

The point that I’ve tried to make here is that the reason our political parties are nepotistic and not internally democratic is simply because Pakistan itself is so undemocratic – with political parties having little real power, and with democratic governments being consistently toppled either by the military, or through deals made between opposition parties and the military. So for this bit, it is the military and its local and foreign allies that are responsible. However, the fact that the ZAB icon has completely overtaken democratic processes in Pakistan is because of the lack of a leader thereafter from any party who could be said to be at par with ZA Bhutto in terms of the latter’s ideology and popularity. For this, the political leaders are themselves responsible for not creating a culture of issue-based or class-based politics in Pakistan – however as politicians, one expects them to be interested in accumulating power. In mature democracies, power comes from below, whereas here, it seems to come from Zardari or Kayani. Power simply does not come from the people, and since we live in a cynical world, and belong to a country run by self-serving bastards, the only way in which this can change is if people take a stand for themselves and make themselves heard through social movements of their own.

On Free Will & Self-Actualization

2009-05-14T06:30:00.001-04:00

[In progress. Takes me a while :P]

Let’s face it people, the world we live in is a shitty place. You don’t have to look far to find an instance of oppression – we all do it to each other. I would define oppression as an act by which one limits another person’s agency, forces them to do/think/feel something they don’t want to, something that makes them unhappy, limits their self-actualization, in essence, objectifies them.

Objectification refers to the eradication of an individual’s human subjectivity, an act by which the objectified is made less human, a lesser version of themselves and more of what they are to the objectifier. The least human that one can be is of course, is when one is dead, incapable of feeling and thought. Hence death is the ultimate end of subjectivity, the point at which a person returns to complete objectivity, and taking away someone's life is the ultimate objectification. Interestingly, all humans can be said to be objects when they are born - if to act on Person A without any participation of Person A's creative agency in the process is to objectify them, then surely the act of creating Person A is one in which A is an object, as (s)he has no agency in the process whatsoever. So is it fair then to say that during life, humans evolve from their status as objects into free adult subjects, before gradually losing that freedom through the physical impairments of old age, and returning to the object condition at death? Perhaps it is a bell shaped curve, with humans reaching optimum agency during middle age and then gradually losing it.

Even so, not all 40 year olds are equally free, equal as human subjects with complete control over who they are. I want to explore the question of what it means to be free, what are the pre-requisites of being able to exercise complete and full agency over the self. I would imagine that the fulfilment of one's material needs and fundamental human rights as set out in the UN charter are essential first steps on the path of self-discovery and self-actualization.

But even after having taken these first steps and actively engaging in the questions of what it means to be me, (or you, or Person A, for that matter,) how far can one really exercise control over one's identity, over who one is? For instance, nearly all of the choices I make now will in some manner derive from or be heavily coloured by experiences in my childhood, by the manner in which I was shaped and socialized by my parents and by society as a whole. At first glance, it appears that the set of choices available to me, a member of the upper middle class in Pakistan are seemingly infinite - I can be whoever I want to be, I can think whatever I want to think for I am free and an adult, and I can choose to do whatever I want to with my life. But if I look closer, all the seemingly infinite choices that I will give even a moment's consideration are a narrow set, all the people I can choose to be [Hold on people, schizophrenia kicking in!] are just a few variations of me - a spectrum of Philistines extending from both sides of me, fading as they go, with the me that I am now placed in the center - the most defined and full version of me that there is, the others just phantom, would-be Philistines. But all of these women will have something in common, some basic traits and experiences that will form an underlying 'personality DNA' almost. These traits and experiences - the sum of an individual's socialization - can be deconstructed, analyzed, understood and compartmentalized during the transition to adulthood, but what will emerge out of them will still be a synthesis of that original experience and its deconstruction. The deconstruction itself might be a product of prior experiences - the manner in which life experiences are dissected and put away will be through skills learned from others. In that sense, there will be little that will be new in the synthesis that emerges.

This is a troubling thought for me to the extent that it relates to the freedom that I will experience during my life. I would have liked if I could have picked and chosen the pieces that went in to making me, I would have relished being able to exercise absolute and complete control over who I am, not being constrained by negative traits that hinder my actualization into my Ideal Self. However, to keep things in perspective, I'm doing quite alright and am comfortable with the way that I am. However, this lack of freedom to choose who you are - and just be who you have become - is a much worse condition for those that have experienced severe oppression or been victims of violence or abuse during their lives, who then might continue to live as victims.

..to be continued.... (da da da daaaa)

The Reader

2009-04-26T04:02:00.000-04:00

So I saw 'The Reader', and it was a very touching film, which touched on a number of issues, wherein the main characters also touched each other in special places rather frequently over the course of a summer.

As I sit here scratching my head, pondering the meaning of it all – of the film, of the tragic lives and love of Hannah and Michael, of law and morality, of that mutability of human nature which permits atrocious events such as genocide to occur, I have to ask myself – why do I have so much dandruff? Why does it not end? Will I ever find a remedy? Will my hair ever be fashionable? Will I be successful at grad school, or will I just spend my time there pondering over the condition of my hair and scalp as I did in college? There are so many questions, and so few answers.

Over the course of my blogging career, I hope to quell my anxiety about all that is uncertain in the world. I will strive towards finding meaning in chaos as well as a Morteinesque angst-killing zen for my soul.

Here is a list of angst-producing issues that I may want to think out in the course of blogging on this, the hole-iest of all that is holy, mine very own G-spot.

Free will
Patriarchy & the sex war - specifically, sexual violence against women and children
Also, sexual agency among Pakistani women.
The Golden Notebook - whattay book, I mean seriously.
All manner of shit relating to how screwed up my country and its people are - shouldn't be that hard.

Stay tuned!