Rant: spitting at the stars and what not

I must admit, I don’t understand blasphemy. I looked it up in the dictionary and that didn’t help much. From what I understand, it is blasphemy when one’s religious or spiritual beliefs are made the subject of hate-speech. That’s the easy part, but here’s what I don’t get: Being raised in urban Pakistan in the 90s, I’m sure a lot of you reading this will have heard Jummah rants from our esteemed maulvis against Jews and Christians and Hindus. How their beliefs are inferior and how their deities are vile. Isn’t that blasphemy?

I also distinctly remember a tele-film on PTV about this fleet of the Pakistan Navy that sneaked past Indian marine defenses and unleashed a barrage of artillery fire on an Indian military outpost and neighboring village Dawarka. The climax of this tale of extreme bravado was the destruction of a Hindu temple – incidentally the same Mohammed Bin Qasim demolished. I am ashamed to admit that I found the sight of Hindu worshippers running away in fright quite gratifying. I’m not too sure that the 1.5% of Hindu “Pakistanis” would have found it gratifying watching it on “national” television. They wouldn’t have found it at all pleasing to see their own “jawans” turning a territorial conflict against a secular enemy into a religious one.

So the next time we have fits of horror and outrage at a video of a man clad in orange spewing rubbish or hear of a minister doing so in a run-down church in America or learn of a movie made in Europe expressing anti-Muslim sentiments, we should think look to ourselves and our own intolerance towards other beliefs.

And that’s not the worst of it. It isn’t any less deplorable, although understandable when individuals or small groups discriminate based on religion or race. But what makes me despair is how governments and legal systems are grossly discriminating against their own citizens all over the world for having beliefs and ideologies different from the standard.

Recently, in Italy a Muslim woman was fined for wearing a hijab on the streets on her way to a prayer meeting. We’ve already seen the persistent discrimination hijab wearing Muslim women are facing in France. But staying closer to home, here in Pakistan there are questionable blasphemy laws that are being continuously manipulated to further suppress the minorities especially the Christians. Last week, a Christian woman in Sheikhupura was sentenced to death by the district courts for uttering blasphemous words. The story as I’ve heard it is that four Muslim women from a village near Sheikhupura reported to the police that they had witnessed this Christian woman uttering blasphemous words. The mother of five then spent a year in jail, before being sentenced to death by the district courts. This situation is pretty common actually. Around 10 people in the past 15 years have been sentenced to death over similar charges and then released on appeal to higher courts.
What baffles me terribly is that how easy it is for four individuals to point the finger at a Christian or Hindu citizen of this country accusing them of blasphemy and then the legal system will put them through hell because of it.

A few weeks ago, I posted a very funny YouTube video on Facebook from the 70s show “Monty Python and the flying circus”. Here a hilarious situation of a man being stoned for blasphemy falls into comical chaos. To the average viewer, the accusation of uttering “the name of our lord” and the severity of the subsequent punishment added to the hilarious inadequacies of the executioners. After reading about this particular incident and the blasphemy law in Pakistan, I couldn’t stop thinking about that clip.

The point I want to make in this very random rant, is that like Afia Siddiqui there are many other daughters of this country facing discrimination on this basis of religious intolerance. Daughters for whom we can do more than just pray.

As a nation simply stares…

Water grey

Through the windows, up the stairs

Chilling rain

Like an ocean everywhere

Don't want to reach for me do you

I mean nothing to you

The little things give you away

And now there will be no mistaking

The levees are breaking

All you've ever wanted

Was someone to truly look up to you

And six feet under water

I Do

Hope decays

Generations disappear

Washed away

As a nation simply stares

Don't want to reach for me do you

I mean nothing to you

The little things give you away

But there will be no mistaking

The levees are breaking

All you've ever wanted

Was someone to truly look up to you

And six feet under water

I Do

All you've ever wanted

Was someone to truly look up to you

And six feet under ground now

I

Now I do

Linkin Park - Little Things Give You Away

Shit Hit Fan

Note: This post was initially to be published in the Express Tribune. However, since they turned it down, I'm posting it here. It's been on Facebook for weeks now.

As I sit to write this, a storm rages around me. Both literally and metaphorically. Recent events have really shaken me up. If you think about it, it's really quite sad that it has taken for things to have gone terribly terribly bad for me to feel all that I'm feeling. Mostly confused.

If you're reading this and finding it a bit too dramatic, maybe you don't realise how bad things really are. Or maybe, this constant barrage of bad news that hammers us like machine-gun fire in these direst of times has left you numb. Either way, I don't hold it against you. But let there be no mistaking that things are absolutely dismal. We've finally started admitting to the truth:

We are a nation of savages.

We've kept it quite for years. Silenced witnesses. Buried it. Covered it up. Looked away at just the right time. But this time it's out and no amount of burying, silencing, covering, paying off and looking away will help. Once everyone's seen the truth in such a detailed and graphic a manner, it can't be unseen. Cue nationwide uproar of outrage and demands for justice. Pfft.. Justice indeed.

Really can't see what the fuss is all about. Over the years we've gotten away with burning churches, blowing up mosques, killing priests, beating up judges, burning and publicly whipping women, vandalising buses and markets, hanging leaders, killing Chinese engineers and selling votes to name a few. What's the problem now?

Maybe it's the graphic nature of not only the act but also presentation of the evidence that has hit us hard. Or maybe it's the nature of the victims. Middle-class, educated, teenagers in urban Punjab as opposed to dirt-poor, illiterate, enslaved young wife in rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Maybe, our sensibilities are triggered in only select conditions. Maybe. I highly doubt that's it.

Part of our nature of looking away at the right time is that we compartmentalise incidents. We tag them and put them aside. We have excuses and justifications for all our savagery. Extremists, illiterates, landlords, brutal police, Taliban, politicians, “agencies”, Indians, Americans, Zionists. One or more of these are the reason behind our savagery. We kill 40 of our own people in Karachi in under 52 hours and we blame the power struggle in the city between the MQM and the ANP. We publicly whip a girl for alleged infidelity and chalk it down to Talibanisation. We are more interested in the latest cricket result than the fact that 115 Pakistanis were killed in 24 hours in the Mohmund Agency. It's all because of “America's war” against terrorism. We have an excuse for everything.

But this. This has really caught us with our pants down. None of the usual suspects were at play here. No illiterate mob of rural Taliban here. This was “normal” Pakistanis like you and me. We, you and I, grabbed a couple of young boys off the street, beat them to their deaths and then hung their corpses like carcass at the butcher's shop. All this while we, you and I, also stood in the mob and watched. Our affinity for sadistic voyeurism is unparalleled.

Think I'm spewing rubbish? Well I want to believe you. Honestly, I do. I want to believe that I have nothing to do with this incident. That the blood of these boys does not taint my conscience. That I cannot be held responsible for this atrocity or the killings in Karachi or the ones in FATA or the killing of the Ahmedis in Lahore or the burning of the church in Sialkot. I want to believe that I am tolerant and rational. But my inaction, and yours, bunches us together with the rest of these cockroaches, as Fasi Zaka has aptly named them.

Today, Pakistan is a country of intolerance, savagery and barbarism. Only because people like me, who may or may not be in the majority sit back, shake our heads and turn away in disgust. And do nothing. Well I've decided to do something. I will protest. To some of you this may sound very anti-climatic and ineffective a strategy, but I will raise my voice starting with this article and if you raise yours with me, our message will be twice as loud.

Haw Haye !

Lo bhai, facebook is no more. It's been leading up to a this for the past week or so and unless you've just gotten out of a coma or work at Google (plausible deniability) you should know about this. This past week has seen people from all corners of Pakistani society rise up and demand justice against the creators of the offensive page(Myspace), Facebook, Zynga, Zionists, Nazis, Niazis, Communists, Capitalists, Israelis, Americans, Indians, Bush, Musharaf, HEC, PCB, Meera, Daryl Hair, all barbers and Bob the builder. The entire nation united in a cause. Everyone except the mummy-daddies.

As of this morning, the world of mummy-daddies has been turned upside down. Miss Pinky woke up this morning, first went to bathroom for pishy potty, then on to her lappy toppy for her daily horoscope from Pundit-jee. That's when, at the tender age of 17 she had her first coronary.

This incident was far from a remote one. All over Pakistan, mummy-daddies voiced their horror:

"What about my fishes?"

"What about my chocolate-pooping cows?"

"How will I now know if my ex-girlfriend is cheating on me?"

"They could atleast have had the decency to warn us so we could change our statuses or immigrate to Canada !"

"Does anybody know the password to my Orkut account?"

"Zulm hai !"

"Ammi !!!"

"How will I flaunt my slutiness ?"

Yeah ok, I made the last one up. But I'm sure alot of them are thinking that. Now they'd actually have to slut up and go to the markets and look offended when boys ogle at them. Guys on the other hand will go back to sitting on sidewalks pretending to text while poondying out of the corner of their eyes. Bathroom walls will be written on, street signs vandalized, sudden increase in pregnancies resulting from boredom, not-funny text messages, "forward this to 200 people or your cat will get raped by a badger" messages, mothers will take out the frustration of having lost their only respite from the monotony of handi pocha, on their children, people will take up hobbies like collecting stamps or visiting prostitutes etc etc...

Now Mr. Judge has said that the ban is till the 31st of May, by which time he'll have assessed the situation completely and make a detailed decision then. Which has left me wondering, what is a guy to do at 1 in the morning, if not to spy on his ex's wall or play poker? Sleep? *shudder*

BT Pakistan - Time to get my ass into gear.

Not long ago Mr. Renk and I spent the summer cruising in his piece of shit Suzuki talking about what was wrong with Pakistan and what could be done to fix it. There were many interesting conversations pinpointing issues like education, unstable economy, failed attempts at democracy etcetera etcetera... The one thing we both agreed upon as the root cause of all the problems that grip our country was Apathy. Nobody really gives a shit about the country. People are too obsessed with their own little worlds to care about the greater good. What made us more uncomfortable was the realisation that we were more guilty than most people, having both ability and resources to find a way out of this state our country finds itself in. So we started talking about what we could do about it and disagreed on most things and left it at that.

Now, a couple of years later Mr. Renk(what a shit nickname, huh?) has started Brain Trust Pakistan, which is basically a platform where like-minded, patriotic Pakistanis can have focused discussions on how to make the country better. He has his ideas, I have mine, others will have come with their own. The bottom line is this: We've decided to stop sitting on our asses and do something. I'll try to post as often as I can on the BT blog. I'll post a copy here on TP&F as well. Please go on over to the BT blog and read the posts. Make sure you comment on the posts and tell us we're lunatics. It'd mean a lot to us. Hopefully, this is the start of something that'll make a difference in the right direction.

Brain Trust Pakistan: http://btpakistan.wordpress.com/