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telling lies? no baba
i apologise. i have disrespected the pakilandish engish teaching system loud and long, with a special focus on the parha likha punjab. this was totally uncalled for and i now acknowledge that inzimam ul haq sounds like an oxford don when compared with some of his fellow punjabis from across the border. respect, also, to the superb marketing system of the indian media which would have you believe that most indians don’t understand any of the thousand languages spoken in their motherland and are more comfortable with internationalism than haifa wehbe is with skimpy western dresses.
this despite the fact that i encounter a hundred guys a day from the same state as sreesanth who would say that azharuddin “fix udd” matches (as opposed to fixed).
you must be wondering why i changed my mind. after all, we (and i use that as a translation of the urdu shahi “hum”), who rule the world are not known to vacillate when we have made up our minds. it takes more than a mispronouncing mallu to change our mind. and so, your honour, i present exhibit ‘a’, a video taken of a village class in haryana, punjab, india, potential world war 3 flashpoint, earth, united milky way of america.
of course, i’m not dissing the underprivileged. its harmless fun so spare me the you’re a snob, racist elitist, meanie comments please. i’m a desi too. just not that desi.
Filed under: desi | 13 Comments
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no we don’t
we didn’t even know her until six months after the deed is done. and we still don’t know anything about the 18 year old girl shaped void in this universe other than that it was created by hungry dogs and evil men. and unfortunately, that’s not even near to being the limit of our apathy. no. we’ll look at her picture in the newspaper today, not beautiful and not ugly, noticeable only because of the semi-smile hinting at a life not ending at six acre plots but full of wider smiles and wetter eyes and sometime laughs and sometime cries and milk bottles and rattles and toys and first words and first steps and school and books and clothes and successes and failures and mehndi on chaandraat and bangles on eid and all the seconds that make the minutes that make the hours that make the days that make the weeks that make the months that make a lousy eighteen years a life – and we’ll sigh and shake our heads and talk about the brutality just below the smiling exteriors of the most hospitable race on the planet and then having registered our displeasure at the way things were carried out we will move on and perhaps the only abiding memory of today’s newspaper will be the bad grammar of the ”let wind mill pay your electric bill” ad. yes, that’s what we do. like we did to a thousand other girls before her and like we’ll do to a thousand after her till the world will be full of nothing but eighteen year old girl shaped voids in the universe.
and maybe after the senate has strongly registered protest by the women members staging a walk out and then going on to get their hair permed or buying iphones or checking out the winter shawls in some rawalpindi bazaar, perhaps only the hungry dogs will throw up what they were forced to eat and after this act of contrition maybe the only nightmares that the eighteen year old girl shaped void in the universe still haunts will end. and maybe not.
milton was a moron. god damn those who only stand and wait.
Filed under: ramble, tasleem solangi | 18 Comments
“yeh baby hai ya baba hai?”
sometimes you hear things that remind you so achingly of home that its unbelievable. most of the time these things are ridiculous. but that’s understandable when you’re from pakiland. every pakistani, no matter how attuned or acclimatized or whatever the word is to wherever he might be, has an element of pakistaniat, as i beleve the blogworld term for it is, in him which lights up suddenly like a firefly in the night. and yes that sentence didn’t make any sense whatsoever. these things might be innocent questions like the title of this post, the racist/gora-complexed way one tends to say bengawlee when being appreciative and bungaalee when being derogatory about the same kind of person, smiling when you overhear two guys discussing ways to kill zardari in a washroom in dubai or raising two index fingers above the shoulders and doing a two second bhangra to celebrate a strike at a bowling alley.
even ringtones going off during friday prayers in mosques playing the soundtrack from this awesome ad for a hideous product will do it.
and you smilingly realise that home isn’t really that far away. we carry it around all the time.
(ps: i didn’t remember forgotten tv star, rustam, being in the ad. is it really him or am i mixing him up with someone else?)
Filed under: desi, desi-ism, music, pakistan, the sweet stench of life | 17 Comments
of cabbages and kings
sumo ballet
hah! i know you guys are expecting a treatise (ok, a satirical variant of one) on the total degradation of democracy and paamaalee of the presidency but i, i will not oblige. i’m going to talk about something far more relevant to my context (thats the bored-desi-in-boringer-environs-context) and this is the highly intriguing social phenomenon that is the sumo ballet.
now most of you who have a vague idea of what i look like are aware that if you took arjun rampal, chopped off his hair, dyed him darker, deflated his pecs, inflated his abs, took eight inches off his height and added them to his waist, he would look exactly like me – only not as good looking. and while this obviously means that the dude wears a huge grin on his face whenever he looks into a mirror, he’s sensible enough to not parade around the posh places bollywood celebs go to trying to dress up like me.
and i don’t try to look like a shorter version of forrest whittaker because, quite obviously, the only similarity is the mismatched eye size.
however, – and there is always a “however” or an “ofcourse” when you come here – common sense, as we all know, is about as common in people as honest politicans are in garhi khuda bakhsh bhutto, and so lots of people try to dress like people they are not. now if you saw a bandwagon (the metaphorical one – i have no clue what a real bandwagon looks like, though i imagine its some sort of cross between a donkey cart and a bugatti) and you jumped on it, you would find that half the people on board are lebanese. this is obviously not a coincidence. its just a lebanese thing. like striped suits, shawarmas and sexy blonde chicks. and the fact that the fatter they get, the more they invest in spandex.
now i’ve got nothing against spandex even though (or maybe because) i do admit that its probably caused more lecherous thoughts than satan’s polished apples up in paradise. but if i want to see someone in tights, i expect them to be tight – and not necessarily in the orangi town sense of the word. somehow a bunch of 280 pounders dressed in a bolshoi-meets-rihanna type of thingamajig (and colour coordinated like travolta’s girlfriend’s gang of groupies in grease – wow, unintended alliteration!) doesn’t quite do it for me. but when you consider that dames here wear hijabs over their “kiss me or kill me” (i kid you not) long tops, this is just another easily ignorable every day occurrence.
(c)old is gold
one of the good things about coldstone creamery is the ice cream. ok that sounds ridiculous. the place is an ice cream shop. but yeah, they’ve got good ice cream. but the good thing about them is the corny way they suddenly start singing (at force 5 cadence – as mohammed hanif would have called it – great book that, case of exploding mangoes) coldstone anthems based on tunes of old pop/rock songs. now stuff like “we are, we are, coldstone” is easy. i mean they still play that in school gigs and karaoke joints in karachi. but last night they stumped me. i couldn’t figure out the tune at all even though it was so tantalisingly familiar.
early this morning – well its a friday, so as my cousins would say “al-as-subah, zuhr ki azaan ke baad” – i was waiting for a taxi at a crowded stop when it suddenly hit me. manfredd mann. doo wah diddy. that would have been perfectly ok except that it hit me rather loudly and i shake my head, snap my fingers and quite audibly go
there she was justa walkin down the street,
singin’ do-wah diddy-diddy down diddy-do
snappin’ her fingers and shufflin her feet,
singin do-wah diddy-diddy down diddy-do…
and then i realised that everyone was staring at me like i’d gone absolutely bonkers.
this is a rather bad situation to be in. picture yourself on a crowded sidewalk trying to flag down a taxi. then picture a dozen people of various ethnic origin on three sides of you staring at you like they would if sheikh rasheed walked into a party wearing jeans and a stetson over a sleeveless d&g vest. what would you do?
i crossed the road.
dekh magar pyar se
there is no real reason to name this segment after the most ghisee pitee line in the history of pakistani bus and truck literature except for that fact that i miss the craziness of karachi roads sometimes. a traffic jam without horns beeping like crazy is like a gun without bullets or a pen without ink or chaudhry shujaat without duct tape on his mouth. you get the picture. but this segment is actually about my being awarded the brillainte blog award by saadat on my birthday (and, incidentally, my blog’s) because, allegedly, i have a “peculiar brand of sarcastic humour”. this is rather interesting, not to mention flattering, even if it means that he’s not well read enough to see where i rip off most of my punchlines from. but that suits me just fine ’cause its the only way this damn place will ever generate any hits.
that’s it up there.
now the rules of the game are as follows (and this will explain how i even got shortlisted):
- the purpose of the prize is to promote as many blogs as possible in the blogosphere (quad erat demonstradum).
- when you receive the prize you must write a post showing it, together with the name of who has given it to you, and link them back.
- choose a minimum of 7 blogs (or even more) that you find brilliant in their content or design.
- show their names and links and leave them a comment informing they were prized with ‘brilliante weblog.’
- show a picture of those who awarded you and those you give the prize (optional).
- and then we pass it on!
now ordinarily, i follow all rules of tags and things like that but i’m just going to list some of my favourite blogs and i don’t care whether or not that makes seven. so here i go.
1. hemlock for writing stuff that would make even someone as cynical as, well, hemlock smile.
2. sabizak for providing the most kaleidoscopic view of the world on nothing. and on everything.
3. abbas halai for creating a blog that gives you more trivia than ripley’s believe it or not.
4. saira for her amazing selection of quotes.
5. rooznamah (even though its been dead for exactly a year on the day i got the award) for providing (however briefly) a satirical view of the pakistani world.
6. newton for writing the most amusing posts with the hardest words i have ever seen.
7. the olive ream for being what it is.
well what do you know? that’s seven. there are dozens more but since they’re mainly private i don’t think it makes sense to promote them. they know who they are. there is also the fact that i now have to go through the agonizing process of visiting these awardees and linking back to this post. sheesh. its enough to make a man cry.
naam hai bond, samad bond.
i now have what pakis call a french beard. sue me.
Filed under: great stuff on other blogs, ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life | 18 Comments
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oh captain, my captain
they say that when rome burned, nero played his fiddle or lyre or whatever they played in those days, singing a lost epic called the sack of ilium. now there’s a lot that can be said about nero but the most damning thing of all is that he was upstaged by every single member of a nation of 160 million largely illiterate, mostly powerless and totally irrational idiots on the eighteenth of august, 2008. and of course, by geo tv.
i don’t think many pakistanis have heard of the sack of ilium, or even lyres, fiddles or nero for that matter, but they’re reasonably well versed in bhangra and those who don’t know how can certainly be convinced to move about in a frenetic display of exultation and excitement by a bunch of aging hypocrites who pose as the saviours of democracy on one hand and by the electronic media (which probably hasn’t yet assessed how much it’s going to miss the general now that the arrogant miss rehman can flex her political biceps) on the other. if nothing else, they might as well have shown some courtesy, some dignity, to the only leader since a drunkard called yahya khan who vacated the seat of his own accord. and i’m not even sure we can say that of yahya. there’s a lot i would like to say but who’s listening?
i’m no biographer, no economist, no constitutional expert, no political analyst. i’m a layman. i won’t go into long flowery descriptions of great leaders and courageous men. or detailed explanations of increased outputs and per capita incomes. or of amended monstrosities like the hudood ordinance or of peace initiatives with india. i won’t because i can’t. what i would really like to do is salute the man and shake his hand and apologise on behalf of a nation that’s so high on its own perceived sense of “we-could-have-done-better”-ness that its more or less forced what was a straight line to curve in and become a full circle. because thats what we did. or at least, let happen.
so goodbye mr. president, let’s hope history is written by better people than those you tried to serve.
wind your clocks back ladies and gentlemen; welcome back to october 11, 1999.
Filed under: pakistan | 12 Comments
meri muthee mein bandh hai kya?
nahin nahin. not naz pan masala. that would be too bloody obvious. and i was never the naz type anyway. shahi deluxe was more my style until i decided to singlehandedly make the guy who owns wrigley’s a multibillionaire. plus why anyone would want to eat something like sonf after coating in it the thing they use to coat the brufen 400 tablets they gave you when you had killer headaches is way beyond me. unless of course that too is an israeli conspiracy like that polio drops thing to spread infertility among the women of the region. of course it won’t work because as hazrat allama iqbal rehmatullah alih said, zara nam ho to yeh mittee baree zarkhaiz hai saqi… you have to admire his farsightedness though, i mean just twenty years after modern day pakistan’s most quoted poet, habib jalib famously referred to his compatriots as dus crore gadhay, 160 million has become a conservative estimate of the national population figures. truly, zara nam ho to yeh mittee baree zarkhaiz hai saqi. assuming, you’ve been reading this thus far, and assuming you’re not blessed with the intellect of einstein – face it, if you’re a regular visitor, both assumptions hold true – you’re probably wondering where i’m going with this train of thought, poetry, pop culture or simply pakistan.
fact is, i haven’t decided yet. so while i go ahead and decide ponder over the words of anwar masood which i suppose are often the subject of debate during the late night deliberations between the sharifs and chaudhry nisar ali kahn and ishaq dar and the other idiots who willingly associate themselves with a party that proudly carries the moniker of “nawaz group”:
bunyan lainay jaanday ho
bunyan le ke aunday ho
paanday oh tay paindee nahin
pai jaye tay laindee nahin
lai jay tay doojee waree pan jogee reahndi nahin
bunyan mein dayaanga
pao gay to pay jaye, lao gaye to lay jaye, lay jaye tay dojee waree pan jogee reh jaye
bunyan meree waddiya, bunyan meri top dee
waddiyan noo pooree aaway nikkayan day naap dee
cheez huway asli tay moonhon pey hee boldee
top naalon goree lagay rassee otay dol dee
jinnay waray chaho tusee ais noo haundalo
phir pawaein bachayan noo jhangian banalo
yep. the guy who offered that probably assured himself of the textiles ministry or something given the way these dudes seem to operate.
but politics and poetry don’t mix unless its faiz doing the poetry and not-yet-disillusioned-but-think-they-are teens doing the politics. i would’ve mentioned jalib again but i never really thought of him as a poet (or a politician for that matter) – just another spin doctor who got popular because he said the right thing at the right time. before you black coat lovers crucify me please tell me how a guy who said shehar mein hoo ka alam tha, jin tha ya referendum tha and repeated it twice as if he was saying something as beautifully crafted as a meer-ian couplet can truly be called a poet. if you said yes, you are no longer welcome on this blog. please go drown in egg yolk.
but i’m no expert on poetry myself so i’ll keep away from the topic unless of course we’re discussing the collected works of chirkeen or imam deen, both of whom, admittedly, are more my style than ghalib or meer.
of course (yes i say that a lot, thank you for pointing it out) the news is dreary and boring. the incredibly irrational way the media has decided to bash whatever is going on without in true godfatherly wisdom measuring long term losses against short term gains is proabably as pathetic as government sponsored propoganda a`la khabarnama style where the current head of state is nothing less than god’s representative on earth and as such must be sanctified and canonised and worshipped and so on so forth ad nauseum. but the fact of the matter is that there was one amazing thing about the khabarnama that the free media never really adopted and that was their ridiculous choice of sponsors. the khabarnama was never complete without some sort of mention of sona ublaye gee zameen jub dalay ga sona urea or the irritatingly catch tune of ciba-geigy ki politan-C. and who can forget tapal tezdam chai lagay tha ker kay, chha jo mazo ruby dust jo mazo and the classic laado ke lashkaray jug mug kapray saaray. but there was nothing more ironically pakistani than royals filter, janbaazon ka intikhab and k2 ka pakistan (for some inexplicable reason there was a bunch of sheedis dancing on k2 in the ad) being followed by my favourite ad of all time – wasim bhai aap thaktay nahin?
i found the ad on you tube. is it just me or does the guy who asks the question really look like a young whatshisname hashmi, faiz ahmed faiz’s grandson better known as loosy of teen bata teen fame?
doesnt the ad remind you of that shehzad roy song only sabizak and me seem to remember, active raho gay to tumhein skating bhi aye gee active raho gay to tumhein acting bhi aye gee… i’d say more about the song but then i have a cousin who debuted with fakhrealam singing goree zara hil ke dekhana.
boy oh boy, did jalib amake an understatement or did he make an understatement. gadhay it is. gadhay we are.
Filed under: death to the nawaz group, desi, desi history, desi-ism, faiz, jalib, music, poetry, politics schmolitics, ramble | 20 Comments
sir jee, tusee to great ho.
be careful what you wish for. it might just…
millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the ice age meant there was a market for gas heaters in sibi and jacobabad; the tectonic plates had not shifted all that much and punjab was still a part of mongolia. the region was socially far more progressive than the rets of the world and the dinosaurs over there established the first democracy known in our galaxy. they elected, time and again, the same species to rule them – parasitic beings known as the sharifosaurus rex, the species ruled over their part of mongolia with iron fists and bald heads and the wierd habit of rolling to and fro from one side to another similar to the earthen utensil the dinosaurs used to store water, the lotasaurus. their rule was characterized by the increasing enrichment of themselves and all who pandered to and claimed to worship the sharifosauruses. a typical dinosaur in their government would talk on and on about how beautiful the hair on the sahrifosauruses bald heads was, how slim their paunches looked, how wise they were in their oppositon to the wellbeing of any region other than their own but most of all about how brave they were to oppose the largely benign militarosauruses who once usurped their power by way of a bloodless coup.
scientists today often try to unlock the magical dna of those times and unravel the mysteries of why the dinosaurs really died. they don’t realise that they didn’t. they evolved into members of the punjab provincial assembly. dawn reported the other day on the crap that goes on in that hallowed hall of democracy.
and you guys ask me why i support dictatorships.
_____________________
now i am no stanger to flattery myself. not because i have somehow been set as default choice for chief minister by the voting public of cheechookimallian – yes, thats a name of a punjabi constituency as are changa manga and toba tek singh, and no they have nothing on some of the more colourful karachi place names like chacha chachi park, unda morh and do-minute chowrangi – and definitely not because i have a born again scalpful of hair but because i’m supposedly some sort of comic relief in the dreary soap opera that is the pakistani blogosphere. and yes that was an unncessarily long sentence. so sue me. anyways, i have been begged (ok i’m getting carried away by the bored “update already” messages i occasionally receive) often enough to write more regularly but the fact that really amuses me is that people often tell me i should write a novel. thats like asking the mayonnaise-ladling-guy at mickey d’s to cook a seven course meal because he occasionally causes (probably accidentally) the creation of a half decent burger.
but if i could write, and indeed if i had fifteen computers fitted in my body (ten in my fingers, two each in eyes and ears and one in my tongue) – not to mention the “uncountable” – interesting choice of words from the pakistan’s largest selling english daily, shouldn’t it have been “countless”? i mean this is a translation right? - ones in my mind; i would definitely consider writing a novel. it would be like becoming chief minister of the blogosphere or at least railways minister.
but therein lies the problem. not the computer bit, i’ve got that covered; i’m talking about the topic. if i really were to write a novel, given my supremely senseless rambling style, what would i write about? the case can be made for an autobiography, after all, the world swoons at my feet and is just dying to know more about the man behind the megahunk, about how i rose to greatness from whatever i used to be, the “streetlights ke neechay baith ker parhta tha” routine and all that jazz, but i somehow feel i’m too young to write my memoirs just yet – not because nothing’s happened yet but because there’s so much left to happen.
i could also write some great art mystery involving sadequain’s calligraphic ceiling at frere hall and an albino tableeghi type and a great conspiracy stretching to the higher echelons of the leadership at jamia hafsa – but someones ripped off that idea already and adapted it to a western market paradigm. or maybe, i could write about this kid who goes to a cadet college in hyderabad, learns magic and reinvents himself as an i-really-care-for-my-country type after earning the ten percent nickname using help from his graduating class of witches and wizards. or i could do a legal thriller – one about an unimportant judge being summarily removed and a movement that results in a two year long standstill of already overloaded dockets while innocent people await trial in jails and how the economy can only be set right if a now-totally-polarised judge gets back his seat as head of the “sanctify me i got you back” courts in islamabad. or maybe i could write a clancy type thriller about a siege in parachinar where militants surround a locality and a sectarian war wages while the zia-ist military operatives stand by watching hoping for an outcome that favours their particular religious beliefs. or i could write a khalid hussaini type drama about a woman who was gangraped beacause her 12 year old brother allegedly seduced a 21 year old woman and how the government thinks she’s using her personal tragedy as a marketing tool simply becuase she fought back. or maybe…
ho hum. lots of possibilities for a pakistani writer, eh?
the only reason i don’t write that much any more is that i only know how to write humour. and trust me, life sure ain’t funny.
Filed under: desi, desi history, desi-ism, politics schmolitics, ramble | 24 Comments
it is no less than a sacrilege that in the same theatre where i was the only one watching a screening of el laberinto del fauno, a masterpiece of cinematic creativity, there was a fullhouse for three days running when they put up something as ridiculously idiotic as tashan. then again, no one can say that tashan wasn’t creative – unless, of course, you don’t think that sultan rahi was asia’s reply to anthony quinn – in which case, maybe a guy who leaps over buildings and slays four thousand policemen without having a weapon, martial arts skills or any sort of claim to superheroism; is maybe pretty damn believable to you.
but, or butt, depending on whether you’re from kashmir or not; maulay noo maula na maray tay maula nahinyo marda – or something to that effect.
of course, that’s not why it can’t be tooba siddiqui.
since this patch in the purple patch of my very purple life is actually a lavenderishly pale lilac - and also because i am gradually transmorphing into a procrastinating workaholic, if there is such a thing - i have been contributing less to the cyber equivalent of the completed works of, well, omar sharif than i normally did in the past.
[ok i know this way off topic, but do you realise that venezuela has only 0.4 % of the world's population but 9.6% of the former miss worlds? - small wonder then that bush has designs on venezuela, he did succeed clinton after all. tharkee...]
but of course that has nothing to do with tooba siddiqui either. and neither does the narrative i am about to relate. i just thought it’d be cooler to start a post with a reference to tooba siddiqui. somehow, i get the feeling that i’ve got the name of the supermodel right but i may very well be wrong. but that has hardly fazed me before.
back when i was a kid, kids had it pretty good. there was no social pressure to conform with all that is cool in the world, like ipods, iphones, beemers and tooba siddiqui type girlfriends. the ipod equivalents were huge boomboxes which skinny teens with dreadlocks used to place on their funky ‘82 corollas and breakdance to on the footpaths. iphones were calling cards to be used in phonebooths, beemers were for yuppies and if you had a girlfriend like tooba siddiqui you’d be a perverted pedophile ‘coz she wes still in preschool. so nice were those days, that a guy could walk into a funeral or a wedding in the same clothes – and if you’re not a desi you will never understand the significance of that last statement. unfortunately, even though the clock does stop at 12, thats actually a different 12 from the one it set out from. and so as time has passed us by, boomboxes have become a distinctly makrani concept, ‘82 corollas have been relegated to jamshoro and breakdancing to jamaica. phonebooth is the name of an old colin farrell movie and tooba siddiqui is probably the only damn thing thats improved a bit.
bottom line: if you were a kid in the eighties, you better not be wearing the same outfit to weddings that you do to funerals.
no sir. now you get invitations to office dinners which have themes and dress codes and very serious invitations to bring spouse(s) and/or partner(s). stuff like “oscar theme” and “black tie only”. if i hadn’t been ubercool and sophisticated, the first thing that would have come to your mind would be jan rambo in raju ban gaya gentleman. but of course, me being me, you’re probably imagining a dashing ryan philippe type in a tuxedo. and therein lies the problem. the tux. as i tried to explain, “behnji, i am being a pakistani. in my muluk waiters are wearing tuxedos. and if i am wearing narmal blake suit with lang tiee i am being look like ali ahmed kurd. i not know which worse.” unfortunately you can’t explain that to anyone. so you reconcile yourself to wearing a combination that would either get you beaten up in karachi or give you an opportunity to beat up sher afgan in mianwali (and they say all pakistanis are the same. sheesh.). the other problem is a tad harder to solve.
in almost 27 years of existence, i have not been able to secure one spouse, let alone spouse(s) and lets not even go near and/or partner(s). so how precisely does one make an impact at a party like this. does one rent a hummer limo and two russian escorts (one for each arm) or does one play the astaghfirullah card and go in loudly proclaiming la haula.. every time someone offers a drink? the horns of a dileema have never been such a battleground before. while we’re on that note, has anyone ever seen a dilemma? is it a fourlegged creature or a two legged one? is it like an antelope or a horned toad? and how many horns are there anyway? sometimes english terms are so bloody obscure.
i have decided to not go in for the russian escorts. not because russians aren’t nice but i don’t like the name natasha (which is why natasha hussain has never featured on my blog) and if there are going to be two six foot tall russians you can bet your bmw that one of them is going to be called natasha. either that or boris. but i don’t swing that way and showing up with boris and olaf isn’t exactly the statement i’d like to make. so its not russians, iman ali’s got other commitments and for some worrying reason, giselle’s not answering the phone. which leaves me short of a date. ki karaan? the silver lining on this cloud is obviously that i won’t be in a position where i might have to end up dancing. not that i’ve got any worries on that front – after all i learnt from the same guy who taught michael jackson, prabhu deva and hasan jehangir – ok from the guy who taught hasan jehangir – but i don’t want to show up the other guys in front of their spouse(s) and/or partner(s).
and so, as a sacrifice for the manly pride of the many many men who’ll be there, i’m going alone. just me and myself and no freaking irene. so sorry tooba, some other time.
sometimes i think i’m going insane. and then i think, yeah? so freaking what?
Filed under: ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life | 36 Comments
it olympic not politic
as embarassing performances go, this would have taken the cake - not to mention the samosas, chaat and pani puri - had it not been for the fact that my companions managed to make as big if not bigger fools of themselves over the beer. there is also the fact that when paki pride is at stake i can smilingly swallow sweet meat – and no, i’m not talking about sweetmeats. understand the difference.
i haven’t been in a mood to blog since my normally razor sharp wit turned out to be blue 2 rather than mach 3 and lost its edge – a gilette-ian reference my male paki readers will no doubt understand - but this lunch just had to be blogged about.
over the course of cinematic history, loads of people have watched jackie chan performing. some call him the greatest action-comedian ever while others call him an idiot and yet others call him jai kishan, probably out of some misplaced sense of apnapan after watching the malika sherawat-starring, two-hour waste of projection film. few, if any, have ever referred to him as oscar winning material. but few critics who count have seen both jackie chan performing in the old kung fu movies days and a bunch of chinks drunk at lunch after putting down one too many of foster’s finest brews, which, if they had seen the two things, would definitely lead them to nominate dear ol’ jackie for the lifetime achievment little gold statue.
chinese people are already interesting enough sober but when drunk, a chinese guy becomes a roller coaster of entertainment. the already incomprehensible accent gets so thick and slurred you cant tell if the poor bloke is talking about the collected works of proust or singing the chatanooga choo choo. the good thing is that unlike their close communist friends, the russian bears, the chinese are cheerful drunks. a russian guy will get more and more serious the more he drinks. a chinese on the other hand gets merrier and merrier the higher he gets. watch and you’ll realise why the british won the opium wars. the poor chinks probably died laughing.
and so no one noticed when i ladled maple syrup on to the roast lamb assuming it was some sort of hot sauce.
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there was a time, a few years ago, when me and weight were two things so far apart, they weren’t even mentionable in the same sentence unless it was one of those made-famous-by-borat “naawwt” jokes. and when, during discussions about washed out, incompetent, unmusical musicians it popped out that nadeem jafri is a second cousin, people would burst out laughing because of the discrepancy in size. it was as if kipling had presented kaa the python as colonel hathi’s cousin.
and then fast food happened.
fast forward a few years and suddenly it seems that if a discussion about washed out, incompetent, unmusical musicians were to take place once more and if somehow i were to divulge that embarassing piece of family history again, all i would get would be those oh-so-irritating “i already knew” looks. not that i would ever admit to being a short fat dark balding guy. nopes, no sir. i’m a dashingly dimunitive, opulently corpulent, melanin endowed, follically conservative person. unfortunately, in most people’s books that still reads as little else than nadeem bhai’s wannabe shakespearean cousin.
so when i grudgingly told the good looking dude in the mirror that its time we did something to fit in (vehicles other than humvees which we cannot afford), despite the heartache at the world’s refusal to appreciate all that is gorgeous in good faith; he agreed.
of course when i told the weighter, i mean waiter, that i wanted a diet coke he gave me a look dripping so much sarcasm you could have irrigated the whole of balochistan if it had been water. saala. so what if i had asked for the extra cheese meal to be followed by a double chocolate fantasy?
and then i looked around. and i looked. and i smiled. i am in the land of the naturally obese man and the naturally slim chick. why the hell am i even trying to lose weight? granted, no one wants to look like the cousin of a guy who had a song that went goree zara hil ke dikhana but then by default, i also look like the cousin of one luciano pavarotti, esq. and that is certianly not a bad thing. plus short, balding and fat has a rather churchillian effect to it which my dunhill lights do not quite keep up with but i can’t for the life of me figure out cigars. plus, wasim bhai cigar nahin peetay.
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speaking of wasim bhai, another fast bowler just made the statement of the millenium.
“the movement for my restoration is the biggest after the chief justice.”
shoaib akhtar
i think sheikh rasheed can safely retire now. we have a suitable rawalpindian replacement for him.
Filed under: cricket, music, ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life | 31 Comments
heil baitullah
think for a little while and you realise why there aren’t any expat germans anywhere in the world in the livestock business. i mean, what would they put down as “profession” in their visa applications if they took care of sheep?
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when quiz shows like who wants to be a millionaire will go bust and bust shows by millionaires will be quizzed about – in fact i bet ms. parton’s assets have already been the subject matter of some edition of the damn show – and no, i don’t know or care what the answer is – our quest for finding the ultimate genius shall spawn a new type of tv show. it will be a spelling bee – in german.
germany is probably the only country in the world where clearing your throat can be poetry. or where pushto could be described as a musical language. they say einstein had speech difficulties as a kid and trust me, its not hard to see why. they communicate in grunts and snorts of varying lengths and speed and when they tell you their names you’re convinced they’re swearing at you. its no wonder then that their greatest musical exponent was a guy who was deaf.
and if you think i’m racist, gurke essen gehen.
in my part of the world, preservation of silver resources was the top national priority for the most part of the past three centuries. at least that’s the reason i give when people question me about the table manners of desis or lack thereof. and this is where i turn the conversation to matters relating to resource conservation and global warming and why guatemala is singularly responsible for sponsoring all pickpockets in switzerland. but while this does normally confuse the person i’m talking to it doesn’t take away from the fact that i have no qualms about using the steak knife to apply butter or the ice cream spoon to drink my soup. and thats why i normally avoid dining out with european clients – that and the fact that they tend to opt for the crappiest joints on earth for lunch.
but sometimes you have to.
and so it happened that i sat down over manakeesh and zaatar with a german guy who was trying to eat the damn stuff with a fork. as if the world didn’t have enough problems already. on the plus side, the guy wasn’t chinese and didn’t ask for chopsticks. do you remember the annoying little brat back in seventh grade who really bugged you because he was such a dumbass but somehow managed to say the right thing whenever the teacher asked him a question? well he took lessons from this dude on dumbassery. so here we are, discussing the militancy in pakistan and after hearing a load of crap about how pakistanis are just naturally violent, i informed him that this thing is not even a pakistani problem.
“see,” i said, “most of these guys aren’t even pakistani. they’re mainly afghans and uzbeks.”
he mulled over this for a couple of minutes and then came up with the most irritatingly appropriate comeback in what was either totally deadpan or genuine seriousness.
“ja. like hitler. he austrian.”
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tip of the century: hire a german to make your car but never ever let him drive it, schumacher notwithstanding.
Filed under: ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life | 44 Comments
i too shall model for brylcreem…
… on fm radio.
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there is, in abu dhabi, a harley davidson dealership which seems to sell more jackets than choppers. there is one hell of a good restaurant that claims to have the original “americana” variety of that very pakistani dish, chicken tikka, and a laloo laundry run by – you guessed it – not laloo. things are not always as they seem, in abu dhabi.
having said that, i don’t really look like james mcavoy even though i have a second cousin with the same hairstyle. not that that digression seems to have a logical connection, but then, neither do second cousins.
the only type of people anyone can understand less than his or her own second cousins is the class of humanity known as filipino telephone operators. if filipinos were sindhis, i’d be a respected member of the community known popularly “as aa bahoo saein”. i would have a quaint little haveli outside manila or vanilla or whatever they call their capital and get elected unopposed to a provincial assembly seat whenever someone held an election. life would be good, i’d have a bunch of bonded labourers, kill my secretary for karo kari, and have great mangoes to eat. unfortunately, filipinos are not sindhi and sindhis are not filipinos so i am simply mispronounced by one and accused of being a racist by the other. it is a sad, sad world we live in.
i get irritated every time they call me aa bahoo saein but then i think of that advertisement for a real estate thing they used to air constantly on ptv in the early nineties with the fat practically mustachioed lady going, “hum to chaley maneeela centre” and i realise they’re just getting back at us. never mind. wasim bhai aap thaktay nahin? nahin, mein cigarette nahin peeta.
waise, speaking of mispronunciations, one lebanese guy very kindly pointed out to me that if i don’t stress the syllables of my name the way he does it, it doesn’t make a difference if they call me aa bahoo saein or chin fuo lee because i’m as guilty as they are. with an arabic name one can hardly argue with that kind of logic but then i’m a pakistani and i have seen wasim bhai and whenever i am faced with that kind of predicament i can safely say “nahin, mein cigarette nahin peeta“.
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in case you were wondering why i’m not missing home as much as i ought to, its because the taxi drivers here in dhabi’s dad are every bit as insanely irrational as those in khi-town. and they’re just as pukhtoonily pathan. also the fact that hemlock’s nimco is rotting on top of my tv. not that her nimco rots on my tv back at home but you get the point.
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eid al muhibba came and went, and i was left thinking if i could somehow get a patent on roses so that every rose sold would result in royalties to me, william richard gates would be shining my shoes. i have never understood why any idiot would presume a chick would like him more just because he gave her a pink teddy bear. but thats what chicks are like nowadays. me, i’d rather give a blue flyswatter as a token of my undying love. they convey so much depth, these blue flyswatters. i mean when its hot and you’re sweaty and the flies are bugging you what would you rather have? a pink teddy bear? of course not.
but girls are just too dumb to understand these things. back in pakistan, we know just how to treat women. consider the following picture from a restaurant at home.
yes. the door really does lead to the desert. so much for progress.
Filed under: picture, ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life | 11 Comments
yes i know no one ever claimed that pecos bill made it to to the persian gulf.
but since the song holds him responsible for virtually everything that ever happened, i’m willing to lay the last pack of extra chewing gum on the line – and yes i value chewing gum very highly – that he’s the reason why them there girlies are wearing them there boots.
where i come from the only times you ever hear someone talk about boots is when they’re talking about the pharmaceutical company or discussing pir pagara’s ridiculous predictions. and if you so much as suggested to ms. so-and-so that she might like a pair of boots she’d either think you were insane or some sort of latex fetishist or both. and frankly, that’s not what most guys want the ms. so-and-sos of this world to be thinking. but because i am no longer where i come from - though i did come from here when i went to where i come from and, as far as other people were concerned, i came from where i come from before i got to where i came from when i got to where i come from (yes my life really is that confusing, i’m always the person who’s not where he comes from) – i must now try to think like the people of where i’ve come to. and here they either like to wear boots or they get paid to do so.
short, tall, fat, skinny, fair, dark or anyother generic description you might choose to employ for them, they’re almost all gorgeous and almost all wearing boots. the arab woman is an interesting sub-species of the human race. as incomprehensible as the women from papua new guinea, peru or pak colony in karachi, these ladies have a distinct air of well, distinctiveness about them normally highlighted in the supreme clash of cultures in the way some of them dress. it is not unusual to see someone in a miniskirt without one square milimetre of skin on their legs visible. that may be hard to visualise but i think someone has started selling woolen spandex if there could possibly be such a thing.
and of course there are the boots. why women who can’t even manage stilletto strap-ons would even want to attempt stilletto cowboy boots – i’m sure i’ll run into one with riding spurs one of these days – is way beyond me. but don’t get me wrong, i don’t mind. it gives a people watcher like me a great new show to watch. and it is kind of relieving to know that its not as easy to get out of, pick, aim and throw a ten kilo arabian girly boot as it is to bombard with pakistani girly sandals. thank god for small mercies. plus, lets face it, the average arab hijaabed and flowing-skirted bebe is twenty times more gorgeous than the average pakistani traffic stopping billo.
apart from that all a guy can do is marvel at the irony that there are actually pakistanis who can so snobbishly refer to the middle east as a dead end when what they call a sattelite is what an arab calls his car.
and yet, i miss everything. from street crime and loadshedding and diesel smoke to aloo bharay parathay and proper urdu and the smell of the raat ki rani wafting in from my bedroom window. i was asked today by a palestinian hottie about what my country is like. and i tried to tell her. about how it looks like at sunsets when the angels dance at saif ul mulook. about how it looks like at sunrise when life wakes up yawning in nathiagali. about how at nights in dadu you can hear your two angels sharing a joke. about how you can’t hear your own shouts when gale force winds lash cape monze. i tried to tell her how no desert safari can match a simple train ride through cholistan or how no shifting dune compares to the 400 year old stillness of trees in ziarat.
but of course i couldn’t. you can’t just describe what goes on in the throbbing of your pulse. so all i said was, “primitive. but beautiful”. and strangely, she seemed to understand.
for all of you who think i’m being melodramatically sentimental, try growing up with a raat ki rani bush just outside your window.
and yes, she was wearing boots too. knee high, brown, probably buckskin.
Filed under: ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life | 13 Comments
hameed bhai
you meet and get to know around 769,334 people during your lifetime. thats the tragedy of globalisation. the good thing about globalisation is that there are still around 5,998,651,277 people whom you do not meet. this was not possible when the world was flat and “flatalisation” was the buzzword among the corporate types who ran the east india company and the spanish armada and abacus factories. of course, that was largely because there weren’t 5,998,651,277 people around at the time – they kept falling off the edges – and because even the greatest visionaries of the time could not come up with a way to form a social networking system called facebook. or face-sheaves-of-parchment. whatever.
i have a bunch of people on my facebook list who, by character are lemmings at best and laxatives at worst. these are the people who add every application they come across and then very kindly include me in the twenty or so people they need to include to find out how many socks they should wear or if they should stop breathing when they die. they wish me not only on birthdays and new years and eids but on the bar mitzvahs of their uncle’s neighbour’s kids and also send me a video clipping to boot. occasionaly they will also congratulate me on someone’s funeral and ask me to join the group “my newspaper deliveryboy died yesterday” and to add the free wreath application. electronic diarrhea.
with friends like these, who needs enemas? i mean enemies. or do i?
speaking of which, i realise that the title of this post has got nothing to do with the post so far – and ordinarily this would make no difference to me whatsoever, but since its been a nice weekend (no sign of sheikh rasheed on any news channel) - so i’ll get back on topic. there was once, and probably still is, an idiot named hameed something-or-the-other who set up a shop in the electronics market on abdullah haroon road in karachi. that wasn’t the idiotic part. neither was getting visiting cards printed. nor was distributing them to every poor sap who bought something from him. what was idiotic was getting his cell number on the card wrong. so lets say his actual number is 0300-5551234. he gets it printed as 0300-5551243. that happens to be my friend, the stud’s cell number (have you noticed how every one in a hollywood flick always has a number that starts with 555? is there some sort of law on this?).
now you can only say ji is number per koi hameed bhai nahin hotay around seven thousand four hundred and thirty nine times without getting irritated. after that it is not humanly possible unless you are sheikh rasheed’s mother and have put up with something more irritating than wrong numbers all your life. so you hand over the phone to someone else and tell them to talk to hameed bhai’s caller. for some reason or the other, this is usually me. that the thing went on for over seven years bears testimony to the fact that when hameed bhai got his cards printed he sure made the card-printer’s day.
over the years i have promised new refrigerators, airconditioners and washing machines to dozens of people. i have claimed that the business has been shut down, gone bankrupt, burned to the ground, raided by bustoms agents and exchanged for a chaat shop in new challi. i have at various times been hameed bhai’s father, son, brother, boss, servant, mugger, ambulance driver and murderer. hameed bhai has been murdered, shot at, electrocuted, suffocated inside a deep freezer and stoned to death for karo-kari. i have also given directions to the shop, other shops, no shops at all and several times to what is known as a public latrine in pakiland. i have even told a guy claiming to be his father in law that i am the cousin of his secret third wife and am using his mobile while err… the marriage is being consummated. the stud, whose cell it is, has obviously done much worse.
of course, this stuff always irritates those calling hameed bhai and not hameed bhai himself who probably remains blissfully unaware of this most of the time. however, when i told his supplier that i wasn’t going to pay him one red cent and that if he ever tried to collect he had better make sure he was well guarded because there was a gunnybag with his name on it in a particular sector office of a particular party, i suppose something not so nice happened to hameed bhai. the calls slowly fizzled out and eventually stopped altogether.
recently, another friend came across an old visiting card that had the stud’s number on it and passed it on. this reminded us of the fun we had fooling people who called for hameed bhai and while passing through saddar we went to see if the shop was still open and if hameed bhai was still alive. so we entered the shop and went through the motions of choosing a bunch of things for the dowry of an imaginary sister and then sat down to negotiate rates with hameed bhai. during the process, we told him that a friend had given his reference and we tried calling but the number was apparently a wrong one as the guy on the phone said that hameed bhai was in jail.
this got the guy all excited and you could literally see him go red as he started cursing the “phone wala” and told us how the #$$^&@@% had nearly runied his business and family life by spreading lies about him. he said he had tried to get the number blocked by mobilink or at least finding out the owner but they hadn’t complied (at this point we both silently thanked the being upstairs – hameed bhai may be old but he is 6′2″ and at least 400 pounds) otherwise the person would have been sorry. we left, after telling him we were bringing our pickup round to the front, and ten minutes later called him from the same number and told him that three split air conditioners he had sold two days ago were all faulty and that he had better send over his repairman immediately or replace the acs. i had, of course, swiped a carbon copy of the receipt from his desk.
three hours later he called nine times but we never answered. we could feel the increased blood pressure with every ring.
i have a feeling that no one from his family will ever issue a misprinted card again.
if they do, we’ll add them on facebook.
Filed under: facebook, ramble, social networking, the sweet stench of life | 27 Comments
… taqreeb kuch to behr-e-mulaqaat chahiye”
mirza ghalib (a pretty long time ago)
considering that you lot have awesomely short memories, a symptom of mental retardation – you are after all reading this blog – i’ll be nice and remind you of the last time we discussed the work of nida waqas nee` aqeel. it was here. the savants among you recognized it as a great piece (or maybe you didn’t but you jumped on the bandwagon to sound all cool and knowledgeable and fashionable, etc etc) while the pure morons didn’t even manage to pull that off.
so now that i have ridiculed the whole boiling lot of you, lets get serious. that painting is now up for your legitimate rating or voting whatever you choose to call it. so, since being a conossieuer (however its spelt) is in, and you all claim to have good taste anyway, and thirty seven other reasons that i can’t recall right now, but most of all because she’s a great artist and deserves it, vote away. here. and hurry up. only 3 days of voting left.
also, if you want to look at more of her work, she’s put it up on her myartprofile. enjoy.
but first, vote. 
Filed under: here and there, inspiration, picture | 7 Comments
he shot me down, bang bang.
not every thing that should happen should happen.
so yes, i, who have long since bemoaned the incomprehensible loyalty of the masses to one of the most corrupt, cruel and often criminal leaders in pakistani history – and we’ve had several, mind you – am now reduced to feeling an overwhelming sense of loss, even grief, at the tragic death of the same leader, undoubtedly the most popular politician in the country, daughter of the east, queen of sindh, princess of pakistan, one ms. benazir bhutto. and yes, i, who have been a constant detractor of the oxymoronically dynastic tendencies of democracy in pakistan suddenly realise what the helmsman who loses control of the rudder must feel like. that it takes one inconsequential man with a tube of iron to derail the democratic process in a nation of 160 million speaks volumes about how trivial a human life really is. that 160 million people can be shaken to the cores of their inner beings at the loss of one paltry citizen speaks volumes about how great the legacy of a human life can be.
this post was not supposed to be a eulogy. it was meant to commemorate not the death of benazir bhutto but the lives of all the unknown people who died in the backlash of emotion following her death. the people who innocently tried to make their respective ways home to their families. i wanted to talk of my own journey home, through burning tyres and cars and a stampede and gunshots and scenes from what looked like a spielberg war film. i wanted to talk about the suffering of women who walked miles with their children in their arms through the cold and violence. about the suffering of people who still haven’t made it home and wait hungry and thirsty for a lull in the looting and arson and fighting to try continue their journey. about the suffering people waiting for their family members to come home. about the people who will never make it home. for these are the people who count. the people who made benazir and all others like her what they are. the people benazir claimed to represent. but as their suffering, this widespread confusion, this mess, is just a reflection of what this great nation will now go through, any eulogy inscribed on her tombstone will speak as much about every pakistani as it will about her. ironic as it might be, in her death we see the ultimate democracy.
so the bhutto legacy continues. hanged, poisoned or shot, they all seem to go with a statement. and while the primary objective of terrorism – spreading terror – might seemingly have been achieved, terrorism has lost. because the fallout is not fuelled by fear its fuelled by rage. rage is good. al qaeda or the taliban or whoever it is that runs the extremist militant business in pakistan have just turned the war aginst terror into a vendetta. its no longer just business. for millions of people it is now very personal. and i feel the recruiters from the human resource division of the extremist business will probably be the first to highlight this.
what happens next is a very big question. one that everyone hopes will be answered sooner rather than later. but for now, let me ponder the irony of myself, a diehard supporter of military intervention in pakistani government, being reminded of the unforgettable party slogan the instant i heard of her death.
yeh baazi khoon ki baazi hai
yeh baazi tum hi haaro gay
har ghar se bhutto niklay ga
tum kitnay bhutto maaro gay?
Filed under: politics schmolitics, ramble | 15 Comments
