| March, 28 2005 | Monday | 17 Safar 1426 |
After the bulls, the bears
WHEN we watched TV in the Gulf 25 years ago we saw that virtually every transmitting station offered one or two mandatory channels with a mullah as staple fare, relentlessly gesticulating with both hands, fiercely pontificating on the virtues of his faith.
We accepted this as a cultural hangover of a region that was suddenly, even rudely, sucked into the vortex of the 20th century from a mediaeval slumber, thanks largely to the great social engineer called the petrodollar.
Colour TV came to India in 1982 piggybacking on the Asiad mini-Olympics held that year in Delhi. The event also heralded Rajiv Gandhi as a key player in national affairs. The youthful premier-to-be not only supervized an impressive Asiad, albeit under his mother’s watchful eye, but also became the nation’s hope for a change in public discourse away from a raging religious strife.
But even before he could fix the searing Hindu-Sikh fissures that dominated the national politics of the time, Rajiv Gandhi, quite unwittingly let us admit, plunged headlong into a Hindu-Muslim discourse. His tinkering with the Shah Bano divorce case to placate orthodox Muslims followed by the unlocking of the Babri mosque to allow Hindu worshippers were not viewed kindly by his liberal supporters.
Insidiously, without doubt, Indian TV too set about abusing its newly unleashed prowess across the remotest parts of the country. It broadcast television programmes that began to draw on religious atavism of the people rather than serving as a vehicle for the unfettered liberal dialogue promised by Jawaharlal Nehru.
The advent of private broadcasters, some of them acknowledged to be gifted with a farsighted worldview, also proved to be a major let down. Their TRP ratings were driven by everything except a rational discourse. If it was mindless soap operas here, it was the bustling bourses there that occupied the space, and determined their earnings.
Thus religion has remained the dominant ingredient of Indian TV, showing up in odd places like the marketplace or the world of entertainment, or politics. Major news channels, including NDTV, initially seen as a progressive platform, find all the time to run live programmes on India’s perennial religious pilgrimages wherever they could find one. Obviously, there must be something in it for everyone.
After all in India today there are dozens of 24-hour TV channels exclusively dedicated to religious discourses. And there is a fair division of spoils. They cater to everyone, be they Sikh, Muslim, Christian, or Hindu viewers. On the other hand there is no public place, much less a single platform for dissent, nor any for the ubiquitous cynic, the atheist or the agnostic. There is virtually no room for the questioning spirit. It looks as though yet again in time, the dice is loaded adversely for Galileo against the awesome might of the Pope.
It was in this stifling atmosphere that free thinking poet Javed Akhtar got his chance recently to breach the fortress of suffocating axioms. His quarry was Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, the globe-trotting spiritual guru. The occasion was India Today magazine’s international symposium on India’s progress. It was an unlikely platform to discuss faith or spirituality, when Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Senator Hillary Clinton and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were competing for attention.
But Javed Akhtar just had to have his way, and how. And as he began punching holes into the arguments for spiritualism put forth by Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, even Javed Akhtar was surprised by the applause he got. Shankar’s case was that spirituality was a virtue. Javed claimed that it was a hoax.
“It has become a fashion with journalists to blindly continue the colonial tradition of calling Hindu spiritual leaders a hoax,” said a miffed Ravi Shankar in a signed article shortly after the debate debacle.
“They called Mahatma Gandhi, Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo godmen and hoaxes, and their contemporaries continue to do so. Would they say this to Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama? No! Only Indian spiritual leaders are singled out.”
Javed Akhtar argued that as a scriptwriter for movies, he creates illusions for his audience. But then after three hours he puts up the sign, The End. Spiritual gurus sell illusions too but they forget to put up The End sign after their discourse.
“The hatred and frustration were obvious from his body language,” thundered Ravi Shankar in the article. “It’s not just Mr Akhtar. Many journalists, communists, atheists and naxalites live in that state of mind, of being anti-religious, anti-rich, anti-famous, anti-business.”
What did Akhtar say that riled the guru so much? “Let’s not be confused by this word spirituality,” he argued. “You can find two people with the same name and they can be totally different people. Ram Charit Manas was written by Tulsidas. And the television film has been made by Ramanand Sagar. Ramayan is common but I don’t think it would be very wise to club Tulsidas with Ramanand Sagar.
“When Tulsidas wrote Ramcharit Manas, he had faced a kind of a social boycott. How could he write a holy book in such a language like Avadhi? Sometimes I wonder fundamentalists of all hues and all colours, religions and communities are similar. In 1798, a gentleman called Shah Abdul Qadir, in this very city, for the first time translated the Quran in Urdu, and all the ulemas of that time gave fatwas against him as to how could he translate this holy book in such a heathen language.”
The audience was glued to his every word. But the point that evidently hit the bull’s eye was searing. “Gautam Buddha came out of a palace and went into wilderness to find the truth,” said Akhtar. “But nowadays we see modern age gurus come out of the wilderness and wind up in palaces. They are moving in the opposite direction. We can’t talk of them in the same breath.” Applause. Applause.
But was it the last time that a confirmed atheist was allowed to speak his mind before a revered Indian guru? Time will tell. However, the dice is loaded.
THEIR treacherous journey from guarding mediaeval harems to earning a living by singing and dancing may not yet have ended, but Indian eunuchs intending to travel abroad now need not pass off as male or female.
They will now be issued passports that specify their true gender identity. Eunuchs applying for passports have just to fill ‘E’ in the gender box on the forms. A capital ‘E’ in any of the tiny ‘M’ and ‘F’ squares meant for male and female applicants.
E-mail: jawednaqvi@gmail.com
A colleague says he had his heart in his mouth the other day when he logged on to the website of his online brokerage house and saw what was inconceivable just a couple of days back: there were over 15 million shares of the Oil Gas Development Corporation in the “sell” column while the “buy” column showed a menacing zero.
For those unfamiliar with the arcane lingo of the stock market, this means that while panic-stricken shareholders wanted to sell off over 15 million OGDC shares as early as possible, there wasn’t a single buyer around.
Our colleague says that the computer screen which flashed the results of online trading in real time looked like a blood-splattered battlefield. (For the uninitiated: when share prices plummet, they are shown in red colour. When there is a lot of blue on the screen, be sure that the index is rising.) With the OGDC, which has a 26 per cent weightage in the index, down, other scrips were faring equally badly.
But for our friend, the continued bear rally in the stock market spelled an unmitigated disaster. For, like most unsuspecting players, he had procured a large number of shares on “badla”, known as carry-over transactions in technical parlance. In order to avoid paying a huge interest to his broker, he must sell the shares he had at the earliest. But there were no buyers in the stock market.
Woebegone, he shut down the computer, knowing full well that over the next few days he would be parting with the profit he had pocketed during the bull rally at the stock exchange which had sent the KSE 100 index pole-vaulting to 10,000 points.
Our colleague says he understands that investors lose money in the stock market just as they make money. But he says he cannot understand why the KSE regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission of
Pakistan, remained silent and inactive for a long time as small first-time investors got their inexperienced fingers burnt.
Return of the book
“You must read Manto,” someone said at a tea shop near Nipa Chowrangi early on a cool morning the other day. The speaker and the person spoken to were both young men, wearing T-shirts and jeans. It was a pleasant surprise to find one of the younger generation showing an interest in Manto. Is a book-reading culture coming back, then?
The owner of a popular bookshop in Saddar says that sales at his shop have recently shown an upward trend and a new generation of book lovers seems to have taken birth. “The folks who were lured to computers by the Internet appear to have been stimulated by it to read books,” he says.
According to the bookseller, another factor behind the revival of book-reading may 9/11 which has generated a great deal of thirst for knowledge, particularly about Islam. This is evident from the fact that books on Islam and Muslims are selling like hot cakes these days.
While a number of book shops in downtown Karachi have been closed, the fact is often ignored that several new outlets have been established in different areas of the city. People often refer to the shrinking of a market for old books in Khori Garden, but do not take into account the appearance of similar, though admittedly smaller, markets in other places like Gulshan-i-Iqbal, where books are sold on pushcarts, and the sale of second-hand books in some shops. And a recent phenomenon is the growth of book fairs: book shops under huge tents. This is another positive indicator.
One avid reader sees tax-evading publishers behind the hype about decline in book-reading habits. “The publishers keep on reprinting popular titles without mentioning that they are reprints to save tax,” he said. The fact that their business is thriving shows that there must be a demand for books.
Bad brew
Should something related to a train journey from Karachi to Lahore be part of the Karachi Notebook or the Lahore Diary? Well, anyway, here goes.
Trains from Karachi are taking at least two hours longer to reach Lahore because the main track is blocked near Lahore for the construction of an underpass. Trains therefore go from Khanewal to Faisalabad and enter Lahore from the Shahdara side over the Ravi bridge. When, on March 13, the Karachi Express (night coach) reached Faisalabad in the morning, there was a scramble to get to the tea stall. The tea was being dispensed in plastic glasses, some with PIA logo on it. Were these used PIA utensils bought by some contractor or new ones leaked out from the airline’s stocks or were they fake PIA ware?
Somebody should look into this. The tea, incidentally, was terrible. There was no food or beverage service on board this particular train because an old rake without a dining car had to be pressed into service.
And while for any Lahore-lover from Karachi it was good to enter the city from across the Ravi, the state of the river broke one’s heart. It has been reduced to a dirty brown nullah.
Cell trauma
Last week a colleague sent an SMS to her father informing him that she wanted to go shopping to Saddar and later to Clifton. Since the message was rather longish it reached her father in two parts, with the second part reaching him first. It read: “2/2 to Panorama”.
Not knowing what to make of the message, the father called up his daughter on her cell number but someone else answered. When the father asked who it was and where he was speaking from, the man on the other end replied, “Well, you called me so must know who I am. I am speaking from Karachi at the moment but who knows where I will be when you call me again.” The man was naturally having fun with a wrong number, but it was no fun for the concerned father who thought his daughter had been kidnapped or something. And since the first part of her SMS had still not reached him, he was pretty sure that something was seriously wrong.
With these thoughts in his mind he turned his car around towards the CPLC office for help. Meanwhile the daughter who had seen her father’s number flashing on her mobile screen had answered the phone only to hear loud music playing at the other end.
Upon taking the daughter’s number from the father, CPLC officials asked him to relax and try calling her up again as he might have got a wrong number.
Of course the matter was finally cleared up. As suspected, the mobile service concerned was responsible for the whole episode. But in the meantime it had caused a great deal of worry for the father.
People thought that with cell phones, wrong numbers were behind them. They were wrong.
— By Karachian
Email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com