| August 16, 2005 | Tuesday | Rajab 10, 1426 |
Raising many questions, and a few hopes
The nostalgic piece on the dwindling Irani restaurants in these columns evoked a response a few days ago from Pakistanis (and one Indian) settled abroad. An old Karachian pointed out one omission in the write-up – Boman Abadan Irani Restaurant.
Bomam Abadan Irani was a plebeian restaurant, where ‘mixed tea’ was served, unlike others where tea was brought in a teapot, with milk and sugar on the side. Hence tea at Boman was cheaper. But what made Boman important were the puffed saltish biscuits (commonly known as khara biscuit). People loved them. Most people dipped them in the tea before eating them, but the purists never did that because the biscuits became soggy.
If Fredrick’s Cafeteria was frequented by the relatively well off punters twice a week after the races, the racegoers who couldn’t spend 40 paisas for a cup of tea preferred to go to Boman Abadan Irani restaurant. Outside its door that opened in Bohri Bazaar, there was a row of shoe-shine boys (not really boys since they were in their twenties and thirties) who would polish your pair of shoes for 25 paisas. All of them were from the Frontier province. They would try to flatter you by saying “Sheesha banayga” (turn your shoes into a mirror). When they would finish working on one shoe, they would hit an empty polish metallic box on the pedestal, which was the signal for you to put the other foot up.
One cannot also help recalling that diametrically opposite Parisian Restaurant, was Gulzar Restaurant, which was there even before partition. In the late 1950s when Indian singer C.H. Atma paid a visit to his home town, he made it a point to have tea at Gulzar’s. “The taste hasn’t changed,” he told an old friend who went with him, which was quite unusual because normally people who go on such nostalgic trips end up saying “Ab wo baat naheen” (It’s not the same”).
Safe blood
Our governments are fond of constituting committees, commissions, teams, boards and working groups. When all of these fail to deliver, they pump in more money and set up task forces to oversee the working of the existing ones.
Take for example Sindh Governor Dr Ishratul Ibad’s new directive of setting up of a task force for safe blood transfusion. He’s unhappy with the performance of the previously formed Safe Blood Transfusion Authority (SBTA). How is the task of the task force task going to be any different from that of the SBTA? And what is the guarantee that where the SBTA failed, the task force will succeed?
Why can’t the existing SBTA be directed to simply shape up and work? Why can’t the existing authority be guided if that is all that is needed?
In 1997 a Safe Blood Transfusion Act was passed but there was little subsequent implementation. Then to bring it to life the SBTA was constituted to monitor blood transfusion services. As a first step, all blood banks were to be registered according to national standards, including collection of blood from non-commercial blood donors and screening of blood for hepatitis B, C, HIV, malaria and syphilis.
Any number of safe blood transfusion acts and setting up of authorities and task forces are going to prove ineffective unless people are made aware of the hazards of buying unscreened blood. And with that there is need to campaign for voluntary blood donations.
According to Dr Syed Abdul Mujeeb, head of blood transfusion service, AIDS Surveillance Centre, JPMC, Pakistan requires 1.5 million units of blood annually, but only 10 per cent of the demand is met by volunteers. The rest is met by family and commercial donors. He has a simple solution to the problem. He says that if just one per cent of the population donates blood once a year, the need can be met.
“When I was in studying in college in Lahore,” recalls a Karachian, “we had annual blood camps set up for two days by medical college students in not just our college but all colleges and almost everyone donated blood. It was so simple. Perhaps this can be started here too at not just colleges but at multi-national organizations, government offices, etc., where people find it difficult to take time out and go to a blood bank to donate.”
Curious quakes
Residents of the city’s coastal areas have no clue why earth tremors pummel only Defence and Clifton — and that only in the small hours.
There must be some explanation for this recurring seismic activity – five low-intensity quakes have jolted Defence and Clifton over the past one month.
The Met Office does not go beyond reporting the occurrence of the earthquakes – provided its device for measuring the intensity of earthquakes is operational. Reportedly the device remains unmanned at night and readings are taken in the morning.
The Met Office says that it is monitoring the seismic activity responsible for the quakes, but refuses to shed light on the cause.
Respect thy flag
Around this time of year when the air is full of enthusiasm for celebrating independence day, one gets to see the usual flags and bunting along with other accessories for sale on roadside stalls. Parents are seen buying their children all kinds of decoration items, most important of which is of course the flag. But the strange thing about buying the flag year after year is that it is not really your first time at purchasing it. Buying bunting every year is understandable because the little paper flags do tear up or get spoiled in the wind or even in the rain, which is expected around this time of year.
One wonders what happened to the flag bought last year or the year before that. It is made of cloth and can be folded and stored in a safe place after the date has passed. The enthusiasm and celebration dies down very soon after August 14, so much so that the people who had so happily put up the flags on their car windows and terraces and rooftops forget about taking them down again. Official flags are taken down soon after sunset and flown again the next morning.
It would be good if parents and responsible citizens would take some time to educate the young about how to care for a flag and how to respect it just like they made time to take the children shopping for these items.
It would also do no harm for traffic police personnel to remind motorists to take off the flags from their vehicles after the holiday has passed.
Now, a letter from a reader in Clifton:
One of the small pleasures of life is to sit on the roof and, after a long day’s toil, enjoy the evening breeze and watch the clouds race across the night sky. That pleasure has been sadly spoilt. A searchlight beam now daily roams around the sky. It comes, it is said, from a restaurant that has thought of this way to advertise itself. But it is extremely distracting and irritating as it traverses the sky from one side to the other. I can’t change the place where I sit because it is next to a potted motia plant which is in flower these days. So it is the beam that should go!
Can anyone operate a searchlight or is permission needed from the government? And couldn’t a sweeping beam of light be a distraction also for airline pilots? That part of Clifton lies in the flight path of many airliners.
— By Karachian
email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com
Raising many questions, and a few hopes
VETERAN writer Khushwant Singh has his normal quota of contradictions. He may wear a turban as a Sikh, but being a self-confessed agnostic, the octogenarian sardarji keeps aloof from organized religion.
When Hindu mobs were lynching fellow Sikhs on the busy streets of Delhi at the start of November in 1984, a terrified and dejected Khushwant Singh took refuge in a diplomat friend’s house. He says he felt like a Jew in a Nazi camp. For the first time in his life he became conscious of his identity as a Sikh.
Outraged by the Congress party’s yen for blood-letting, as its goons slaughtered 4,000 Sikhs on the busy streets of Delhi and elsewhere in a macabre revenge for the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, Khushwant Singh turned to of all the people Lal Kishan Advani. He canvassed for Advani’s election in 1989, thereby becoming a supporter of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
After the BJP staged the carnage of Muslims in Gujarat in a three-month long orgy from February to April of 2002, a contrite Singh published a compilation of his old essays on communalism, with a heart-wrenching title: The End of India .
In one of the essays from the book, Singh poured acid at our foolish myth-making about India’s alleged non-violent history. “One such belief the communalists use to their advantage is Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhaism: we are children of one God who is both Ishwar and Allah, Ram and Rahim, ergo, Hindus and Muslims and Christians are brothers,” he scoffed with lucid reasoning.
The truth is that wherever people of different races, religions, languages and cultures have co-existed, instead of ‘bhai-bhais’ there is tension. “And if land, property or business is involved, tension often explodes into violence.”
Khushwant Singh disapproved also of other quasi maudlin notions deployed crassly for so-called nation-building. For example, the belief that there were no communal riots before the British introduced their policy of divide and rule is one such myth. Facts mirror a different reality on this point. “In fact, Hindu-Muslim tensions have existed since Islam came to India,” according to Khushwant Singh. “And before Islam there were conflicts between Hindus and Jains, Hindus and Buddhists, Dravidians and Aryans.”
Khushwant Singh’s angry reaction to the Nanavati Commission report on the 1984 pogrom of Sikhs, which was recently tabled in parliament, was thus not entirely unexpected.
“I am very disappointed,” he told Tehelka newspaper. “I was expecting a more forthright denunciation of the people involved.” He said 90 per cent of the Nanavati report was of no consequence. “It is all focused on police stations and I am sure the police could not have acted the way it did unless instructions had come from the very top. Delhi burnt for four days and there was no Section 144, no curfew, no shoot-at-sight orders.”
The Nanavati report was presented by the government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Sikh. “I don’t think he has any say. We know the circumstances under which he became the prime minister. Sikh or not, he has integrity, ability and humility. The Sikh community needs to also look at the positive side. Was it even conceivable in 1984 that we would have a Sikh prime minister, a Sikh army chief and a Sikh heading the Planning Commission?” he told Tehelka .
Here Khushwant Singh is perhaps falling into the trap of sentimentality he has so assiduously avoided, even cautioned against. For if it takes a massacre of 4,000 Sikhs for the Congress to become contrite enough to nominate a Sikh prime minister then the argument follows: when is India going to get a Dalit prime minister so that he or she could wipe out a bit of 5,000 years of cumulative shame?
Also, by the same logic, should Muslims and Christians wait in hope for their prime minister to come to deliver them from years of injustice and religious terror because their toll in cumulative pogroms is numerically higher? Naturally there can’t be any justification for this line of reasoning in a secular democracy that India claims to be. So what is the way out?
There is one. Dr. Singh must now pick up the Shri Krishna commission’s report on the 1993 anti-Muslim pogroms of Mumbai from his library. He must also address the findings of numerous such commissions of inquiry on carnages and atrocities perpetrated against the country’s Dalits, the tribes-people, Christians and so forth.
Needless to say discrimination in criminal justice systems is not an Indian phenomenon. The issue was discussed at the recent session of the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. “It transpired that discrimination within the criminal justice systems is not only behavioural but also institutional,” wrote former attorney-general Soli Sorabjee last week.
Direct discrimination is easy to recognize; it is difficult to discern indirect discrimination, which seriously affects exercise of fundamental rights by vulnerable groups. “It is tragic that the poor and the marginalized segments are under-represented in the administration of justice but are ‘over-represented’ in prisons and on death rows,” it was observed at the Geneva conference.
Of course Dr Singh must quickly deliver relief packages that are already overdue by two decades, to the hapless Sikh community of Delhi. But he must not waste any time to address the post-pogrom ghettoization of Gujarat’s Christians and Muslims. We are sure Khushwant Singh is making a note of that.
A FRIEND called from Lucknow to alert me about Prime Minister Singh’s Independence Day address, which was delivered in chaste Urdu. As the camera caught Dr Singh reading from the prepared text, from behind a bullet proof glass, he was seen turning the pages of his speech from left to right — an indication he was reading the speech from an Urdu script, a kind of first in independent India.