IMAGES vanish in the face of harsh reality. No make over or painter’s retouching can soften the jagged contours of the real world. The cruel stare of death and destruction cannot be given a kindly look. Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s tragic hero that I wrote about last time, ultimately kills himself to salvage his image. Painted in real blood and real tears the ravaged images coming from Muzaffarabad and Balakot need no redemption, no softening brush or artistry of the fakers. Reality has jolted the world; it has awakened humanity. We have no need for explanations, justifications or publicity campaigns. There is no need for lobbyists. Sympathy and support is pouring in from all corners of the world without our asking. Such is the power of truth and reality of facts. Spin masters have here a very clear lesson.

Images can take care of themselves if we mind the reality. Images are of primary concern to manipulators of reality. Among them you will find penmen and media players of all shades who are doing a job. Partial narratives and selective visuals are employed to create an intended effect. The focus is turned on what in cinema we call a montage.

There are other suggestive devices that journalists and media people use nowadays with great effect. The practice is so pervasive that what the general public reads in print and sees on the screen is a calculated version of reality. It is a tragic paradox of our time that the most civilized who should be promoting clarity of thought and vision are engaged in mass deception at such a grand scale. It is in this realm that literature plays its corrective role.

Urdu poetry has for long taken good care of dissemblers and hypocrites of mostly religious orders through its tradition of satirizing assorted categories of zahids, aabids, nasehs, shiekhs and waezeen who in their wider meaning can be taken to cover all pretenders and impostors styling themselves in images that are in total contrast to their reality.

In our prose we do not see much of this critical eye exposing pretension and imposture as even critics proper suffer under the strains and compulsions of politeness which is a part of our courtly culture. We have few writers in the tradition of Lytton Stratchy (Eminent Victorians). There may be few others who could be stood with Manto and Ahmad Bashir as iconoclasts. On the other hand we have many among our biographers and autobiographers who have indulged in reckless image building, ably led by establishment historians and ideological brain launderers. The late Dr Aftab Ahmad and the ailing Khaleeq Ibrahim Khaleeq are among the few exceptions whom you can safely reckon among those amused spectators of life who are gifted with a sophisticated vision. There’s no malice in their portrayal, nor either excessive idolation of their subjects. Agha Babar enjoyed creating self-images. He dramatized himself by creating appropriate situations. Once on a visit to Pakistan he asked me and artist Abbas Shah to take him to the shrine of Bari Imam on the occasion of the Saint’s Urs. There when he saw a batch of men performing the matam (mourning), he took off his jacket and shoes and joined them, It was a hot day. We got very worried about his health. But he seemed altogether rapt. When the matam ended after some minutes he took some time catching his breath. Later he told me that he had visited Data Sahib, Mian Meer and some other shrines but could not attain the state of Hazoory-i-Qalb (the heart’s attention) but seeing the men in the act of matam he felt moved and experienced that mystical state. It was an act he had played for us. We find the same dramatization in his unfinished autobiography.

Playwright Harold Pinter who most deservedly got this year’s Nobel for Literature is a master assembler of extended imagery that we see in his enigmatic adaptation of John Fowle’s French Lieutenant’s Woman. Image and reality, in this film directed by Karel Reisz, run side by side. The image surreptitiously influences and seems to captivate reality in the lives of its creators as scene after scene the parallells interact, the past that is fiction swaying the present that is fact. And this often happens. In Oni Baba, the 1964 Japanese film by Kaneto Shindo, it is shown in stark images how one becomes the mask one wears. The film focuses on a period of Japanese history when warlords ruled Japan and common people took refuge in remote forests and valleys to escape conscription and the constant fighting. One such character, a widow, lives in a forest dwelling with her widowed daughter-in-law. To survive they trap wandering soldiers and passersby, kill them and loot their belongings. The lovelorn daughter-in-law is involved with a friend of her husband’s which the widow resents and wants to bring to an end. One day they trap a warlord who wears a dreadful mask ostensibly to protect his beautiful face. After killing him the widow takes off the mask and uses it to frighten her daughter-in-law out of the liaison.

But one night while wearing the mask she gets soaked in the rain which glues it to her face permanently and try as she might she cannot take it off. She runs about in desperation in the reed jungle shouting who she really is and not the demon the people take her for. But nobody believes her. She becomes the demon she was posing as. The mask becomes her real face. Unfortunately we don’t see this happening in Pakistan where the masks of piety and goodness people wear remain skin deep. Yet the power of images is undeniable. Whether related to reality or otherwise they do sway people’s opinion to some extent, of the unwary very significantly. The subtleties of the publicity craft as we see in commercials, affect us all in unfelt ways. It is indeed a demon we cannot now exorcise from our lives. So we live a life of part reality that we tend to overlook and part image that we remain hooked on to.

IMAGINE a doomsday disaster like the October 8 earthquake in a nuclear setting. The mere thought is horrifying. There would be hardly any rubble left except for deadly yellow rain, a mushrooming radioactive cloud and the charred vista of howling desolation.

The earthquake killed, wounded and destroyed without raising any fires, which would happen in a nuclear scenario. And yet the damage done remains inestimable.

According to an expert account the ‘fireball’ developing around in a nuclear holocaust will melt or evaporate everything and everybody within or around it. The heat ‘radiated’ from the fireball will cause burns which may be lethal within one mile of a 20kt (Hiroshima / Nagasaki size) bomb hit. A blast wave will demolish buildings and crush men beneath the debris, or sweep people up and send them crashing into the rubble. Up to a distance of two miles, most buildings will collapse. Meanwhile, lethal ‘ionizing radiation’ is emitted to kill any survivor within a mile and a half of the explosion.

That such a catastrophe as the October 8 earthquake should have occurred in the holy month of Ramazan, the month of Allah’s infinite mercy and blessings, should put us to some honest heart-searching. Was it just a clash of tectonic plates or some other such geological upheaval or something beyond the material, supernatural or divine?

Could that in any way have anything to do with our own nuclear arrogance and boasting of an ‘invincible’ power with an impregnable defence? Even doubting Thomases like myself look heavenward for answers to these questions.

Not once but many a time would the famed father of our (Islamic) Bomb, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, threaten to destroy much of India with one of his lethal bomb-missiles devices. He would threaten to ‘vaporize’ places as distant as Kolkata any time he was given the go-ahead.

What happened to Dr. Khan himself is for all of us to see and to learn a lesson from his sad plight. When overindulged, semantics have the vicious power of leading one astray from the path of reality. It would tend to invoke inflated images of invincibility and triumph.

Therefore the less we talk of Pakistan as the impregnable fortress of Islam and, of the nation as a ‘steel-fed wall’, the better.

In today’s war, even one of a relatively low-tech calibre, there would be nothing more vulnerable and less impregnable than a fortress or a wall, no matter how strong. We saw what happened to our well-defended ‘fortresses’ in then East Pakistan. The enemy simply bypassed them to leave us in the lurch. Trapped in our own ‘fortresses’ we could not even chase the enemy.

More than others, such language should be avoided by professional military leaders, particularly those at the level of higher command. Even as a purely motivational device, this would have but little value or effect. As for the talk about the absolute security of our ‘strategic assets’, it would at best make sense only in the case of an outside attack or internal sabotage.

But what about a natural disaster like the traumatic October 8 earthquake? Scientists and meteorologists should know better. However, even the most solid structures could hardly absorb the shock and after-shocks of a quake overshooting a magnitude of eight on the Richter scale.

It’s also to be noted that Kahuta is less than an hour’s drive from the national capital — to pose a perceived threat to our command and control centres in Islamabad at the highest level in the case of a sudden accident.

We had the traumatic experience of the Ojhri Camp disaster in April 1988. Masses of live ammunition including a number of Stinger missiles hit some of the busiest areas of Islamabad. The Central Ordnance Depot in Rawalpindi and the Pakistan Ordnance Factories, Wah, are not too far away either to place the national capital within range of a truant missile or an accidental blow-up there. No disaster-management would be complete without reckoning with these factors.

However, as the president said in his telecast, this is no time for a ‘blame game’. No government, least of all one as problem-ridden as ours, can foresee and plan ahead for such sudden catastrophic disasters as the earthquake.

As regards deterrence, it remains potentially effective in disuse only, and ends as soon as the nuclear button is pushed. It’s no good either way except as a deadly scarecrow in one of Stephen King’s novels. It would tend to keep the nuclear threat alive while it lasts. In the case of two neighbours physically so perilously juxtaposed as India and Pakistan, deterrence could only help peace hang precariously by a slender thread without ensuring it.

What reduces deterrence to sheer absurdity is that while it makes the possession of nuclear weapons permissible, it forbids their use.

— The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.