| May 29, 2006 | Monday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 1, 1427 |
The importance of being Ms. Roy
CONTRARY to their claims, South Asians are not very tolerant of criticism. When an American journalist wrote about prime minister Vajpayee’s so obviously poor health, he was promptly rebuked by the foreign ministry and was all but expelled. A Pakistani journalist who seldom sees eye to eye with Gen. Musharraf was personally berated by the president in an interview to an Indian journalist. By that token the American system is far more tolerant of criticism. But then this is where the difference ends.
“Knock, knock, knock!”
“Who’s there?”
“Allah kay naam par, Baba.”
“Moaaf karo, Baba.”
“Knock, knock, knock … ”
In most cases you pay something to the beggar either as an act of piety or you just want to get rid of him.
You may face a similar situation when your vehicle slows down at a red light. You may be tempted to avoid a charging beggar and move your vehicle forward if there is some space. But the crafty person may not let you off the hook so easily and would adjust his pace to catch you at the right place.
Baring their deformed limbs or faking handicaps, these beggars are everywhere — at street corners, at bus stops, in marketplaces, parks, hospitals, in front of restaurants and hotels. There are others who may catch you unawares anywhere. They do not don the garb of a beggar. They may say that they have lost their money, or they had come to see their relatives in Karachi but have not found them and want to go back home.
One of another breed would embark a bus and tell passengers that his mother is in hospital suffering a dreaded disease and he desperately needs money to save her life. “Those who doubt my statement, may accompany me to the hospital and see for themselves,” he invariably says.
Little girls in buses and minibuses use similar words and tone when they seek alms to provide for their purported younger siblings. “Uncles and aunties, my younger brothers and sisters are hungry at home. Please, give me a few rupees so that I can buy ration for them.”
Then there are those who seek money for madressah students saying that “they wholly depend on your generosity to serve the cause of religion”. They may be armed with receipt books and plastic-coated certificates to establish their authenticity.
The number of transvestites seeking alms is also on the rise. Experts believe that 95 per cent of the eunuchs may be lured into the profession by economic reasons rather than biological. For them, it is easier to saunter about and pick money than to sweat for it.
And some of the beggars may be interesting characters. A colleague insists that they may be involved in small-time intelligence-gathering activities. He mentions a particular bearded man resting on a walking stick, often seen at the Saudi Embassy (consulate) intersection. “He peeps into cars to see who are inside and pays little attention to the money he receives.”
Beggars usually ignore taunting remarks and criticism by the public. But if really provoked, they may be quite articulate in their retort. A woman from Canada visiting Pakistan after 23 years asked a stout woman why was she begging instead of working for a living. “What do you think I am doing?” the young woman said in a harsh tone. “Am I relaxing on a bridal bed made out of rose petals.” They may even equate themselves with governments seeking foreign aid or individuals collecting donations for a worthy cause.
The beggars are believed to have formed cartels to protect their ‘rights’. They have their own pick and drop arrangement — dropped at designated places on the intersections in the morning and picked in the evening. Their workplaces are also saleable property and may cost quite a sum to a buyer in the Defence and Clifton areas. They have established their exclusive settlements where they live under a strong social order.
There have been reports that some beggars own cars and tall buildings, but they refuse to shun their lucrative profession, sometimes out of habit.
The numbers of beggars seem to be growing quite rapidly. The government’s detractors may attribute this phenomenon to growing poverty, but this can also be a sign of growing affluence and people’s willingness to pay alms.
There may be many genuinely needy and deserving people who have been forced to this state by circumstances. But in most cases they are professionals who consider themselves artistes of high class knowing well how to make people loosen their purses.
This surging tide of beggary needs to be stemmed. Effective measures are needed. The previous city government had started a campaign to flush out beggars from roads and intersections. Hordes of beggars were packed into police and city government vans and taken to certain detention centres. But the drive soon fizzled out as thousands of beggars moved inside residential areas to avoid police ‘harassment’ and set up their business points there.
People who are really deserving, must be taken care of by the government. They do not form a large part of the beggars’ community and can be easily sifted out of the lot.
Slim and trim
Want to look slim and smart in a short time? No problem. You can do so within minutes.
Go to a photo studio. Have yourself photographed at close range. Then stand up and get a life-size picture made. Put both the photographs side by side. Mark the first one ‘Before’ and the other ‘After’. Meaning, you were fat and your cheeks looked swollen like a golden apple, your belly was like a bag filled with wheat flour, and after the use of a certain machine, medicine or by just smearing a cream on the bulging spots, you have been transformed into a thin gnome or slim nymph.
This is how newspaper advertisements make people believe. But this gimmick to swindle health-conscious people has become a little outdated. Now the job is done by TV channels more effectively. They will make us believe that a certain machine, a waist-belt or potion will make our bulges disappear in no time. They try to show us that gyms and jogging tracks are things of the past and there is no need to waste time and money on them.
When a caller in a Pushto TV channel asked the expert that she was not as much disturbed by her bulging belly as by the backside weight. The expert soothed her saying that that was how nature worked to keep balance.
We have increasingly become fond of shortcuts. We look for them in every aspect of life. Actually we fool ourselves into believing that the fat we accumulate over the years will melt away easily, without any rigorous exercise.
But believe me, ladies and gentlemen, you can deprive yourself of vital fluids and be happy to weigh light on the scales. But if your aim is to dissolve the fat, you will have to sweat it out.
By the way, I have shed three kilograms during the last as many days. You can guess what will happen in a month if the slimming process continues at this pace. Nowadays I am taking light intakes of food and heavy of medicines. Actually, I am suffering from chest congestion and consequent fever.
— Karachian
email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com
Arundhati Roy was in New York last week berating President Bush and Indian democracy in the same breath. She described Bush simply as a butcher, and said democracy in India was a hollow institution in which it was difficult to say if the chief minister of a notorious state was a fascist democrat or a fascist dictator.
In a public speech and a TV interview during her visit, Ms. Roy was at her scathing best. What makes her so angry about the world she lives in and so passionate about her resistance to its follies? Amy Goodman interviewed her for Democracy Now, a daily radio and TV programme on over 400 stations worldwide. She spoke on a range of issues including Maoists, Kashmir, free trade, biased judiciary and George W. Bush.
On the Bush visit: “He visited Gandhi’s grave, and first his dogs visited Gandhi’s grave. Then Gandhians were wanting to purify it. And I said, look, I don’t mind the dogs. I mind Bush much more than the dogs. Obviously one can have all kinds of opinions about Gandhi. It’s not universal that everybody adores and loves him, but still he stood for non-violence, and here it was really the equivalent of a butcher coming and tipping a pot of blood on that memorial and going away. It was — you know, there was no room left, as I said, for satire or for anything, because it was so vulgar, the whole of it.”
On Indian media and Kashmir: But I have to say the Indian mainstream media was so servile. You know, you had a newspaper like the Indian Express saying, ‘He is here, and he has spoken.’ I’m sure he doesn’t get worshipped that much even by the American mainstream press, you know. It was extraordinary...I’ll give you a wonderful example of how it works. I was at a meeting in Delhi a few months ago, the Association of Parents for Disappeared People. Now, women had come down from Kashmir. There are 10,000 or so disappeared people in Kashmir, which nobody talks about in the mainstream media at all. Here were these women whose brothers or sons or husbands had (disappeared). All these people who were speaking of their personal experiences, and there were other speakers, and there was me. And the next day in this more-or-less rightwing paper called Indian Express, there was a big picture of me, really close so that you couldn’t see the context. You couldn’t see who had organised the meeting or what it was about, nothing. And underneath it said, ‘Arundhati Roy at the International Day of the Disappeared’. So, you have the news, but it says nothing, you know? That’s the kind of thing that can happen.”
On Indian judiciary: Overnight, notices go up saying tomorrow or day after tomorrow you’re going to be evicted from here. The Supreme Court judges have come out saying things like, ‘If the poor can’t afford to live in the city, why do they come here?’...So a former chief justice of India gave a decision allowing the Narmada Dam to be built, where 400,000 people will be displaced. The same judge gave a judgment saying slum dwellers are pickpockets of urban land. So you displace people from the villages; they come into the cities; you call them pickpockets. He gave a judgment shutting down all kinds of informal industry in Delhi. Then he gave a judgment asking for all India’s rivers to be linked, which is a Stalinist scheme beyond imagination, where millions of people will be displaced. And when he retired, he joined Coca-Cola. You know, it’s incredible.
On economic liberalisation: Obviously it creates a very vocal constituency that supports it, among the elite of poor countries. And so you have in India an elite, an upper caste, upper class wealthy elite who are fiercely loyal to the neo-liberal programme
On Indian politics: India not being a world power, however much it wants to claim it is, turns those energies on its own people. So in Gujarat, you had in 2002 this mass killing of Muslims on the streets, a bloodbath where people were burnt alive, women were raped on the streets, dismembered, killed in full public view.
What happened after that, there were elections, and the man who engineered all this won the elections. So you’re thinking, ‘Is it better to have a fascist dictator or a fascist democrat who has the approbation of all these people continues to be in power in Gujarat? Nothing has happened. It’s a Nazi type of society, where hundreds of thousands of people are still economically boycotting Muslims, something like 100,000 driven from their homes.
But during the general elections, all of us were waiting with bated breath to see what would happen. And when the Congress came to power, supported by the left parties from the outside, obviously we allowed ourselves a huge gasp of relief, you know, walked on our hands in front of the TV for a bit.
But the Congress campaigned against the neo-liberal policies that it had brought in, actually. But before even we knew whether Sonia Gandhi was going to be the prime minister or what was going to happen, there was an orchestrated drop in the stock market. The media’s own stocks began to drop. The cameras that had been in all these villages, saying look at this wonderful democracy, and the camels and the bullock carts and everyone that’s coming to vote was outside the stock market now. And before the government was formed, both from the left and from the Congress, spokesmen had to come out and say, ‘We will not dismantle this neo-liberal regime’. And today we have a prime minister who has not been elected. He is a technocrat who has been nominated. He is part of the Washington consensus.
On Maoists and democracy : Orissa is sort of east, southeast. And it’s got a huge indigenous population...So they, the government, took over the lands of indigenous people...And when they protested, there was dynamite, you know, in the ground. Some of them were blown up, killed. Six of them, I think, were injured, taken to hospital, and their bodies were returned with their hands and breasts and things cut off. And those people have been blocking the highway now for six months, the indigenous people, because it became a big issue in India. But it’s been happening everywhere, and they are all called terrorists. You know, people with bows and arrows are called terrorists.
So, in India, the poor are the terrorists, and even states like Andhra Pradesh, we have thousands of people being held as political prisoners, called Maoists, held as political prisoners in unknown places without charges or with false charges. We have the highest number of custodial deaths in the world. And we have Thomas Friedman going on and on about how this is an idealistic — ideal society, a tolerant society. Hundreds — I mean, tens of thousands of people killed in Kashmir. All over the northeast, you have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, where a junior non-commissioned officer can shoot at sight. And that is the democracy in which we live.
LIKE many of us, Bengalis too love to poke fun at their own idiosyncrasies. Here is what journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta observed during a recent visit to Kolkata:
“Adda (the act of conversing without an agenda) and fish are the two things the Bong cannot survive without. Apprehensive of my broken and rusted Bangla, I tried to relearn my mother tongue for a TV programme only to be spoken back to in heavily accented English. The state government had scrapped English in primary schools but has since reversed the decision. The Ananda Bazar Patrika front-paged a photo of Buddhadeb being garlanded with a delectable-looking hilsa. Please pass on, one pis phis dis.”
jawednaqvi@gmail.com