Highlights of the August 2011 issue
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The unfortunate tale of a captain who spent
three months in captivity
When the captain of a fishing boat returns from a fishing trip, he usually
brings with him the money he earns from the sale of the catch. This money is
enough to meet the expenses of his family for the next two months. But Nazir,
who comes from Gwadar and works as a captain for an Iranian fishing boat, spent
five month on the sea and brought home nothing.
He left Iran’s Chabahar port in the first week of January, captaining a boat of
20 crew members, with high hopes of returning with a big catch and spending a
whole month with his family in Gwadar. While his crew was busy pulling up a net
laden with fish 700 nautical miles off the Iranian coast, the pirates attacked
and seized Nazir’s boat. They had just released a cargo ship after receiving
ransom and found his boat a convenient launch pad for their next prey.
By Umer Farooq
On March 16, 2004, the Pakistan Army launched its first operation in South
Waziristan tribal agency to weed out al-Qaeda and Taliban elements who had
crossed into Pakistan after coming under American attacks in Afghanistan.
General Pervez Musharraf, the then Chief of Army Staff (COAS) and the ruler
of the country, held a series of meetings with his top commanders in the
run-up to the operation and repeatedly asked them a single question. “Do you
see any kind of reluctance among your soldiers to fire at the militants?” a
participant of these meetings quotes him as asking. “He was visibly worried.
He wanted to be dead sure that he did not face any backlash from within the
army as he sent it into the tribal areas,” says a retired military officer
who worked closely with Musharraf during his tenure in the government.
Literati: Beyond
storytelling
By Mohsin Siddiqui
Photography by Arif Mahmood/White Star
It is difficult to reconcile Mohammed Hanif, the author of the biting,
satirical A Case of Exploding Mangoes, with the soft-spoken, unassuming man
sitting across the table from me. Fueled almost exclusively, it seems, by
cups of black coffee and nicotine, Hanif is almost painfully easy to talk to
yet, as a friend once put it, interviewing him is a little bit like "trying
to nail jelly to a wall".
It does not take me long to realise that this is because Hanif has no real
agenda. Incredibly candid, he deflects questioning inadvertently because he
does not try to hide anything, leaving anyone seeking his deep dark secrets
completely disarmed. What you see is what you get and, in this case, what
you get is an individual who, despite his avowals to the contrary, seems to
have an uncanny knack for writing about topics that electrify the
imagination and well before anyone even realises that they could be ‘issues’
for discussion.
The
year 2011 was off to a bleak start in Pakistan, with Punjab Governor Salmaan
Taseer shot multiple times on January 4 for his stance on the blasphemy law.
Since then, the mercurial lines, often blurred in Pakistan, between human rights
and the law, particularly when pertaining to minorities, have garnered
vociferous supporters on both sides. On August 11, 1947, Jinnah assured a new
nation’s minority groups, “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed —
that has nothing to do with the business of the State”. Unfortunately, as we
have discovered, the state is woefully absent in minority affairs, often the
perpetrator of injustices or an impassive spectator in moments of blood sport
that have threatened to consume both Pakistan’s shrinking liberal sphere and
minority communities. This month, four photographers give voice to members of
four major religions living in Karachi. As Pakistan struggles through its 65th
year, perhaps it is not too late to hope, as Jinnah optimistically did, that,
“in due course Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be
Muslims, not in the religious sense … but in the political sense as citizens of
the state”.
Delhi Belly
By Mira Hashmi
Starring: Imran Khan, Vir Das, Kunaal Roy
Kapur, Vijay Raaz, Shenaz Treasury, Poorna Jagannathan
Directed by Abhinay Deo
Say it loud: I’m lewd and I’m proud!
Oh boy is this going to be akin to trying to do the flamenco on a floor full of
exploding eggshells! Because it’s almost certain, given the nature of the beast
that is Delhi Belly, that you’ll up end offending someone no matter what you
say, either those who think this outrageously daft little film is some sort of
sign that judgment day is upon us or those who think it’s not fit to be seen in
polite company (and it isn’t, unless your circle of polite company includes
people who can cuss the ears off a sailor), or those who think it’s the greatest
work of raunch since Walter Lantz decided to call his animated avian hero Woody
Woodpecker.
Small-time journalist Tashi (Khan) and his slackeresque roommates Arup (Das) and
Nitin (Kapur) loll about their squalid apartment hurling insults at each other
and waiting for life to happen to them, which it does when Tashi’s air hostess
girlfriend Sonia (Treasury) inadvertently turns them into contraband diamond
mules for a mafioso (Raaz), who doesn’t take it too kindly when he instead ends
up with the contents of the perennially incontinent Nitin’s stool sample.
Needless to say, much expletive-ridden mayhem ensues, in the midst of which,
Arup is dumped by his rich girlfriend and fantasizes about disrupting her
impending nuptials with an unmentionable revelation concerning his
unmentionables, Nitin anonymously blackmails the landlord with nudie pictures
while trying to deal with his explosive rectal issues, and Tashi is waylaid, in
a manner of speaking, by salty, corkscrew-haired fellow journo Menaka (Jagannathan).
Add to the mix a joke about making earrings out of the family jewels, and the
best, funniest visual burka gag since Saad Haroon’s notorious viral hit Burka
Woman, and you have some idea of what you might be faced with here.
Tyranny of Language in Education: The Problem
and its Solution
Zubeida Mustafa
Ushba Publishing International
Karachi, 2011
Price: 200 rupees
Zubeida Mustafa wants to take the language question back to education and out of
politics. In the preface to Tyranny of Language in Education: The Problem and
its Solution, she explains that the book is an attempt “to articulate the point
of view of experts” on the subject “and convey it to lay readers, policymakers
and parents”. Drawing on historical references to colonial language policies
regarding education and the experience of European scholars and Pakistani
educationists, she advocates that a region’s native language, instead of foreign
languages, should be used in primary education. Contrary to prevailing myths
within private English medium schools, she argues that this does not obstruct
the acquisition of second or third languages in later years.
Rather than asserting her thesis through the authority of the text and academic
citations, Mustafa opens up a dialogical space within the text. By quoting and
reproducing dissenting responses to her arguments, the book provides a rare
opportunity to draw one’s own conclusions on the merits of respective positions.