The fear of the unknown in an alien land: DATELINE WASHINGTON

IF YOU are born in a repressive society, your psyche embraces fear — that feeling of impending doom etched into your soul forever. It is there, lurking, even when it isn’t baring its mythic fangs, waiting to leap from its inner lair and overpower you at the slightest excuse.

It was there, with me, part of me back home, too.

And it rears its head to remind me every time I see something unusual. It was a normal day, cool and bright. I was travelling in a train in New York, again. It was packed. No one was looking at me and I felt safe in the anonymity of the crowd. But my freedom from fear was short-lived.

At one of the stations, I don’t know which, a burly Caucasian boarded the train. General George Patton’s philosophy glowered across his shirt — “The aim of the war is not to die for your country. It is to make the other ... die for his.” My fear and guilt rose in my throat.

Confused and scared, I took out my cell phone — the train had not entered the tunnel yet. I called Raz, a friend in Brooklyn who had been beaten outside a bar near his flat several days earlier. Raz, a born liberal, found it funny he should be beaten up for being a militant.

I remember that in the early 1980s, when both the Islamic and Christian worlds were busy fighting a holy war against the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan, a group of zealots in Islamabad had set fire to Raz’s motorcycle because he opposed the war.

He has changed since then. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he lost the only ideology he believed in, socialism. He moved to America soon after the Russians smashed his dreams of an ideal communist society and settled in New York.

“It is a city I respect,” he says of New York. “It allowed me to be lost in its madness. It is so big and so crowded that you can live here without being discovered by friends and foes. You even stop looking for yourself. It is a good feeling.”

Even two broken teeth, a fractured arm and bruised nose did not reduce his affection for New York. He still loves this city. But the beating has had a strange impact on his relationship with his American girlfriend.

Before the brawl, he loved her as people love their girlfriends. His emotions have changed since the fight. He still loves her. But she is more like a shield he hides behind whenever he felt threatened.

“I feel protected,” he says. This new twist in his love bothers his girlfriend, who wants more than this display of childish affection.

Raz is a polite man and tries not to annoy others. But soon after Sept 11, he had a big fight with a priest who stopped him near his flat, asking him to increase his contacts with his fellow Muslims.

“Why should I do that,” he asked.

“We should stay together. There is protection in unity,” said the priest.

“Protection? What do you know about protection?” retorted Raz. “I have my girlfriend. She can protect me.”

This offended the priest, who spread the news that Raz was now an infidel and “every Muslim who still values his faith should stay away from him.” The edict pleased Raz.

When I told him about this man and his shirt, Raz got scared. “Get off the train, take a cab and come over to me,” he said.

Our conversation broke off when the train entered the tunnel before Manhattan. I looked around for some reassurance; a friendly smile, a known face, a little affection. I found nothing.

As soon as I got off the train, my phone rang. It was Raz. “What happened? Why did you switch off the phone?” he asked.

“Nothing, yaar (buddy), I got disconnected.” I said.

“OK. But keep it on. I will keep checking,” he said. And he did. Several times.

I was already feeling better. It is a pleasant walk from Grand Central Station to UN Plaza. You pass and meet people of every colour and creed. I have always enjoyed this walk. And now I like it even more. It makes me forget who I am.

This desire to assume a neutral identity that transcends all boundaries of colour, caste and religion is not new. I have yearned for a nameless and faceless identity for years. Even when I was living in my own country, I was an ethnic minority. Here, in New York, I am both an ethnic and religious minority. And this has increased my desire to acquire a new name tag that makes me part of the larger crowd by erasing all those features that distinguish me from others.

But at the same time, I want to retain what I brought with me from home. I not only want to retain it but also want to pass it on to my coming generations.

This is a strange dilemma that perhaps all minorities have to face. Whenever they feel the crush, they regret being different from others and when they are among their own, they want to preserve what makes them different.

Discrimination at the BBC: MEDIA REVIEW

THE BBC is normally associated in Pakistan with more objective and impartial news coverage, at least more than, say, CNN or some of similar other networks (FOX News does not qualify on grounds of bad taste, self-righteousness and extreme prejudice).

However, the BBC is one channel that many Pakistanis often tune in to — when they want to get information on a particular event. This is not to say that many of us don’t have problems with the way the BBC might cover certain events or how it might portray certain regions or faiths of the world, but by and large it’s thought to be more balanced than the other news networks. However, the channel’s zeal to investigate and uncover injustice and wrongdoing all over the world, or the outspokenness of many of its editorial staff in support of issues like democracy and human rights, or greater transparency and accountability, does not seem to extend to the organization itself. Or at least that’s what a series of articles appearing in the Guardian newspaper would have us think. In fact, according to one account, a radio show presenter of Asian origin had to co-opt her family members to work for the show but in return for nothing. In June this year, the BBC released its annual report. However, the Guardian reported that the press was kept away from the meeting and that the BBC director-general, Greg Dyke, and chairman, Gavin Davies, refused to talk to journalists about the corporation’s annual report.

“After a two-hour grilling from MPs Mr Dyke and Mr Davies swept out of the committee room surrounded by PR minders and ignored the waiting journalists, claiming they didn’t have time to deal with questions. A dozen or so specialist reporters were at the Commons media select committee but when they approached the duo after the session, they were met by a total of seven PRs.

The journalists were told to call BBC PRs Donald Steel and Sally Osman on their mobiles if they wanted answerers to their questions,” the paper wrote.

It noted: “The annual report day is the only official occasion reporters have to quiz [BBC] governors about the performance of management and is usually considered an important way of demonstrating to critics that the chairman and board of governors are independent of management.”

In fact, in the days to come, the director-general did not hold his traditional press conference (much like a finance minister would after his or her country’s budget) and instead the corporation chose to hold a meeting in which selected guests, including “some” journalists were invited.

Some British MPs have criticized the channel for spending too much of licence fee money on digital and online services, offerings they say “most people can’t get.” However, the more pressing issues that have generated a lot of controversy relate to salaries of executives within the BBC. Reporters and correspondents can expect to earn upwards of 20,000-25,000 pounds but compare this to what the BBC’s director-general, Greg Dyke, received in annual pay and bonuses in 2001 — 469,000 pounds, which is considerably higher than the 170,000 pounds a year Tony Blair gets. Mark Byford, director of the World Service, received 294,000 pounds while Rupert Gavin, head of BBC Worldwide, received 339,000 pounds, and Richard Sambrook, head of the news division, was paid 260,000 pounds. In fact, the 17 members on the BBC’s executive board received a total of 1.2 million pounds in bonuses and benefits, and they all had annual salaries of well over 200,000 pounds.

Other than the issue of salaries, the corporation has had to face several cases of employees alleging discrimination based on their ethnic origin. For example, the Guardian reported recently that an industrial tribunal was told that BBC Radio managers degraded the host of a flagship programme for Asians, treating her like an “illiterate native” under the Raj.

Fifty-three-year-old Anand Jazani cried as she told how her husband, a doctor, and two daughters worked for nothing to make sure that the weekly BBC Radio Wales show, A Voice For All, could keep running. She said that despite this a programme controller allegedly dismissed her show as not serving a “useful purpose.” Ms Jazani told the tribunal she was paid 267 a week and this was to be her salary as well as the programme budget. She also said that she had spent up to 10,000 pounds of her own money in the last 15 years, building up a music catalogue for use in the show. She said that over the show’s 10-year run, which continues, she had interviewed celebrities ranging from Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Sir Richard Attenoorough to Tony Blair but apparently for all her efforts she was being paid a rather dismal amount. Ms Jazani has won several Asian media awards, been awarded an MBE and saw her show shortlisted as Best Radio Entertainment along with the wildly popular Goodness Gracious Me. She told the tribunal that she was “belittled and bullied” by a programmes controller and told that the BBC was not in the business of running an Asian channel for a programme that had an audience of just 2,000.

According to the Guardian, this was the third such case this year of a BBC employee alleging racial discrimination. In April Sharan Sandhu, an Asian journalist with the World Service, claimed she had been passed over for promotion because of her race and sex. And in June, Perry Grambas, a former World Service contractor, brought a claim of racial discrimination and unfair dismissal against the corporation. The other development with respect to the annual report is that the listening audience of the BBC World Service fell last year from 153 million to 150 million, 5 million below its audience target. Interestingly, the biggest decline happened in Asia and the Pacific region, mainly as a result of a slump in radio listening in India presumably because of television.

— OMAR R. QURAISHI

(email: omarq@cyber.net.pk)

Too much of a muchness

IT WAS nice to notice the enthusiasm with which functions were organized in connection with the 204th urs of Waris Shah. Various organizations got people together to pay tributes to one of the most respected poets of the Punjabi language.

However, what disturbed me was the repetition of one name on every invitation card that I received. Granted that Shaista Nuzhat deserves to be invited to speak on Waris Shah for her doctorate on him, I feel she deserves a respite. Starting from 1998 when she spoke from the platform of the Lahore Arts Forum, and indicated that she was conducting a research on Waris Shah, she has been a star attraction at every function devoted to the poet.

Last year, she got a second invitation from the LEAF to speak on the same subject. And, she was again in the Model Town Library in June last, soon after getting her doctorate, as an invitee of the same Lahore Arts Forum to speak on the same subject. But that is not all. Earlier last month, the Pakistan Academy of Letters’ local chapter, made her the main speaker at the poet’s urs celebrations. Another function in connection with the urs celebrations was organized jointly by the Punjab Arts Council and the Punjabi Adabi Board and Shaista Nuzhat was roped in by them as well. Somehow, all these enthusiasts do not seem to believe that enough is enough. Moreover, listening to her one does not feel that she has something special to say. It is the same old story — that Waris Shah was born around 1720, that he acquired religious education, that he had the same teacher who had earlier groomed Bulleh Shah in Kasur, that he started writing Heer in 1766, taking nine years to complete it, and so on.

The special achievement that she claims is the discovery of a document during the course of her research, (makhtoota, as she calls it) said to be written by Qasim Shah, the younger brother of the poet. According to it, Waris Shah had wandered not only all over the sub-continent but had even visited China. It is yet to be established whether the document is authentic.

Quite some time back, it was during a talk on Waris Shah that Prof Gilani Kamran shocked the audience by saying that Heer never existed. He added that the tomb which stands today in Jhang is that of Mai Heera, a Greek goddess. To prove his point, he said that the name Heer was not given to any girl in the region.

However, when I checked this with a former deputy commissioner of Jhang, he confirmed that the story of Heer was true. He said the reason parents did not name their daughters after her was because they thought she had brought a bad name to her clan. It was the only new thing I heard in these, Waris Shah lectures.

Strangely, no one even talks about Waris Shah’s work. After all, he would not be equated with Saadi, Rumi, Shakespeare and other greats of literature only on the basis of a single love story.

I have heard of his Mairajnama, Nasihatnama, dohras, mahiyas, si-harfis and the Punjabi translation of Qasida Barda Sharif but all these are mentioned in passing. And then, no one has dwelt enough on the Heer story itself. It has a history of its own for it has been written several times before and after Waris Shah.

In this connection, I have heard the names of Damodar Das Arora, Baqi Kolabi, Shahjahan Muqbil, Chiragh Awan and others, but just the names. I would like to be told more about them. Then I know that the same story was written in languages other than Punjabi, not only in verse but also in prose. I understand that one in Urdu was translated into French in 1857. This story was also adopted as a stage play by Hafiz Abdullah of the Light of India Theatrical Company of Agra and by Raunaq Banarsi in 1880.

There are several versions of this romance in Sindhi, Hindi, Persian and even in English. The late Dr Muhammad Baqir has gone to prove that the romance of Heer and Ranjha took place during the reign of Emperor Akbar. Based on this story, the masnawi of Baqi Kolabi in Persian is preserved in the National Museum at Karachi. It was evidently written before 1579, the year of the poet’s death. This also goes to prove that the story of Heer was known all over by that time. Another version of the same story was versified by Meer Qamaruddin Minnat Dehlvi which was translated into English by Sardar Abdul Qadir Effendi.

All said and done it is to the everlasting credit of Waris Shah that his version of Heer is not limited to the story as he has referred to all that was going on in the Punjab at the time when he wrote it.

I HAVE never liked prose-poetry. The very combination of these two words brings to my mind some kind of an extra-marital relationship. But Javed Siddiq Bhatti, a poet years and years younger to me, has put a spanner in my works. I have the second collection of his verse before me, Yaas, and the prose-poems in it have somehow enticed me. It is the feelings and thoughts behind those disjointed lines which compel appreciation. His poem, Mazloom Ghairat, stirs the soul.

Javed Siddiq Bhatti has all the promise of maturing into a poet of merit. Basically fond of the ghazal, his first collection, Pani Par Tasveer, appeared in 1996. Yaas is his second collection.

Bhatti is no more the poet of soft and delicate expressions as he appeared in Pani Par Tasveer. In Yaas, he appears a totally changed person; there is aggression in his poems, he frets, he fumes, he breaks down, he sheds tears. Yet, I would still advise him to concentrate on the ghazal.

— Ashfaque Naqvi