THERE have been two recent additions to our household: my son Shakir has bought a pair of adorable Boxer puppies that he has named Manek and Bibi.

As little Manek, an import from Russia, has not acclimatized well to local conditions, Shakir has been anxiously hand-feeding him and giving him all kinds of medicines. Mercifully, he has improved considerably over the last week and is now almost as frisky as the locally-bred Bibi, although his ribs still show and his coat is not as glossy as his little friend's.

Although we have always had dogs in the house, they have generally been older and more lethargic than these two tiny bundles of energy, and the reactions of our servants to them have been decidedly mixed. While young Dilshad, a migrant from the North, loves playing with them, the urban Saima will not go anywhere near them claiming that she is frightened. Baboo the cook dislikes all dogs, and while he fed Sally, our late lamented Irish Setter, brooked no closeness with her.

For some inexplicable reason, dogs are deemed 'unclean' in our culture, and children are taught to fear them at a very early age. Indeed, when General Pervez Musharraf first seized power, one of his earliest PR photos showed him holding his two miniature Samoyds. Criticism of such a public show of liberalism from the loony right was swift and strident and the poor dogs have not been seen with their master in the media again. By contrast, the Blair cat and the Clinton dog have often been in the public eye. If memory serves, Barbara Bush, the present White House incumbent's mother, even wrote a book about her dog when she was the First Lady, thus showing that she had more time on her hands than many of her successors.

But while we loathe dogs and westerners love them, Koreans consider them to be delicacies. Similarly, different cultures view the same objects very differently. In China, calling somebody a turtle is to mortally insult him. and while an owl is a symbol of wisdom in western culture, a 'son-of-an-owl' (ulloo-ka-path) is a strong term of abuse here. The study of the evolution of insults and abuse in different societies, much neglected thus far, would make a fascinating branch of social anthropology.

Another field of study waiting to be explored by sociologists is the attitude towards alcohol in most Muslim societies. While the forbidden fluid is consumed in larger quantities, the official attitude is one of disapproval while religious opinion consigns the practice to outer darkness and drinkers are considered beyond salvation. Indeed, in some Muslim countries, penalty for this 'crime' generally involves horrific punishments like public flogging. By contrast, the payment of 'blood money' to the family of the victim can get a murderer off the hook.

Interestingly, despite public censure and draconian punishments, alcohol remains a fixation with our poets. Giants like Omar Khayyam and Mirza Ghalib wrote thousands of couplets extolling its virtues. When Muslims ruled Spain, they absorbed the local wine culture and further refined it: one ruler of Grenada spent his evenings reciting poetry with his companions while servants floated goblets full of wine on little boats down a stream that meandered by the merry group.

Over the years, my column in the Internet edition of this newspaper has attracted a considerable volume of fan mail as well as flak. But perhaps no article I have written caused so much indignation among readers as did a recent piece about Southall in which I casually mentioned in passing that members of our group had carried a couple of cans of beer into a Pakistani restaurant.

I was soundly berated by readers who accused me of everything from turning away from our culture to (horror of horrors!) liberalism. Wading through this critical barrage, I was relieved to get an e-mail from an Indian reader in the States who said he was happy to read the article as he was sick of the hypocrisy of his Pakistani friends who would regularly drink with him but would beg him not to tell anybody.

In fact, this hypocrisy is a hallmark of our culture and our society: it is fine to commit any sin, break any law as long as nobody finds out. The only sin is to get caught. Thus, it is perfectly all right to get totally and disgracefully drunk at a diplomatic party, and then piously announce that you don't serve liquor at home because your wife disapproves or you don't want your children to know you drink. Similarly, many of our countrymen behave in the most unacceptable manner when they are abroad, desperately trying to pick up women and making fools of themselves, while insisting that their own daughters and sisters behave in a completely chaste manner.

Yet another fascinating area of study I would recommend to scholars is the weird attitude our men have towards women. An amazing amount of time and energy has been spent in Muslim societies on determining how much skin women can show and how much facial and bodily hair men must retain. The Taliban of Afghanistan have taken this exercise to unprecedented extremes, but I find it interesting that these two traits are virtually universal in Muslim countries from Indonesia to Turkey. By contrast, other societies have a much more easygoing attitude towards the human body, leaving its owner to decide how he or she wishes to adorn or bare it, up to a point.

Ultimately, a society is defined by its prejudices and biases, as well as the freedom of choice of appearance and lifestyle it allows its members. A mature society, firmly rooted in its culture and proud of its history, is more tolerant of differences and accepting of diversity than societies that feel they have to prove something and lack the inner confidence that comes with having found a place in the world. In acquiring this self-confidence, the arts, literature, cuisine, the economy and sports all play a part.

We in Pakistan often take recourse to bluster and bravado as we are unsure of our cultural roots: having physically separated ourselves from the subcontinent, we feel the constant need to justify our existence. Thus, we have become more Muslim than any other Muslim country with the merciful exception of Afghanistan. At the official level, we pretend we are a Middle Eastern nation when in reality we are very much part of South Asia. This dichotomy has caused a number of contradictions and distortions that we badly need to address and resolve because until we do we will declare more and more pleasures taboo, and become an even more culturally sterile and joyless society.