Confessions

As a Pakistani, I am ashamed to admit that I do not understand Pakistan. I do not understand the ever present cut-throat loyalty and the lurking insanity under the fragile scab of rationality; for something so easily wounded and scratched away should be reduced to the rank of a scab. For you see, I am a part of a pop-idol watching, KFC eating and probably foreign educated, well fed, apathetic, sarcastic to the brim, literature indulgent, technology savvy minority.

And I am not Pakistan. Pakistan is precisely what resides remotely on the periphery of my consciousness; the Pakistan that can be dismissed. The Pakistan which is inarticulate, inaccessible to the world, voiceless except for the unintelligible screams of emotions; sometimes jubilation, often fury and constantly suffering.

You and I probably may be too ill-equipped to understand that Pakistan but our leaders understand it well; well enough to manipulate it, to gauge its energy and focus it ever which way. My deepest respects to our leaders then. Pardon me the self indulgence in my remorse of my ineptitude, but it hasn’t left me blind sighted. My rational capacity is vivid enough to offer a few words of praise.

So, I praise that leader of great vision who resides comfortably in Britain, mobilizes a city by a phone call, who had the clear sightedness to point out, in the wake of BB’s assassination, that three leaders of Sind have died in Rawalpindi. It is not a mere fact; it is a shot in the veins of thousand out in the streets to burn. Burn everything… anything… nothing!

My utmost praise to that statesman of vast industrial enterprise in Punjab who in his pain offered solidarity to the supporters of PPP by boycotting the elections and calling for nationwide strike on all levels (he being the leader of all) it must be pointed out; from truck drivers to shop owners to corporate investors. Marvellous move! A shrewd businessman ought to know the effect of such a course of action. Hence the stock exchange remains closed and banks are burnt. Solidarity achieved…. suffering voiced.

My compliments too, to the president who sits in his home (cosily? anxiously?), probably basking under the prayers of his mother which saved him from two assassination attempts. A president rejected, forever tenacious of his position. Perhaps I should show some compassion towards him; he too doesn’t understand his people. He too belongs not to the authentic Pakistan.

Waiting for a connecting flight in Karachi international airport this summer I was asked to get my behind through to the security or to get out, forcing me to question the cause of this unpleasantness, this dreariness. Is it the hunger of a million desolate souls or the guilt of an apathetic people that lets Lal masjid go unquestioned? Is it the mounting stress of an identity, forever crying for a definition, clamouring for relevance from east, west and farther west?

I have no answers. The Pakistan that I am has immense compassion for the emptiness in the eyes of the other Pakistan. But it is, ashamedly, an impotent compassion; of temporary tears and no action.

I am guilty, not of a tangible crime but at the hands of this relativity without a dynamic; a dynamic of distribution and exchange.

But I digress. I am guilty because I have rolling images of my country burning on my telly and I must return to reading about the ruin of Czechoslovakia.