Sohail Rabbani

Welcome

Come and go as you will, for this is not my home. I have no home in cyberspace. I am a vagabond and claim no place as my own, yet I belong everywhere. Unlike the flea who thought it owned the dog, I own nothing except the privacy of my thoughts. Everything else is on a short-term lease.

This is the Chowk’s equivalent of the glass display windows in Amsterdam’s entertainment district. Here those of us who ’expose’ ourselves for the visitors’ entertainment are placed in a virtual ’glass showcase’. Only, unlike Amsterdam, the curtains are not drawn when you step inside.




About Me
’Born free’ on the left bank of The Ravi, I grew up in La’whore, the second city of The Land of the Pure.

No, I was not an unwanted accident, my mother insists. I was, no doubt, a ’second thought’. The other five siblings were much, much older. Being the baby I was indulged and spoilt rotten. It was worse than being the only child. I perfected the fine art of emotional blackmail, extortion and manipulation even before I’d mastered speech.

But trouble began with school. Suddenly I was not the prince any more. Being treated equal was not my idea of fairness. School authorities and I didn’t get along from the get go, and it was all down hill from there. At Aitchison I got ’brushings’ till junior school and later on it was canings. Then my father who was the most indulgent of me died and the family decided that I was in need of some discipline and structure. Off I went to Cadet College at Hassanabdal where I regularly qualified for extra-drills and caning from the house master first and then from the principal. Could not last the five years of Cadet College. They expelled me after three. Back to La’whore: first in F. C. College then on to King Edward’s Medical College. Tried hard to avoid K.E.M.C., because most of my friends from Hassanabdal went to the Military Academies in Kakul and Risalpur. I couldn’t, because the ’psychologists’ of the Inter Services Selection Board would tag me for rejection. There was no choice but to stink with the rotting cadavers in the dissection hall of the medical college.

In Lahore real trouble started seeking me out. Student politics was a serious affair. Back then it was the ’Reds’ and the ’Greens’. (The leftists and the Islamists, that is.) At the time it was a lot of fun and though I didn’t know then, it was a dangerous game. On a few occasions I was an involuntarily visitor to the Roberts Club (headquarters of the police special branch) and once also had the dubious honor of being the state’s guest at Lahore Fort. Fortunately, unlike most ’visitors’ to the Fort, I did not ’disappear’ but got out in one piece, thanks to a timely and potent ’sifarish’ phone call.

My big mouth got me in lots of trouble; I had to bail out to save my skin. So I quit making trouble, learnt to bite my tongue, behaved myself and marked my time. Then I discovered sex, drugs and Rock and Roll. I traded Lenin’s ideals for those of Lennon.


After an aborted attempt in 1977 -a journey that took me through nine countries, including the Soviet Union- I finally left The Islimy Rip Public off Pakistan in 1981 for good.

From the Land of the Pure I came to John Lennon’s America. Unfortunately, upon my arrival it turned out to be Ronald Reagan’s Country of God, Guts and Glory, where one was supposed to ’just say no’. The hippie utopia of the Seventies was out; the yuppie rat race of the Eighties was in. The American Dream was the Great Urban nightmare. But I had burnt my boats at the beach. There was no turning back.

Ten years and a thousand rebirths later, inspired by the crumbling Iron Curtain and the Velvet Revolution, I made another abortive attempt to escape to freedom. This time I was running from the incrementally creeping fascism in America by sneaking away to Europe and ending up in Prague.

’Love all you need is’ was a prominently spray-painted graffiti on a wall that was dubbed ’Lennon’s Wall’ near Charles Bridge in the Castle District of the Old Town in Prague. But that was not to be. After spending a season of Bohemian rhapsody and surviving a hopelessly failed romance I returned to the US in one piece, but with a bruised heart.

Now, years later many other heartaches have come and gone but the thirst is unquenched and the quest --for that illusive mirage, that sanctuary of the soul, the unattainable-- lingers on.




What I do for Work
There was never an imminent danger of me becoming a workaholic. ’Work’, as they say in the West, ’is the curse of the drinking class.’ It isn’t for just no reason that The Land of the Pure is dry. That avoids the curse of workaholism.

In The Land of the Pure I’d learnt the fine art of idleness and excelled at it. However, after coming to America things had to change drastically. The rent came due every month, and I quickly discovered that sleeping in the public parks did not promote one’s social standing, there was no alternative but to sell my soul to the devil in exchange for a paltry wage that could afford me a warm bed and a roof. (Contrary to Hollywood’s image, the devil does not wear a red cloak. He wears a gray pinstriped suit.)

Being born free has its disadvantages. I couldn’t last long as the devil’s 8 to 5 slave; locked up on the 9th floor of a gigantic glass-and-concrete shoe box where light and temperature remained constant twenty four hours, seven days and twelve months. That sterile and opaque hell suffocated me. Once again, I had to bail out.


My exodus to America was motivated by an urge for freedom. That, I soon learnt, was a pure fiction while one was a member of the drinking class. Moreover, I began to notice clinical signs of early workaholism so I had to quit, cold turkey. I don’t drink much any more either.

Money, they used to tell me, is a universal solvent. They say it can dissolve, or at least, dilute and diffuse most, if not all, difficulties. So I decided to pursue the elusive chimera of trade and finance on my own. Recanting my misguided Marxist ideals I joined the church of the Worshipers of the Golden Calf. I even made a pilgrimage to the Holy Shrines of Wall and La Salle Streets in New York and Chicago; the Mecca and Medina of Capitalism.

Now I am intermittently self-employed and self-unemployed. Like the barracuda that lives in shark infested waters I, too, must rely on my wits. Each day the barracuda sets out not knowing whether it shall get dinner or become dinner.

My economic life is akin to that of a ’ronin’ -- a mercinary samuri who has no master. I have no clients no coworkers and no employees. ’Live by the sword and die by the sword’ is the ronin’s motto. So far I am alive, sword in hand, ready to fight or die.

They say on Wall Street that Bulls and Bears make money while sheep and pigs get slaughtered. I try neither to ’bleet’ nor ’oink’.

Though I love the hedonistic comforts of life, yet freedom of action and expression take precedence over material accumulation. Therefore, I’m in no danger of becoming a multi millionaire any time soon, but my time is entirely my own to spend as I choose.

Of all the available and desired ’assets’ or ’resources’ TIME is the one which is the most precious. It is absolutely finite and the only one which is truly ’non-replinishable’. Every other asset or resource can be duplicated, substituted, reconstituted or otherwise ’replinished’. On this premise I have chosen a lifestyle which is long on ’discretionary time’ even if it may be short on temporal wealth and power.

In fact, I have no more time than any one else because there are, after all, only the same twenty four hours in each day that we all get to spend, one way or the other. However, I have unencumbered my life from the yolk of the time clock. It is a conscious choice that comes at a material cost. I have given up much in terms of ’career’ but by my calculus this is success.





What I do for Fun
Its a great relief for men to be ’over the hill’. As the waist expands and the arteries shrink the focus of our interest shifts from that which is underneath the skirt to what is inside the wallet. It is, in fact, a liberating experience; truly, life begins at forty. No longer driven by the exigency of testosterone surges, we finally have the tranquility and composure to enjoy all dimensions of life.

Practically everything new interests and fascinates me now that wine, women and song are no longer an obsessions.

I am a student emeritus in the Open University of Life and I relish this ’work’ which is also my ’play’ and my ’love’.

Though still a novelty seeker, a lone ranger, and a vagabond at heart, I am now also a fairly responsible husband and father. My loved ones, family & friends, and my ideals -- in this order of priority -- command all my loyalty. I owe no allegiances whatsoever to any political, geographic, social or economic entity anywhere.



Random Thoughts
Fortune favors the brave. Those who take destiny in their own hands and plunge into the unknown, they either perish or sail past the horizon. It is only they who go on to uncharted high seas of life. While those who fear the unknown, are shackled away in the familiar and secure dungeons of monotonous tyranny.


Life is so short, fragile and, ultimately, meaningless that one wonders what all this is worth? In the greater scheme of things we are mere bubbles on the surf, inconsequential and transient. But as long as we are here, this is our only reality. What we do with this life, in the end, may not even amount to a whiff of smoke in the face of wind. A hundred years from now there will be no trace of what we do today, and in four billion years the earth shall be a cinder and the sun a red giant. Yet none of that should concern us; ours is only here and now.

A life lived in the past or for tomorrow is a thankless ritual, as meaningless as scooping water with a sieve. Yesterday is only a dream buried under the dust of time. Tomorrow is an illusion, a mere fantasy, a phantom forever elusive.

We are confined in solitary cubicals of self. The door is locked and there are no windows. Our only view of the outside is through the narrow slit of the keyhole. The nature of our existence and the inherent limitations of language condem us to the role of Peeping Toms through this keyhole.

We can tap in Morse Code on the cell walls and communicate with inmates of the adjacent cells, but we never see them for who they are. We can only imagine their faces in the eyes of our mind. Our only link with them is through this tenuous acoustic clatter which is formed by the constant tapping on the walls. The least we owe ourselves is to keep the stuffing out of the keyhole and our knuckles on the wall.

In the end we all turn into dust. Our dreams, desires, sorrows and triumphs are all too transient, just flickers of a candle in eternal darkness. One must reach out and cease the moment, grab this shifting mirage with both hands, and share these fleeting joys with loved ones. Nothing else really matters.

Ultimately, there are no rights or wrongs, and even if there are any, we cannot know them. We are only left with axiomatic faith in the righteousness of our own convictions. Life may not have a purpose or meaning but we do have real aspirations and yearnings


...SR

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