Moborate

I had hoped to put up this image which one of our Twitter friends (don't remember which one) had pointed us to, after a Pakistan win in yesterday's semi-final. But I think it's more appropriate than ever now. ( Incidentally, I do not know who made it but if the designer is reading this and would like credit, let us know and we will credit you. ) Afridi: The Renaissance Man (Design: Komail Naqvi) So, yes, India played far better than us on the day and deserved to win the match. But as, thankfully, most people in Pakistan have recalled, nobody, including myself, gave the Pakistan team much chance of even getting this far before the World Cup began. And for this, Shahid Afridi , the captain, and the team deserves our respect. Generally, despite the one major blip against New Zealand (for which we'll forever be grateful to Kamran Akmal ), Pakistan played far beyond expectations and seemed, after a long, long, time, to be a united team. Of course, it hurts to lose, especiall...

It's usually at times like these that I heave a sigh of relief that one does not have easy access to Indian news television channels in Pakistan. Because, really, I think adding them to the mix of frequent absurdity that Pakistan's news channels are capable of would be just too much to bear. Have a gander at the following two clips. The first is from India TV   which claims it has "earned a repute [sic] of credible reporting, courage, espousal of public interest and its [sic] unmatched delivery which is of a [sic] great value to all stakeholders." I truly do not know where to begin on this one. I suppose if one put intellectual absurdity mixed with an utter lack of knowledge and cricketing ignorance into a blender, added a cup of whacked out sensationalism with generous doses of bhang , you could, ostensibly arrive at something tasting like this 'report.' The second clip is from a channel called CNEB , which, believe it or not, is short for Complete News and ...

I would have written this in February but I’ve been stuck in traffic outside a lawn exhibition since. If you live in the open in Karachi, and not under a rock, you cannot have missed the wave of lawn related advertising that has been crashing upon our shores for the last few weeks, leaving sensory carnage in its wake. 2011 has seen a record number of brands flood the market. Some 30-odd designers have lent their names to collections, and if you count the textile mills without big name designers attached and the imitation lawn print makers the number reportedly edges well over fifty. They call me Jofa, say it like Sofa, you look tired hon, lean on my Ottoman. Women are unislamic. Look instead at my jeweled balls floating heavenwards. Because April 1st was already taken, fool! I love the way those bubbles of lightness float across pastel space almost as randomly as the way I park. I must buy this aqua ensemble because it looks ridiculously expensive and so did my husband. Nishat Textile...

So yeah, I think we're all pretty psyched now for the Mother Of All Battles to take place in Mohali next Wednesday (March 30). An India - Pakistan World Cup semi-final is really the true final as far as both cricketing rivals are concerned (for one it will be a final, of course, even technically speaking). There can be nothing bigger at this World Cup. Nothing . And even as India completed its thrashing of Australia in the quarter-final today, the excitement at what is to come was already easily palpable. People on Twitter and Facebook were already sharing inspirational songs, hopes and cricketing assessments, expressing fears and neuroses, trash-talking to their digital brethren across the border and hoping to reverse-jinx the other side by talking up its strengths. And there's still five days of an agonizing wait ahead. But more on that, perhaps, later. What I wanted to share with all of you today was this television advertisement which began airing (I think) on March 23rd....

I have to admit I'm not particularly fond of PPP Senator Faisal Raza Abidi 's appearances on television. But that's just because, my ears having been bled from the apparent dominant paradigm of anchors and participants on Pakistani television talk shows, I have a general aversion to over-emotional and LOUD grandstanding. And nobody gets more emotional and louder than Senator Abidi. However, this typically cataclysmic rant from him on Aaj TV 's Aaj Ki Khabar programme on March 17th (which one missed partly because the England - West Indies thriller was on the same night and partly because one doesn't normally bother with Aaj in any case) deserves to be heard. To be fair, he only let loose after the other participants (including the host Absar Alam , Khalifa-ul-Waqt Ansar Abbasi , Justice (retd) Tariq Mahmood , PMLN's Pervez Rashid and Jamaat-e-Islami's cretinous  Fareed Paracha ) all pointed fingers at the federal government for either letting 'Raymond...

Just in case you thought the Pakistani electronic media was unique in its bittter, on-screen, infighting , you might want to check out yesterday's flap between Fox News and CNN over reporting from Libya . Here's what Fox News said about an officially-sponsored trip to view the damage to one of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi 's compounds, caused by the US/UK Tomahawk missile attacks. Having not actually got the footage that other news outlets managed to get, they accused the other journalists of allowing themselves to be used as "human shields" by the Libyan regime to prevent more attacks. Here's how CNN correspondent Nic Robertson responded to those claims on Wolf Blitzer 's programme: Personally, I find Robertson's indignation that Western journalists could sometimes lie, have personal agendas, cover up for their professional failures and promote propagandistic drivel a bit... how shall I put it delicately?... naive. And to top it all off, we'...

OMG. I don't think anyone could have done a better parody even if they had tried. I laughed so hard I almost cried. A Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) supporter / activist presents his case to an Aaj TV cameraman. See this clip to understand why, as the title of the clip says, Imran Khan is doomed. (Thanks to Syed Ali Raza Abidi for the link.) For those who do not understand the revolutionary Urdu slogans, here is a word-for-word translation of what Islamabad's Che Guevara says: "See what is happening with our sisters and mothers in this demonstration. We are all from good families. We have come out on to the streets to raise slogans for Imran Khan. We are being beaten by our own police. They're pushing us. We have come for a revolution, for your country. Every person here has come out of his house for this. Who would do such demonstrations in such heat [otherwise]? The police is shoving us, for what? For a foreigner? For Raymond Davis? He caused such bloodshed in Lah...

By the way, just in case you would like to see copies of the court documents from the ' Raymond Davis ' case, attesting to the relatives of the deceased accepting diyat (blood money) and allowing the court to acquit the accused, here are some of them. I can't put all of them up (there are too many) but here's a representative sample of relatives' documents of one of the two men killed by 'Davis', Faizan Haider . Here's the main prayer to the court setting out that the persons named have no objection to 'Raymond Davis' being acquitted by the court since they had accepted compensation and reached agreement to settle the matter. Here's the individual affidavit of the mother of Faizan Haider, attesting that she has reached an agreement with her son's killer of her "free will, without any fear or pressure, without any enticement, and in her full senses." She further testifies that she has not been subjected to any injustice and has r...

If you thought Pakistani society was polarized, take a look at the open warfare going on under the same media house roof. The issue being discussed was, of course, the sudden release of the man known as Raymond Davis from jail after the payment of diyat or 'blood money' to the relatives of the deceased. What better time than that, thought Geo's analysts with wildly divergent points of view, to attack each other in the most personalized manner possible? First up, Geo's Capital Talk programme, where host Hamid Mir assembled a long list of panelists and commentators he knew (or hoped) would raise a hue and cry about the release, among them the odious Irfan Siddiqui , the slippery Mohammad Mallick , the dissenting lawyer for the victims' families and former foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi . But star attraction was of course the once journalist-now-self-righteous turd known as Ansar Abbasi . Abbasi had made his contempt for the result of the case known earlier...

Just when you think Pakistani political discourse cannot sink any lower, your delusions are undermined with even more sleaze. Our SleazeMaster of the Day is none other than Sindh Home Minister, Dr. Zulfiqar Mirza , who has never been a stranger to spouting crude diatribes in an 'I'll say what I want and I don't care what you think!' fashion. He has understandably been under some pressure recently since his party, the Pakistan People's Party 's (PPP's) main parliamentary ally, the Muttaheda Qaumi Movement (MQM), had sort of made his removal from his current post or a restraining order on his mouth a precondition for continuing support to the government. He seems to have been particularly irked by a story in The News and Jang  on March 14 that he was about to be shown the door as Home Minister within 10-12 days and it was partly the intervention of his wife, Fehmida Mirza , the current Speaker of the National Assembly, that prevented an immediate boot. Nothi...

I had vowed at some point in Pakistan's dismal recent cricketing history not to write on cricket again. Actually I had probably vowed not to watch cricket again as well. But of course I knew even then that I was lying to myself. There is something inherently masochistic in a Pakistan cricket fan that keeps her/him coming back, even at the almost certain risk of heart-break, social ostracization from polite company and medical complications such as untenably high blood pressure. And then along comes the World Cup and Pakistan, despite all their quirks and Kamran Akmal , do scrape through to the quarter-finals. So there you have it. What can you do? Of course, getting through to the knock-out stage is only the first part of the battle and, as every cricket-mad enthusiast in Pakistan will affirm, the bigger question on everyone's mind is who we will end up playing in the quarterfinals. The consensus seems to be that we would not like to meet India in the quarters. Some claim this...

Finally, someone in the National Assembly, who has the guts to say what must be said about the assassination of Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs , Shahbaz Bhatti . The legislator is MNA Asiya Nasir , elected on a reserved women's seat from Balochistan, the only minority female legislator in the National Assembly and speaking the day after the murder. She holds a Masters in English literature from the Government Girls College, Quetta and a certificate in Teachers' Training and is a member of the NGO Aurat Foundation. She has been a member of the House since 2002 when she was elected on a reserved seat for minorities. Remarkably, she is affiliated politically with the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam - Fazlur Rehman ( JUI-F ) and was elected in 2002 (as well as in 2008) on a ticket of the 'religious' parties alliance, the Muttaheda Majlis-e-Amal ( MMA ). A powerful speech that should be heard by all in Pakistan, especially because it raises uncomfortable truths...

Many of us have often had a laugh about Americans' woeful knowledge about the rest of the world. Well, what would you say to this? A BBC Urdu correspondent roamed the streets of Punjab 's largest and most cosmopolitan city, Lahore , to ask random people on the street how much they knew of Balochistan . His report is compiled under the heading "Punjab Balochistan Ko Kitna Jaanta Hai?" (How well does Punjab know Balochistan?). Keep in mind that Lahore is not a rural backwater where media is not easily accessible, that Punjab's population comprises some 60 percent of the Pakistan's population and that in the last three years, the issue of Balochistan has probably been one of the most talked about issues in domestic politics. Think for a moment what it says about our educational system, our media, our democracy, our policy-making,  our national integration and yes, our majoritarian chauvinism. If this does not actually shock you, you're made of sterner stuff...

Unlike MSS, or at least partly unlike MSS, I truly was at a loss for words about the the assassination of Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti . The only words that seemed to express the intensity of the despair I felt about the abyss staring us in the face came from poetry. In fact, before MSS posted her piece, I thought a collection of Urdu couplets was the only way I could mark this tragedy, because what is the point of repeating all that I have said so many times before. I might still do a post with such a collection, but here's a sample, from Faiz : "Amaa'n kaisi ke mauj-e-khoo'n abhi sar se nahin guzri Guzar jaaye tau shaayad baazu-e-qaatil thehr jaaye" [No one is safe, for the wave of blood has yet to wash over our heads Perhaps once we drown the killer's hand will be stayed]  But my reasons for writing today are slightly different. I have to admit that I am not a regular watcher of  DawnNews , a hangover probably of experiences from ...

DISCLAIMER: This piece was written yesterday, and then languished overnight due to a PTCL outage. It contains emotion and other profanity. I am rarely at a loss for words. I certainly wasn’t this morning, when I started out on a smarmy skewering of George Fulton’s ‘I’m leaving Pakistan because she’s being mean to me dammit! ' piece in the Express Tribune yesterday. I was going to run with his personification of the blessed motherland as a flighty female prone to self-destructive megalomania, I was. I was particularly taken with the bit featuring the Bryan Adams song where Pakistan, the impenetrable, fecund, feminine other, sings to him the lyrics To really love a woman/ To understand her - you gotta know her deep inside/ Hear every thought - see every dream/ N' give her wings - if she wants to fly/ Then when you find yourself lyin' helpless in her arms/ You know you really love a woman... Then I ran it by another Pyala who, with what is in hindsight admirable self-restrain...