Moborate

"Laal’s new and most revolutionary video to date. Please paste to your profile to spread awareness against religious extremism." Thus spake the Twitter-feed of Laal the band’s lead singer, guitarist-songwriter-Marxist-academic-revolutionary Dr. Taimur Rahman , announcing the upload of the band’s latest track onto YouTube. The song, which features an anti-American/CIA/ISI visual collage, plus Comrade Taimur's delightfully uninhibited-by-hipness moves, and a chorus of " Dehshatgardi Murdabad " (Death to Terrorism), hasn’t received as much hype as some of their earlier offerings. One theory is that this is not because of its subject matter, or the moves (you know someone is committed to their cause when they even dance earnestly), but because it simply isn’t good music. (Though some people feel that a song that incorporates spitting out the words " Pitthoo ", " Chamchay " and " Tattu " deserves the same special cult status reserved f...

We have been frequent critics of Imran Khan the politician in the past and with very good reason. I still hold that his prescriptions for Pakistan's various ills are entirely simplistic and that his flirtations with the mullah lobby are dangerous indicators of his muddle-headed analysis of this country's political economy. And if anything gets my back up more, it's his and his supporters' dour self-righteousness on top of it all. But even I have to admit that for the first time ever Immy bhai exhibited a sense a wit when he dubbed Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif , presiding over a grossly personalized maladministration in the Punjab , the "Dengue Biradraan" (the Dengue Brothers). It actually made me laugh. Perhaps a rising popularity graph in the province can do wonders for your self-confidence. It's certainly loosened Immy bhai's stiff neck it seems. Imran Khan addressing a big rally in Gujranwala in September A showdown of egos now looms as the P...

Much has already been written and will be written about Begum Nusrat Bhutto , who passed away yesterday. I don't wish to regurgitate those words (you can read more about her life and times here , here and here ). But I do want to write a couple of lines for those who did not live through the times that really defined her (and most Pakistanis now, it should be recalled, were born after 1993) and who wonder what the massive outpouring of emotion at the death of an 82-year-old woman who had not been seen in public for more than a decade is all about. Nusrat Bhutto with Chinese premier Zhou En Lai and Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1964 (Photo: Dawn) To understand the connection that millions of people - and not just the supporters of the Pakistan Peoples Party - feel with Nusrat Bhutto, one must understand how her grace under pressure and in the face of overwhelming tragedy - here was a wife and mother who lived to see most of her immediate family wiped out - inspired count...

I had the chance, or misfortune, to stumble upon yesterday's Khari Baat Lucman Ke Saath on its repeat today and I am still reeling at the heights of lunacy achieved in that programme. And no, I am not referring to the fact that, as an intro to the show, Mubasher Lucman kept pretending to present declassified and Wikileaked US government documents, which are freely available on the web and which have been written and talked about for the past one year, as documents that he had somehow mysteriously and surreptitiously got his hands on ("I have got Anne Patterson's entire email," he once proclaimed). I'm not even referring to how he claimed that one of his guests, Asfandyar Kasuri (who he claimed needed no introduction but who at least I have no idea about aside from the fact that he apparently likes to be known as 'Fundy' on Facebook) had a show shut down on Aaj TV because he had, horror of horrors, interviewed Noam Chomsky . (Yes, I'm sure the fac...

Credit for digging up this Video of the Day, and even inspiring the title should go to @shahidsaeed on Twitter... This is from the anti- Zulfiqar Mirza protests outside the Karachi Press Club on October 10, which followed the return to Pakistan of the former Sindh Home Minister and his attempts to stoke controversy yet again by bilious rants against his bete noire, the MQM and its leader Altaf Hussain . The MQM castigated the media for giving too much importance to the "nobody" Mirza and pretended it had nothing to do with the "spontaneous" protests while at the same time, through its testy reactions, it probably gave Mirza exactly the importance he craved. In any case, do not miss this hilarious clip where the chant leader begins with slogans of ' Altaf Kutta ', which he belts out twice before realizing what protest he's at, upon which he slaps his head and does a 'tauba '. Unfortunately, it still doesn't prevent him from receiving a repro...

You know how, sometimes, you want to write a post on something big and important but then along comes something trivial but so funny that it's hard to pass up? Well, that's what I feel right now. See the following ad featured on the back page of The News today, featuring a line up of Geo TV 's drama serials for the week: Geo TV ad in The News today Read the descriptions of the storylines. In the interest of easy reading, I am reproducing them verbatim below (my favourite has to be #4): 1. Is woman made to sacrifice herself on man's desire? 2. Is a woman so useless that she can be kept and left on one's own wish? 3. Does a widow have the right to remarry? 4. Helpless woman with limited options. 5. Is it really hard to believe a woman? 6. Is a woman born only to be used? 7. Is woman so weak that any man can shake her existence? What a rollicking week of entertainment to look forward to. Or could one say that the success of the relentlessly misery-focused  Bol has g...

“Ever wondered what you could do in light of ongoing terrorism, the Haqqani network, the Taliban, the al Qaeda? Tried shooting off a punch line, or throwing a joke at them?” So began this piece in the Express Tribune today praising This Is Standup Comedy , a four-part web series in which local comics Saad Haroon and Danish Ali ostensibly “try and explore the effect terrorism has had on Pakistani society”. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that as the series loaded I was already thinking but haven’t we got any psychologists for that? Half the point of good comedy is that it isn’t earnest, well-meaning or motivated by the desire to please people or explain the world. It is about subversion. A good comic will not say the right things. He or she will say the wrong things. And if, in the process of saying the wrong thing, they punch a hole in my own Line Of Bullshit Control, well then ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. Or rather, a loser. Because that’s what genuine...

I had not actually planned to write this post but am doing so on the insistence of some of our friends on Twitter who think, quite rightly, that that medium is a rather ephemeral one and the information supplied on it should be preserved in a relatively more easily accessible format such as this one. This post is a follow-up to Pakistan Media Watch 's scrutiny of an apparent campaign against well-known journalist and television anchor Najam Sethi , which raises some very valid questions about who is behind the vilification and to what end. They are obviously mainly rhetorical questions since we can all tell what the possible motivations are when one looks at some of the illustrious names involved and the means employed. However, the PMW post also includes links to two television appearances by current Dunya TV talk show host Mubasher Lucman , wherein he attacks Sethi by name almost without provocation, and this is what prompted sharing this story. Here is the first of them, fr...