Cheer Up England

Saeed Ajmal trying to bring some comic relief to
the proceedings after witnessing the England team's
despondent expressions in the nets

Jiyalas in Training

The picture above was spirited away from pee-pee central at great personal (tho' little professional) risk by our intrepid political espionage crackerjack Sheeda Kharpainch. It shows the latest batch of inductees at the top secret jiyala training camp located in its state of the art facility (the overflowing garbage dump behind Bilawal House). They are of course undergoing intensive training in preparation for next year's lieutenant-colonel elections.

On the left is the party's Chief Suit Wearer, Syed Y.R.G., in charge of trying-to-look-snooty-but-failing-miserably training. To the extreme right is Kantutta-in-Chief Rehman Malik, who drills these crack troops in the art of ball crushing, bat wielding and information technology.

In between are the stalwart Jiyalas, warts and all, who, once properly trained, will attempt once again to liberate our benighted country from the yoke of whatever it is that has a chokehold on us, as well as shortlisting the 387 awards and accolades that Shaheeda Benazir Buttho so justly deserves.

I
cannot
wait


.

The lady doth protest too little, methinks

While one can understand the desire amongst professional women to distance themselves genealogically from the sheer sleaziness of politics and those paragons of moral decrepitude who practice its dark arts, no less (or more) a luminary than Marhoom Ronald W. Reagan The First once linked the two... more to the detriment of practitioners of the oldest profession, no doubt, than that of the second oldest.

__________
[Note: the t-shirt reads “The prostitutes insist that the politicians are not their children”]

Free Speech 0, Free bloggers 5

In an update to yesterday's post, the president of the UAE has issued a royal pardon to the jailed bloggers. The Abu-Dhabi-Five, who have been incarcerated since April, were recenlty convicted for, among other things, insulting the president, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Surely a glorious day for freedom of royal speech. Horay.

Flee speech

News item in todays's edition of the UAE's 7 Days daily newspaper:

UAE bloggers jailed

Five men have been sent to prison by the UAE Supreme Court in Abu Dhabi for posting remarks online about political reform that were deemed to pose a security threat and insulted the country’s leaders.

Judge Ahmad Abdul Hamid, who presided over the court yesterday, sentenced one of the defendants, Ahmed Al Mansour Ali Abdullah Al Shehi, to three years in prison while the other four were jailed for two years each.

[An official statement] said the men had been convicted of charges of insulting the President and Crown Prince of the UAE, breaking laws and refraining from the Federal National Council elections and inciting demonstrations and perpetrating acts that pose threat to state security. The verdict was greeted with approval by pro-government supporters...

Thabit Al Qassieh, who is Emirati, said: “I think it has been a fair judgment. Two or three years in jail is enough penalty for them.” However, Ahmed Jumah, also Emirati, said: “What they did was not proper, insulting our rulers. They deserved a tougher penalty than that. But we have to respect the court’s decision.”

The court also ordered the website where the men made the comments - uaehewar.net - be shut permanently.

The court’s decision cannot be appealed against.

_______________

I am rendered speechless... legally, quite apart from anything else.

Usman "Guitar" Riaz - aka Johnny B. Guddu

Book Fire-sale Update

So, as you can see (click here), most of the books off my original giving away list have gone. I'll be putting up a new list shortly. Stay tuned...

Books I'm giving away (and hopefully not having to burn)

Please let me know if you want any of them.
email me at jaahil.jutt@gmail.com or post a comment on the blog.
(never, i s'pose, has the blog subtitle been so apposite!)

The following books are up for grabs: 

Fiction

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Usual Suspects (Screenplay) - Chris McQuarrie taken
Sherlock Holmes Short Stories - AC Doyle

dil bolay boom boom

dear cricket fans (faux and genuine alike),

i have been blessed to witness one of the finest one-day innings ever – arguably the greatest match-winning o.d.i. knock by a pakistani batsman: abdul razzaq has just won for pakistan, single-handedly, the second one-day match against south africa.

razzaq is, as i (and many, more articulate men and the occasional woman) have said on numerous occasions, the cleanest striker of a cricket ball. more so than the formidable kay-pee or the high-carbon-steel-wristed m.s. dhoni. more so even than the fearsome chris gayle. but even beyond that, what was impressed upon me most during tonight’s innings was the sheer un-complicated-ness of razzaq’s batting. he just gets on with the job. no fancy footwork. no shuffling. no bobbing or swaying or vacillating between front foot and back.

i have always liked the way razzaq plays his cricket. he is not prone to histrionics and must be one of the calmest cricketer to have ever played for pakistan. i remember how, early in his career, he would show almost no emotion at all. his display of it upon taking a wicket, for example, would be limited to the merest hint of a smile playing around the edge of his mouth for perhaps a second or two; though of late i notice he reacts to a wicket with something approaching conventional emotion. while batting, however, he retains his endearing reticence. which makes him stand out in a nation firmly entrenched in the frenzied end of the emotional scale.


as razzaq hit the winning boundary, i wondered how many pakistani friends and relatives and associates would have been watching the match. my guess is, precious few. i like to think of myself as a true fan of pakistani cricket – sitting through matches won and (of late, so much more often than not) matches lost. these days i hear people say, “aray, kya faida dekhne ka? match to harna hi hai.” so be it, is my response. if i am to call myself a true fan, i have to stick by my team through thick and thin (and these days it’s stretched thinner than japanese mending tissue), even if it means suffering the agony of ignominious defeat.

of course, that doesn’t mean that my team’s dismal performances don’t wind me up. tonight, for instance, i was constantly cursing f.alam’s limp-wristed batting, the huge number of inside edges which narrowly missed the stumps (surely a world record for an odi team-innings – i counted seven. there may have been more, as i missed some of the pak innings while having dinner). i even cursed razzaq’s tentative and blood pressure-raising nudges at balls just outside the off stump (all of which he thankfully failed to connect with).

but in the end, ah... what a heart-warming display of determined, purposeful batting.

to his credit, our national “lala” aka sahibzada mohammed shahid khan afridi generously stated, during the post-match prez, that with batting like this, “razzaq is the real boom boom.”

this performance, and the result does not mean, of course, that the tide has turned. we shall continue, in the foreseeable future, to lose way more matches than we win. professional and/or voluble commentators and journos and pundit-types (self-styled and otherwise) have been suffering painful writer’s cramp jotting down their interpretations of the reasons behind this. cramp away, cramp away (as might be said by hugh-laurie-as-b-w-wooster). i’m just basking in the glow of a typically non-team-performance-win by the pakistani national cricket team.

let’s face it... we are not, as a nation, prone to working collectively towards any goal.

kinkminos out (for the count… it’s past half-past midnight)


.

First of all, thanks to Allah

So Pakistan finally defeated Australia in a test match. “Hallelujah,” if you’re an ethnophobic Anglophiliac like myself. “Shukr alhamdolillah,” if your thot processes have more of an Urdu-medium bent.

The attendant frailties exposed during the match are immaterial to the majority of cricket-mad Pakistanis. The lack of commitment and self-belief; the absence of any sort of plan or an attacking approach; the insha’allah masha’allah subhanallah state of mind… kiss the ground as we bow to the heavens in gratitude to the only force we accept as relevant in any clash, confrontation, encounter or conflict.

So what? We’re Packies. We play (and follow) cricket the way we live our lives; with an unshakeable belief in the almighty and his ability (if inexplicable lack of willingness) to influence events in our favour. And an equally unshakeable lack of belief in our own ability to control or transform them in our favour.

Voices more (and less) articulate than myself will expound on what this hard-won victory means to our grated nation and the cause of Pakistani cricket. How important it is for

i txt, thrfr i m

sperry univacs populate my dreams. stacks of unsorted magnetic tape reels are piled high in a corner. little orange lights flash intermittently. digital beeps punctuate the steady drone of mechanically whirring tapes. zakir on tippy-toes tries in vain not to look like the midget he is on the inside. and i’m thinking…

…technology was so much more exciting when i was growing up. mainly cos it was not yet ubiquitous. it was esoteric. it remained the realm of pointy-headed science geeks; many-degree holding engineers in starched white lab coats, brandishing clipboards with intent. nowadays technology is so…humdrum, so routine. every eight-year old north of sub-saharan africa knows that you save data onto a hard disk, has heard of ipods and ipads, and is gathering enough information to be able to intelligently discuss, in the not too distant future, the status of bandwidth or the relative benefits of accelerometers and infrared detectors. would mister turing revise turing test criteria if he were alive today?

our kids are jaded before they’ve heard of puberty. we inundate them with psp’s, and wii-wii’s, and mobile phones with 2” x 4” colour screens and more computing power than the sum total of all the univacs i have ever dreamed of (23,476 at last count). they are growing up peering out into the world through a two-by-four-inch window of missed opportunity.

one of my recurring nightmares is inhabited by dull-eyed, three foot tall, humanoid troglodytes with names like tintendo and ifoong’ru. they are all hard-wired into their personal digital devices, and every now and then will intone monotonously the lyrics to miley cyrus songs. for an encore they will demonstrate the sound barrier breaking speed at which they can text the lyrics to stars and stripes forever.

today’s kids hardly ever speak to each other, except through enabling (disabling?) videotech like msn and skype. when physically face to face with another human bean they resort to sending shorthand txt msgs wch lk lk gbrsh 2 d rst f us.

emotion is no longer expressed, but communicated through abbreviations like :-) and lol and crbt. in such an emotionless world the increasing use of botox no longer seems so scary; with nothing to express, facial expressions are gradually becoming redundant (lol), as are those of us over the age of 27.

given my age, being described as a dinosaur by the youngest generation would be a goddam compliment!

Blood’s a-boiling

took my fan with me in the car yesterday; the a/c in the new, improved civic just doesn’t cut the wasabi. i guess you could say i got those mean ol’ swindon blues, even though cyanic references usually apply to the lower end of the temperature spectrum – at least on the vintage, late 20th century mixer tap in my bathroom. this fan, i should point out (in case you hadn’t already put 237 and 273 together), is of the folding rather than electrically rotating variety.

i have to say, though, that neither this despondency, nor the rivulets of perspiration whence said despondency derives, has any effect on the messianic zeal with which my right foot attacks the go.fast.pedal – esp in second gear and third. of course, this means that i need to have both hands on the helm; negating thus, for most of my journey, the potentially cooling effects of lady windermere’s favourite implement.

fifty degree heat, dodgy a/c’s and hooligan right foots do not mix well.

i have taken – as a consequence of this half-century of celsius scales – to wearing suits of the finest (well, sort of) linen instead of the usual cheap-to-middling woolen jobs. they are light in weight, cooler of course, and wrinkle so very very evocatively. they put me in mind of certain monochrome hollywood classics of the forties and fifties, the ones set in exotic tropical locales like tangiers, alexandria, and lubbock, texas – ceiling fans raspingly rotating at six-and-a-half revolutions per minute, the male protagonists, draped in suitably wrinkled linen suits, dabbing the backs of their necks with cotton hankies.

i imagine myself as part of not the group of “fortunate ones who through money, or influence, or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to lisbon; and from lisbon, to the new world” – but “the others… who wait... and wait... and wait...” and sweat.

my advice to those of you destined to spend the summer here in the premised [sic] land is to adopt linen as your fabric of choice. and to accept that perspiration (if you’re a woman) or good old fashioned manly sweat is not only inevitable, but therapeutic too (have you not heard of turkish baths?).

or you could spend your days cocooned in the cool comfort of your climate-controlled abode, not stepping out before the sun has well and truly set, and fifty degrees cools down to a less oppressive 38½. i’d suggest stocking up on a few good books though (marathon sessions of tv-remote flicking can seriously damage your health). yann martell’s beatrice and virgil, aravind adiga’s the white tiger, and m. hanif’s a case of exploding mangoes (all of which i have read in the past couple of weeks) are cracking good reads.

i have just finished kundera’s the joke, and dived right into james ellroy’s american tabloid once again (to be followed by the cold six thousand) in order to refresh my timeworn memory in preparation of attacking blood’s a rover, the much awaited final instalment of ellroy's brilliant “underworld usa” trilogy.

__________

p.s. linen is meant to crinkle. use your window of ironing opportunity to press discipline upon more fastidious fabrics.

p.p.s. swindon is the site of honda’s uk manufacturing facilities, not the birthplace of the poet algernon charles.