mine kampf is your campfire

Free Speech 0, Free bloggers 5

2011-11-29T07:19:00.002+04:00

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

2011-11-28T11:34:00.021+04:00

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

2011-11-27T12:34:00.001+04:00

Book Fire-sale Update

2011-11-20T10:45:00.000+04:00

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)

2011-11-01T15:03:00.012+04:00

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
~~The Death of Reginald Perrin - David Nobbs~~ taken
Caligula - Allan Massie
Go On, I’m Listening - Robert Russell
~~Fat City - Leonard Gardner~~ taken

General Non-fiction

~~Traders Guns and Money - Satyajit Das~~ taken
~~Chronicles (Vol 1) - Bob Dylan (extra copy)~~ taken
~~Who Are We? America's Great Debate - Samuel Huntington~~ taken
~~From the Land of Shadows - Clive James~~ taken
~~The World According to Clarkson - Jeremy Clarkson~~ taken
~~A Separate Reality - Carlos Castaneda~~ taken
~~Complete Guide to Sherlock Holmes - Michael Hardwick~~ taken
~~Protest (The Beat Generation...) - Gene Feldman ed.~~ taken
~~Fontana History of Chemistry - William Brock~~ taken
~~Maximum City - Suketa Mehta~~ taken
~~Michael Schumacher - James Allen~~ taken
~~How To Make Money Selling Stocks Short - WJ O’Neill~~ taken
~~After The Neocons - Francis Fukuyama~~ taken

History

Barbarossa (The Russian German C0nflict 1941-45) - Alan Clark
From Armageddon to the Fall of Rome - Erik Durschmed
Enemy at the Gates - William Craig

Management &c

~~When Giants Learn To Dance - Rosabeth M Kanter~~ taken
~~Silver Bullet Selling - GA & P Bartick~~ taken
Running Things - Philip Crosby
~~Successful Selling With NLP - J O’Connor~~ taken
~~Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale - Zig Ziglar~~ taken
Managing the Hidden Organisation - TE Deal
~~First, Break All The Rules - M Buckingham~~ taken
~~Customers Mean Business - J Unruh~~ taken
~~Simplicity - Bill Jensen~~ taken
~~How To Negotiate Anything... - F Acuff~~ taken
~~Against The Flow - Yuda Tuval~~ taken

dil bolay boom boom

2010-11-01T01:21:00.005+04:00

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

2010-07-25T15:00:00.003+04:00

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 the team as it heads into the full series with England. On whether Salman Butt represents the future. On the tendency of our front-line batsmen to fish impotently outside the off stump when subjected to even the lightest pressure.
Let me state at this point, in case I have not made it clear, that I too am, without qualification, thrilled at the win. All the rest of it is irrelevant because I have accepted, after a lifetime of patriotically following the Pakistan cricket team’s progress, that this is the way the team plays, and will continue to play in the foreseeable future. Allah will be kareem (insha’allah).

What I do want to express is related to the way our perspectives seemed to have skewed in recent times. In the twenty-four hours since the reticent Umar Gul lucked into a gap between off side fielders, the thing more Pakistanis are discussing than anything else is how well newly anointed Test captain Salman Butt spoke during the post-match presentation ceremony. As if that is the single most important attribute required of a captain of the national test side. (Some people I know have been saying, only half jokingly, that this is one of the reasons Butt was chosen to lead the side.) I say to hell with it. Give me Ghazi Inzamam’s “Firstofallthankstoallah-myboysisplaywell” over Butt’s commendable but not-relevant-on-the-field-of-play eloquence any day.

On a related (however tenuously) note, the most amusing thing for me was the gamut of emotions expressed by S. Butt and those around him as the match approached it’s ultimate climax. Aamer’s fortuitous edge to third man, which levelled the scores, brought a huge smile to Butt’s face, as he turned to those around him and graciously accepted anticipatory plaudits and japhi’s. Said smile continued to broaden over the course of the next six deliveries until that stunning catch by my khassi at gully. I swear I have never seen a smile wiped off a man’s face so fast.

Our utter lack of self-belief as a people and a nation was never more apparent.

Cross-posted up at the chai khana

i txt, thrfr i m

2010-07-19T13:19:00.002+04:00

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

2010-07-14T13:48:00.035+04:00

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.

How I make friends with influential people

2010-05-12T16:04:00.010+04:00

First of all after all anyhow, I would like to congratulate and facilitate Mr Daywood Kamran Sahib for winning prime ministry of English Kingdom after so many year of Laborious rule and regulation. Now no more of Brown Nosing like Toony Blair. My brothers and sisters in UK must be look forward to many many years of Toory Blur (Al Eluyah and Hamd O’lilllah).

My relation with Mr Dawood Kamran MP & PM of UK goes back to beginning of the week when my Tweeter-count is hacking by the man who’s name is Honorbell Gym Hacker (farmer MP & PM of UK). I say How? This possible? How he can PM when I have not heard. Is his name Major Jhon? Is his name Kernel Thetcher? Is his name Toony, Israeli or Navel or Ramzi? No no no no no! His name is Gym so how he can PiM?

So. I call my good friend Pinky Gupta famous hacker to unhack this Gym, but. He fails. But. Because he is trying to hacking jaali PM he breakthrough sight of Kamran bhai Toory Party leader and leave message for to call me on my international roaming mobile phoon. And you can guess, what?

He did not call.
: (

I thinks he must be busy with election. So I forgave him. But. Now I have chance to best friends. And this is why I congratulate and facilitate my good buddy Kamran bhai who is foaming collusion government with Libido party of England. And if he will call me I will prove my friendship by advice him that to be real success in political world he will make collusion with most smartest and the honest poilticain in whole world. Husband of Shaheed Mohtarma, Hazrat-e-Asif Ali Bhutto-Zardari Sahib. And I will take my picture with arm around these both parties and hang on my wall next to famous photo of Shaheed Bhutto Sahib and Shaheed Indira Begum and Shaheed Mohtarma sitting comfor table on sofa.

After all anyhow, Dawood Kamran bhai will my good friend.

Thankyou. If any needs my so-good political advise please tweeter me on newer count @maula_jutt.

But. Kamran bhai, please call karo na.

_

Three cheers for the Pretorian Abdominal Guards

2009-03-25T12:26:00.005+04:00

Call me pedantic, but am I the only one who sees the irony in staging the INDIAN Premier League in South Africa? Surely now that the new venue has been decided this megamegabuck event should be renamed. Perhaps something like the International Premier League (which, for one, would save significant amounts of money which would otherwise be spent on redesigning the logo) (not that cash is something the IPL syndicate is in any way short of).

On the other hand this move speaks volumes for the way in which globalisation has become an ineluctable part of the very fabric of 21st century life. In a virtual world, one becoming more and more so in virtually every way, what does it matter where any game is played. 99.97% (or thereabouts) of all viewers will be watching matches off-site, on tv sets and computer monitors. Hell, this could be the start of a new and wonderful chapter in sports marketing.

For example, the English Premier League, world's favourite league -- after the League of Notions [sic] -- could be played all year round. In fact, Dubai might be the perfect venue for the EPL during it's summer hiatus. This most anglophiliac of pseudocolonies would welcome EPL football stars and starlets alike with open arms, and the odd garland or two. Of course, the balmy, pleasantly humid atmosphere would do wonders for the tans of the more pigmentally challenged of the bootmeisters, while the proximity of sandy beaches must, i'm sure, be good for something (i'm just not quite sure what).

The matches might have to be restricted to 15 minutes or so (in light of the aforementioned atmosphere and the general shortening of attention spans). Perhaps 20 minutes would be better. We could then have a T20 of football. And on days when it gets warmer than usual, matches could simply consist of a 20-shot penalty shootout. Vah, whatte funne, as one LongBlackVeil might say.

But coming back to the now seemingly inaptly, if not downright ineptly named IPL, might i suggest that they also change the team names. Considering all the work that needs to be done to transport the event, i am taking the liberty of suggesting new names for the teams, to take some of the load off L. Modi and Co. so that they can concentrate on the logistics, et cetera:

1. Free State Firebrands
2. KwaZulu-Natal Kirpaans
3. Gauteng Game Beers
4. Durban Turbans
5. Blomfontein Bully Boys
6. Mpumalanga Pomelos
7. Limpopo Lungis
8. Pretorian Abdominal Guards

And, while we're on the subject, all those in favour of staging Baseball's World Series in Swat, say "aye".

Beam me up, Spotty.

kirkminos out!

Death to Infielders, Chapter IV

2008-10-24T00:43:00.009+04:00

Hashim leaned back against the slimegreen wall of the Government hospital, straring blankly at the fluids flowing through the various IV-lines hooked up to his brother’s battered body, and this one line kept looping inside his head: “Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!”

He’d been trying and trying to remember where he’d heard that line. A childhood memory? For sure. A good memory, too. A happy one. And it sounded so... familiar. If his brother could speak right now, this may well be the first thing he would say to Hashim.

“Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into, bhai jaan!”

And Hashim had to admit that he would have a point. After all, whatever the state of the cause-and-effect cycle in the broader scheme of things, it was, sensu stricto, Hashim’s fault that Khadim had been present, wrongtime-wrongplace, at the site of the blast. “Hashim bachha, we’re out of Marmite,” Ammi-ji had said. “Meri jaan, zara run down to Agha’s na, and get me small pot. Your father will be back from office soon.”

Hashim’s father had, post-Ramzan, taken to munching slices of buttered and Marmited bread with his post-office pre-dinner tea. Before that it had been buttered-scones-ooh-la-la, lathered with homemade raspberry jam and – before that – any one of Ammi-ji’s world-famous mixed-fruit chutneys with roghni roti. Ammi-ji was an enthusiastic preserver. Of jams and pickles and unhappy memories. And of the fragile sanity of a family loosely bound together by the tightest of lips.

Abba’s most notorious evening snack, the one they all remembered with wrinkled noses and wry smiles, had been sevruga caviar on melba toast. That menu item had lasted just three days (thank God). That is, for as long as the solitary tin presented to him with much fanfare by Basit Uncle on his return from Baku had lasted. Abba had offered to share it with them, but all had politely declined. “Heh, so much more for me then,” he had smiled, before gingerly taking a bite.

Ammi-ji later told Hashim and Khadim that Abba couldn’t really stand the stuff, and only ate it cos that’s what sophisticated English pipples ate, y’know, y’know. And so he could brag about it at the Marine Club, or whenever he met Basit Uncle and his cronies at some high-funty shaadi or other. “I’m telling you,” she had smiled, “your Abba heaved a sigh of relief when that foul stuff finally finished.”

“Ammi-ji! Do I have to go?” said Hashim. “Let Khadim go, na? He won’t mind. You know he needs any excuse to drive the car, and it’s not like he won’t be able to find Marmite.” This approach always worked, cos Ammi-ji could never resist an opportunity for her twee li’l Khadim jaan to show how independent and reliable he was, the “mmm-waaaaah, schweety-pie.”

Thus Khadim was despatched to procure Abba’s tea-time condiment, which shouldn’t have taken him more than half an hour or so. Abba came home an hour later and there was no sign of Khadim. When he discovered that his Marmite hadn’t arrived he threw a right old fit.

“Aray, why did you have to send that good-for-nothing lafanga?” he asked Ammi-ji. He pointed a finger at Hashim. “Why not this good-for-something fellow? Voh moti-choor ka luddoo hai na tumhara, must be leaning against some greasy pillar eyeing all the fat-bottomed chhokris.” He turned to Hashim. “Call the bugger on his mobile.” But the line was engaged.

“Uffo! Kaunsi chhokri hai this time?” exclaimed Abba testily. “Jao, take my car and find the fellow. Or... no, no, just get me my bloody Marmite.”

A few minutes later an almighty bang shook the house, shattering all the upper-storey windows.

That night, all night, the media circus big-topped the blast with its customary gusto. “Karachi on fire,” was the most commonly heard phrase on tv. Fatality estimates of the many networks varied between sixty-three and seventy-nine. There were as yet no clues to the identity of the obliterated perpetrator, though at least three known terrorist groups had claimed responsibility, including the loathsome TTP. Next morning’s newspapers front-paged the story. A suicide attack of this magnitude, striking at the very heart of Burgher Central, could be said to rival the apocalyptic assault on the once-grand Marriott Hotel. At one point a baritoned anchor for an English-language tv channel referred to the crater that was once Schon Circle as “Ground Double Zero.” It wasn’t clear whether he’d come up with the line himself or had read it off the teleprompter. The phrase was not heard again, at least not in this context.

One Urdu language ’paper, after logging the names of the deceased, published a partial list of those injured in the blast. At number two hundred and forty-nine was one Qadeem [sic] Farooqi, vald Zaeem Farooqi.

* * *

After witnessing his brother’s disconnection from all the life-support gizmos and lengths of tubing, time of death having been duly noted, Hashim turned on his heels and strode out of the hospital, the sound of his mother’s funerary sobs fading away
behind him. There were papers to sign, but he had told the admin types his father was around and would return at some point to sign them. Nobody asked why the father had not been present. Nobody said much of anything.

He got into Abba’s car, adjusted the rear-view mirror, the electrically-operated wing-mirrors. Strapped on his seat belt. Lit a cigarette. Cranked the engine. Took a long, deep drag and slammed the gearshift into drive, fishtailing out of the parking lot. His face, which had been the consistency of putty in the hospital, had set to granite. Only his blazing eyes betrayed any sense of purpose. And his hands – gripping the steering wheel so hard the knuckles were turning green.

Avoiding known bottlenecks, he arrived at his destination not long afterwards, screeching to a halt alongside the boundary wall of a not entirely modest house. Its ornate, though rusting gates, unlike almost any house in Karachi, stood wide open. Inside, on the wide, neatly tiled driveway, stood a dark-blue fin de siècle Honda Civic and a coffee-coloured Cadillac of Ayubian vintage. Both looked well-maintained. To one corner, amidst a clutter of parts and tools strewn around, stood a partly dismantled, partially mantled motorbike, as unHarleylike as one could ever wish for, hallelujah. Hashim called it The Workshop That Jackshit Built.

The house itself was shelter to his langotiya yaar Siddique Salam and Hashim marched through the gate like he owned the place. He would normally have stopped to admire the sleek lines of the older car, caressing the fenders, sometimes even speaking to it. Her. Whispering sweet nothings under his breath.

Today he walked right up to the front door and rang the bell. He always hated ringing the bell. The kitschy, atonal, digital rendition of Greensleeves never failed to send a shiver down his musically-inclined spine. The door was opened by a short, wizened baba dressed in saffron kurta and check lungi. He greeted Hashim with a toothless smile. “Salaam, chhotay-sarkar!”

Hashim brought his palms together in front of him. “Namaste, Prakash Dada.” Dispensing with his usual banter, he said, “Kidhar hai Siddu Seth?”

It didn’t take old Prakash more than a second or three to sense that all was not right with young Hashim Babu. “Kya hua chhotay-sarkar? Khadim Babu ki haalat behtar hai na?”

“Nahin, Prakash Dada,” he sighed. “Buss... jo hona tha, ho gaya. Par ye kumbakht Siddu ka bachha kidhar hai?” And without waiting for a reply from the old retainer, Hashim ran up the stairs and on towards the door of one of the rooms off the landing. He opened the door without knocking.

Siddique Salam, brushing his wavy, shoulder-length hair in the mirror, turned around to see who it was. “Man, I was just about to leave for the hospital. Tu idhar kaisay?” Then, seeing the look on Hashim’s face he asked, “Kya hua, bhai?” although he knew the answer even as he spoke the words.

At this Hashim finally broke down. Embracing his friend, he wailed a blubbering lament, the only words of which Siddique could make out were, “my fault, my fault!”

A couple of hours later, having washed his face and reluctantly swallowed the two tablets of Valium 5 that Siddu raided from his mother’s medicine chest, Hashim sat on an unsteady bench opposite a man whose name he had heard many a time, and about whom he had occasionally read in the City sections of certain newspapers. The man, commonly known as Veer, lolled amiably in a plush armchair upholstered in linen that might once have been snow-white. He wore a starched white shalvaar-kameez. His mustache was full and slightly upturned at the ends, and he was twirling one of the ends between thumb and forefinger. On either side of him stood stocky bodyguard types, AK-47s casually slung over their shoulders. One of them was inspecting his nails. The other had an index finger jammed up one nostril, digging for buried treasure with intense concentration.

The room they sat in was small, fairly neat, with recently whitewashed walls. An antechamber of sorts, where visitors of perhaps lesser importance were granted audience. Behind Hashim, and to his right, sat Siddu uncomfortably on what was either an upturned packing crate, or a stool designed by one of Mad’s madder artists. Siddu had already removed two splinters from the fleshier parts of his backside by the time Veer, who had been silently listening to Hashim trying to tell his story around Siddu’s frequent interjections, spoke.

“Kitnay paisay hein tumharay pass, bachha?”

“Not much, Saeen. Yehi, koi lakh, derh lakh.”

Veer emitted a hollow, sardonic laugh. “Buss? Iss khazaanay se teesri jang-e-azeem larogay? Take my advice – find yourself a healthy, poputt-si Punjabi mundi. For that much she’ll satisfy you up and down and all around for at least a month. Subb ghum bhula degi.”

Siddu had warned Hashim about Veer’s cynical manner. Anyway, he wasn’t going to pick a fight while two submachine guns were aimed in the general direction of his genitalia. “Saeen, sirf aik dhansu si banduq, aur tagra sa aslaha dai do. And leave the rest to me.”

“And I suppose you’re going to tell me you saw an orchard full of gun trees planted in my front lawn when you drove in, huh!” said Veer, mockingly. He turned to the nosepicker. “Kyun Makku, kaunsay darakht pe ugti hai banduq? Oi mujhe yaad hai tu ne kaha tha teray baap ne klaashin-kove ke beej lagaay thay! Kya bana unn ka, kuchh mehnat ka phull mila teray baap ko?”

Hashim squared his shoulders. The close, stale atmosphere of the room made him woozy. With a concerted effort to focus on Veer, he said, “Saeen, aik Uzi, aur do-chaar hazaar round ki baat hai. Jo daam boleingay Saeen, manzoor hai.” He knew that unless he met Veer’s piercing gaze unflinchingly he was unlikely to get anywhere. (That’s what Siddu had told him.)

Veer looked over at Siddu. “Kyun Billoo Mian, kaisa banda hai tera yaar? Mard ka bachha? Gaandh mein dumm hai?”

“Haan, Saeen. Meray bachpan ka dost hai. Jaan dainay ke liye tayyar hunh iss ke liye.”

“And this one? Would he give his life for you?” countered Veer, in his measured missionary-school accent.

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“So, what about it, little boy? Would you give your life to save this vee baa lamb?”

“Perhaps,” shrugged Hashim. “But I’d sure as hell cut the balls off anyone who threatened the life of baa-baa-blockhead. Why should it come down to either of our own lives?” And for the first time since he entered the antechamber, the first time since time-of-death, Hashim smiled. A bold smile. A cavalier smile, which Siddu later told him sealed the deal.

“How could you tell?” asked Hashim.

“I could see it in his eyes. I’ve known that fucker Veer all my life. He’s queer. I don’t mean like a poof or something, you know, a faggot.” Hashim nodded. “I mean he’s weird. Loves you or leaves you. Very often for dead, kind of thing.”

Hashim unwrapped the oil-cloth set across his lap and fondled the frame of his recent acquisition. A shiver ran down his spine. Then another. He lifted the piece, slowly turning it from side to side, admiring its compactness, enjoying the chill of cold steel against his burning palms.

“Oi, point that thing somewhere else,” exclaimed a nervous Siddu. “It might be loaded.”

* * *

During times of stress Hashim’s mother made jams and chutneys and pickles out of anything and eveything that came to hand. Rows and rows of glass jars filled to the brim with solid- and parti-coloured concoctions were the result of this creative therapy. It had been passed on to her by her own mother, who, according to Ammi-ji, had thus preserved her sanity in the bloody aftermath of Partition.

In the days that followed, acres of kitchen workspace remained bare. There was not a lime chutney in sight. No jars of apricot compotes, no shaljam ka achaar. The picture-perfect Farooqi household faded to a rusty shade of sepia photograph curling at the edges.

Ammi-ji settled into a spot on the edge of the back lawn. She would sit motionless for hours on a cushioned, white-cane armchair, facing one corner of the boundary wall, responding to queries with a slight, noncommittal nod of the head. Hashim sometimes sat with her, usually cross-legged on the grass. He wanted to talk to her. Talk her out of her stupor. But he could find nothing to say, except, “Ammi-ji, chai banaon aap ke liye?”

Abba would reel in every night after midnight, reeking of mean-spiritedness and vodka.

Then on the fourth or fifth day Hashim came home to find his mother in the kitchen conjuring up a storm of preservation. She looked radiant, barking a steady volley of orders, which the servants gladly followed, for they were happy to be forced out of their mourning. Sticky, sweet, sour, tangy, spicy fragrances floated through the house, vying with each other for dominance. Ammi-ji turned to her son and smiled. “Just wait till you taste this plum chutney. It’s to die for!”

Ignoring the bizarre choice of words, Hashim smiled back. He could now get on with the job at hand.

* * *

The standard Uzi submachine gun has seen much action in military battles and urban conflicts all over the world. It is a compact weapon, which can be fired in full-auto mode at a rate of six hundred rounds per minute. It is said that, if fired by an expert spraying from left to right, it can sever a victim’s body in two. This claim has all the hallmarks of urban legend.

The gun that Hashim bought off Veer was a Micro Uzi. This version is much smaller than the standard Uzi, but uses the same 9x19mm rounds. It weighs just two and a half kg with a 25-round clip attached, and is barely ten inches long with the wire stock folded. In full-auto mode it fires in excess of 1200 rpm, thus discharging an entire clip in little over a second.

As is widely known, the firearm of choice in this benighted land of the puritanical is the AK-47 assault rifle or “Klaashin-kove.” Not for Hashim. The main advantage to him of the Uzi was, of course, its concealability. But there was another reason for his choice. The Uzi is an Israeli-made weapon. In a perverse application of the adage “the enemy of mine enemy is my friend,” Hashim befriended his Uzi. In his mind revenge would be all the sweeter.

A few weeks of self-instruction followed, though not with the frequency Hashim would have liked. Finding a place isolated enough to fire off a few rounds without being heard was not easy. Everyone was nervous, jumpy. The sound of a bottle falling to the ground and shattering could raise the average pulse rate of those in the vicinity by at least ten beats per minute.

Police checkposts mushroomed and cars were stopped and searched on the slightest suspicion. Hashim found that the best place to practice was on the increasingly deserted beaches of Hawke’s Bay. His routine was to form a hill of wet sand into which he would draw small targets with his finger, firing at close- and medium-range, careful to collect all the shell casings and bury them deep in the sand after he was done. He knew he would never be able to (or want to, for that matter) take apart and reassamble his diminutive firearm, blindfolded or otherwise. But he began to get a feel for what the deceptively lightweight weapon might achieve in a live action situation. He wished he had access to the kind of indoor shooting ranges and urban-landscape sets shown in Special Ops-type Hollywood action flicks. That would have injected a further dose of drama into the proceedings, if nothing else.

Hashim decided that he needed a “look” and took to wearing a cloth headband, tied in a knot at the back. This was soon substituted with a red, white and green bandana, and he would spend hours in front of the mirror getting the angle right. On his left wrist he wore the copper bracelet he’d bought across the border from Livingstone, in the no-man’s land between Zambia and Zimbabwe, site of the mighty Victoria Falls. The boy who sold it to him was about the same age as him then (and now, he supposed, supposing he was still alive), in his late teens. He claimed to be Zimbabwean and had chided Hashim on not being sympathetic to the abject plight of his once great nation and it’s once great subjects. The boy had wanted fifty thousand Zambian Kwacha, fifteen dollars. Hashim bought it off him for ten grand. It now became a key part of his new regalia; bandana, bracelet, khaki combat pants, solid red T-shirt. The ensemble was rounded off by a lightweight black-leather jacket with an inside pocket deep and wide enough to stow his doozy Uzi. On the back of the jacket was emblazoned, also in red, white and green, his battle cry, Death to Infielders!

As his technique, if not his aim, improved, Hashim started thinking about basic attack tactics. He devoured all the Bing Fa he could find. Many a Sun Tzu. Sun Bin. Norman Blockhead. Lawrence of Araby. Clausewitz proved unuseful, and he tossed it aside after flipping through the first few chapters. Old Carl von wasn’t out to train vigilantes. He stumbled across Michael Herr’s Dispatches. It, too, was no manual for conducting urban guerrilla hit-and-run assaults. But it did make him think about the differences in ideological, strategic and tactical objectives between him and the enemy. In the end, though, he figured all this reading-sheading was a waste of time.

He could often be heard singing, “To everything, turn, turn, turn... there is a season, turn, turn, turn...” in his cracked falsetto.

He worried that the ethical underpinnings of his plotificationings were weak. Siddu agreed. “Have you bothered to think about the moral issues involved?” he had asked early on.

Hashim was watching the Kill Bills a lot, often back to back. “Siddu-ji,” he replied, “revenge is a dish best served cold.”

“That’s non sequitur, buddy, and doesn’t answer my question.”

“So was your question, yaara! From whence does it sequitur into what we were talking about?”

“Whence it flows into the raging whitewater rapids of madness that you intend to surf through blindfolded,” countered Siddu, mixing his metaphors with great gusto.

Hashim knew there was nothing in his inchoate plan which could claim to have an ideological basis. But he was convinced that his adversary was in the same proverbial boat, the only difference being that he, Hashim, realised this fact.

All he wanted was blood. Not glory. Not victory. Not peace. Not time to plant, not to reap, not to heal. Not even to weep.

Siddu stopped trying to dissuade him. On a random surf through cyberspace he had come across a line of verse to which he would not have been able to relate just a few weeks ago. It read, “Guilt is the cause of more disorders than history’s most obscene marorders.” It made perfect sense to him now, quirky spelling and all.

Hashim was a lost cause, and for Siddu the only thing to do was stick by him to the bitter end. It seemed the poetic thing to do.

* * *

After having, over the course of an infuriatingly uncathartic fortnight, single-handedly despatched thiry-five bearded, avaami-suited “fundos” to what he hoped were the nether regions of hell (as he recorded in his meticulously kept diary), Hashim’s weapon jammed one day. It was a cool Karachi afternoon in early February. The kind of late afternoon on which, in better days – in days when the smog, and the suicidal horn-ok-please rush of diesel buses, and the wretched stench of gunpowder had yet to consume the city – a “respectable” man might have considered taking Jimmy the dog for a walk. Hashim had never owned a dog.

During the interminable lull in proceedings he thought about his father, who might have known many such days. And perhaps his grandfather, who wrote him long, meticulously punctuated emails in agonizingly correct King’s English. (“Not the Queen’s English, mind,” he had written. “That would, more appropriately, to my mind, refer to the excruciatingly painful speech adopted by the Queen’s subjects nowadays. Ah, Long Live the King!”) Daddy, that is, Abba’s Daddy, lived what Hashim called his “fixin’ to die” life a million miles away in sunny Toronto. He had chosen the company of his daughter, Abba would say in an accusatory tone. The reasons for this decision, nor Abba’s notion of the reasons, were never made clear.

In muted slow motion Hashim saw the man in front of him draw an unsilenced repeater from the side pocket of his kameez. .32 calibre, Hashim guessed. Probably unlicensed, too. He had stopped tugging at the trigger of his recalcitrant Uzi. Without a backup plan, he stood rooted to the spot. This wasn’t supposed to happen. All the websites he had visited had assured him that Uzis never jam. Oh crap! Maybe this wasn’t a genuine I.M.I. Uzi. Maybe that infernal Veer had sold him a lemon. Maybe time was not on his side.

Taking deliberate, two-handed aim, the man with the .32 fired three rounds. Bang/recoil... Bang/recoil... Bang/recoil... all three of which hit Hashim in the chest. The man pocketed his gun and slowly walked away.

Hashim didn’t die on the spot. On the way to the hospital, bouncing around in a battered old Edhi ambulance, he was accompanied by a middle-aged man whose beard he estimated to measure exactly a fist and a half in length from stem to stern. Over the course of his recent misadventures, Hashim’s outlook on life had turned from vivid, optical colour to high contrast black and white. Through the mist of tears and pain he saw this attendant as simply The Enemy, for which dramatic role he qualified by the fact of sporting copious amounts of facial hair, wearing shalvaar-kameez, and reciting a Quranic prayer.

The boy had lost a lot of blood. In his weakened state he made a vain attempt to raise himself off the stretcher, arms outstretched, as if he wanted to strangle the attendant. The effort was too great. His heart, which had shrunk to the size and consistency of a prune during his killing spree, simply gave way. Time of death was not duly noted.

He was buried with little fanfare in a simple grave in the vicinity of Golimar, along with the hundreds of victims of the by now almost daily bomb blasts and drive-by shootings. The grave was religiously maintained by Siddique/Siddu, who visited at least twice a week, often accompanied by Prakash Dada.

Contrary to Siddu’s expectations, his comrade-in-harm’s-way Hashim Farooqi did not become the martyred poster boy of the New Left. There was no New Left. There was no Old Left, either. In fact, there was nothing left of any kind of ideology anymore. Just a whole lot of self-righteousness masquerading in an interchangeable set of death masks.

Hashim’s father returned to the graves of each of his sons just once, placing on each of them a single red rose, as he had once seen someone do in a movie. He never went back, since he was not familiar with the words to Surah-e-Fateha, and was in no mood to learn the incantation by heart. That’s what he told his wife who, at forty-three years old, now looked seventy. She just shrugged her drooping shoulders, her comatose eyes registering no emotion.

She had lost all desire to preserve.

Death to Infielders, Take Five

2008-10-17T00:33:00.011+04:00

typed by kinkminos sometime in octomber

"Woke up this morning and found myself dead" is the working title of a film treatment i'm working on at the moment. Hardly an original title, as hard core fans of the late Jimi Hendrix will testify. You have to admit, though, that as kitschy commentary on the state of affairs of the current affairs of state, it does have a certain moribund relevance to the vexatious theme of escalating puritanicalism.

"Come on, let's do it again," sang Peter Frampton.

The structure of the story conforms to the basic three-act action-flick formula. There is, of course, a mian hero, representing an heroic class of White-hatted folk. These are Good People. Kind people. The kind of people who help the old and the infirm and the respectable. Who give unstintingly of themselves and never forget to say "masha'allah" when admiring the cherubic cheeks of clear-skinned toddlers. They are not prone to prejudice, except towards the darker-complexioned, and one or two of the lesser ethnic groups of our purestate. But then that hardly counts, right? Let's face it, you wouldn't want your daughter marrying a Bengali, ya?

Our hero, a morally upright member of an uptight community, finds himself, as is often the case, unwittingly pitted against the forces of darkness, led by a shadowy figure who is in the process of assembling a motley crew of cutthroat vagabonds from the depths of society's underclasses. At the mass induction ceremonies he conducts, he likes to welcome recruits with a short speech. i visualise these speeches taking place inside a huge cavern or underground lair. (i'm thinking, something along the lines of Temple of Doom.)

"I have but three simple rules," intones the villain (Vill Ian?) – whose name is either Kifayat Khan or Sabaahat Gul, but whom the Good and the Great refer to as Girdhari Lal (tho' suggestions for more suitable names are welcome) – in his measured and melliflous baritone, "rules which are sacrosanct and inviolable, and set in the stone you see on the wall behind me.

"Rule Number One –" he declares, after an aposiopetic pause, "you must grow your beards to the precise length of a fist and a half. These will be regularly monitored for conformity.

"Rule Number Two – you must at all times carry an ablution pebble, as prescribed, to ensure that your wee-wees are always clean in the eyes of the almighty.

"Rule Number Three – Death to Infidels. Without exception."

Stroking his own luxuriant facial hair, he continues, "You will find the definition of Infidel in the instruction manual provided to you. If you are unable to read, Munshi Sabahuddin is conducting a sing-along around the campfire tonight, during which the definition will be clarified. It's all in good fun, and prizes will be awaded for qira'at and the best rendition of Surah-e-Yasin. Attendance is mandatory." (The previous batch, arriving in early Ramzan last, had been judged on the speed and zeal – in that order – of their taraavi renditions.)

I'm sure you get the picture.

(Note: Flashback? Flash forward? Fantasy flash forward of an aspiring jihaadi?)

(Note: should h.q. be set in madrassa or masjid?)

Midway through act two, our hero, after proving his courage time and again, despite losing friends and relatives and associates at an alarming rate (body bags are going to be in short supply), faces off the black-bearded villain in a thrilling scene in which hero shoots villain in left testicle, damaging right one in process. This renders Girdhari Lal incabaple of facing his band of mercenaries, now that he has no balls left to speak of. He is seen shuffling off shamefacedly in the direction of the rugged South Waziri mountains, and is never seen or heard from again. His unholy mob, now ringleaderless, without half a Weltanschauung between the lot of them, reverts to its aimless, nosepicking, urban-nomadic ways.

Act three has barely been outlined, but preliminary story options include the development of the love interest, a kidnapping of some sort by a splinter militia group of Girdhari Lal's disbanded faction, and might take in an item number. Personally i'd love to see Mallika Sherawat frolic around the rain-washed trees of Lahore's Lawrence Gardens in a green, white and saffron sari. On film, of course. (i'm sure they'll give her a visa.)

The epilogue celebrates the exploits of our hero, who is called Gubroo Shah or Rye Bahadur (haven't decided yet), being feted by the metrop's Burghers, who have been delivered from the potentially dreadful yoke of fundamentalist puritanicalism. Outside a large crowd has gathered, chanting the hero's name in chorus. They could be singing something like

jeevay, jeevay, jeevay Gubroo Shah
Gubroo Shah, Gubroo Shah, jeevay Gubroo Shah...

(Note: budgetary constraints might limit the scope and breadth of the crowd shots.)

The federal government awards him a ten-marla plot in the vicinity of Kharian Cantonment. Snow-white-hatted President of The Islamic Republic of Pakistan personally pins the Sitara-e-Jura'at medal onto Gubroo's chest (does the ghost of Yossarian enter the proceedings?) (just kidding!). Highly articulate Prime Minister of I.R. (producers feel he should be Syed, tho' i'm not sure if they mean the character, or the actor who plays him) delivers an impassioned speech extolling the incorruptible virtues of our Gubroo javaan and the need for one and all to adopt his brave and morally upright ways. With the ultimate defeat of the evil forces of anachronism, he continues, the country can return to the path of righteousness and start to achieve the prosperity it has always had the potential for. Credits roll, over the audience giving the VIPs a standing ovation.

i've never been in favour of moral ambiguity as an underlying motif in action fillums. "Give the pipples what they want" is my lucrative motto.

(Concluding note: would the obvious crowd-pulling advantages of casting an incoherent but big-bottled, blonde, Caucasian love-interest compensate for the sheer crassness of the idea?)

—–

P.S. The internal plumbing of Chapter IV of this meandering series has become clogged and is need of a dose of Drano. The Union of Plumbers has been alerted.

“Goli” as Caesar

2008-09-07T22:32:00.008+04:00

A Panglossian Panegyric in the Glossolalian Tongue to His Majesty, our Most Glorious, and Most Magnificent, and Most Noble, and Most Munificent Sovereign

Fiends, womans, cuntrymans, lend me your ears;
I come to praise Caesar, not to bury his crackter.
The evil that men do lives with them;
Their goods are oft confused with their bonuses;
So let it be with Caesar. The Noble mans and womans
Of Civil Society have told you Caesar is seditious:
If it be so, it is a grievous fault,
And grievously may Caesar answer it.
Here, under leave of Civil Society,
For Civil Society is a bunch of
Honourable mans and womans,
All, all honourable mans and womans,
Come I to speak at Caesar’s accession to the Bullcock Throne.
He is our friend, faithfully unjust to us:
But Civil Society says he is seditious;
And Civil Society is a right ol’ bunch of
Honourable mans and womans.
He hath brought many a chicken home to roost
Whose rancid pong does fill the general air so fragrantly:
Does this in Caesar seem so seditious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath slept:
Sedition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Civil Society says he is seditious;
And Civil Society is a right ol’ bunch of
Honourable mans and womans.
You all did see that in the capital
We thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did accept but once: was this sedition?
Yet Civil Society says he is seditious;
And, sure, Civil Society is a right ol’ bunch of
Honourable mans and womans.
I speak not to disprove what Civil Society speaks,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did hate him once, not without cause:
But give the poor bugger a chance, wontcha!
For, verily, sayeth the bard,
“All we are saying, is give the bugger a chance!”

All Terrorists are Muslim, therefore all Muslims are Terrorists

2008-09-01T16:36:00.009+04:00

A Ballad in Plain D-monic Logic
by Ginkminos

Our world is changing. Fast. And in ways that even the more visionary of our ancestors could not have imagined. Believe it or not, many of these changes actually do benefit mankind as a whole, or at the very least a significant part of it. The dreaded curse of consumerism, for instance, has led to an unprecedented rise in the living standards of millions across the globe who would otherwise still be floundering in the murky waters of abject poverty.

Man has been to the moon, can order pizza delivery without speaking to another person, and is able to replace the human heart. These are just some of the marvels of our age. The imminent end of religion as the preeminent guiding principle in our lives signals yet another miracle [sic], which the more rational amongst the populace of terra firma are preparing to celebrate with the kind of fervour more commonly reserved for rave parties fueled by sex ’n drugs ’n rock ’n roll.

On the flip side, the long awaited and much vaunted renascence of Muhammedanism has been cheered by many. It has also been denounced by many more, including the aforementioned ravers. It is the subject of the most intense debates and is, arguably, the defining discourse of our time. It polarises opinion like no other topic, except perhaps the question of the eminently questionable elegance of Lagerfeld’s Spring Collection.

Much of the debate focuses on the definition of “Terrorism,” and what constitutes this plague on civilised human life. The world is divided into two camps. One which equates Islam with Terrorism, and one for whom Islam offers the only route to the salvation of civilisation. While the latter group is composed exclusively of Muslims, membership of the former camp is open to all and sundry, and does not exclude (sensible) Muslims.

The most feared Terrorists belong to a cult unofficially known as Suicide Bombers ’R Us. Because they believe they are death-proof, possessing an unshakeable faith in Elysian reincarnation, they are not afraid to blow themselves (and many others) up into a million little pieces in order to achieve their evil, if rather fuzzy, goals. Many realistic people feel that, in light of the clear and present danger posed to world peace by these Godless felons, it is high time we renamed our celestial orb Planet Terror.

All this is nothing new, and is widely known. What is not known is how successful the Terrorists have been in their recruitment drive. Until recently Terrorists belonged to every race, colour, creed and sexual orientation known to Man (and at least one orientation known only to the loinclothed saadhu who inhabits one of the more impressive peaks of the Karakoram Range). No more. According to the Galoop Galoop Organisation’s latest global survey, every single non-Muslim Terrorist in the world has converted to Islam, right down to (in the case of males of this disgusting species) gleefully shedding their foreskins.

And we all know how accurate GGO’s surveys are. More accurate even than a mercury-ion clock on a long-term course of anabolic steroids, in case you were wondering.

GGO’s findings reveal that there are no longer any African Terrorists. There are no European Terrorists. No Caucasian Terrorists. No Jewish Terrorists. No Hindu Terrorists. And there are certainly no American Terrorists. (There’s just a whole lot of Bloody Tourists, but that is to be the subject of yet another survey.)

Ah (plop-plop-fizz-fizz), what a relief! This unambiguous homogeneity of Terrorists makes the job of hunting down and liquidating these demons so much easier.

An argument currently doing the rounds, quite disturbing for moral reasons to many in the bleeding-heart liberal community, advocates the extermination of each and every man, woman and child of the Muslim persuasion; thereby eliminating entirely the threat of Terrorism. Thankfully no Nazi gas chamber remains in working order, or the capitalist system would implode with the removal of so many hundreds of millions of consumer-goods consumers (“suckers” in marketing parlance). Where would we be then, hain ji?

In the meantime, until we can find a viable final solution to the terrorist menace, I advise all non-Muslims, and all sane Muslims too, to display extreme caution when faced with anyone

a) Sporting a beard.

b) Wearing a veil.

c) Speaking Arabic (cos you never know, it might just be some unholy incantation).

d) Using the word “bomb” in a sentence, even as a seemingly harmless suffix or prefix. (The commercial hub of India now, thankfully, has the much less frightening handle of “Mumbai.”)

e) Trying to convince you that she is not a Terrorist, even though she is dressed from head to toe in a jet-black tent, with just enough exposure to allow two eyes to peep warily out from within the incarceration of intellectual capitulation and incapacity.

If you do come across such terrifying creatures, please just drop whatever you have in your hands, and run like hell. As Messrs Gilmour and Waters used to sing so eloquently:

If you’re taking your girlfriend out tonight
You’d better park the car well out of sight
Cos if they catch you in the back seat trying to pick her locks
They’re gonna send you back to mother in a cardboard box
You better
Run… run… run… run…
Run… run… run… run…
Run… run… run… run…
Run… run… run… run…

cross-posted up at Pak Tea House

The King is a Fink! Long Live the King!

2008-08-24T00:55:00.022+04:00

a politically ~~correct~~ inept allegory by Finkminos

Pokeystan is an Asian nation with a population of 80m people. In a recent development, unprecedented in human history, 79.99 million Pokeystanis have successfully applied for political, social and psychotic asylum in various countries throughout the civilised and uncivilised world. According to a survey conducted by the Galoop Galoop Organisation (whose motto, as we all know, is "The King is a Fink!"), every single respondent interviewed (and most married ones) claimed that the Angel Gabriel had appeared to them in a dream and told them to migrate to another country. As the respondents included not only Muslims and Christians, but people of the Hindu and Zoroastrian faiths, this struck the GGO as being a possibly fraudulent claim. Interviewers were told to conduct repeat interviews and, under intense grilling, the respondents broke down and admitted that the real reason was the impending appointment of Pir Asaf Ali Shah of Zarda Shareef as the next Führer of the Slavish Republic of Pokeystan.

If my Chinese-designed-and-built calculator is as accurate as it claims to be on the packaging, once all the successful asylum seekers leave, the country will be left with a resident population of 10,000 people. According to senior political statisticians, this is precisely the number of people required to successfully hand-carry the entire contents of Pokeystan's state coffers to private Swiss bank accounts. Serendipity most surely works in mysterious ways.

It is estimated that transporting almost-but-not-quite 80 million Pokeystanis to countries as far apart as Palau, Mali, Kiribati, Somalia, Belize and the United States will take at least thirteen days. That is if all the country's Matter Transference Pods remain in full working order, and the required quantities of enriched di-lithium can be procured on time.

Pir Asif Ali Shah is thrilled at the prospect of the impending mass exodus. Speaking from behind the veil of anonymity (to protect, claim his bevy of simpering lickspittles, millions of Pokeystanis from being blinded by the light of his seraphic smile), the Leader-in-Waiting expressed his delight at millions of Pokeystanis being finally able to pursue their dreams of travelling the globe. "The world," he intoned pontifically, "is their oyster. This one here is mine. Schlurrrrrp. Yum. Burrrrrp!"

Work is already underway on a biopic detailing the pious and holy life of Pir Sahib. According to sources close to him, the Pir had wanted Heath Ledger to play him in the film, stating that all the actor needed to do was arrive off the set of The Dark Knight without costume- or character-change in order to accurately portray the Pir. When told that the talented actor was dead, Pir Sahib was shattered, but recovered quickly and is now trying to decide between Jackie Chan and Paris Hilton. The former is the more likely choice, as nobody would deny that Ms Hilton (plug-ugly enough as it is) would look quite hideous with a mustache.

Midnight at the Oasis

2008-04-09T12:51:00.009+04:00

The following piece appeared on the Front Page of yesterday’s Khaleej Times (8.04.08):

Shaikh Hamdan buys camel for record $2.72m

ABU DHABI - Shaikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, has bought a female camel for a record $2.72 million, an organiser at a camel beauty pageant said yesterday.

Shaikh Hamdan “bought camels... worth Dh16.5 million ($4.49 million), including a female camel... for Dh10 million ($2.72 million),” Hamad bin Kardoum Al Amiri said.

Now i don’t know about you bunch of cynical halfwits, but i have to cheer not only the embracing of traditional beddu values, but the unabashed celebration of said values (not to mention the wily investment decision). Yee-haaaaaaaaa! so to speak. Why is our first instinct, on hearing this sort of Breaking News, to react with supercilious disdain (or worse)? Does it not behoove us to acknowledge the fact that here we see someone not ashamed to embrace his simple culture and traditional values? What a truly wonderful example it will set for his compatriots, many of whom are actively rejecting their age-old traditions.

On the other hand, we ethnophobic Anglophiliac Packies, living it up in this desert paradice, cannot shed our Packyness fast enough. Our shalvar kameez are piled high upon on the pyre, to be replaced by rejected Armani designs and Levi Strauss’ finest, and our language jettisoned down the loo in favour of twangy American colloquialisms we never fully comprehend. Mera Pakistan nahin, ye tera Pakistan hoga!

So, whether the bright young Shaikh rides around town on his multi-million dollar dromedary, or just parks it in the driveway as a killer conversation piece, let’s give a nice, warm round of applause for the triumph of character and sense of values over rampant postmodernism.

“I stand up next to a mountain and chop it down with the edge of my hand”

2008-04-07T14:55:00.005+04:00

(or What Is & What Should Never Be)

It wuz late an they weren’t nobody insida this room so I dragged the case in here where it wuz dark ’cept fer the tv that’s on an they wuz a nice comfy easy chair fer me ter set in. So I lockt the door an set myself down in it an open up the case an took out the first bottle. Glug-glug glug-glug glug-glug aaaaaaaaaaaah.

So anyway now I’s comfortable settin here in this fancy lazyboy thang an lookin at all o’ them blinkin lights on this big flat-screen tv thang. Now you probly heard about the pres’dent bein the guy who in charge o’ "the button". Y’know the one that start a nuclear war against all o’ them evil people in this world that wants ter destroy our way o’ life (I heard the pres’dent say that on tv one time an like the sound o’ that) like them muzzlem freaks in Eye-rack an Eye-ran an them hindoo freaks in Packiss Tan an them gook freaks in Coe Ria.

Well it all true ’cept it ain’t jess one button. It a whole lotta button with li’l numbers on ’em. An on the big flat screen tv thang they got a map o’ the You Knighted States on one side with a lotta lights flashin sayin S1 an S2 an S34177 an the like. An on the other side’s a map o’ the world with a lotta lights flashin sayin T1 an T2 an T34177 and the like. I don’ get it. Wide they have the same numbers on both o’ the maps. I tell yer they says I’s dumb but some o’ those guys in they fancy suits cud learn a thang or two frum me.

But hold on while I take another swig outa my pint o’ Jack Daniels frum this here casefull I found in back o’ this closet in t’other room. Hoooooooo-ee that some sweet stuff. Not like that evil rotgut I’s use ter. I’s on my fourth pint takin it one at a time. Yes sirree one at a time. Theys eight more ter get thru after that cuz I can’t take ’em outa the buildin an if I leave ‘em here they’s bound ter find it an give it ter somebody else so I best jess finish it tonite. Burrrrp! ‘Scuse me. I guess I’s drinkin it too fast. An I’s sure that fella Charly Daniels be related ter ole Jack here. You member how he sung:

The devil went down to Joe Juh
He wuz lookin fer a soul to steal
He wuz in a bind cuz he wuz way behind
An he wuz willin ter make a deal
He came pon this young man
Sawin on a fiddle an playin it hot
Then the devil jumped pon a hick’ry stump
An said boy lemme tell yer wut

Now I’s also frum down south in Joe-juh an I don’t need to tell yer we got a hiss tree o’ hatin then niggers an them jewboys an that ol’ devil. Even tho Jimmy Cowtah frum they too. I’s frum a big Babble bashin family o’ workin class foke. But I don’ like them padres who gets the people all riled up about these thangs. I sure as hell ain’t no redneck nigger-hatin yokel. My best friend in the whole world a jewboy call Shlomo. An how this came about yer surely wants ter know. Well he save my life one time an that all they is to it. Now he my best friend cuz that’s what they teacht us in Babble class along with stuff about turnin the other cheek an all. An I may not be no saint but I sure as hell ain’t no hell-bound sinner.

Y’know they tells us here in the Wart House that we’s not ter cuss an call people no niggers an jewboys cuz it ain’t perlitickly correct an all. Well down where I come frum we’s teacht ter call a spade a spade an a hoe a hoe an ain’t both o’ them got nothin ter do with farmin. I tell yer it jess ain’t fair not ter let us do it when them bigwigs gets ter do it alla the time.

Why jess last week I wuz moppin up the floor outside o’ the evil office an I hear one o’ them holey add vizer fellas that the pres’dent brung with him all the way from Galveston or thereabouts talkin ter him about the dame they got runnin the Stay Department. Y’know the one they all call Doctor Ass. "Mistah Pres’dent" say this add vizer fella "why I don’t mean ter be no devil’s advo kate but that spade hoe better watch her mouth roun me. I ain’t got no truck with no spade hoes no how an she runnin off at the mouth about shit that ain’t none o’ her cooncern."

Now I ain’t sure about summa the other stuff he said cuz he use a lotta big words. But I sure as hell hear him call her them names an ain’t no mistakin it. It jess ain’t fair.

Yeah but this jaydee sho taste nice. Should I. Shouldn’ I. Should I. Shouldn’ I. Should I press this one here or that one they or this little piggy goin ter market or that little piggy stayin hic at home?

Theys a letter on the desk addrest ter the pres’dent from some guy call John Dutch or somethin cuz that the name at the bottom o’ the letter that I read. Say somethin about nuclear dit dit ditterents an how alla the Pennagone bunch best change they ideas about nukes cuz the way they goin about it ain’t gonna do nothin ’cept make a whole lotta countries wanna have more nukes an makin the chance o’ nuclear war a dead certainty cuz alla the hawks they got in uniform is in love with nukes. Whadduz he mean hawks. I thought they got generals up they in the Pennagone. Don’ tell me they went an made it into a hic bird sank cherry. Thass too bad. Thass jess tooooooo bad. Them generals use ter look reel nice in them uniforms.

Way I see it this Dutch fella tellin the pres’dent off an that ain’ right. He the pres’dent an yer can’t talk like that to the pres’dent. Speshly not this one. He a real standup guy an I can’t stand ter hear no bad things about him. He a good man. Why one time I was dustin the shelfs in the evil office an they wuz this hi falutin meetin with alla them generals an all. An they go quite an lookin at me like I’s stupid or somethin. Then the pres’dent says ter them don’t pay ole Joe no mind. He’s y’know special like. You can say annnnnny thang in frunner him an it won’t make no bit o’ difference. An I tell yer I felt so proud that day that my pres’dent trust me so much. Why they should put me in ter the secret service cuz I swear I’d take a bullet for the guy any ole day.

So I guess it alright if I’s here in the nuke room cuz the pres’dent trust me an I’s sure hic he won’t mind if I decide ter let off one o’ them nukes on one of our enemies. Cuz y’know he hic trust me. An he can’t do it hisself cuz o’ the me dear you dear problems he gonna have if he let one or two off. But I know he wanna do it cuz I hear him say so many times if only he cud nuke them sumbitches ter hell then all his problems be over. Anyway I’s retirin in two months an I’s already due fer my pension. Alla the me dear you dear problems don’t bother me none.

But which one which one which one ter blast in ter kingdom come like Father Johanssen use ter say. I guess it gotta be them damn hindoos in Packiss Tan. Them Eye-racky an Eye-ranny muzzlem terrorists is evil. I know cuz they did nine eleven. An them Coe Reen gooks is plain evil too. But Father Johanssen use ter tell me about them hindoos. Y’know they believes that the soul come back ter life in another body when they dies. An thass plain wrong. Jess plain wrong an I bet they all go straight ter hell fer believin it.

Theys a note here in the pres’dent han ritin says all Packiss Tannies is evil pay guns who can’t be hic trusted an don’ hic deserve ter live. Theys all a bunch o’ fundo mennerlist psychos that keeps fightin between theyselves alla the time an the whole damn cuntree gonna end soon anyway frum too much ker-rupshun. It also say the only god fearin one o’them wuz some chick call Miz Boo Toe an she dead so it ok if I blow the evil sumbitches ter hell. So here hic goes. One hic. Two hic. Three… Ka-boooooom!

Heyyyyy hic who that bangin on the door?

-----
Transliterated from the Georgian language by yours truly

Three Two Cheers For Democracy*

2008-03-25T00:10:00.007+04:00

a typically immature rant by moi

Hear, hear.

With an absolute lack of cynicism i’d like to wish Mr Gillani and the soon to be formed government of Pakistan a memorable term in office. (Memorable for the people that is, not for them.)

Perhaps the best thing that can be said (at this stage, as he has still to prove himself worthy of the post) of Mr Gillani’s election to the office of PM is that his winning means that the other candidate, Ch. Perv. Elahi, is not First Minister (no mere silver lining, imho).

Still, the optimism (thank God there is still some vestige of it left in me, i don’t know why or how) is tinged with a sense of oh-no-here-we-go-againism. For while the freshly minted PM subsequently mentioned the release of held judges, and “vowed to take efforts for the resolution of multiple problems of people,” neither of these were his first order of business.

No. In keeping with our “feudal” modello politico, as entrenched as it ever was, il nuovo primo ministro stated as his “first job” (his very first job, mind) the passing of “a resolution for UN probe into the assassination of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto.”

Now, despite my barely disguised dislike for the excessive feudalistic tendencies that have held democracy hostage all these years, and my suspicion of the motives of members of Pakistan’s First Family, i would be the first to acknowledge the need for an independent high-level enquiry into the death of Benazir Bhutto... for many reasons. Not least of which is the need to ascertain just how many hands were involved in the shocking murder of the former chairperson-for-life and her fellow party “members” as well as innocent bystanders. In a truly democratic system, any new government would push for the same, not just one formed by the PPP. But that is, at this juncture, a mere pipe dream.

My point is that, with “the multiple problems of people” (our new PM’s words), which are multiplying geometrically and not arithmetically, should not the first job of a new PM who is, along with his colleagues, touting the restoration of democracy be the adoption of a resolution strongly and categorically calling for a comprehensive solution to said problems?

Instead it is stated almost as an afterthought.
tisk tisk tisk [sic sic sic]
[Slow shaking of head, indicating a mixture of sadness and mild horror and a questioning of his contention of vestiges of optimism]

Thus it is with a heavy heart and just a mild dose of cynicism that i call upon the nation to join me in a ~~rousing~~ whimpering two cheers for the ~~restoration~~ recitation of democracy in Pakistan.

Hip hip hoary
Hip hop houri

---
* One cheer for a “resolution for UN probe into the assassination of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto,” and another for a “resolution to apologize to the nation for hanging of Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto.”

The canonisation deification of Shaheed Mohtarma. (About bloody time, if you arks me!)

2008-03-23T13:46:00.037+04:00

an unsponsored panegyric

The following item appeared [undated as usual] on the online version of The News:

The PPP finally nominated Makhdoom Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani for the prime ministerial slot.... [The] announcement... was made on behalf of Asif Ali Zardari by party spokesman Farhatullah Babar before the media outside the Zardari House. The statement read: “I have great pleasure in calling upon Makhdoom Yousuf Raza Gilani in the name of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto to accept the heavy responsibility and lead the coalition government and the nation to greater heights and a glorious future and Makhdoom Yousuf Raza Gilani is not afraid to lead and he knows the way.”

What struck me as odd was the invocation. Until a friend of mine (who insists on remaining nameless, as he is, to put it mildly, of dubious repute) pointed out that the printed version of the statement had probably read thus:

“I have great pleasure in calling upon Makhdoom Yousuf Raza Gilani in the name of ~~God~~ Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto to accept the heavy responsibility...”

i don’t know about you, but personally i’m ~~excited~~ ~~thrilled~~ ecstatic at witnessing these, the first tentative steps that are being taken towards the ultimate deification of Shaheed Chairperson-For-Life Benazir Bhutto, Inna Lillahe Wa Inna Ilaihe Rajeoon. She who tragically gave her life for the better future which none of us (not a one) deserves.

Our national pantheon is woefully sparse. More so since the fall from grace of Navab Viqar-ul-Mulk Imran Khan Niazi. As a nation of fallen ~~heroes~~ hairdos, i tell you we need all the deities we can get. And who is more worthy of insertion, through the ruins of the propylon, into that august assemblage? Thus i bend low and in a bondman’s key, with bated breath and whispering humbleness do supplicate myself before the awe-inspiring memory of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto, former Chairperson-For-Life of Demockery Magazine’s Most Democratically Run Party In The Known Universe (Including The Outer Reaches Of Gamma Quadrant).

Jiye Jamhuriyat, Jiye Bhutto, Jiye Bilawal, ~~Jiye Gilani~~.

’Tis a joy to witness, take to the streets, rejoice
Our Slain Sister not a Saint, but Goddess of our choice

---
cross posted up at Pak Tea House

¿jail to the chief?

2008-02-24T19:06:00.005+04:00

or as i said rather peevishly not a while back at pak tea house

the ONLY way i will ever consider respecting* the pee-pee-pee as a political party truly involved in the democratic process is when its members grow the balls (or feminine equivalent) to chuck ALL butthos (biological or marital) from the party high command and start developing a whole new set of secular (and not hereditary or “feudal”) leaders.

or as the song goes, “that’ll be the day-ay-ay when i sigh”

-----

* respecting, no less!

Don’t Look Back in Anger

2008-02-21T13:30:00.005+04:00

phew!
An election!
A General Election at that!
Not, however, a General’s Election. At least not to the extent that all of us priggish pettifoggers had predicted.

Shaheed Benazir and Ghazi Nawaz have won a significant (but perhaps not significant enough) majority of parliamentary seats. Apart from the terrifying spectre of sorry Brother Asif as First Minister, that’s a good thing, no? The King is dead. Long live the King!

So what are we, or rather they going to do now? Perhaps consult navigational charts to see what needs to be done to correct the direction of the ship of state? Yeah, right!

More likely stiffen their right index fingers with a heavy dose of 100mg Viagra and wag them at villains past. Wow! i can’t wait for the orgasmic catharsis of yet newly formed accountability bureaus to work their cleansing magic.

When are we going to stop looking back in anger? When are our poilticains [sic] going to stop basing their manifestos on the philosophy of rooting out evils past and start focusing on what needs to be done in the future?

The biggest problem, bar none, with military intervention in our affairs of state is that it has the effect of fucking up the electoral process to the extent that all anybody has to do to win an election is to promise the ouster of the military from the political sphere.

Ok.Then what???

i don’t hear anybody talking about “education of the masses” as a cure for our ills. About widening the tax net. About providing a safe, healthy economic environment as a way to nullify the lure of quasi-religious extremism.

The election is over. In my humble opinion those who boycotted it deserve to be consigned to some form of Dantean hell. Cos the only thing that will pull us out of the morass of political purgatory is the participation in the electoral process of all parties who wish to see democracy take root in Pakistan. This process will take ten, twenty, thirty years… if the process is allowed to continue unimpeded by our so-called uniformed saviours.

Having said that, i still retain warm feelings towards the erstwhile General. Don’t ask me why. i don’t know. Perhaps the result should speak for itself.

-----

cross posted up at Pak Tea House

w’allahi a’na aasif *

2008-01-23T12:12:00.000+04:00

I’m sorry for all the hearts I break
I’m sorry for all the tarts I make

I’m sorry for all the cream I skim
I’m sorry for all the quim I trim

I’m sorry for all the rear-ends I rip
I’m sorry for all the pee pee I drip

I’m sorry for all the colleagues I drop
I’m sorry for all the lackeys I whop

I’m sorry for all the avarice I show
I’m sorry for all the farts I let go

Sigh...

Oh Saeen, if only I weren’t
Such a terminally sorry specimen :(

(minos - january 2008)

-----

* translation: “By God, I’m sorry.”

Truce or Dare in a Haiku Vein Dept.

2007-12-08T11:58:00.000+04:00

Salute the white flag
Click your heels and face about
Then shoot the buggers

A great new watering hole

2007-12-01T14:08:00.000+04:00

So there’s this bright new spot on the blogospheric horizon, where (dare i say it) an eclectic bunch of literary and intellectual types hang out on their tea breaks, sharing with the rest of us their, mostly, profound thots on life, the universal truth, and everything (more or less) in between.

The online magazine is edited by amateur artist and professional blogmeister Raza Rumi of Jahane Rumi fame and is called Pak Tea House. Its mandate is to “endeavour to revive the culture of debate, pluralism and tolerance,” with “no pretensions nor illusions but the motivation of a few people who want to see Pakistan a better place - where ideas need to counter the forces of commercialism, adverse effects of globalisation and extremism,” which “translate into action that leads us to an equitable, just and healthy society.”

Now there’s a lofty ideal which could do with a whole lot more elevation. Do visit Pak Tea House and partake of the wide selection of de-lectable, mouth-watering de-lites on de-splay.

the vaguest traces of skipping reels of rhyme

2007-11-27T18:29:00.000+04:00

well, the ~~mew~~ new blog is up and running over at wordpress. it features some of my wold-famous shor-o-shairi [sic + sic], some of which you may have chosen not to read up here at the campfire, and some other stuff my long-suffering email recipients have pass-through’d straight into the trashcan or the spam-bin. it will, one hopes, also be the light of day first seen by newly minted poyum-shoyums in the not too distant future. that is, if i can find my flighty muse, who seems to have buggered off without leaving a forwarding address. (the slut.)

anyway, without further ado, i present poetry in notion. (that’s what al blooj al jadeed is called.)

er, you have to click on the link with your mouse pointer to get there. snapping your fingers and gutturally intoning chhu mantar chhu will not do the trick.

alabaster thighs and clandestine sighs

2007-11-24T18:25:00.000+04:00

oh mama! sit by me i won’t say a word
sing me lullabies you heard as a delicate child
in zorbing-like frames tainted lemony yellow
which you hated and wanted to paint bloody red

or ivory-white for to mourn the not-dead
like the sergeant-at-arms who’s aloof in me head
dying from under-exposure to big-bottled mona
who giv’im a boner in tite little jeanies

reminded of jean-y (a right little meeny)
she was always so teasingly pleasingly splayed
in front of the fireplace all toasted and cuddly
(s)pouting hubbily-bubble her dank incantations

not caring that he and the beautiful-she
had arrived in grand style at the governor’s ball
down the tubular hall bored by saintly de paul
for his bevy of heavily decked courtesans

the music as yet neither brash nor quintet
and the prancing dervaish unsprung from his cage
wound tight like a spring on this hot august night
dressed up like a sprite to her wood-nymphy pose

wants to giver her a rose in castilian style
on a flaming greek isle famed for levantine smiles
and forget not your mile-high caribbean dive
him piggy-back strapped to the hump on your back

light-hearted carousal through mid-morning air
consummated with care and lush grass underfoot
while your fantasies focused on little ol’ me
up to no blessed good on the ’orribly posh rue de guerre

(minos – november 2007)

Locksmiths Я Us in a Haiku Vein Dept.

2007-11-20T12:14:00.000+04:00

Generals hold the key
you and i are locks of hair
roughly brushed aside

Scary!(for us or for them?)

2007-11-19T13:19:00.000+04:00

For just the tiniest of glimpses at the kind of behind-the-scenes tactical and strategic planning which takes place at American think tanks, you might want to read the op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times, Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem, by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution.

They start by scaring the huggoo right out of righteous god-fearing Americans: “As the government of Pakistan totters, we must face a fact: the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss.... We need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that.” Though they do go on to say (bless their little hearts), "We do not intend to be fear mongers.”

Some choice titbits before dinner, m’ludd:

“...unless we had precise information about the location of all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and materials, we could not rely on bombing or using Special Forces to destroy them.”

·····

“One possible plan would be a Special Forces operation with the limited goal of preventing Pakistan’s nuclear materials and warheads from getting into the wrong hands.... Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place. For the United States, the safest bet would be shipping the material to someplace like New Mexico...”

·····

“So, if we got a large number of troops into the country, what would they do? The most likely directive would be to help Pakistan’s military and security forces hold the country’s center...”

·····

“There was a time when volatility in places like Pakistan was mostly a humanitarian worry; today it is as much a threat to our basic security as Soviet tanks once were. We must be militarily and diplomatically prepared to keep ourselves safe in such a world. Pakistan may be the next big test.”

····················

Do you think they move about coloured pieces on a giant Risk board in their merry little kriegspielen?

(Thanks to the mysterious chapati for the link to the quoted article.)

One Cop Per Dictator, Please

2007-11-17T13:26:00.000+04:00

Or is that “One Cup Per Dictator?” My spell-checker offered me the first alternative, while Google suggested the second. (My spell-checker has not, it seems, heard of coups, though it is familiar with the term “cooze.”). (Go figure.) Personally, i think Pakistan’s street-cred-smart protestors probably mean the latter. Having myself, in younger, goofier days, imbibed (i won’t say “enjoyed” cos i don’t think that’s possible) the ~~nectar~~ ~~neck-tie~~ noose that is the kuppi of 190-proof surgical spirit (sold in plastic bottles which should come with a menacing skull and crossbone-motif warning) i can tell you that more than one cup can seriously fuck with your mental, physical and spiritual well-being. Even if you are a kun-toot-ta dictator.

Amidst all the hoopla, and the euphoria generated by fervent sloganeering, i ask myself, “whither grass roots activism?” (No, i’m NOT trying to incite the youth of Pakistan into getting stonked and swaying disco-deevana style to a rock-steady dhol beat.) The only grass roots protestations in the country have been coming from Laskhar-e-Vahab legions. Roundly pilloried by “rational” elements of society, they are, nevertheless more in tune with the sentiments of the majority of Pakistanis (who still, believe it or not, live outside Karachi and Lahore). That these sentiments are the result of an environment which shrouds in darkness the minds of the people, an atmosphere which needs to be (forcibly?) changed, is true. i do subscribe to that view, though not about forcibly doing so. The last thing we need is an even heavier backlash from misguided fundamentalism.

On the other hand, the wave of libertarianism wafting (though hardly sweeping) across the campuses of educational institutions across the country bodes well for the future of ideologically motivated popular uprisings of the non-denominational kind. Hopefully, the expression of discontentment by the youth of more affluent segments of society will filter its way up [sic] the social ladder, as more people realise that the results of such protests cannot be measured in the short-term.

The fact of the matter is that the situation in Pakistan is waaaay too complex to be summarised in a few pithy bullet points which can then be passed off as a political manifesto. One of the problems with the continuous de-railing of the democratic process is that our political leaders end up banding together in acronymically chantable alliances which bring together that motley crew in a hypocritical show of solidarity. Instead of electioneering on the basis of a particular ideology, what they then fight for is the (ho hum) restoration of demockery. Which means, in a nutshell, to the winner go the spoils.

The older i get, the more i feel that what we need in Pakistan, more than anything (apart from universal access to education), is to produce thinkers who can develop socio-political philosophies relevant to us and not U.S.

We have no model of our own, just the rotting carcass of Anglo-Saxon imperial tradition – which seemed to serve us well in our nation’s infancy, but really locked us, at the outset, into the Romano-Hellenic tradition (in and of itself, not such a bad thing). Myself belonging to Macaulay’s “class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” it is still difficult for me not to fall back on my post-colonial upbringing. The conditioned response is to benchmark everything to “what do people in the wilayat do, hein-ji?” East is Beast, but Vest is Best, no?

Following in the footsteps of imperial tradition is the framework curretly underpinning Western civilisation; the rational, socially-aware, politically-correct philosophy based on the principles of reason. Having taken hold in an organic process spanning centuries of ideological development, this framework is fine for a civilisation which has been able to overhaul its traditions on a regular basis and has shed for the most part its instinctive reliance on divine guidance.

Not so fine when roundly forced into the square peg of our own Indo-Islamic identity.

Currently the ideological lines are drawn between followers of the Western-rational approach and those who subscribe to the atavistic phantasmagorical vision of Islam as a hacker-off of heads, shoulders, knees and toes, brewed in rusty cauldrons during darker ages. One set of frustrated youth – drunk on this unholy brew quaffed out of dust-encrusted jeroboams brought up from the dingy cellars of quasi-religious halfway houses – dance unholy jigs on the grave of benevolent Islam, which respected the whole of humanity as a heteregenous group with many common goals and (would you believe) subscribed to the philosophy of agreeing to disagree.

Another (smaller) set of frustrated youth take to the streets waving banners transcribed in a semi-foreign tongue. Whom do these banners address with their eloquence? Oppresed masses? Perpetrators of said oppression? An “international” media which will spread the word to pious upholders of democratic principles who may righteously intervene on our behalf?

Ah, but it seems to be working. That renowned champion of democracy the world over, Mr Jhon Negroponte, is currently visiting Pakistan (perhaps prompted by the banners flashed on CNN et al) to rap General Musharraf on the knuckles and insist that he stop being a naughty boy and start behaving in more democratic fashion. i have been holding my breath since i heard this heart-warming piece of news. My (overly cynical) doctor tells me that i’m in danger of turning permanently blue in the face.

The majority of Pakistanis are practising (in the commonly accepted sense of the the term) Muslims. Any viable political solution to our myriad problems must take into account this fact (however hard it is for Western-oriented liberals to stomach). That is not to say that the desirable solution should be based on Shariah-compliancy. Just that the aspirations, as well as the collective state of mind of this majority need to be addressed, along with the interests of those who are non-Muslim, either by birth or inclination.

The Umpire Strikes Back Out

2007-11-15T00:02:00.000+04:00

Dawn was breaking wind on a warm and sultry day as Oberfeldwebel Darren Broz Parsnip hitched up his elastic-waisted baggy chartreuse dhoti and smoothed the front of his pink and lilac striped Markuri ka banyan. He took one final look in the mirror to make sure the war paint had been applied according to the detailed instructions printed on the back of his favourite box of cereal, before giving his six-foot tall, three-hundred-pound frame a delicate twirl, careful to support his impressive belly in baseball glove-like hands.

Satisfied (if not entirely happy) with what he saw, Oberfeldwebel Parsnip waltzed out of his wallaby-dung reinforced Nissen hut with a song on his lips and a rictus grin adorning his alabaster face: for today was the day he was going to sue the abdominal guards off those pansy, Kaffir-luvvin honchos of the Interdenominational Croquet and Curry Confessional – led by The Traitor, Milksop Spud – and once and for all wipe the silly-ass grin off the face of that inarticulate Saracen, Mahomet Ebd El Kudos Bin Zaman Khan, known to all the world as Maulana Miskey, and to his friends and admirers as, simply, Bin Zaman.

Certainly, it would not be as satisfying a victory as the one he had for years been unsuccessfully plotting against that limp-wristed Moor, Ali Darren (o why o why did he have to share a name with that double-tapping cheat), but hell, all those curry-munching triple-chocolate brownies looked the same, didn’t they? And one brownie down was as good as another brownie down, wasn’t it? Well, he thought so anyway. One at a time, mate, one at a time.

His head was buzzing with all these profound thoughts. So much so that he almost forgot to remove his slippers before climbing aboard his turbocharged bullock cart. Taking a moment to settle comfortably into the hay-lined driver’s bucket seat, Oberfeldwebel Parsnip put the key into the ignition, which involved inserting a callused big-toe up the bullock’s “exhaust” and giving it a determined twist. As always, this activated the vehicle’s powerful turbocharger and the cart set off with a jerk, quickly reaching a pace of thirty yards per minute.

Some twenty minutes later, once he had caught his breath and got used to this breakneck speed, Oberfeldwebel Parsnip resumed his croquettish musings. Those fabulously grand testicular-matches were in danger of dying an unnatural death if that beastly Backyard Croquet nonsense was allowed by the I.C.C.C. to flourish. Granted it got the public at large involved in the sport, but to his mind it just wan’t croquet.

But then the horrible realisation that he might never again umpire an interdenominational croquet match hit him square in the face. Suddenly the fact of the decline of the magisterial sport of croquet didn’t seem quite so important. The case, the case, the case was the thing. And by Gad he’d win it if it entailed having to shimmy semi-nude under the fullmoonlight for the prurient pleasure of Doctor of Spin, Shame Vaughan and his bevy of heavily made-up two-hundred pound Sports Balustraded bathing beauties. Come to think of it, he’d do that regardless of its effect on the outcome of his court case; Shame Vaughan’s homely beach beauties were the only humanoids he knew of who could put the lead back into the old 2B. Well, almost.

The sun was inching its way higher, and he was still a good three thousand yards away from the village courthouse. Commanding the compliant bullock to engage auto pilot, Oberfeldwebel Parsnip decided to take a short nap so that he would be fighting fit by the time he arrived. As he drifted off to sleep, however, the key slipped out of the ignition. Thus, soon after he’d dozed off, the turbocharged cart had ground to a complete halt.

Over by the courthouse steps, Parsnip’s lead counsel, Bubba Gryffindor, was in animated conversation with I.C.C.C. Head Honcho Spud and his lawyer Beat-Cycle Korsakoff. Things had been going well. Gryffindor had already got them to admit, off the record, that they had been wrong to deny Parsnip bathing rights in the village nala. But it was nearing time for the court proceedings to begin for the day, and there was as yet no sign of Parsnip. Gryffindor could feel the beads of sweat crawling down his spine and he thought furiously of ways to postpone the proceedings until his client showed up.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, a bright yellow light bulb lit up a few inches above his untonsured head. Inside it could be seen the cover of Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It For The Money, an album that Gryffindor had heard many a time as a young lad, without being able to decipher the lyrics, while perched uncomfortably upon what he had been told was his sugar daddy’s left leg (s.daddy’s right leg had been the victim of a “war injury”). Gryffindor laid out for Spud and Korsakoff a simple but effective win-win plan for allowing everyone involved to save face. Beleaguered, and embarrassed by the way they had treated Parsnip, the I.C.C.C. management readily accepted Gryffindor’s plan.

Thus, when Oberfeldwebel Parsnip finally hove in sight, huffing and puffing along on his own stubby legs, cursing the entire bovine species in words of two and four syllables, he was greeted by the sight of a bright and colourful hand-painted banner which read,

At the sight of this Parsnip is said to have fallen to his knees weeping. It is not certain whether out of joy, or from fear of having to reveal details of an embarrassing bodily dysfunction which would prevent him from performing acts customarily required in order to initiate the process by which you can give someone your own babies.

Whatever the reason, Parsnip was obviously so overwhelmed by the sentiments expressed by I.C.C.C. officials that he promptly withdrew his case and disappeared into the undergrowth. He was never heard from again, except one Walpurgisnacht an octogenarian goatherd claimed to have seen him dancing wildly in a pink and lilac tutu on top of Mount Sillyminjaro.

And the shy, retiring Maulana Miskey, urf Bin Zaman, lived happily ever after, tending billy goats gruff destined for holy slaughter during the festive season.

Note: this piece can also be read up on my wordpress blog

sibling revelry

2007-11-14T09:36:00.000+04:00

my (not so) little brudda’s band kicking up a right ol’ dhamaal, with dhol demigod pappu saeen and sidekick in attendance.

hassan is the one playing the various hand percussion instruments (he looks so cool, no?). he’s now taken up the tabla, and has just returned from a second four-week stint in jullundher city (yup, the one made famous all those years ago by that raggamuffin, apache indian who, in addition, has done more for raising the profile of the divine jalebi than anyone i know), where he (hassan, not the don raja) has been shagirdofying with an ustad of (i’m told) much repute.

he’s been threatening to descend on the cultural capital (punishment) of the world (that would be duh buy, judge saab). sadly these have been idle threats thus far. kids and better-half and i wait with bated breath. (much-much lost time to make up for.) ’twould be nice too if the antipodean contingent (phish and crew) of our terminally dysfunctional clan could wing their way in from sunny mal born, to make it a right ol’ réunion island kind of deal.

for those of you who don’t know, the fourth sibling in our crazy li’l mixed-up muddled-up mix is my elder brudda in isloo-shareef, and the fifth is li’l-sis. (trust me, you don’t wanna know how li’l.)

Suspension of this “Belief” thingy

2007-11-08T10:45:00.001+04:00

Found this evocative picture hung up on the walls of the resurgent Zakintosh blog:

I suppose we should be thankful that this sheaf of loosely-bound sheets of toilet paper we call a Constitution (often with a capital see) has simply been suspended and not hung by the goolies until permanently Viagra-proof. Though perhaps at this stage we shouldn't be putting ideas into the head of that constitutionally constipated occupant of the ~~Peacock~~ Toilet Throne, Maharaja Jarnail Singh urf ~~Paaji Puttsun~~ Peiji Badshah.

Addressing the state of the onion

2007-11-07T13:51:00.000+04:00

something i wrote half a ~~century~~ year ago, and which I've dredged up from the labyrinthine sewers of my personal archives to show y'all how prescient I can be (in hindsight).

Suddenly we felt alive
as the veil of lassitude
circumscribing our manifest destinies
all this while
was lifted off and cast aside
by an unseen hand, which some few
imagined to be divine, wearing rings of
pure gold adorned with sapphires
and emeralds and rubies and
crafted by the finest artisans, while others
less devout suspected the hand of the
fiendish blue-eyed courtesan
who dances round the graves of
unwed mothers on moonless nights

The rest of us didn't give a toss,
caught up in the moment,
hugging and kissing,
jumping up and down
and twirling and whirling and turning
cartwheels in the sweet-smelling air,
chattering away incessantly
on orgasmically multifunctional
cellular phones, till we were overcome
by our newfound sense of vitality
and fell in to loose military formation
on an unheard command
to watch, ba-jamaat, a million
high-definition plasma tvs displaying
a million and one tv channels broadcasting
in tongues alien and native

Breathing heavy from the exertion
and the excitement, yet
smiling gaily, weighing our options
now that life was restored and
stunning vistas visible to the native eye
beckoned coquettishly, too busy
all the while to notice the veil
that fell silently upon us once more
and we were, once more, to be counted
among the living dead

(minos - march 2007)

The Thing With Feathers in a Haiku Vein Dept.

2007-11-06T08:29:00.000+04:00

Idolatrous world!
Hope is a four-letter word,
and ideals old hat

avam ka naya naara(amitabh ke andaaz mein)“haanh! mujhe bai-ghairat kahobai-ghairat kahobai-ghairat kaho”

2007-11-05T18:05:00.000+04:00

Well, the kid gloves are finally off. The smiley mask, too, is slowly being dissolved by the vitriol oozing out of dilated facial pores. Dear Leader San, sans Chaplinesque mustache, stands before us in all his pint-sized totalitarian glory. A strongman-the-laaltein for our weird and wonderful times. A Sodomise-’em Hussein in the making. Der Führer Redux in khaki, whom we should face with right arms raised in reverent salutes, chanting Sieg Heil (or else crawl back into our little foxholes and go back to sleep).

A telling facet of Act Sixty-One of the melodrama that is Pakistan is that (almost on cue) everyone’s started pointing fingers accusingly at those individuals, groups, peoples who are despised, without anyone in any way being concerned about a viable long-term solution to yet another fine mess we find ourselves in. This is certainly not News. In fact, spouting knee-jerk accusations when frustrated is an intergral part of our national character (insofar as we as a nation have any character to boast of).

Let me say, right now, that I’m not in favour of modern Western-style democracy being thrust, willy-nilly, upon us. Democracy is not a result which can be achieved by the application of precise mathematical formulae. It is not an exact science. And equitable democracy can only be achieved by the development of theories and philosophies which are relevant to the particular set of socio-cultural circumstances which define us -- now and in the future.

Nevertheless, I believe that only a democratic form of government can, in the long run, bring about a society which provides liberty, justice and (pardon the cliche) human rights for all. The tragedy is that we have not developed a single philosophy which addresses the issue of democratic government for us. This is partly because we have precious few philosophers, and partly because we are too lazy to do anything other than apply to ourselves political philosophies which are either foreign to our nature, or which end up benefitting only a small segment of society.

(Then again, perhaps we are too bai-ghairat to ever struggle hard enough to achieve it.)

On the other hand, while I am horrified (eek, a mouse!) by the draconian steps taken by Der Führer and his cabal of shadowy henchmen, perhaps this is the kind of electric-shock-therapy-up-the-backside we need to jolt us into unified action (and I don’t mean of the ARD/MRD/IJI/MMA/PNA alliance of the cut-throat vagabond variety). For, until we as a people shed our apathy in the face of rampant kleptocratic cronyism, we deserve to be crapped upon like this. Again and again and again.

Why Benazir must stay

2007-10-28T00:14:00.000+04:00

I started writing this as a comment to a post by blogmeister Ali Eteraz in which he tries to explain why he is (reluctantly) for Miz Buttho. In it he quotes an Irfan Hussain article in Dawn in which Hussain urges people to support the, er... lady.

I myself am, to put it mildly, not a supporter of Benazir Buttho. The woman has no character, no vision, no political savvy, no concern for the well being of the people of Pakistan, and absolutely no morals or scruples.

Nevertheless I am convinced (though I say it with a heavy heart) that she (and consequently her party, which, as it stands is synonymous with her family name) are at present an essential component of the democratic process. This is because the pee-pee-pee is one of the largest and most organised parties in the country, and is currently the only party that has the potential to lead the country back onto the path of, er... democracy.

I have no illusions about her ability to bring about positive change to the condition of the common man. If elected she will pursue, broadly speaking, the same self-serving policy she (and others) have pursued in the past (oh god I hope I hope I hope I’m wrong). My support for her involvement in the forthcoming elections is based on the hope (based on what, I don’t know) that once elected she can somehow manage to bring about a situation where so-called democracy is allowed to continue without military intervention for twenty or thirty or forty years (pipe dream!). So that leaders with integrity and vision are thrown up and enter the fray to wrest the reins of government and policy from the likes of evil, money-grubbing politicians like Benazir and Mian Nawaz.

In the same vein, Nawaz Sharif too must be allowed to return.

The premise of Irfan Hussain’s article is that the pee-pee-pee is the only party capable of halting the “Talibanisation” (as it is being called) of Pakistan. Perhaps. That is a worthwhile objective. But it should not be the only objective. Whatever happened to democracy’s fundamental objectives of equal opportunity, justice for all and universal human rights? Just because we apply democracy as enshrined in the Western canon upon ourselves, it doesn’t mean we must apply it solely to suit Western interests.

What about our interests?

I also take exception to Hussain’s assertion that, “now, she has come out strongly in her condemnation of extremism and terrorism in the name of religion, and should therefore be supported by all those who fear this virulent modern disease.” Why are we bound to believe that she will stand by this statement simply because she has made it? Can we believe any politician in Pakistan, a country in which standing by one’s pre-election rhetoric is the least of a successful candidate’s concerns? And anyway, is this the only “virulent modern disease” we want to eradicate through democracy?

Hussain ends his piece by asking, “Is this the sort of Pakistan we want to live in?” And the answer that I’m sure a significant number of Pakistanis will proffer is a categorical “No!”

But he may well ask, “Do we want to live in the sort of Pakistan that Benazir ruled over in either of her two previous terms?” I really wonder how many Pakistanis would say “Yes!”

Hocus-pocus in a Haiku Vein Dept.

2007-10-27T14:45:00.001+04:00

Thirty year old Scotch
daughter raping impure land
Zulfi's legacy

__________________

Updated version, Jan 2012:

Thirty year old Scotch

husband raping impure land

BB's legacy

Reclaiming Karachi

2007-10-27T00:53:00.000+04:00

Up on the website of The Second Floor, an upmarket watering hole housed in one of Karachi's not so underprivileged districts, and with what seems dangerously like a social conscience, is a poster advertising

“Karachi is in the grip of violence and terror,” it states. “As citizens and stakeholders, we have decided to raise hell and make a nuisance of ourselves. What we are aiming to do is express our outrage and let our leaders know that we’ve had enough. Join us in our struggle to reclaim our city of lights.”

The campaign is to take the form of a one week peaceful protest starting on Ocober 29, with participants asked to wear black armbands and attend a peaceful rally at the Karachi Press Club next Saturday.

Now my first (typically cynical) thought was, “What difference are 27 English-medium coffeehouse afficionados, peacefully chanting We Shall Overcome, going to make to the situation in a city of over 15 million mainly-Urdu speaking people?”

But then two things struck me. Firstly, what the hell am I doing to help matters? Hell, I've even forsaken the town of my birth - perhaps forever :( At least, while I'm sitting on my expanding ass doing nothing in another goddam country, these guys are concerned enough to want to do something, and are going out and doing it.

The second thing that occurred to me was that if a change is to come in Karachi, a change for the better, for peace, then this is how it must begin. Through peaceful means. And gradually. Karachi is burning – literally and figuratively has been for decades now. But rabid, flash in the pan type protests will achieve nothing. Have achieved nothing in the past. Angry rhetoric and threats and expressions of violence may be superficially cathartic, but will only fan flames already way out of control.

To gain lasting peace in Karachi peaceful means need to be adopted. To achieve the unachievable the very pulse of the city must resonate with the desire to banish forever the demon of internecine feuding: one by one by one the people of Karachi, coming together in peace to reject the purveyors of civil war. It will be a slow process, one that requires all to be patient, to have a clear objective, to not waver from the desire to create an environment where children can grow up without fear, without hatred, and with hope.

A pipe dream? Quite possibly. But what other choice is there?

Vote for Pakistan Peepul Par-tree – it sways with the prevailing wind

2007-10-24T13:21:00.000+04:00

Reading about the reactions of people following the triumphant but ultimately sad return of our very own ~~prodigal~~ prodigious daughter in the least, a parable suggests itself:

--------------------

Sometime in the not too distant future, the Pakistan cricket team had been suffering a slew of defeats, barely averaging one win per ten games played. The line-up was being chopped and changed constantly, captains appointed, discarded, re-appointed, and a revolving doorway had finally been installed at the office of the PCB cos they changed chairpersons so damned often.

Cricket being the national pastime, the media was up in arms, and public sentiment was at an all-time low.

The burning question of the day was, of course, what can we do to make our team winners again, or, at the very least rid ourselves of the shameful title of “minnows” which was increasingly being applied to the team?

Of the great team of the previous decade, only one man survived, Sahibzada Mohammed Khalid Khan Yusufzai, now in his late thirties. Despite having been a key member of the team for over 20 years, the Sahibzada had never been made captain. Naturally he felt that this was unfair, since everybody and their uncle’s dog had held the position. Nevertheless he remained silent, cos he didn’t want to experience the heartache of being formally turned down.

Into the team debuted one Nigel Gul Niazi, son of one of Pakistan’s greatest ever cricketers, Nawab Kamran Gul Niazi. At twenty, Nigel Gul was relatively mature for his debut. This was becuase his father, the illustrious Great Gul, was reluctant to allow his son to enter the fray without gaining the right physical and mental prowess required to excel in the highest form of the sport.

As it transpired, young Nigel Gul was, to put it mildly, a pathetic cricketer. His shot range was limited, shot selection poor, and he never averaged under 68 with the ball. He was, however, the son and heir of the magnificent Gul of yore. So six weeks after his debut, Nigel (who had studied for a while at the Slade School of Fine Art, and had spent a summer working for the Bujumbura office of reputed firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn as an apprentice typesetter – perfect experience for launching a campaign) decided to throw his hat into the captain’s ring – for the good of the game of course.

His minimalist campaign consisted of the slogan, “I am the son of Kamran Gul, therefore I deserve to be appointed captain of Pakistan,” splashed across banners and posters showing Gul Jr hooking a short pitched ball for eight (the ICC had been busy these past few years).

Within six days of the launch of the campaign, thirty-three million people had come out in cities, towns, villages and effluent nalas, demanding that Nigel be appointed captain, and on the seventh day the President of Pakistan (aka Patron in Chief of the PCB) capitulated, and introduced the lad as the new skipper of the team. The only proviso was that young Master Nigel would have to accept Sahibzada Yusufzai as his deputy. Which, of course, he did without protest.

The rest of course will be history in times to come, because naturally the fact that the boy was the son of the greatest cricketer of his time meant that he (and the nation as a whole) would triumph. Especially as he was able to convince the world at large that a full 33 million people had come out onto the streets in his support.

--------------------

With that soul-uplifting tale, my soul is so uplifted that i am leaving the house right bloody now to vote for PPP. Mohtarma Benazir Buttho is the daughter of Lategreat Shaheed Zulafkaar Ali Bhutto. Therefore I must vote for her. And so should you, and you, and you, if you have any self respect (or dreams).

Mad Magazine's Don Martin

2007-10-24T01:07:00.000+04:00

after reading this post down a hollow to a cavern, i realised how long it had been since i had had a don martin fix. unfortunately a search for strips drawn by the most brilliant cartoonist of the most irreverent magazine in history (that would be mad magazine, not esquire!) did not prove very fruitful, but i did manage to find the dynamic duo of fester bestertester (on the right) and his erudite sidekick karbunkle. ah, the mem'ries.

Hanh mein Musa, hanh Firaun

2007-10-22T13:14:00.000+04:00

What happened on the night of Thursday, October 18 is a tragedy on so many levels, both personal and social. (I mean the bomb blast, not The Return of The Queen to The Misty Mountains.)

Without trying to take anything away from the enormity or horror of the attack, it is not, however, a tragedy on a political level. If anything, this should end up strengthening the resolve of people who want to see democracy in Pakistan (or at the very least, some kind of major socio-political change). And, in the context of the shaky uncapitalised movement to restore democracy, this is surely a good thing.

One of the biggest fallouts of the perpetual cycle of military rule (and the consequent strengthening of Talibanesque groups) is that the people have become so fed up with the current status quo that Pious, Sincere, Crusading Champeens of Democratic Principles like H.M. Mohtarma Benazir Zardari, née Buttho, assume the status of demigods, further strengthening their respective cults of politico-celebrityhood.

If Pakistanis had been given ten commandments by the Almighty, might not the eleventh have been:

Thou Shalt Elect To The Nation’s Highest Office Any and All Descendants of Pir Szab† of Garhi Khuda Baksh For The Next Seventeen Generations Or Until They Adopt Foreign Nationality and Give Up Their Pakistani Citizenship.

†Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto

As Her Majesty is the sitting gaddi-nasheen of the House of Bhutto, all must vote for Mohtarma. And then all must vote for her children and, after that (why not?) even any children that Viqar-ul-Mulk Asif Ali Bhutto, né Zardari, sires from future spouses. Man, this selection of election choices just became so damn easy.

In the overall scheme of things, the election of any one of the usual suspects at this stage seems to be the only way to bring us back to a state of democracy. And if, by some quirk of fate, democracy is allowed to continue unhindered for ten or twenty or thirty years, there is a glimmer of a hope that we might actually end up with visionary leaders and become transfomed into citizens of a truly democratic nation with liberty and (fingers crossed) justice for all. Without going into the need for us to develop our own set of guiding political principles and methods of statecraft (rather than trying to apply foreign standards of socio-political behaviour – standards which were developed over centuries in the Occident by Occidental thinkers and writers and statesmen for the Occident) that is a consummation devoutly to be wished, no?

I just hope (which, would you believe, yet springs eternal) that we can keep in perspective the character and track record of political *leaders* who purport to have the interest of the people (and only the interest of the people) at heart – and, at the very least, hold them to higher (much much higher) standards of moral behaviour than they have displayed thus far; that is the key to sustainable democracy, not the prostrating of ourselves before the modern version of feudal lords and ladies who come to us in the guise of heroic national saviours.

Meanwhile, hundreds of budding poets laureate are rumoured to be slaving away, in candlelit hovels, penning chansons de geste in Her Majesty’s shaan.

The smell of damp earth after a heavy shower

2007-10-21T14:09:00.000+04:00

S’good to be back home, lying
in unfamiliar beds at dawn in the old
familial town, waking peacefully from sweet
dreams to the lilting tune of happy sparrows.

My clan, jing bang lot of us, buggered off
a long time ago. Westward Ho! All except for
Pinky bhai, conducting biodynamic farming
experiments in the vicinity of Outer Mongolia.

And Munni baji, who never left
and whose three blue-eyed sons sell
right-hand drive cars to overweight Sardars
and underwhelmed mondaines in the
quaint English town of Leighton Buzzard.

Every year they send her a solitary merry-merry
Christmas card with a short, impersonal message in
badly transcribed Urdu. She tapes it
to the teak-framed looking glass in her vast
mock-Tudor bathroom, keeping it for a whole year,
then torching it on a bonfire of flimsy matches
when the next one arrives. She asked if

I understood the significance of this and I,
in no mood to comfort her if she broke down,
languidly opened one lazy eye, nodded sagely,
and consummately intoned, “I do,”
before nodding off contentedly under
an undulating chuppah.

So long since I tuned in to the sound of
birds chirping. There are no birds where I live,
none that you can hear anyway. Not even
on the Sabbath, that short and very weak end
to the slavey cycle, spent productively
curled up in microscopic backland lodgings,
foetally, spatiopetally, past azaan
and through khutba, half awake and searching
for signs that the natives are
getting restless, wondering how many minor
accidents have occurred since last night.

Dear, dear God, I pray it rains all day
today, tomorrow,
the day after, and the day after that.
Rains so long my flight is cancelled
and I never
ever
go back

(minos - november 2006)

A toast to free speech

2007-09-29T15:14:00.000+04:00

Personally I can't understand what all the fuss is about Irani President Mahmood Ahmadinejad's tour of Amreeka, and the acerbic way in which Columbia University President Monseigneur Veuve Clicquot introduced him to the students and faculty members of the university. I mean what's the point of being a superpower if your white-hatted cowboys can't ride roughshod over the leader of an openly acknowlewdged pagan enemy state whom you have for months been threatening to attack militarily. I tell you, this bleeding heart liberalism will be the death of Yankee supremacy yet.

What could the Irani president say but

In Iran, when you invite a guest, you respect them

I hope that, when Pakistan finally becomes the world superpower it has always deserved to be, our political and opinion leaders will have the bollocks to make such statements to representatives of our own national enemies.

Oil for Food Fools Programme

2007-09-20T00:24:00.000+04:00

Be afraid. Be very afraid.
And have a bit of a laugh while your having the pants scared off you.
Here's a video clip of a piece of stand-up that may have you running the gamut of emotions from Ay to ~~Bee~~ See:

Robert Newman's History of Oil
Quinge.com - Thursday, 20 September 2007

It's long (very long by the standards of current online attention spans), but if you can spare three quarters of an hour you might find the time well spent. This comedian (of whom I've not heard before) synthsises much of what has been talked about regarding oil, U.S. policy in the Middle East, and the impending energy/resource crisis into a funny monologue that will send shivers down your spine.

Brilliant stuff.

Shazam!and the Harlot of Haifa

2007-09-12T17:22:00.000+04:00

a poacher and his daughter were seen stepping to the road, trying to flag a ride, any ride that led out of there, anywhere but there at the crossroads ---------- in the backdrop (if you care to listen) hums the unmistakable hum of Bananaman! and his faithful flycatchers, floop as they swoop down on an enemy outpost... formation-perfect... picture-perfect... rehearsed a hundred times and a hundred times again, for seventy-two million people to display as wallpaper or funky avatar for the next couple of weeks (on their iPhones even).

catch a fire, or the crest of a wandering knave and maybe you'll keep up with Bananaman!

tucked in close to Bananaman!s slipstream are his principal wingmen:
·fg/off· aldershott
(of the nineteenth nervous longshott squadron), and
·captain· indiana goldshit
(on secondment from the “kamikazes ’r us” wing)
wide-eyed as they wait to catch and relay the signal that Bananaman! (banana held like a baton at a mozart recital) is animatedly poised to give.

down below, protective cocktail umbrellas at the ready (as they've learnt over the course of more than a few air-raid drills, simulations and actual attacks) a flock and then some of vulture-like residents crouch in anticipation of couch's malodorous assault on sensibilites quaint only in name. hallelujah! a battle cry ever ready and at the ready. havoc in haifa, nor peace in (neither) ram/allah. (you're my guitar hero joe strummer!)

afterwards Bananaman! and some of his ~~bum~~ bosom buddies are slated to stop by for a celebratory drink (including complimentary welcome kiss) at madame hanaifa's world famous haifa meat-mart for the well-dressed bird about town.

damn the torpedoes and the drums. no banning of the bums. can't fake it no more, can't shake it fer sure, all those dozens of fables adrift by the shore, short on narrative, tall on call to the elegantly balled-up shawl carried under the shoulder over a strapless number, perfect for the rhumba, the jive even. gran’daddy drove his old humber through virginal fields of vaginal willow, always carried his pillow, sort of like linus, once caught those pesky little snoops doggy-dogging on the back of purty miss peggy-o, all dolled up with somewhere to go (i just wish somebody would tell me where).
i'll tell you if you let me.
do it.
pref without a blush,
on the part of either party,
cos it like messes with the masher's mashers, and if yer wonderin how in hell he got that name, well he always wanted to fly a messerschmitt one hundred and something.

Easy Meat

2007-09-10T19:00:00.000+04:00

she’s a perfect six
not in need of a fix
(make’s a change) the kind
you hope will hang about
drinkalot
tick tock talk talk talk
lol around and guffaw affording
each other sneaky peeks and the odd
preview
not an air
nor the faintest grace that
you or maulana furball or
madame masàla might object to
so expect mother nature to call
unannounced and have her way with me
soon

(minos - september 2007)

Shazam! (or) Keeping the bloody tourists at bay

2007-09-10T15:33:00.001+04:00

You see here some of the terror-cotta suspects detained at The British Museum last week by an intercontinental consortium of krime-fightin, butt-kickin, evil-kreamin anti-terror krusaders led by Ben “The Thing” Grimm and Bananaman! (krime-fightin, butt-kickin, etc etc, alter ego of Lance Corporal T.E. Blair, of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment). Weapons of mass destruction, in the form of two peashooters, an expired dildo, and seven bags of Atomic Fireball candy, were seized and sent to Dexter's Laboratory for detailed analysis.

Neither superhero was available for comment. Mr Grimm wandered off in search of an all-you-can-eat hot dog stand, while Bananaman! had to bugger off for his summit meeting with the Whore of Babylon and her Emmy Award winning twin sister, the Harlot of Haifa.

This from someone sounding frightfully, but not frighteningly, like Spike Milligan casually reciting a dirge in the town of his birth:

“The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear.”

The quote is sometimes attributed to (Group?) Captain Marvel, while others cite an ancient German source titled Heinrich Himmler.

er... which ones are the terrorists again?

tarantula at warp factor five

2007-09-06T16:25:00.000+04:00

saw this brilliant poster on a random trawl through space, quaffing jelly tots like they were going out of style in sunny but cool johannesburg, which at 6000 feet high is an apt metaphor for this smooth ride i'm on. they're going to let me off soon.

saw bourne ultimatum the other night. dozed through much of it, due as much to the upsetting of my sleepy-cycle as attempts on my neurophysioligical thingummy. thinema tickets are cheaper here and smashing pumpkins look cheaper here. and that's got nothing to do with getting a taste of windhoek all the way in joburg.

and wouldja believe, i saw the entire west indies cricket team getting on to a bus this morning around 9.30 am, as i was walking into a shopping mall (to buy, among other things, the aforementioned jelly tots). i only recognised two - sarwan and gayle - and a third, but still can't remember his name. i'll be back in dubai before the twenty20 starts. baaaaaaad juju

sometime between now and saturday all things coming to pass
may not have. so it goes.

back at the ranch, scotty awaits orders, while lance corporal singh of the queen's twenty fiworst grenadiers cannot understand what he's suddenly doing in jet black ninja garb with a tantō sword in his hands, or why the crowd is chanting "sepp-ppu-kku-sepp-ppu-kku-sepp-ppu-kku."

all this while reports come in of twenty terror-cotta suspects detained at the british museum; rumour has it that they were not planning on singing at pavarotti's funeral.

Islamophobic phoebes and big-breastedkiskadees starring in Ed Wood’sTechnicolor adaptation of theDance of the Seven Army Surplus Veils

2007-09-06T10:07:00.000+04:00

Tyrant flycatchers of a craven new world:
zebra-crested yellow-breasted keskidees
white-winged becards and westwood pewees
grey and tan phoebes tailing
Couch’s mitey kingbird with his
little sliver of a beak and
silver-grey head of hair

Scramble off purple-eyed grass
somewhere east of cascading
mountains and take flight
at the first symphonic strains of
an algorithmically prescient
early warning system

Soar high into an obsidian sky
darkened by terror and
fear of mindless fundo
mentalistic coups de main

Await the signal from Bird King
to swoop down and discharge
their partially digested payload
upon hydroponic hillsides
infested with enemy outposts

Some of the native birds
cower under sagelike brush, while the
air-raid-drilled hold up cocktail
umbrellas on the one hand
and their noses down
on the other
in anticipation of the impending assault
on their quaint sensibilities

(minos – january 2007)

It’s entertainment Jim,but not as we know it

2007-09-01T10:02:00.001+04:00

Slartibartfast kick-started his two-wheeler alive
peeling off to one side on a wave of jive
and the rattle and hum of tiny shiny pebbles
bellyflopping off the faces of recruitment posters
selling redemption in the form of participation
in the War on Terra Firma

Over on the other side of the pond
beachfront property prices were heading south
for the summer in the lead-up to the
declaration of hostilities against those
unfathomable chest-beating descendants
of Ardeshir and Daryush mounted
high on heavy horses above
the hills overlooking the bay
trying desperately to quell
false-positive rumours
of whooping horah-dancing dybbukim
celebrating the completion of
an unidentified project
which convinced not a few bookies
that the match had been fixed
from the outset like an
intercontinental WWF bout between
Floyd “Alcatraz” Boyd and
Ping Ping Junior the giant panda

Meantime CNN was on standby
while Oliver Stone and others of his ilk
stood by on the sidelines licking their lips
at the juicy prospect of yet more fodder
for their quasi-veracious re-enactments of
Famous Battles Which Can Be Faithfully
And Entertainingly Recreated
For The Eternal Glorification Of G.I. Joe
And His Bloodthirsty Kapellmeisters

The producer of the prime time talent show
Sailor-Shanty Samurai
gazed out towards the harbour at
a brand spanking new battle-ready
aircraft carrier and wistfully wondered
out loud if he could get permission to
shoot the season finale on the flight deck of
this pristine war machine if and when
it came under enemy fire

The standard of western entertainment
is flagging limp-wristedly, but
is that a factor of sheer volume
or sheer hubris
or a disturbing reluctance by punters
to suspend disbelief?

(minos – march 2007)

I'm a survivor

2007-08-27T14:47:00.000+04:00

Dawn survives
just
and the Anglo-Klaxon propagandu machine
putt putt putters alive
trailing plumes of thick black acrid smoke
as it chugs along its merry way
ignoring anachronistic cannons to left of it
and banners proclaiming The End Is Nigh
to right of it
dispensing summary justice here
and there
and sugar-coating the gift of
corporate blessed globalisation
just about everywhere

You know, we unworthy, unworldly,
unwashed natives really should cease
this anally retentive knee-jerk rejection
of modern Christendom's undeniable benisons
and realise that life without upsized Big Macs
and international debt servicing
and Calvin Klein's inspirational designs
is a life as good (or bad)
as death itself

Let us instead cheat scriptural Satan
out of his unwarranted due and
give our asses
and our assets too
to the seductive you-devil-you
called Mammon in English
or anything you want in your own tongue
whose being reeks of temptingly redemptive
Chanel number nine hundred and ninety-five
cos you know
the pleasure principle was created
by )> himupthere <( for our collective benefit

Why then do we continue to masturbate
on the sidelines

(minos - march 2007)

Happy Anniversary

2007-08-23T15:15:00.000+04:00

I have this mental picture of you
like Avril Lavigne
on the cover of Seventeen magazine
sporting a crew cut that's right out of
the no comparsion section of my
Sinead O'Connor scrapbook except

It's been 7 hours and 15
years to the day
and I'm more or less bald meself
save for the saving grace of greying temples
built to enshrine your fading memory
in capsulated solitude

(minos - february 2007)

Maleeha says:

2007-08-05T23:40:00.000+04:00

abba you have very funny Smell

2007-08-02T17:09:00.000+04:00

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams

Slartibartfast at Tiffany's

2007-08-02T17:07:00.000+04:00

and i said i don't want
breaksfast epiphanies,
not in the company of
this cold comfort of snot-nosed
coffee house aficionados

so i just pass out into rain
drenched streets, past the junkies,
passed out from boredom and indigestion,
preparing to arise sir night-turned-into
unwelcome morning, sleeping under
drab shabby awning,
sadly mourning the passing away
of darkness - redemptive motherly
darkness - awaited and longed for in
nightmarish daydreams and
forgotten in the fitful sleep of
the dead drunk

no dt's for me thankyouplease;
alkies anon would have nothing
of that sort
what sort?
your sort
(my sort)

so i guess it's back to
early morning epiphanies for
me and my wino family,
which we superciliously ignore
while wolfing down scraps of
half-eaten dinners kindly tossed
into the rubbish tip in the wee hours
for our much needed
pseudo-intellectual nourishment

(minos - august 2007)

No time off for good behaviour

2007-08-02T10:36:00.000+04:00

Morally speaking
I was miles ahead of the competition
wasn't I ha ha

For instance my
quest for nirvana never focused
simply on a sari clad
Shilpa Shetty (oh mama) lugging
an eight-figure dowry up
a dimly lit staircase
oh no

A series of unfortunately messy affairs
were always my specialty
and hightailing it out of town
before dawn in just my Y-fronts
(even though I only wear boxers)
is how I'd best like to remember it
- a series of fantasised escapades
you know
paid for ultimately though
by my ever-loving wife
who thought
along with Vee
and Auntie Mimi
and Uncle Fariduddin Agha
and the entire cast of Fifty-Fifty
(except for Ismail Tara and the fat guy
who always played the traffic cop)
that incarceration of twenty to life
in cocooned security would surely
cure me of my ills and woes
and holy psychoses by transferring them
onto chronologically organised photographs
dating back to eternity and recalled
fondly
years later as the happy couple
flips through the oversized pages
of a never-ending series of
gilt-edged photo albums
(laid out by year)

(minos - march 2007)

After the gold rush

2007-08-01T18:23:00.000+04:00

Klondyke was not a name which suited him greatly

For one thing its brassiness
was at odds with his weak grin
and ineffectual chin

It reeked of unbridled avarice
and hotspur desperados sporting
five o'clock shadows at nine in the morning
while he radiated good grace amd the
reassuring scent of home-made pomade

Yet he insisted that everyone
except his mother and his
long-time "personal trainer"
call him Klondyke

Not Mister Klondyke
or Klondyke Saab
just Klondyke or rather
Klon Dyke

Klon from the obscure Klingon dialect
of Xrogtzj in which it means
Sir or Lord or Noble one
and Dyke from undisputed Galaxy
gilli-dunda champ
Fragglespune van Dyke of
Greater Mandria which is
on the outskirts of the
Gamma Quadrant
a short flight across
from the expirating nebula of Az
where not Shaz nor Waz
ever featured heavily on the
telebox menu but Paris Hilton's
Simple Life was rated
even higher than
The Adventures Of
Princess Slytherine And Her
Hairy Escapades Alongside The
Hairless Beast of Betelgeuse Seven
- a weekly intergalactic tag-team
mud-wrestling extravaganza
produced broadly along the lines
of Disaster Area's infamous
gigawatt concerts like
the one they broadcast
across the vast Rudlit Desert on
the dry red planet of Kakrafoon

(minos - march 2007)

The reluctant transcendentalist

2007-07-31T15:43:00.000+04:00

I get off my horse, but there is no place
to park it, so I hand the reins over to the
beardless boy playing marbles by himself
in a shallow, malodorous dust bowl. He is
happy with the handful of grimy currency
notes I thrust into his eager little hand

I have ridden across the vastated plains of
Hindutvastan and Puristan, through deserts
Rajasthani and Tharthari and am now
on the outskirts of the great unwashed city,
in the village of a great Persian warrior

His father, burly child of a man, Rustam
by name, greets me warmly like a long lost
brother. His bear hug raises clouds of
inter subcontinental dust off my weary back

This makes him sneeze a series of unexpectedly
polite little sneezes which make me laugh,
discreetly. We have only just met,
but we are old friends already

Yes, I remember. We were old friends.
I knew him in a past life, the one which
ended three minutes ago, when I got off
my horse and strode into township

Because we are old friends once again,
and because he is my host and I his guest,
I drink slurpingly from a saucer his sweet
sticky tea and wolf down stale pieces of
rock cake redolent with fresh diesel fumes
and mature goatskin. They make me strong,
stronger than I have felt since
I got on my horse and rode

Pity it won't last, this strength; tonight
I enter the town of my birth. My
horse is not very welcome there.
I do know how to drive.
I wish I didn't.
I wish I didn't have to.
I wish the view from my window
was coloured green and not
innumerable shades of snot-grey.
I wish I had nine lives concurrent, or just one
with you in it

(minos - late 2006 or early 2007)

do doodh patti saab ko maro

2007-07-29T14:13:00.000+04:00

She can't be annoyed
by my cute boyish charm
the way that she poutingly
makes out to be. Not really.
I'll bet it's a show
of girlish know-how
of which I'm convinced
she know's not too much

Perhaps if we both
canned this sophisticate
and let down our hair
we'd stand a good chance
of wowing each other
with our powder keg powers
of volcanic passion

Or maybe we'd figure
it's too much damn bother
and bugger off down separate paths

(minos - june 2007)

voyeurism isn't all it's cracked up to be

2007-07-19T14:28:00.000+04:00

she knew, and so did he,
that being late was never
as bad as coming on time

time had stood still for so long,
silently looking on,
idle time with time on its grubby hands,
time to kill you could say

which is why when time
got a kick up its shapely backside
from myself who'd become tired
of viewing life through
the stained glass of
suspended animation,
they turned to me in a fit of pique
and banished me from the viewing room

then everything happened so fast

flash-forward to the now
that by now has become then,
and right now i just wonder(ed) whether
it wouldn't have been better if i'd
minded my own business

in my sorry defence all i have to say,
your honour, is that i
was green with envy
and blue with longing
and yellow with fever
and read her like an open book
that she shut with a syphilitic clap
which i'm thankful
i didn't catch from her, cos that's like
the oxidized silver lining i will
continue to desparately cling to
until time has time to stand still again

(minos - july 2007)

The statue of libertinism

2007-07-18T13:07:00.000+04:00

A long long time ago before the end of time had taken away man’s thirst for knowledge and development (as well as that much aligned word, progress), a big statue of a little boy adorned the centre of the Piazza del Shaheed, in the ancient Spanish town of Al Ahmaq.

This statue had stood for hundreds of years (would have been four hundred in 2016 or 2019, opinion is divided), and though precious little of what must have been its original form remained intact, the statue had stood as a symbol of courage and honour and the preferrred target of accuracy-seeking pigeons keen to cement a relationship with the young hero-prince, whose legends of bravery would fill a hundred volumes of odious odery to the shan-o-shaukat of the hero of Zero’stan (as this enclave was called in reference to its zero-tolerance approach to acts of terrorism). The statue was revered by generations of young and old caballeros with exotic names like Abu Hamza, Gaius Bakr Siddiqui, Hassan Hussein Shaheeduddin El Cid and Cato Ibn Clouseau, which were passed down generation to generation, names skipping lineage by one or a maximum of two generations.

On the run from Torquemada’s secret polit-bureau of buried pasts,

Read the rest of this piece >>>

We thought she'd be happy

2007-07-17T12:58:00.000+04:00

She was always wary of sundown aftermaths,
never leaving home past dark
unless her barrel-chested husband felt
like taking a leisurely stroll
through the wooded park which bordered
the childless two-storeyed mansion
that He owned

She would have preferred,
on these dreaded evenings,
to have been born poor, dirt poor,
destitute even, without a single
sutth-larha to her name, born of
a daddy up to his ears in debt to
mustachioed, huqqah-puffing landlords,
and a mummy whose eyes reflected
no light at all, than to be trailing a mate
who measured happiness
with a yardstick made of pure gold

(minos - february 2007)

The indebtedness of King Bodge

2007-07-15T18:14:00.000+04:00

A light northerly wind blew gently over undulating hills green with possibility, and just a touch of envy. The day was bright, with a spring in its step and still full of hope, at least according to the pileated woodpeckers, whose sun dances had finally begun to show results: a clear cerulean sky, bar the odd wisp of cirrus floating way up above the no-fly zone, greeted an emotionally challenged, technologically unchallenged world divided into amorphous arrays of multiplication and long division.

On this fine day His Majesty King-Kong of the World awoke feeling fine, ready to face a hostile dominion with aplomb. After all, today was the Sabbath of Lord Mordecai of Suq-ash-Shuyukh, and a crack squadron of The Royal Wedge of Trumpeter Swans had been winging its way westwards as he slumbered.

The swans had touched down on schedule, and in perfect formation, on the East Lawn of Bai-rang Mahal, the Royal Palace, to trumpet triumphantly last night’s territorial gains through the open windows of the Royal Bedchamber – and His Majesty had cajoled his kaajol’d eyelids open to the tune of the crack of noon and a concerto of concerted honks.

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ev'rybuddy's talkin bout...

2007-07-11T15:06:00.001+04:00

bagism
shagism
dragism
madism
ragism
tagism
this-ism
that-ism
islam-ism-ism-ism-ism...

sad thing is nobuddy's even talking about giving peace a chance anymore. i guess we've realised what a pipe dream that whole seventies thang was, how naive we were to ever have believed in the post-ww2 rhetoric about freedom and justice for all except those evil commie bastards intent on annihilating the world just to spite eisenhower and nixon and their withy successors.

now, in the collective imagination of all “sensible” people, the army of evil red devils has been replaced (in a bizarre example of photo-negativisation) by an army of evil green devils intent on annihilating the world just to spite georgie porgie and three-card-trick dick and, of course, their own withy successors.

what i want to know is why all of us continue to steadfastly support one or the other side of the bipolar argument; which used to be

freedom (capitalism) vs moral decay (communism)

and is still

freedom (capitalism) vs moral decay (radical islamism)

(and if at this point you don't know what the fuck i'm going on about, i don't blame you.)

pretty soon radical islamism too will fall by the wayside, drawn into a series of ultimately destructive traps set by an adversary more wily, farther-sighted and less intensely focused on short-term goals.

who then will step up to the plate, bat in hand? probably some kind of sucker-punched pinch-hitter not quite ready to take on a pitcher who’s adept at three-striking his opponent with a combination of
· brute force
· guile
· dr goebbels' gift to the western world

he won't be red, cos the reds are dead. he won't be green cos the greens will have been creamed.

perhaps a new, true-blue brigade of ingénue amazons armed to the teeth with bullwhips and (hey wait a minute, i think i took a wrong turn at the crossroads and ended up in lap(dance)land) (oops).

fundos: your time is almost up.

ffundophobes: so is yours, cos once the fundos are gone the whole basis of your existence will crumble as you have no ideology save the annihilation of the fundos (to which effort you contribute nothing but hackneyed, whiny rhetoric).

ghazi --> shaheed (sorry, but ’tis the time and the place for cliches)

2007-07-10T19:54:00.001+04:00

and zo it remains to be seen who, in the aftermath, will be more besmirched by the bloody red of the (in the end) aptly-named mosque that is no more: the viridescent fundo brigade, or their erstwhile "cacky" clad puppetmasters.

Old Fart at Play
(by Don Van Vleit)

Pappy with the khaki sweatband
Bowed goat potbellied barnyard that only he noticed
The old fart was smart
The old gold cloth madonna
Dancin' t' the fiddle 'n saw
He ran down behind the knoll
'n slipped on his wooden fishhead
The mouth worked 'n snapped all the bees
Back t' the bungalow

Momma was flatten'n lard
With her red enamel rollin' pin
When the fishhead broke the window
Rubber eye erect 'n precisely detailed
Airholes from which breath should come
Is now closely fit
With the chatter of the old fart inside

An assortment of observations took place
Momma licked 'er lips like uh cat
Pecked the ground like uh rooster
Pivoted like uh duck
Her stockings down caught dust 'n doughballs
She cracked 'er mouth glaze caught one eyelash
Rubbed 'er hands on 'er gorgeous gingham
Her hand grasped sticky metal intricate latchwork
Open t' the room uh smell cold mixed with bologna
Rubber bands crumpled wax paper bonnets
Fat goose legs 'n special jellies
Ignited by the warmth of the room
The old fart smelled this thru his important breather holes
Cleverly he dialed from within from the outside we observed
That the nose of the wooden mask
Where the holes had just been uh moment ago
Was now smooth amazingly blended camouflaged in
With the very intricate rainbow trout replica

The old fart inside was now breathin' freely
From his perfume bottle atomizer air bulb invention

His excited eyes from within the dark interior glazed;
watered in appreciation of his thoughtful preparation.

as sung by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
on Trout Mask Replica

shameful or shameless?

2007-07-08T11:43:00.000+04:00

after mailana abdul aziz's shameful (or should it be shameless? i can't decide which) attempt at a getaway, is there any true-green muslim (cleric or otherwise inclined) in our land of the puritanical whose head is not bowed in shame at his (her) cowardice (except perhaps for mailana furball).

Lesson #7 in armchair sociopathology

2007-07-08T10:52:00.000+04:00

We cheered as overweight underlings
cheerfully bulldozed our
friendly neighbourhood madrassa
into the ground, chanting risible slogans
in grammatically correct English
and flowery French, and even one that
Flash Rash coined in ecclesiastical Latin.

We jeered the terrified monkeys
who swarmed out of the
collapsing structure - gimlet-eyed mullahs
sporting foreshortened shalvars, scanning
the heavens for the saving grace
of a deus ex machina - and cockeyed,
delinquent chhokras in two-toned
rubber flip-flops, trailing a weeping,
one-armed nancy boy, whose
uncapped noggin reeked of
mustard oil even at a distance.

We cheered cos we've read
all about the insidious motives
behind the promotion of these iniquitous
dens of vice, and how their continued existence
further sullies the tarnished image of
Muslims in a neomillenial world
infested with terror and darkness
and dogmatic fundo
mentalism (and how it affects
our hopes of obtaining visas
for countries worth visiting).

We cheered afterwards when
bleeding hearts decried the
abject plight of the grubby urchins
and proclaimed the end of
any hope they had of ever being educated.

Education? Sacre bleu, what kind of
education is it if it's an education
that ain't discharged up the fundament,
in a process of antibiosis, by the
empurpled illuminati of mondo primo?
I went to school in Bahawalpur, but graduated,
summa cum laudanum,
from Truth or Consequences Community College
in delatinofied New Mexico. Trust me,
I know
what I'm talking about: God made
man in his own blond,
blanched,
blue-eyed image. Who are you to
question His Motives or go against
His Will?

(minos - december 2006)

Something i wrote last year. People are telling me i'll have to eat these words now. But i won't, i swear i won't (at least not without significant quantities of ♪♪♪ Ahmed ki mango chutney ♪♪♪)

In my younger days

2007-07-05T15:36:00.000+04:00

Krakatoa east of Java
would aptly describe
my only palaver
with amazing, metaphrasing
Priyanka Batul Kobayash
(professor and mother of three)

which is to say she put
her hand on my knee
and it couldn't have been
more than a second before
to my undying shame
i came with a bang
as my poor little thang
gave up its lost fight
for the forces of right

she said son you're a helluva sight
but d'ya think that i might
take a wee-bitsy bite
of your thoroughly wonderful smile
so i can pretend
for just a short while
that the much vaunted style
of your erstwhile guru
has come into me to hum easily
and win the sweet boy of my dreams
     not you
     not you
     not you
     not you
     not yoooooou
because of the wonderful things he do
to me
(in your dreams)

(minos - june 2007)

Quaffing doodh patti a la mode

2007-07-03T17:28:00.000+04:00

She sat licking thin lips, chin
on upturned palm, elbow on grimy
table, wild riot of rumpled ringlets
framing doe eyed inner sense

I sat shitting briquettes at the thought
of revealing plans for a future
foretold at birth, slurping syrupy
milk-tea from a chipped white saucer

She spoke fervently of a rose tinted
future, and the heartbreak of domestic
servitude seen through the eyes of
an expatriate pappy, tapping out a
tattoo on the dog-eared menu

I joked nervously about being all
you can be in God's holy army,
fighting for righteous cause célèbres
like the recovery of hallowed Kashmir
from perfidious infidel cowboys

She righteously denounced my
“myth-guided neanderthal thanatos,”
pendulous jugs jiggling from side
to side as she hurled taunting
Sieg Heils in my direction, ignoring
wide-eyed, fly-button-feel waiters

I left without looking back and
turned into a pillar of salt on
the fractured sidewalk, until a
passing shower dissolved me into a
piddly little puddle which washed
into the gutter where she says I belong

(minos - december 2006)

All the news that's fit to strip to?

2007-07-01T13:40:00.000+04:00

While I'm generally not a gatherer of news, off the tv and newspapers etc, I do occasionally like to tune into the dreaded Fux Noose channel (085 on the eVision decoder).

Often this is my self prescribed treatment for hypotension (i.e. low blood pressure). 15 minutes of Folk Snooze and my BP is a-ok. And it's so important to get a flip-side view of the world from time to time.

Sometimes I amuse myself by imagining that the plastic-fantastic botox babes on Fox News are actually Naked News anchors stripping away their anachronistic modesty in the interests of The Truth (shall set your bubis free). Get's a bit boring after a while, though.

Basically I think it's a good idea to know what people, whose opinion you disagree with, are saying. And since I'm a newborn blogger, randomly searching blogs good, bad and ugly, I have come across this, shall we say, interesting site, which many of you might find, um... interesting.

I'm sure there's a million more just like it out there, but Ms Lipstadt's claim to fame is that she conducted a (in her own words) successful defense against Holocaust denier, David Irving, who sued her for libel for calling him a denier. Irving suffered a resounding loss.

Those of you wishing to partake of her wit and wisdom may do so here: History on Trial

Some selected gems for your enlightenment:

“Another thought about the [German] military leaders who wanted to negotiate [WWII] peace: Had they been successful we might never have known of the Holocaust.”

Under the heading No comment necessary a series of slogans by that paragon of truth, justice and the rabbinical way: ADL (whose full slogan might just be "Fighting Anti-Semitism, Bigotry and Extremism with Anti-Islamism, Bigotry and Extremism") including this one

And if you really want to get under the skin of a true blue holocaustic evangelist, take a peak at this short piece and the comments of some refreshingly free-thinkers (except for one Stacy, who may or may not have been "taken out" by an AIPAC/B'nai B'rith hit squad since then).

good man the laal-tain

2007-06-30T13:04:00.000+04:00

spent a while in a
cold cold cell
listening to tom waits in his spare time
never had much money to speak of
though he spoke of it
sometimes often in a
nonchalant sort of way
which fooled most everybody
but her nibs

lady la-di-da in a past life
if she ever owned up to it
which she didn't
despite the mounting mountains
of evidence he laid at her feet
every chaudhveen ka chand
or every excuse he got
and every chance he didn't take
preferring to lie low
in anticipation
without daring to go sharing himselves
with any aira ghaira nathoo khaira
whom they might give away
the game for a bottle of cheap plonk
and/or a chance at redemption

silently
occasionally slow
once fast
though he swore aft
erwards off forever
such frivolity was for the birds
man for the birds
and as far as he could see he didn't
stay so thoroughly nourished
on birdseed
nor could he recollect frank
(zappa or wild years) ever breathing
a word of it to him

couldn't buy himselves love not
for sale even x-mas season pre-shopping
time which was a time for introspection
amongst himselves
which was the one thing they (he) were good at

not that she cared
daddy only ever cared
about her grades
and be a woman
be a somebody
not a nobody like
your old man who's
an old man
an old-fashioned man
a good man the laal-tain
a man who can still
ban
in his own mind
ban the bums
who sneak their insidious way
into your heart ("er that would be
my pants, daddy") and ain't that
what panties are for?
to be got inside

ma ki chut as a
mixed metaphor for
life-threatening
boy dare i say friends?
too clued up on virtual
bubblegum and mountains
of freshly mown grass
freshly mown into their
tired eyes which open up
one at a time
trying to find the other
roving in some far distant
corner of the eastern rim
of the spiral nebula

(minos - june 2007)

Al-kohoul se pak fauj ko salaam

2007-06-27T16:39:00.000+04:00

My pigeon-toed batman is a total nincompoop
who deserves nothing better than to be
declared “it” at the inter-regimental
round robin butt-whipping tournament
at which all the closet faggots of
the garrison try desperately
to manipulate the order of battle to suit
their underwearing bodies in
underwired bodices and beribboned bonnets
while rehearsing the ad infinitum chant
of “hai allah kabaddi”
jumping up and down like Charlie Chaplin
protecting his butt cheeks as he runs away from
the big
fat
bug-eyed
villain-in-a-top-hat
filmed in sepia tone at sixteen frames per second

(minos - february 2007)

The sadness of King George’s favourite puppy

2007-06-24T17:29:00.000+04:00

Britain’s soon to be ex-Prime Minister, Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, is depressed. A while back he had asked his sovereign (who is right now not depressed, but hopping – some would say barking – mad) if there was anything in particular he could perform as the final act of his much-lauded tenure as head of government of his muppet state (with apologies to Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear).

Now if you think that, at this point, he was addressing a woman, think again. As every sentient 21st-century being is aware, Lord Blair’s acknowledged monarch is not Tinpot Lizzie, aka Good Queen Bess Redux, but good ol’ King Kong of the World – known to British subjects as George VIII, and the rest of the scumsucking world as King George the Second (except in Uganda, where they call him The First Kink of Snotland).

King George, desperately seeking suzerainty over those recalcitrant reprobates in Eye-ran, responded with a hey nonny nonny and a hotchacha, and summoned Donee-Tony to the Evil Office for a detailed briefing session.

In a nutshell, he ordered Bony-Tony to come up with a killer plan for inciting the excitable Eye-ranians into committing an act of such blatant terrorism that the whole world would support him in his humanitarian efforts at bringing democracy to that troubled land.

“My Lord,” intoned Intern Tony, “I have a cunning plan,” and he proceeded to recount to His Majesty an all but forgotten legend harking back to the dawn of time. According to the legend, a price was placed upon the head of a celebrated court jester by the name of Salamander Raskolnikov. This Raskolnikov had been accused by the Pharisaic breed of blasphemy for having once jested that Lord Cyrus Bonecrusher had been born out of wedlock. For this heinous crime the Pharisees had sworn to serve his head upon a platter to their liege lords. “He, my Lord, is the answer to our problem.”

The King was sceptical. He said, “But this fellow must be dead by now.”

“Oh no no no no no, Your Majesty, he is alive if not kicking. And if you but say the word I shall trundle his sorry arse out of the Skittish Museum for your amusement, and his bemusement, and confer upon him the honourable title of Knight Commander of the Bathwater, thus causing those evil Eye-rannies to go beserk.”

“Oh,” asked King George, “and which word would you have me say, Tommy?”

“Your Majesty, any three-letter word beginning with the letter Y will do. (And it’s Tony, my Lord, not Tommy.)”

“In that case not-Tommy... yip yip yip yip yip yip yip.”

And so Raskolnikov was duly dipped in barely-used bathwater and knighted. King George and little Tommy waited with bated breath for rabid Eye-ranny death squads, daggers drawn, to hit the shores of flighty Blighty, baying for Sir Salamander’s blood.

And waited.

But nothing happened. Except that a handful of boring old farts from that (terminally) damned land of the puritanical beyond the pale stood up, turned their backsides westward, bent over, and let off a barrage of misguided incendiary devices.

Which is why King Kong of the World is fuming at Camp David Ben Gurion; Lord Blair is out of favour for the moment; and Sir Salamander has a confused expression on his face.

In days of old when knights were clean bowled by fair maidens

2007-06-21T10:55:00.000+04:00

The evil spectre of one Mr Solomon Rushton - aka Salman Rusdhie, aka The Devil Incarnate, aka Sir Suleiman the Magniloquent - once again raises its ugly head above the foetid mire that envelops our (sovereign) state of consciousness. We inhabitants (and non) of our fair land of the puritanical, frustrated by our collective insignificance in a World Gone Wrong ("I told you baby... I would have to kill you dead"), have a new old-chestnut to roast over an open fire. On the whole, though, I'd rather be toasting pink marshmallows by the mellow-yellow heat of a Dubai summer noon.

Good ol' Ardeshir C, bless his munificent heart, made a suggestion the other day which I for one wholeheartedly endorse: let our blessed son-of-a-late-cmla charter a flight to points west and personally declare war on the decadent enemies of Islam (thereby, no doubt, securing himself unlimited access to all seven levels of Valhalla and beyond). Well, we all know how expensive air travel is these days, so I hereby take the initiative of establishing a fund (fundo) (funda) to pay for said voyage. And this is the donation that will kick-start the fund... a whole two bits worth.

Contributions to the Send Glorious Minister for Religiose [sic] Affairs to ~~Hell~~ Heaven Fund may be mailed to Eulak House, 1 Bhangi Para, (Giving) Islam A Bad (Name)

Interactive blogging

2007-06-19T13:30:00.000+04:00

Having recently given in to the self-aggrandising temptation to set up a blog, I find myself wondering what it really is to er, blog. In the traditional sense (insofar as something this new can be said to have established a "tradition") the crap that I've posted here so far doesn't really qualify. It consists of vague ramblings on demeaning of life by forces beyond one's control (it's easier on the conscience to believe that it's beyond one's control) - stuff I've dredged up from the foetid swamp that is my personal archive.

Last night I came across a passage which struck me as an apt early analogy to the blog thang. In the absence of an entity called cyberspace, this would have been the perfect medium for a public blog (in the "traditional" sense - i.e. discourse on the problems, corruption, hypocrisies and general day to day issues of human life):

“ [Raman] speculated sometimes what he would do for a living if everyone adopted the boardless notion. They might engage him to inscribe gossip or blackmail on public walls; do it on the command of one and rub it off on the command of another. Sivanand, the municipal chairman, would provide enough material for all the blank walls of the city. His enemies could offer five rupees a line for writing, and Sivanand's supporters ten rupees for rubbing it off. A better medium than a scandal-sheet, less perishable. You could have a new item each day about this or that man, the renting of market stalls, the contract for that piece of roadmending, change of name to immortalize a visiting minister and gain his favour; and a thousand other sins. What about the American milk powder meant for the orphans of India and sold on the black market? What about the government hospital surgeon who flourished his knife like an assassin and made money and acquired the much-coveted building sites beyond the railway-crossing! And that wholesale grain-merchant who cornered all the rationed articles and ran the co-operative stores meant for the poor? Raman would expose them to the world if someone paid him and provided him with a spacious wall, but ironically enough, he wrote sign-boards for most of them. ”
RK Narayan - The Painter of Signs

In walked Bird

2007-06-18T19:05:00.000+04:00

The loneliest monk I ever met
was a piebald slaphead who never
owned a Ferrari (not even a scale model),
who'd never heard of jazz, or American Idol,
or Michael Jackson's colourful exploits,
though his dimly lit monastic cell
was wallpapered floor-to-ceiling
with tabloid sheets from Ireland in
what passes today for the English language
and from Swaziland
in one of the Nguni languages
and from Finland
in several Finno-Ugric languages

He swore he could read them all
but chose not to, cos he didn't want to be
drawn into the murky depths of
hell on earth, where bacchanalia
is the order of the day and glossolalia
the curse of the werewolf's overbitten tongue

He liked to watch The Omen on his
Betamax video machine and asked if I knew
where he could find a copy of the original
version of Sholay in that quaint format

He'd seen it once before and suspected
that Gabbar Singh was the long lost
brother of the devil in a blue dress
to whom he'd lost virginity when
he was thirty-five (damn her to hell),
but couldn't be sure
without further investigation

I was able to help him find the film, but
didn't see him for months afterwards,
and when I did he looked as fit as a fiddle,
with a rosy glow to his cheeks (though this
might have been a trick of the light)
and when I asked about his investigations
he swore softly in his native dialect,
a mellifluous hybrid of Lepcha and Dzongkha,
then added dismissively, in English,
that he'd been too busy tossing off
to worry about such trivialities,
although I think he was lying
(about trivialities)

On reflection, perhaps he wasn't
as lonely as I have been
trained to expect

(minos - february 2007)

Perchance to dream

2007-06-18T16:04:00.000+04:00

I left my country long ago to live
in a land where the air is clean
the grass is green (what little there is)
the money obscene (for the chosen few)
where the boulevards are gleaming testaments
to the bulldozing prowess of the world's
most talented builders and a
million edifying structures
tower up and away towards a clear cerulean sky
making even a paltry sinner like myself believe
that heaven is in my grasp
and that all I have to do is jump off
this ninety-ninth floor ledge
and take the express elevator up
to the pearly gates
for a warm welcome
a complimentary "beverage"
and a plush suite in the VVIP section

I live close to my country
but they say it is as far removed
from anything there
as any place could possibly be
spiritually
demographically
topographically
intellectually ethically parenthetically
syntactically

I love my country
yes I do and keep
at all times
a piece of it in my pocket
and this I tell everyone I meet
and they ask

Is it a piece of earth
and I say
nay

Is it a piece of your flag
and I say
nay

Is it a piece of ass ha ha
and I say
nay

And they ask
is it a peace offering from an unrequited love
and I say
nay nay nay

And they give up after
a few more tries and beg me
to tell them what it is
or show them
and I say
no way Jose

They wouldn't believe me
if I told them and they couldn't
see it if I showed them
and nor would you
and nor could you

And anyway
if I took it out
it would dissipate
for a handful of air doesn't hang about too long
when exposed to alien elements

(minos - february 2007)

On the eve of The World Cup Final

2007-06-18T11:57:00.000+04:00

Something I had thrown together just before the anticlimactic finale of the most bizarre World cup ever. (Exactly six people - including myself - read it at the time.)

SCENE ONE: a sound stage of fairly recent vintage, all mod cons, jam butties on a long table in one corner. Some sort of short promo clip is being shot. The director is in his high-chair, wearing a relatively unstained bib. He has a battery-powered rattle in one hand and a comical, conical megaphone in the other.

The second protagonist of this scene is none other than the (shy?) retiring Glenn McGraw, greatest fast bowler in history, magnificently attired in baggy-green Oxford bags. He is practising various types of smile in a mirror that a mousy-haired assistant is holding up.

Director: Ready, Glenn? Awright everybody... quiet on the set. Take 1...

McGraw: Hi, my name is Glenn McGraw and I'm going to take wife pickets and win the Stashes for my cuntry, before...

Director: Cut, cut, cut! Glenn, that's "country," not "cuntry." And what you do with your wife's pickets... hell, I don't even wanna go there. Oh, and you do remember, Glenn that tomorrow's game is a ONE-DAY game. The final of the 2007...

McGraw: Sorry, Dick, let me just looka' the, looka' the, looka' the... that paper thingy.

Director: It's called a script, Glenn, a script. Basic tool of the acting trade. Somebodyyyyyyyyyyy, please... get him that "paper thingy." Ok... read it? Good. Ready? Ekkkkkkk-cellent. Quiet everybody. Take 2...

McGraw: Hi, my name is Glenn McGraw and I'm going to take five wickets and SHOVE 'EM UP YOUR ARSE, Murali. Then I'm gonna rip a new one...

Director: Cut-cut-cutcutcutcutcutcut CUTTTTTTTTTT

McGraw: What's the matter, Dick, what did I do wrong?

Director: (breathing a little laboured) Well, for one thing, that's NOT in the script...

McGraw: (grinning one of the beaming smiles he has just practised) Ad-billing, Dick, it's called ad-billing. Yeah, I know a little something about it too you know.

Director: It's ad-libbing, and you CAN'T say that sort of thing on camera.

McGraw: (bewildered) Why not? We do it all the time in the field.

Director: That's why they turn the stump mike down so low, Glenn.

McGraw: (more bewildered) Stump mike? (A knowing smile spreads slowly across his face). You mean Virgil, don't you!

Director: (rolling his eyes to the heavens, despite STRICT instructions from the playwright not to do so) Never mind Glenn. Let's just take it from the top shall we. And please... no profanity.

McGraw: You mean no "arse" and no "bugger" and no "yo-mama-so-fat" jokes, right?

Director: (heaving a sigh of relief) Right. OK everybody, let's make this the final take. I've got a camera date with that Shilpa-babe to take care of too, you know. Take 3...

McGraw: Hi, my name is Glenn McGraw and I'm going to take my wife's pants off and whip 'em around my head before diving in to save the game... tongue in cheek, of course... woo-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

Director: Glenn, what happened to you. Glenn, Glenn. Heyyyyyyyy, you're not Glenn. You're, you're... oh no, it's SHAME WARNE.

CricOz P.R. Manager Bobby Brown (of Sheik Yerbouti fame): Aw, bugger it Dick, we'll just have to go with a written statement and hope we don't miss the tabloid printing-deadlines.

Director: Grrrrrrrr... for the last time, ok, my name is Hrithik, NOT DICK !

-----------------------------------

Lap (dance) dissolve to

SCENE ONE-AND-A-HALF: NOW (as in "this very minute while you're reading this"). Just hours before the 2007 World Cup Final b/w Sri Lanka and Australia.

Dick: (grittng teeth) It's Hrithik, alright? Hrithik... Hmmm, Shilp's, whaddaya think? You're the brainier one of us two. Who do you think we ought to bet our hard-earned Rupee on? Beaming Glenn McGraw or vo doosra vala, kya naam he uss ka?

-----------------------------------

Cut to

SCENE TWO: The 2007 World Cup Final b/w Sri Lanka and Australia.

-----------------------------------

McGraw at the top of the hill

Girls just wanna have fun

2007-06-11T12:11:00.001+04:00

Daisy says she’s had enough
of mindless raffle draws. Win gold,
win car, win house, get a life,
as if life is designed
by the gadabout architects
of built-in obsolescence. She wants
to win something with a bit of zing,
not bling – a chance to scale the Matterhorn
with hunky Hrithik Roshan by her side,
or going to eat pizza
with the Wenger boys of Highbury,
followed by a wild night out
pursuing cheery Thierry

(minos - january 2007)

Sugar plum fairy came and hit the streets

2007-06-11T01:00:00.000+04:00

Just saw one of those microscopic ants crawl out from under the plate on my just-arrived tray of room service crap. And I promptly dealt with it (which entails the simple expedient of squishing it - making sure, of course, that I've actually killed it, and not left it writhing in what experience tells me ought to be classified under the heading of pain) (pain for whom - him/she/it? or me?)

Now your average jay would be submerged by a wave of paranoia. And since I'm not an entirely unaverage jayjay, this is what started to happen to me. My first thought was, Could there be more of these evil beasts lurking around in wait? I couldn't see any, but what if? Then my slumbering imagination awoke with a start and I started to imagine that larger, less savoury characters might be hiding under said plate - bigger ants, caterpillars, boll weevils and perhaps even a cockroach (ewwwwwwwwwww, I hate cockroaches).

So what dya think I did. Toss the tray right out the door and scream for Housekeeping to come and fumigate my room, right?

Wrong. Right now I'm wolfing down the almost-tasty Chicken Tandoori Roll and fattoush and almost-expired Fanta orange (I'm typing this as I eat). Life's too short to let itsy bitsy ants ruin your day (or, in this case, night). And until I see the dreaded smoke-free cucaracha crawl curiously towards me, tenatacles at the alert, it's munchmunchmunch for me.

After I've finished eating I'll say a prayer for the tiny ant's lately liberated aatma (in case I discover in the afterlife that these accursed beings too are cursed with those utterly useless soul thingies).

My eyes popped out for a stroll

2007-06-09T21:56:00.000+04:00

Instead of crawling off to the roadhouse,
as one might have expected,
Sami and I turned up unannounced
for a spot of cards at the Bangash mansion,
dressed to the nines, sporting
white cashmere scarves and
genyoowine malacca-cane walking sticks
carbon-dated to antiquity,
give or take a few hundred years

Only to find the inmates floating about
in Bermudas, a few in strapless Wonderbras
no less, proffering
artificial suntans followed
by a friendly word or two
in the language of your choice

On a wibbly-wobbly pedestal,
gharara-clad Auntie Bangash wiggled Watusi
for her husband’s aggrandisement,
but he was too busy defending himself against
a mounted Charge of Delight Brigade chanting
“poetaster!” in almost-unison,
to applaud her sterling effort

This was a side of the mansion I
had not seen before and hope
never to again

(minos - march 2007)

This train (of thought) is not bound for glory

2007-06-07T15:07:00.000+04:00

Scandinavian daydreams
                before Swedish Erotica nightfall
Impotent ramblings about
                unpaid gambling debts
Viagra-fuelled bacchanals
                under undulating chuppahs
Spontaneously combusting groupies
                with hearts afire
Electric blue walls of kilowatt
                per channel surround sound
Brocken spectres captured
                on high-speed film
Inflexible inflections of
                cross-border dialogue
Standing one's ground in
                the face of old pheromones
Leaning towards audacity
                when accused of rapacity
Feigning incapacity to mask
                one's duplicity
                or
Felicity under the greenwood tree
                lying next to me
Promethean in her adoption
                of alien virtues
With her spirit unbowed and
                her bodice unbound
She and I in communion
                devoutly unmawkish
No hawkish sentimentality
                muddying the waters
Once indivisibly frozen in
                normative cubiform avatars
Which I formerly mistook for
                the cold comfort of theophany

(minos - april 2007)

Now that you’ve recharged your batteries honey-bunny

2007-06-07T08:58:00.000+04:00

She fell in love
her head below
her legs above
and parted ways with her
promiscuous ways, committing
herself to one and one alone,
a wise decision in this age
of serial gratification

Ah but if only her one true love
had a variable switch in vibrate mode

(minos - april 2007)

Scars and bloody-stripes forever

2007-06-07T08:30:00.000+04:00

Following exhaustive research in the form of intense introspection conducted over the course of the better part of an entire minute, I am pleased to announce that the mystery of the origin of the Abu Ghraib saga has finally been unravelled, to my satisfaction anyway.

I’m sure you recall how captured Terrorismistic Suspects (aka Muslims, aka Fundos, aka Coalescence of the Damned) have, for many years, had the most unspeakably sad machinations performed on their unwilling unmentionables, willy-nilly.

I just wanted to refresh your memory, in case you had succeeded in cordoning off the holiday-snap imagery from your conscious mind, which may well have boggled at the terroristicable atrocities broadcast far and wide across high bandwith internet connections.

I have tried to understand how such a thing came to pass. What impetus spurred representatives of The Free World to resurrect inquisitional measures unknown in The Civilized World for centuries? (Apart from interwar Germany which is, without doubt, the only known exception. Of course, neither Soviet nor post-Soviet Russia is included in Nigel Farquhar-Lloyd’s List of Civilized Countries.)

I have long (i.e. since yesterday) suspected, in this terrible affair, the long arm of Gresham’s Law; viz the tendency for money of inferior moral value to circulate more freely than money of superior moral and equal nominal value, better know by the maxim “dirty money drives out clean.” And lo and behold, it turns out that The Original Abu Ghraib Experience was the brainchild of one Klaus John von Finkelstein, an itinerant entrepreneur previously un-known for his failure to sell the benefits of “Fair and Lovely” cream to Scandinavian fräuleins.

Herr Finkelstein stumbled on the idea one morning as he lay awake contemplating the cracked and peeling plaster of his bedroom ceiling. The hounds of insolvency had been howling at the rusty gates of his deluxe shanty shack for months and he had managed to filter out of his surroundings the bloodcurdling noise. Until a minute earlier he had been contemplating the geometrical asymmetry of a two day old navel orange.

The orange was, as oranges tend to be, coloured a festive orange. Invitingly orange this one was. So inviting, in fact, that he had accepted the invitation and inserted a long, thin, crooked finger up its mini-me side. A second later he let out a stream of expletives, for the orange had responded by squirting him in the eye. Thus his ceiling-contemplation was initiated with just the one eye, the other being covered by the palm of his hand.

By an extraordinary coincidence, the patch of flaked-off ceiling he espied was the exact shape of Iraq’s territorial boundary. He knew this because his mother’s grandfather on her uncle’s side had chosen this shape as the logo for his wildly successful leather thong and bullwhip business, which he had named Iraklion Tanneries™ in the mistaken belief that Iraq had been called Iraklion in antiquity. It is not known what connection grandad had with Iraq.

Putting two and two and three together, he came up with the number seven, his lucky number according to either Sydney Omarr or his own illegitimate twin brother Mel Bourne (no relation to International Man Of No History, Jason). Exposition of how Finkelstein arrived at the number seven has no bearing on the outcome of this tale, but was inserted to give you an idea of how numerous strands of coincidence had been frenetically intertwining themselves within his hitherto empty destiny.

To cut a long story short in the interests of 21st century attention spans, Finkelstein came up with a cunning plan. It is rumoured that he said, “My Lord, I have a cunning plan.” But the absence of a Lord of any denomination within twenty miles of his Godless shack would seem to indicate that one of his neighbours was watching an episode of the first Blackadder series at the time.

In a nutshell, his plan was this.

Given that the Western world had a centuries-old tradition of sado-masochistic peversion, the same had to be true of the Eastern world. Knowing how private matters relating to licentiousness still are in our part of the world, Finkelstein was convinced that it was simply a matter of providing deviant believers with a discreet environment in which to practice, and have practised upon them, their perversion, for a price.

With the world in general, and the economies of the east in particular, booming like the Guns of Navarone there would be no shortage, he reasoned, of well-heeled, even stilletto’d punters queueing up to sample the deviational dee-lites he would conjure up for their pleasure. Plus he knew a black-leather queen of a bank manager who proved to be surprisingly compliant in the loan approving department.

Finkelstein commissioned the world’s most celebrated deviants to create, around Abu Ghraib, a package tour of infernal delights such as the world had never seen. He hired Madison Avenue’s maddest creative directors to design a multimedia campaign to lure willing victims. Finally he signed a contract with then El Presidente Saddam Hussein, and sat back in anticipation, dollar signs cha-chinging around him.

No one came. None except a twenty-three year old tree surgeon from Lala Musa who had been experimenting with electric shock therapy as a substitute for insecticide on fruit farms. He was seen exiting Abu Ghraib, after a non-sampling tour of the facilities, ashen-faced. He had aged considerably and now looked twenty-four.

In an effort to cut his losses, Finkelstein auctioned his options off on e-bay. He received one bid – from representatives of the Coalition of The Willy-Nilly, which at that very moment was in the process of invading Iraq. Finkelstein bailed and the rest, as they say, will be history in times to come. Rumours that he was responsible for designing the facilities at Guantanamo Bay are patently false. Research into its true origins will have to be conducted by others.

Meanwhile, all attempts to trace the whereabouts of Klaus Finkelstein have been unsuccessful. The trail is as cold as yesterday’s news.

Is really boycott?

2007-06-07T08:03:00.000+04:00

We are True-Green Believers who
stand tall in Karachi and Lahore in
solidarity with our suffering
Brothers on Alms in other parts
of the world (and not just on Fridays!)

We boycott Mock Sun’s Panzer
cos it’s Jewish or Ziyunist
or something like that

We used to boycott Khokla Kola
cos it used to be Jewish or Ziyunist
or something like that

We may boycott Storebox if it
turns out that all the propaganda
about it being Jewish or Ziyunist
or something like that
turns out to be true

And we continue to boycott those
annoying little killjoys who equate
the Romany Empire in the West with
the spread of Judaism or Ziyunism
or something like that

Cos yaar that’s the only way we can
continue to enjoy Mickey Doolunz
and Papsy Caller and high body count
blockbuster action films from the
likes of Tom and Jerry Sledgeheimer
while carrying on our eternal
outpourings of ostentatious grief
(the kind that late-great Steve Irwin
was likely familiar with)

(minos - april 2007)

I’ll bet Tar Zan never swung through anything as awesome as this

2007-06-05T07:08:00.000+04:00

I dreamed I was being chased by
whooping, trident-wielding native bandits
clad in loose grass skirts,
myself wearing nothing but
a diamond-studded fig leaf
from the House of Dior, and
a ruby red Patek Phillipe
showing one minute to ten,
almost closing time for
the fashionable boutiques,
through verdant jungle thick with
redwood and chinaberry
deodar and blackbutt
coco de mer and dipterocarp
bunya bunya and rewa-rewa
mountian ash and more cedar than
any man would know what to do with

Chased through plush-carpeted pathways
inlaid with polished gold leaf patterns reflecting
the silvicultural setting in perfect haramoney

Past thorny thickets and spiky spinneys
which tickled the more tender parts
of my own glabrous bark

Then I caught sight of the familiar
grande croix de la tour de l’arabie and a
fleeting sense of relief ran through me
cos this place was none other than
my own adoptive town

And the sylvan erections
were the architectural marvels
of a brave and chivalrous new world

And the plush-carpeted pathways
were the beautifully manicured streets
paved with goldbrick baked in sun-fired kilns

And the spiky spinneys and thorny thickets
were the Brobdingnagian strip malls and strip
joints created for our sempiternal gratification

I was still petrified, though, cos
my ass was on the line and
we’re not used to dealing with
the criminal element out here in this
eminently laudable, soul-uplifting
feudatory safe haven, until I realised that
these bandits weren’t the murderous,
we-don’t-need-no-stinkin-batches
type of bandit at all,
but credit card debt collectors
chasing me down for the minimum
monthly instalment, failing which
late-payment penalties would be applied

I stopped dead in my tracks,
about-faced, and tried to distract them
with vague promises of passing on to them
long lists of potential cardmembers,
but they weren’t buying
cos they weren’t whining
call-centre fodder
trawling for business,
but repo types with microlithic hearts
and pastel blue eyes devoid of light
and the milky white of human kindness

So I flung my fig leaf high into the air
and feinted to the right before
zooming off into the night,
leaving them fumbling with the balls
they’d latched on to,
which weren’t my balls at all, ha ha,
but christmas tree trinkets left over
from Hogmanay slash New Year’s Eve
(and saved for next Walpurgisnacht)
which last time around was
around the same time as that festival
of beastly feasting we Muslims call
Idol Adda or something like that, no?

(minos - february 2007)