Keeping It Real

This blog was originally published in the Express Tribune Magazine. It was meant to be published in the Dawn blog, but someone there felt it wasn't relevant. My special thanks to a great fan of the blog who had my back, and to @Nadir_Hassan for offering and succeeding at publishing it at ET.

According to this article, bestiality is a rite of passage in parts of Pakistan. Considering that sexual depravity, even in innocuous terms is no stranger to young, virile Pakistani men, I am reluctant to dismiss this claim as another journo out to malign the image of Pakistan.

Rites of passage after all, are essential to human life. 

Take for example the rite of passage involving young bloggers in Pakistan. At some point in their blogging career, all of us write this post.

This post?

You know, the one in which we deride, mock and seek to humiliate the ‘elites’ of Pakistan, their obsession with material goods and facebooks, their cluelessness regarding the local transport network, their obliviousness to the rampant poverty faced by the unclothed majority, their contempt for our local vernacular.

Inevitably, these rants exhort the elites to pacify their ‘liberal extremism,’ to nullify their ‘western-boot-licking’ to pop out of their ‘bubbles.’ Words like ‘reality’ ‘common man’ and ‘masses’ litter these posts like plastic bags in Clifton Beach. 

Let us lay aside the implicit irony of English speaking, computer using bloggerati railing against people who are essentially their own friends and family. 

Let us look instead, at something far more intriguing.

What makes someone a ‘real’ Pakistani? What makes something a ‘real’ Pakistani experience? From what these posts imply, being rich and privileged strips you of the ability to be real.

What a fascinating idea! 

It appears that the venerable Defence Housing Authority is no more than a figment of my imagination, that the Fez nights at Sindh Club are merely a mirage concocted by misfiring neurons in our elitist brains, that those of us going to ‘dance parties’ and ‘social clubs’ are merely computer generated holograms, created to incense the fevered blogger and implode Pakistan from within.

On the flip side, it also implies that the poor are one coagulated mass of noble, wretched, helpless, nameless limbs and faces whose entire destiny depends on whether or not we stop watching ‘Jersey Shore’ and sipping skimmed milk espressos.

What a load of bull.

For starters, while there is no reason to defend the oblivious and corrosive actions of the elites in our country, pointing the fingers at people essentially from the same background as yourself displays stunning self-delusion.

Secondly, holding up the ‘poor’ as some paragons of virtue, as being common or part of an undifferentiated mass, robs them of their individuality, their diversity, and only further intensifies the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them.’

And most importantly, defining some things as ‘real’ and others as not only deludes us from taking responsibility of the fact that every action, every moment, every experience is as real (or not) as any other. Eating out in Burns Road or Anarkali is not more any more ‘real’ than the same activity being done in Zamzama or MM Alam Road. Spurning the advances of nefarious corporations might be healthy for your wallet, but falling to their embraces does not cloak you in a halo of ‘unreality.’

So much like young men allegedly deflowering unsuspecting four-legged mammals, bloggers railing against the elite is one rite of passage we can all do without. 

Middle Class Canines

it seems strange to base your world view on a music album, but if the album in question is animals, and the band is pink floyd, you can at least premise an argument around this far-fetched concept.

the album consists of three epic songs titled 'pigs' 'dogs' and 'sheep' based loosely on george orwell's animal farm.

i used to listen to this quite regularly while i was a student at a curious university in pakistan.

why was it curious?

well mainly because it seemed to incorporate an evolutionary process within its students that i had not observed elsewhere.

to put it simply, when you joined you had a very high probability of evolving into one of three distinct archetypes - the mullah, the commie and the charsi.

of course, there were those who were unaffected by this process, but those were either day scholars* (non-hostel students), extraordinary variants, scholarship students, or nerds.

*(since day scholars by and large had the rest of the lives and social circles accesible as soon as they left the university, they were less prone to this evolution. the hostelites on the other hand, whose entire universe was the university were a lot more vulnerable)

no one necessarily entered the university as any of the types i mentioned. the existential transformation seemed to strike after a year or two into the four year program, and once the student became hyponotized by one of the three types, it was often irreversible during the entire period at the university.

the transformation would be violent in nature, necessitating a drastic change in outlook, clothing, hygiene and sleeping patterns.

i was myself a fully paid member of one of these variants, and during the time, the vast gulf between each group seemed insurmountable. sure you had friends who crossed over - charsis would often be with commies until they became insufferable, and both commies and mullahs could link up on the moral decadence and decay symbolised by the charsis.

each group reserved infinite scorn and condescention for the others, each was completely committed to their belief, and each group was relentless in its zeal for conversion.

commies would be found arguing loudly over obscure texts which they would reverentially quote. mullahs would often hunt in pairs, forcing people to get up and join them when the azaan rang out. charsis would enter a room on the pretense of asking for a cigarette, and end up questioning entire moral systems while forcing someone to have just one puff.

yet for all their chest-thumping bravado, they were also extremely testy and defensive when questioned over the apparently obvious contradictions inherent to them.

how can someone holding meetings in colonial mansions claim to feel the pain of the proletariat? how can buying expensive foreign made mobile phones be reconciled with the spiritual austerity you preach? how can you claim to be ridding yourself of all pretensions and hypocrisies when you can't even admit that you are addicted to what you just smoked?

in response, the archetype being questioned would eventually shake their head and leave you to your apparent ignorance.

once i graduated, these variants were at first ornaments of my nostalgia.

slowly, as we all started earning and making the salaries our fancy-pants university guaranteed, one would hear of deviancies amongst these archetypes. the charsi who one day broke his family television set and started growing a beard. the commie who decided to take up the corporate job because they wanted to change the system from within. the mullah who decided that he would shave off his beard for his the sake of his promotion, because religion is a private matter.

but i never really understood why we all became those archetypes in the first place.

the epiphany that led to this blog happened last week.

i recently found work as a producer for a tv channel. however, i didn't mention this new job either online or to any of my friends. the reason being that it was for a 24 hour Muslim channel.

i knew i wasn't completely ashamed, and i wasn't exactly proud. i was definitely confused.

then i met perhaps the most intriguing muslims i've ever come across - mohammad sulayman - a convert from st. kitts who works with troubled youth, speaks in an amazing rasta accent, and quotes both the quran and malcom x with liberal abandon. his ethos continues to be 'if i find that there is something in islam i don't agree with, i'll leave this religion.'

the reason i had went to him was because i was doing a story on whether young Muslims in britain are getting radicalised through the internet, and he told me something quite fascinating.

a host of recent headlines grabbing stories - such as the underwear bomber, the times square bomber, the MP stabber - all had protagonists who were not the downtrodden, marginalised, poor muslims from the ghettoes, but rather university educated middle class muslims.

and according to sulayman, they were driven to those acts because of their socio-economic situation. this is how he explained it:

a middle class child is brought up in a culture that places great pressure on achieving a good education, finding a stable and succesful foothold in society, managing to provide and support the family.

but for all these essentially material aims, the middle class provides its children with lofty ideologies as justifications.

do this to be a good person, do this to be rewarded in heaven, do this to live with honor etc. all these things which are essentially subjective and unknowable are sought to be validated through decidely material and objective goals.

when the middle class child, especially a talented or high achieving one, enters university or the workplace, they get a chance to be away from their middle class culture and become exposed to a greater spectrum of ideas and expereiences. and at this point, the chasm between the material aims they strive for, and the ideas that are meant to supplant them, become glaringly obvious.

they become exceedingly frustrated that their entire lives were premised around contradictions and as a reaction, they embrace a certain set of ideals with unwavering ferocity (which as i saw at my alma mater translated into the three archetypes i mentioned above.)

if we return to the pink floyd reference, the middle class child begins to see himself as different from both the pigs above and the sheep below.

and so he starts to growl at the pigs to protect them from the sheep, and then he barks viciously at the sheep to get them to rise from their slumber. he doesn't want to be a pig, but he doesn't want to be a sheep even more.

the problem is that the middle class child never quite realises that he is, at the end of the day, a dog.
now, there is nothing wrong with being a dog.

but if one never realises that fact, they get caught up in a web of frustration. and when they do so their venting can get quite dangerous.

all too often, the middle class vents their vitriol at the excesses of the rich, but when the poor eventually take up arms and respond to their calls, the middle classes are the first to shirk away.

all too often the middle classes decry the illiteracy of the poor, and yet when they are asked to accomodate their needs, they decide to hide elsewhere.

unfortunately, no matter how noble or base the intentions, dogs can't transform themselves to become either pigs or sheep, and neither can a dog save the pigs or the sheep.

it just doesn't work like that.

what does work is shedding your preconcieved ideologies, and accepting those held by others.

what does work is reserving judgement, yet having the guts to call out right from wrong.

what does work is focusing on your own biases, your own failings, your own impotencies before railing at others.

in other words, o children of the middle class, if you want to stop being a dog, start being a human instead.