for starters, numbers were symbols used to denote a certain sum of objects, regardless of the nature of the objects. two sticks, three bushels of wheat, five cows etc.
but what was zero denoting?
moreover, when you factor in division, which had been around since --- it gets even more forbidding towards comprehension. try and divide zero by any number, and you still get zero. try and divide any number by zero, and you get infinity.
infinity. whoa dude.
i always thought the reason behind zero's mystique is partly due to the fact that it is an oval - 0. as in its a circular shape. and because circles are the grand daddies of symbols in relation to their contribution towards understanding a conceptualization of reality.
Circles go a long way towards explaining the most mysterious of humanity's thoughts. Circles are the best examples of divinity. for the plebians, consider Lion King, the song circle of life.
What brought me to circles was when i was considering classes - it seems that if you view classes as a spectrum ranging fromabsolutely fucking poor - really poor - poor - middle class - upper middle class - rich - super rich
then you have the following range of classes. now if you take this string and make it into a circle, the first thing you will notice is that the super rich and the absolutely fucking poor come next to one another. in other words, the same point marks the end of one category and the beginning of another.
for the bottom of the barrel, access to any entertainment which doesn't involve sex is the realm of the well off. the situation improves very slightly as you move up, accentuated ever more by the fact that the Islamic Republic offers very few avenues of entertainment as it is.
but when you do move up, eating out becomes the primary entertainment source.
in fact, you need to jump up quite a few more notches to arrive at the strata which can afford forms of entertainment that are not based on eating.one such popular outlet is being the member of a 'club.' like most things pakistani, this is a colonial endowment.
now in karachi, there are several clubs. maybe you belong to kda officers club, or the kw&sb club near karsaz. people who are at such clubs probably tell their neighbors, friends, relatives with great pride about the facilities available at their club. the people they tell are usually not part of such, or any club.
but then those who belong to maybe sunset club, or dha club in phase II, can smugly look down upon them. because after all, those clubs are literally no more than one pit of water posing as a pool, several dilapidated machines pretending to be a gym, and precious else.
but sunset, dha, beachview types are something much better. these clubs came around in what were at varying times the hot, exciting new localities in karachi. they had tennis courts, and courteous waiters, tambola nights, bridge clubs, and for some, the presence of retired generals and brigadiers which certainly afforded a sense of respectability.
but they, even at their prime, could not really penetrate the aura of something like karachi club, or its immediate superior, the gymkhana. these are genuine heirs to the claim of genuine, having of course been around for so damn long, and being gestated in the ideas of the white man, and having long flowing generations within their membership lists.
so people from beachview, sunset etc could look down upon the KDA types, but certainly not on KG. and so the ladder of snobs added a few more rungs. anyways, eventually the KG types were dying a slow death, primarily because 'certain' ethnicities began dominating their clientele. and the problem with that was that those ethnicities had displayed great social mobility - they were not part of the glorious people who had formed the initial crust of the pie that had afforded Gymkhana its prestige.
when this anomaly began to exist i.e. exclusive clubs that had lost their aura of exclusivity, a new swathe of clubs arrived, mainly in newer parts of defence - phases V-VIII. these clubs were part of the military's resurgence, were big and promised all sorts of new entertainment, such as enormous domed pools where women constrained by the perils of morality could swim in peace. later, newer, more exclusive clubs also opened up in the hinterlands of the city.what was different about these clubs was that every year there was a new club that was more exclusive than the last. marina, creek, golf, country, arabian etc etc. each club's exclusivity was determined mainly by the price of its membership, and consequently the clientele was of a more agreeable nature in terms of their affluence and place in society.
people who were members of this club could gleefully sneer at everyone else, because their club was where it was at. they could benignly, maliciously, explicitly or implicitly look down upon each and every other member of the club going heathen. all except one group.
members of sindh club.
when general napier captured the province for the brits, he sent a brief telegram, allegedly because telegrams were priced according to the word count, but i find it unlikely to think that napier was such a stingy little fellow.
his brief telegram was limited to one word - peccavi. its latin, meaning "I have sinned." geddit?that's a good way of understanding sindh club, because it represents the most exclusive facet of a reality forged primarily out of the idea of exclusivity - the idea of the social club. and the reason peccavi goes well for it is because in any society, the most exclusive of the elite are associated with the most extreme varieties of debauchery and decadence.
i have no statistical studies to show whether that is actually a fact, especially where members of sindh club are concerned, so i will leave that to the reader.
the reason i spoke originally about circles is that when you come to this most exalted of levels, you are out of people to look up to. you can only look down. which of course has many advantages, but gets boring after a while. it also means that the plethora of entertainment available to you loses its luster and sex, which each preceding class had sought to replace as the sole provision of entertainment, is once again back on the menu*.
at the risk of extreme generalization, it stands to reason that the super rich society is where there is the most unabashed hedonism.
and from there we arrive at the fact that the only two classes in karachi enjoying the most sex are the top and bottom classes.moreover, the ones having the least sex are the middle classes, the ones most removed from the point where the best and worse meet.
so now you, the reader, has begun to digest what i was saying, and you are now mentally refuting some of the points i have made. there will be some who will argue that the implication that hedonism equals the super rich is completely, or mostly wrong. however, since this is the blogosphere, i don't expect that sentiment to arrive.
instead, most people would agree. they would also focus on the level of clubs directly above the ones they are members of, or are able of becoming members of, and rail against them with great abandon. they would mock them as the bourgeois, the burgers, the blissfully unaware, the bane of our society. they would all deride how class driven our society is, and proclaim with great scorn and disgust that this is why our country is in the state it is in.
what would escape most is that the fact that they are somewhere amongst the hallowed classes, as their access to the internet, and their ability to come this far on this post implies. and as such they are an extremely integral part of the problem they have just complained of.
but pakistanis will never see that. they care far more about making sure that they have someone to bitch about. someone to hate. someone to complain about. which is why they will always find someone below them that they can look down upon, and someone above them which they can direct their derision towards. the only way that is possible is if we find ourselves in a circle. because a liner path will always have an absolute end, but a circle has no end or beginning.
what pakistanis would hate is if they had no one to complain about. because to be able to complain about someone indicates that the person on whom the complaint is being directed upon has the responsibility to make things better. or to make changes. you can not sit all day complaining until you are at the mercy of someone else. if you are not, then you won't be complaining all day because rationality would dictate that you do something to change whatever you are complaining about.
it is why we love to sit and blame the feudal landlords, the Army, the US or India, or the CIA, or Israel, the Shias, the Wahabis, the Taliban, the Memons, the Bengalis, the Jews, the Jews, and of course, the Jews.
because if someone whispered to us that we are our own masters, it would immediately mean that we have the responsibility to clean up our own shit, and stop complaining.
you can not complain if you are in control.
and that is something that no pakistani would ever want. we are far more content to be part of the order, neither being at the absolute top, or at the absolute bottom. because being at the top means no more complaining.
but what about the bottom? why avoid that? doesn't it allow freedom of unbridled complaints?
well, complaints arise out of spite. otherwise they are just lamentations, such as those that come out of mourning. you lament a death, you can't really complain about it much.
and spite can not survive if you have no one to look down upon. because spite and conceit must drink from that same cesspool of shit.
so you can't be bottom, and you can't be on top.
we're pakistanis - we're glad we've got our own country, but please rule it for us so that we can bitch about you. please.
*(it is for this reason that many of this class complain tirelessly about the country, and wish to move abroad, but never do. mainly because most of them would lose their exalted status in another country, and as such are infinitely more content to be here. if they were to ever stop complaining, they would immediately stop belonging, and if they don't belong to their class, then their class loses its value to them, and they become empty of all meaning, because their humanity died a long time ago.)