A Quick One While You Were Away

why do we - pakistanis - discuss politics non-stop? before you perform some vigilante justice on me, hear me out.

a few hours ago there was a lot of anguish over politicians and journalists baying for another coup. i realise the need to speak out against this. yet i can't help but feel a great futility in such practices. to me, they seem like a way of venting frustrations. since we on the internet are not concerned with the next meal, our drowning lifestock or our dying, starving children, what is the basis of this frustration?

a hopeless future? a poor national image across the globe? a desire to feel superior and important? a reflection of our own personal conflicts - which we have failed to resolve, so we turn to battering the politicians, the generals, the journalists?

there are those who will dismiss this as another example of our elitist chattering class professing disdain for the downtrodden masses. you will paint my rants as belonging to a fiddling feudalistic nero.

i don't give a shit.

because i personally believe that at the end of the day its a question of intelligent. an intelligent society can be trusted to find intelligent answers, and not just those that think-tanks and pol-sci textbooks deem correct. and i don't think people discussing politics are not intelligent - its just that discussing the same old shit repeatedly is an insult to said intelligence.

but ahsan at fiverupees has an interesting point. perhaps my grievances are down to the fact that i don't know the right places to look. there may well be amazing blogs out there discussing non-political stuff, or at least a non-nauseating amount of it and are also written by intelligent people who aren't resorting to copy-pasting whatever the Big Blogs are currently discussing.

so here is my clarion call - do we have intelligent, articulate people out there talking about pakistan, but not about whats on the news, whats in the papers and whats in their faces?

post recommendations and suggestions in the comments below.

3 Days in Karachi

if there's one thing i truly hate about abbas, it's his bhenchod paan. every time he has it in his mouth, which is all the time, he's constantly letting out these poisonous pichkaars. 


when he does that, it produces this repulsive little sound, like a sharp hiss or a brief puckering sound, which rises during that brief moment when his lips tremble apart slightly, and a sharp sting of spittle pierces through the crevices within his teeth. 


to be sure, if there is one thing i hate about that choot, its his paan.


now, this is no fanciful statement. abbas is a truly despicable human being, so there is a lot to hate about him. 


to begin with, he is ek dam kala bhujjang - black as sin. i mean kala. but i don't mind that. 


his heart is much darker than his complexion. he was the child who would use elfy on the cats and shut their eyes. he was the boy who would slap his sisters for fun. he was the son you kept your valuables hidden from. 


and on top of that, there was his bhenchod bharham. i mean obnoxious level bharhams. constant bataein chodna. constant bravado. he was a spindly little lund, but he talked as if he owned the bhenchod city.


and as he kept talking and slurping his oral cesspool, he kept pissing out those pichkaars. 


II


there are two boys, and they are standing under a tree. there is a thin dark one who keeps pacing and spitting pan, and waving his assault weapon in the air. the more muscular one remains silent most of the time. i cannot be sure if he is saying anything at all, because i'm too far, and the thin one doesn't look like he's stopping.


abid thinks that we should move. i know we can't get a good shot of them from here, but if anyone were to come by that road, we'd have a kutta shot of the whole scene. i tell abid to be patient.


the thin one has not put his gun against the pavement, and is using his free hands to make crude gestures. he accompanies these mathira grabs with thrusting his pelvis. soon, a simple narrative emerges from this dance. 


the thin one seems to be saying that someone with large breasts encourages him to adopt a slow, languid pace during intercourse, so that he concentrates on kneading. but a lover with smaller breasts compels him to pinch and squeeze with wild abandon, a luxury which necessitates that he perform the act with a furious vigour. 


abid tells me he didn't have time to re-charge the spare battery. 

III


Asim thinks he's some bhenchod poet, some udaas aashiq who's going to take this randi world and hide all her oozing warts and fix her up so that he can marry her and take her to his gandoo village.


Saala lund.


he thinks like he's the guy who's on some mission to rid us of our sins, like he is some bhenchod avenger, like he's that gandu baazigar. 


and oh how he loves to give me this chutia smug look. how he loves to takes these deep, meaningful breaths which he uses to cover up the fact that he's got lund to say. and then there's his taliban routine every juma, where he makes this big show of going to offer the only namaaz he does all week. but oh no - somehow that makes him some bhenchod philosopher.


fact is asim is just as much as a gandoo as the rest of us,  but he's decided that he's going to ignore that. he's going to ignore the fact that he's a third class ghunda with mobile snatching as his primary vocation. he's going to ignore the fact that he is just as khwaar as all the rest of the qaum. because he is asim bhenchod ashiq. asim bhenchod hero, asim bhenchod leader.


Saala lund.

IV


The two boys now descend
Into a fight that never ends
Between them.


They speak of women they'll never see
Of how they would seduce them in their sleep
One Day.


One speaks of the goddess Katrina
Another extols the virtues of Kareena
Ad Nauseam.


Screaming, straining, pulsing
Throbbing, lashing, excreting
Screaming, screaming, screaming.

V


EXT. EMPTY ROAD, DAY


          [We track across a wide, empty road in Garden, stopping bang
          in the middle of the road. there is a slight haze, and its
          cloudy and cool. The two boys are on the extreme right of
          the frame, under a tree. we hear them talk, but not
          audibly.]


                                                          CUT TO:
          CLOSE UP of ABBAS:


          [Abbas suddenly whips his head around. We can hear the faint
          sound of a rickshaw in the background.]


                                                          CUT TO:


          CLOSE UP of ASIM:


          [Asim follows suit, and instinctively, grips and squeezes
          the gargantuan gun he holds.]


                                                          CUT TO:


          [We return to the original shot. The boys are now getting
          animated, and we see a rickshaw chugging slowly towards them
          in the vast empty road.]


                              ABBAS:
                    Chal bhenchod! Aaja beta asim teri
                    baari aa gayee hai! Chal gushtee
                    kay shurroo ho ja (lets out a
                    stream of paan spittle)


                              ASIM:
                    Lun Pay aa...


                              ABBAS:
                         (screaming)
                    Kya ho gaya hai lun ke siray? Chala
                    goli madarchod yeh wali Katrina kay
                    liyain! (breaks out into maniacal
                    laughter)


                                                          CUT TO:


          [We now split the screen, with close ups of both boys. We
          see Abbas screaming as a rush of emotions wash across Asim's
          face. The background music, and general sense of chaos
          continues to rise, until...]


                                                          CUT TO:


          [We see Asim face on, screaming loudly. He opens fire, and
          holds the gun with both arms between his legs. We see
          bullets pulsing out of the weapon, with Asim's body
          convulsing with each release of a bullet, each burst of fire
          coalescing as an other-wordly experience on his face. His
          mouth hangs open, his pupils dilated, his entire being
          sublimated into the gun he holds between his legs, the gun
          which continues to spit out bullets...]


                                                          CUT TO:


INT. RICKSHAW, DAY


          [The camera is now within the rickshaw, which is a
          smouldering, burning, bleeding carcass. We see both boys in
          the background, with Abbas gesticulating wildly, while Asim
          stands there, spent, in a daze.]

VI


Holy shit!


I turn to Abid and ask him if he got it, and he has. And although we both know its not going to run on-air, the confirmation has me elated. i was already nursing a semi having witnessed that first hand, but this is too good.


The boys continue to stand there. The psycho who completely ravaged the rickshaw continues to stand still, while the other prances about the rickshaw. I keep wondering whether I should move or go in, but Abid keeps me in check. I want to send a message to the assignments desk, but I have no idea whether to call this one ethnic or not. 


I realise that they might have the same problem too. The rickshaw driver is fair, ruddy type, but his passenger, an old woman, looks much darker. The dark boy continues to run around their smoldering bodies.  


Suddenly, the killer speaks. He seems to have made up his mind and barks instructions to the other. They grab the woman, and carry her corpse to the nearby gully. The fair one then returns alone, and stands by the rickshaw which he now begins to douse in petrol.

VII


More die as violence and arson continue in Karachi


KARACHI (Staff Report): The death toll in the city rose to 85 this morning, as raging gun battles continued through out the city, with the authorities continuing to be missing from the action...


... In Garden, at least two bodies were recovered early on Saturday morning. Aasia Ahmed, a 55 year old local resident, was found dead in an alley near her home, having been shot multiple times in the head and torso. Aasia's son was an activist in the MQM, and police confirmed that her death was a target killing.


Police also recovered the body of Asfandyar Khan, a 42 year old rickshaw driver from the same vicinity. His remains were found within his rickshaw, which had been set on fire. The authorities confirmed that they were treating his death as a target killing, pointing out that several bus drivers and rickshaw drivers had been similarly burnt alive due to their ethnic origins. 

why coke studio matters

no one in pakistan has any convictions, but everyone has an opinion.


the great joy of opinions is that you can change them with the wind. convictions require standing by your faith while others heckle you and throw half empty yogurt packs in your direction. opinions require you to be loud, and have an inflated estimation of your own self.

the kind of opinion pakistanis excel in is the one which finds faults in others. it doesn't matter if the opinion they currently hold completely contradicts everything they said yesterday, or exposes their hypocrisies. as long as it makes someone look bad, everyone's in on it.


all societies create heroes only to rip them apart. i know that. look at the brits and jordan.  but in pakistan, we skip the hero part, and start directly from the ripping apart business.


and i know that coke studio is already facing all this. everyone's got a million fucking gripes with the whole show.


this is where i answer them. because pakistan can't afford to have assholes with opinions destroy everything we have worth believing in .


(i) How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Cola


Before we had the Islamic Republic of Blogistan, desi opinions were voiced at a place called chowk.com. In 2004, someone named asif memon wrote a seminal piece with the same title as above, detailing the exploitation and destruction of pakistan's greatest ever rock band, Junoon. those of us who went along till the horrible ride knew the story well - a band that had defied governments and invented its own genres was eventually reduced to dishing out half-assed 'Best of' albums, and shitting out what was easily their worst album ever - Dewaar; an album which graced a large coke logo on its front.

but if Coke only epitomized the sloth that accompanied the once-glorious junoon, Pepsi's channeling of a bloke named Machiavelli throughout the entirety of the Vital Signs career was an even greater sin.


before he became a paranoid politico harping endlessly about military governments from a generation ago, NFP was the authority on music in pakistan. he had an even greater article, also in chowk.com, which traced the whole history of the Signs, including the role of Pepsi. NFP tells of how Pepsi tried to influence the kind of songs the band made, how they forced them to tour endlessly and release albums faster, of how they tried to leverage their position by siding with a band named Awaz instead, and how they eventually led to the destruction of the legendary band.

those of you too young to have spent broken-hearted summers listening to "Chalay thay Saath Saath" may not realise this, but at their peak, Junoon and Vital Signs represented the last line of the kalima. to fuck with that was a sin far greater than blasphemy, and both the cola giants had blood on their hands.


there will be idealistic numbnuts who will exhale whatever their smoking, clear their throats, and wheeze out that "that's what  you get when you sell out maaaan..." such assholes have no idea what it means to be a musician, or an artist in pakistan. when the people refer to you as kanjars, they plan to treat you like them too. take a look at the last days of mehdi hasan to get a feel of what i mean. 

this is a land without record deals, without agents or record labels, without royalties, without any way of making any living off your work. work which the whole fucking country would love to pieces, listen to and gain inspiration from, and use for their own commercial purposes, without ever bothering to treat you anything better than a kanjar. so if some young kids decide to make some money off the back of releasing a debut song which would win a shady BBC prize as the greatest song EVER, can you blame them? if an aging band decides that they have nothing to show for their years of building up a fucking industry on their own, so they might as well take the money and run, can you blame them? 


any true fan couldn't. they had to accept the demise of both these monoliths. but they all could, and did, begin to despise the cola kings. them they could hate with all their might. capitalism had destroyed art. end of.


but this is pakistan. where the greatest socialists are feudal lords, where the greatest writers are penniless drunkards, where the greatest sportsmen are chinese coaches and tory cheerleaders. where the maulvis sell heroin and the kuffar save lives. pakistan is that point where the past and the future collide, and you're never quite sure which one you're living in. so it makes sense that the most seismic event in this era's music has a cola sugar daddy which has radically changed the whole rules of the game. as we say, only in pakistan.

what coke has done is not what people think it's done. the whole concept, its equipment, its vision, its outlook, its feel, its music had been planned up, conceived by a man who is the Godfather of Pakistani pop - rohail hyatt. 


what coke did was find an (almost definitely temporary) solution to a problem that the industry has faced for a long fucking time now. you see, music, like much else in this country, survives on patronage. people are loath to pay for music, and as such musicians have very few options. in the past, the national TV and radio would prove to be a modest source for most. but post-80s, the problem has exacerbated. during the 90s, amazing bands would put together the money for a video, then hope to get enough support to put out an album. but it would rarely be enough. which is why any act which manages to put out a second album in pakistan with the original line up automatically enters the hall of fame. 


as time passed, the profligacy of piracy and the rampant spread of downloading meant that money had to be made through endorsements (see Strings, Haroon et al) through sub-standard indian film songs (see Atif Aslam, Jal, Strings) through dubious charitable and religious causes (see Strings, Najam et al) or by pimping out your music fame for any and everything you can (see JJ, Nadeem Jafri)


in recent times, a strange 'improvement' has come about. a record label owned by a media house which loves to get down and dirty has taken on piracy, and started giving out proper deals. only, the kinds of bonded labor shit that the artists are being put through under their watch means that signing up with them is probably akin to artistic and financial suicide.


so when coke came up with the brilliant idea of giving out, handing out, fucking rewarding the whole country with awesome fucking music for free - nay, paying them to run it - it marked a radical departure from what the whole country or even the whole world had so far come up with. 


and then coke did something even better. they decided not to fuck with the sound, or make it commercial. they let it be, or even if they did meddle, they didn't do it enough to ruin the music.


capitalism and art in a win-win situation. only in pakistan.

(post script: in case some of you decide the pepsi is still evil, think of this. the current wave of music, of which coke studio either represents the peak of, or the final hurrah of, began when bands like Aaroh, eP, Mekaal Hasan, Messiah, Schehzad Hameed etc suddenly hit the scene. the reason they all came to the forefront at the same time was because of an event known as Pepsi Battle of the Bands.)


(ii) "Man, this year's Coke Studio has been a huge downer compared to last year..."


after the first episode this season, safieh came up with the golden rule of Coke Studio. sure it's nice to watch it, but you really need to listen to it to get it. the first time is like many other first times - a disappointing preview of whats to come. now you may think this is obvious, but she was speaking to a group which thought that the Arif Lohar song they'd just heard was too long, and Meesha was underused and off-beat. the song you now know as the official song of the summer. 


which is the whole point. most people who were excited about the show this year weren't even bothered with last year's season. in fact, most of the people who did watch last season never got past the blockbuster first episode, which had atif and ali zafar, and noori collaborating with some faqeer dude. so when season three rolled around, there was a lot of hype because of a particular breed of pakistani - the bandwagoner.

bandwagoners are a dime a dozen in this land. whenever they realise something is obviously cool, they jump on and pretend they were always there to begin with. in order to hide their pagan pasts, they become over-zealous about their bandwagon, eventually turning everyone else off. at which point they disembark and bitch to their heart's content. those are the people who were so fucking excited about coke studio because they knew it was cool. and those are the people who fill blog spaces and twitter spaces and youtube spaces with lamentations that the episode sucks.


well fuck you.


to begin with, the songs are being produced by a guy whose last band came out while most of you were still sperms and eggs, and still rumors of its comeback mark a frenzy. rohail hyatt KNOWS how to make timeless music. so if you think that you're the prick who's figured out his music a few minutes after hearing it, you deserve to die.


if anything, the whole program has taken on an even riskier route this season, and a far more nuanced one. gone are the superstars of pop. their place has been taken by people on the verge of breaking out, people who are already massive on another musical plane, and a couple of true blue legends. there is more genre hopping, and a lot, lot less virtuosity, especially for vocalists. this season has been about moods and spaces a lot more than the last one. and the music continues to get denser and richer.


this is not stuff you can digest overnight. its the kind of music you can walk away from and forget for a decade, until one day it suddenly comes rushing back through the smell of a biscuit soaked in brandy.


mark my words - as the time passes, this season will follow its predecessor in continuing to rise in people's estimation. and by the next season (if there is one) the same people who were bitching now would be harping on about how season three was the one that changed their lives and prompted them to create greater space for spirituality in their drawing room paint color choices.


(iii) "Abida doesn't sound so good - how could Coke Studio fuck that up?"


i realise that most of this can be answered by the rant above. but since this is abida we're talking about, i also realise that she deserves a whole section to herself. i concede that the two abida parveen songs weren't quite what i had hoped for, and in the case of the first, the situation has so far not improved with time. i realise that this is still too early, but there is another explanation.


you see, abida parveen is far bigger than the whole sum of coke studio - all the artists and people behind the scene and all the buzz and everything. she's been a global legend for some time now, she's worked with everyone, she's been covered in every genre, she's been produced a million different ways. while the level of technical and aesthetic production at CS has been unprecedented for most musicians, AP has already had that and more. that's why her songs have not been obvious so far, rather layered around her. 

moreover, sometimes the greatest things coming together doesn't work. there is a bootlegged mp3 of jim morrison singing while jimi hendrix plays guitar. its pretty shitty. 


(iv) "Why I'm proud to be a Burger"


one of this year's participants, Omer Bilal Akhtar had recently published an op-ed in the  Dr. NewsPaper/Mr Blog Aggregator Express Tribune recently by this name. it was pretty shit, and was absolutely crucified by commenters. the ADP frontman eventually wrote a hilarious and heroic defence of his piece, but it was too little, too late.


he had a point though - if burgers keep feeling ashamed and aloof, they'd keep being called out for living in a bubble. and since its assumed that those living in a bubble can't communicate with their society, they should and would be ridiculed.

but if anyone sits through the behind the scenes clips on the show, they'd see long haired, american accented, weirdly dressed, farangi influenced, clueless burgers talking very intelligently about music. and they'd see those same burgers being accorded tremendous respect and love by musicians from the other side of the bridge, the other side of the divide, from the 'real' part of pakistan. all goes to show that if you embrace your talent AND your identity, being a burger is no impediment, and even an advantage for creating something remarkable. 


and the ADP song had one of the most vintage pakistani freak out leads in recent history. so stop bitching on them.


(v) "Fuck yaar, they're just ripping off the originals..."


i could spend a long time on this, but a few lines should do. 'copying' someone's music and lyrics and calling them your own, ala Anu Malik, is cheating. paying homage to greats while composing something original is not cheating of ripping off.


there were a lot of people who did, and continue to, hate Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. these were qawwali connoisseurs who hated his cheap remixes, and resented the fact this his fame was not anywhere in proportion to his ability or talent when compared to his peers and predecessors. and i'll be the first to say it - there are some truly terrible nusrat remixes out there. but the whole point is, if it wasn't for those dishkum-dishkum songs, an entire  generation would have been alienated from one of their most significant art forms. because without nusrat, there was no one who was able to make the conditions which allowed pop-music and casual listeners into the world of qawwali. who allowed us to discover his influences, and love it so much that we began to listen to the unremixed, unedited versions of his own qawwalis, and those of others. the man, on his own, resuscitated the entire goddam form.


that's what coke studio is doing now. sure, you have these snobby friends who will show you the original version of "Chori Chori" or "Chambey di Booti" and piss all over the covers. but what these music puritans and fundamentalists don't realise is that without these cover songs, this conversation about which Reshma version of Chori Chori is the best would have probably never happened. these songs are allowing us a way back into our own pasts, our own identities and selfs, which we would have otherwise lost in the morass of unseen youtube videos. 


(vi) "Oooohhhh, so they're not ALL reactionary, jaahil, media-obsessed, heads-in-the-sand, clueless, greedy, selfish miserable chootias..."


the greatest thing about coke studio is that it proves that if you do something with the best people, with the best intentions and the best efforts to create something according to an aesthetic ideal, it can be popular and widely accepted in pakistan. 


this is no small thing.


there is such little hope for people trying to not dumb themselves down, trying to avoid being popular for popularity's sake, for people interested in saying something meaningful, for people who lack the energy and bitchiness to find a savage way to the top. 


so when you see something that brings together the best people and works brilliantly, you know that its possible. if we put aside our bullshit, if we lay down our ideologies, if we shed our inhibitions and our insecurities, we can do something that stands the test of time.


and that is why coke studio matters.