Stabbing Lions in the Skull is the path to Salvation

look at this picture.

no really, take a look at it.

are you suppressing a giggle, or perhaps recalling the awesome article on cracked.com that showcased this once?

this picture, and i am not mincing my words here, explains why the burqa/hijab and its politics are such a huge issue in our modern world.

no really, take a look at it, and you should see be able to see it.

still don't get it, do you?

let me tell you a story.

there used to be two tribes, one in the east and one in the west.

the men of both tribes would gather every day to perform their rituals. in the east, they would inhale gas. in the west, they would imbibe liquids.

the men of the east said that our faith is in something that can not be seen or measured readily, but can be felt. so our ritual centers around gas, because it is what exemplifies our faith.

the men of the west said that our faith is in something we can see and know and measure, so our rituals are based on liquids.

one day the men in the east realised that the tribes of the west had built big buildings and fancy roads and phones you could touch instead of tap, and it made them very upset.

some of them thought, hey, why not give this liquid idea a try. so with heads filled with up with gases they started to give this liquid thing a shot

but other men of the east got really pissed, so pissed that they started filling themselves up with gas until they blew up. they didn't realise that they were in on the liquid too, because their denial was so powerful.

interestingly, the women of the east had no choice on the matter but to keep up the rituals that had always existed.

one year the tribe in the west started running out of its liquid, and suddenly there was great commotion and despair. some of them shouted that the men in the east had probably finished off all their liquid, siphoning it into their dirty gaseous minds. all hell broke lose, as the tribe vowed to get their liquid back, and to make sure that no gas-guzzling easterner would ever get to sip any liquid until they provided permission.

cue chaos and confusion.

cue, this picture.

why do i keep returning here? well, i had seen this image a few times on the web, and my reactions had ranged from the incredulity of being confronted with pakistanica, to embarrasment at our tackiness, to titlation based on my desire to feel different. but i'd never quite understood it.

then, i visited the british museum, and suddenly i saw this, and it floored me.

to be honest, i actually saw a version of this image where the king was actually stabbing the lion through the skull with a dagger, but even here, you can make out the fight with the lion resulting in a stab wound for the beast.

suddenly, as cracked.com would say, something punched my brain in the face. the sultan rahi poster was not some example of deranged pakistani violence fantasies, or the poster that hate mailers send to PETA.

it made a very strong and obvious point - this image is of a hero.

heroes in all mythologies kill lions to prove their valour. in one image, that poster tells me everything i need to know about who sultan rahi is, and the moral world he inhabits.

now, perhaps it seems like a huge leap to link the persepolis image with the pakistani one as either ends of a tradition, but i have reasons.

you may claim i am simply doing so to root this piece of faux-art onto a venerable tradition. you may even say that the reason i do so is to find a rooting in history for my country and its culture, which suffers from such absurd amnesias in definig its own past.

but i am doing it because it makes sense. it makes sense because of trucks.

truck art has become this symbol and motif of showcasing non-terrorist pakistan.

its this idea that 'we have culture too', although most people who use it do it to add some ethnic flavour to their own ideals. they do it without ever understanding it, but only showcasing it like a circus shows a bearded woman.

infact, if i may say so, truck art is the most exoticized pakistani object after mathira's body.

what makes things interesting is if you try and investiage why trucks in pakistan are decorated the way they are, you find something revelatory.

almost every aspect of truck art, from the way those giant d-shaped crowns are created, to the patterns and motifs inscribed, to the very idea of decoration itself, stems from traditions in islamic art.

essentially, artistic traditions organic to this area and region which have just morphed from buildings and canvases onto truck bodies.

which is why the sultan rahi poster itself fits in with the persian king - both of those are part of certain ideas and traditions.

what is worrying is that i had no idea about any of this.

and i'm not alone here.

we've all found ourselves in the position where we are unsure whether to take gulps of gas or shots of liquid. and by we, i don't mean western-boot licking liberals, i mean all the tribesmen of the east, because when you use a mobile phone to blow up the infidels, well you're using the products of liquid faith.

but as we rushed to bathe ourselve in liquid, we did not consider that perhaps liquid and gas could have a synthesis, or that gas may have something to say about liquid or vice versa. so eager were we to reap the benefits of liquid that we felt the best way forward was to pretend gas never existed.

which is why a 27 year old film graduate had no way of understanding the imagery of a local film, because that whole world view had been replaced a long time ago.

and unfortunately, while the men of the east gave up their traditional forms of dressing and their traditional occupations and thoughts, they could never really let go of the idea of tradition itself. they just reduced it to certain symbols that proved to themselves that they were still a gas.

and so, cue the hijab, cue halal kfc, cue men dressed in jeans and working in investment banks who feel that women who don't cover up are asking to be raped.

in this post 9/11 climate of mosques floating upon grounds of zero and sikhs being thrashed for their turbans and newspaper comics becoming nuclear bombs, we find ourselves in an odd position.

the west doesn't 'hate' us, it just doesn't get us.

and they don't get us because we don't get ourselves. the reason we don't get ourselves is because we don't know what was ours to begin with. like this image.

i'm not trying to make this a pedantic debate about islam and the west, or the perils of modernity, and i am certainly not advocating a return to the stone ages.

what i am trying to say, is that when you and i don't know what sultan rahi is doing stabbing two lions in the head, its not because we were never interested in that lollywood crap to begin with, but because we have no clue how to decode and interpret the symbols that are organic to us.

because somewhere in the past few centuries, we oscillated between trying to buy into modernity and trying to retain our own identity. and in doing so, we made the disastrous decision to ape the liquid drinkers in the areas we needed to, and spurn their logic when their ideas meant our own privilieges would be threatened. that meant that our own traditions and logic and worldviews literally vanished in thin air, leaving us gasping for breath.

and in today's world, where suddenly all of us - from the talib in swat to the student in swarthmore, are finding ourselves like the kawa with the peacock feathers, we have no idea where to turn and what to look at. because what we see, we don't understand.

and if we can't understand our own selves out, no amount of development funds, sympathetic op-eds, well meaning NGOs and facebook protests can save us from our self-inflicted destruction.

Why We Watch Sports

I have branched out my blogging of late. I can recently be found on these two sites:

http://blog.dawn.com/author/ahmer-naqvi/
http://clearcricket.wordpress.com/author/karachikhatmal/

now, here is another post that recently got published at dawn. i have written other stuff for both blogs that i haven't put here yet, so do check it out.

London is a notorious city to travel in. According to one account, the average speed of travel across the city has not changed in over 300 years. The situation becomes exacerbated further when winter comes in, especially this year’s edition which promises to be the worst in 30 years. Yet last night, I found myself braving the elements to take on a two-hour journey, all to catch the last 15 minutes of a match.

Unfortunately, the team I was supporting was decimated, to put it politely. You can read about it here, but as far as I was concerned, there was a more pressing question I needed to answer. Why did I care?

At first, my meditations flocked around the match in question, which involved two teams I had no link to, had never seen in person, and was probably never going to be able to either. But perhaps the sheer magnitude of the loss forced me to delve deeper – why do we follow any sports at all? Especially people like me, who have been so bad at all sports that they are forced to buy the equipment in their local gully before anyone reluctantly puts them in the team.

Sports as war

Ok, that is a rather sensationalist claim, inspired by George Orwell’s observation that all sports was ‘war minus the shooting.’ But its not completely off the mark.

Modern football, for example, evolved from annual events where neighbouring villages would compete to drag an animal carcass across a lengthy field. The whole fiasco would result in outrageous violence and often, fatalities.

However, the noblemen realised that if the villagers would be allowed to vent their emotions, angers and frustrations through such events, they would be less likely to involve themselves in actual warmongering, particularly against their overlords.

To date, a lot of sports allow themselves to serve as a way of channelling machismo, aggression and frustration. The Pakistani artist Faiza Butt has done some fascinating work showcasing how sports allow ideas of masculinity to be represented and reified. As a recent blog noted, channelling machismo is not always the best recipe for success. However, it continues to be the way forward for sportsmen, but more importantly sports followers.

Getting excited, angry, vengeful, bullish, threatening on the fluctuations of a match allows supporters to come to terms with their own emotions that they perhaps struggle to express otherwise due to the bounds of civility, legality and social norms.

Sports as narrative

One day I was being deliberately sexist (I do that as part of my roguish charm routine. It’s not always successful, but I am married, so clearly it worked when I needed it to) and claiming that women are vacuous because they like watching soap operas. My wife had a pithy response – watching a soap is no different than following a football team.

What? At first, I began to pout and snipe, angrily demanding she take it back. But later, I started to think about what she had said.

Every day, I find myself scouring blogs and articles which dissect the latest sporting events, the reactions of the competitors, the intrigue of the administrators, the drama, the suspense, the excitement.

However, I recently realised that the restrictions of work and personal obligations meant that I was rarely able to actually watch the sports I was following so diligently. I could not stop going into work, or avoid picking up a relative from the airport just because a sporting event was playing live.

More interestingly, I hadn’t even realised that I had been reduced to following these sports through some scattered highlights, and a plethora of words on websites, tweets and forums. So I wondered, why am I so eager to follow the interpretation of events I am not even watching?

The answer is that our own lives are messy, seemingly random experiences. Sure we have goals and dreams, but our trials and tribulations are constant and monotonous, our ‘defining’ moments occur haphazardly and irregularly, and it is often difficult to discern any tangible meaning from the procession of our daily routine.

In contrast, sports follow pre-defined patterns. There are seasons, tournaments, leagues, rankings, competitions. The adversary is easily defined, the end is easily identified. There are winners and losers, champions and chumps, heroes and villains.

We can’t watch every match, but we can follow the score, day in day out, through out the season. And doing so, it helps provide a steady tale of ups and downs, of victories and defeats, of hope and sorrow. And so if our own lives seem messy and complicated, sports (and indeed soap operas) allow us to follow something that does seem to make sense, and end with a nice ceremony.

Sports as art

For a lot of people, a trip to an art gallery can be bewildering. Very few things seem to make sense, and fewer still betray any idea as to why they were deemed important enough to be put up in such a sacred manner. Which is why, a lot of attendees are there to curry favour with others, to be seen and talked about. But that’s not true for everyone. Appreciating art requires an understanding of context, but also technique. The knowledge of both allows one to appreciate a work for what it’s trying to say, as well as the difficulties and the limits, of conveying and representing what has been said.

Sometimes, watching sports is truly akin to appreciating art, and in that sense, it becomes divorced from the experiences described above. Sometimes, we watch not for who is playing, and who we want to win, but rather to watch something incredible unfold.

We watch to see limits being challenged, to see previously someone breach what is considered possible. We watch to see roles being changed, new interpretations being created, new ideas brought to life. We essentially partake in a supremely creative process, where the appreciation comes not from our own affiliations and prejudices, but rather our desire to watch new possibilities, new meanings to emerge.

Truly great performers are like great painters creating new styles, great writers discovering new forms of expressions. A Messi dribble, a drive from Lara, a shot from Federer is watching a new form of expression being created, and in such a moment, narrative and emotions matter little.

Sports as transcendental experience

It was 2004, and I was in a concrete cauldron in Karachi. By all accounts, me and 30,000 other people should have already headed home. It was lunch, and India had just posted the highest total the ground had ever seen. In the days before mammoth chases were common, and the fact that this was Pakistan’s notoriously hollow batting doing the chasing, the target of 350 seemed like an impossibility.

And yet somehow, the crowd hung around, ignoring the initial parts of Pakistan’s chase and amusing themselves with shouting out obscene comments to the outfielders, and buying copious amounts of food from the stalls nearby.  Somehow, they resisted their usual penchant for stoning the opposition captain, or rioting in the stands.

And somehow, even more improbably, Pakistan starting making a fist of the chase. Somehow, the boundaries kept flowing. Somehow, that glorious saviour Inzi kept shuffling his cards and producing aces. Somehow, the most impossible of chases, against the most fiercest of rivals, began to materialise.

And it was there, in the last few hours of that match, that I suddenly lost myself. The entire stadium began to pulsate as one giant beastly cacophony of sound. Bottles were relentlessly smacked against plastic seats, Mexican waves cascaded continuously upon themselves. Roar after roar after roar continued to be emitted. It didn’t stop for dot balls, it didn’t stop for over breaks or drinks breaks. It didn’t stop for fall of wickets.

And when the match reached its climax and Pakistan lost in one blink of an eye, the roar stopped for a moment, before beginning again. The stadium’s relentless noise transformed into applause for a team which had been pelted with rocks the last time it had played there.

And when it all ended, I realised that for the past few hours, I had no awareness of my self, my individual self. The entire experience had felt otherworldly, eerie even in retrospect. There had been no concept of individuals, no concept of political feuds and human follies. No concept of victory or defeat even. It had been a sustained moment of pure exhilaration.

And every sports fan who tastes such a moment, who participates in that obliteration of the self and the connection with all of humanity around them, who experiences emotions beyond those that can be described by words, keeps coming back for more.

For all its faults and pretensions, sports remains one of those mediums where we can experience something truly beyond the ordinary. Something which affirms our belief that there is more to life, if only we choose to embrace it.

And out of all the reasons, that is the most noble one for following sports.