UthRecords Songs as Pakistani Fast Bowlers

"Where does Pakistan keep finding these amazing fast bowlers from? Probably the same place they find great musicians from"
- Ancient Chinese Proverb

Somewhere beneath the madness of the world cup, one of pakistan's most significant cultural moments was gleefully occurring. I am referring to what is currently the second most important TV show in Pakistan - uth records.

Now i realise that some of you might have missed it (catch all of the first season here) And I also know that many of you are still trying to adjust your mind's bleary eyes from the crushing hangover of the world cup. so, in an extravagant display of my magnanimity and confused mindset, i am going to put indulge in some intellectual crossing of these two perennial nashay - music and cricket.

presenting - UthRecords Songs As Pakistani Fast Bowlers.

(please note that the analogies are for the songs, not the artists. thanks.)

Jumbo Jatt - Jahiliya

In the recent past, Sheikhupura has beget two fast men to make it into the national side. A few years ago, during a vist there, i met three men whose primary pursuits involved getting drunk and betting on cricket. they had been avid followers of the domestic circuit for reasons of both passion and money, and they were extremely confused by something. of the two bowlers i speak of, one had been a waif like no-hope who had nothing special about him. a waste of space, they condemned him. the other, had it all.

and yet, mohammad asif was making mark nicholson cream his pants, while rana naved-ul-hasan was getting the thanks-for-coming notes.

it makes sense. rana's seam when he releases the ball is truer than a biblical prophet. he bowls at real pace, yet his slower deliveries are as deceptive as an akmal brother. he ticks every check box a premier fast bowler needs to. and yet.

something isn't there - the sum is not greater, even lesser than the parts.

that's the feeling i get with this song. i can't quite see what's wrong with it. the lyrics are contemporary, the sound is great, the length is just right, and faraz anwar provides some fascinating virtuousity right at the end. and yet.

perhaps it just sounds too much like a lot of other things.

the vocalist is good, but not distinctive. the guitars are awesome, but in an adequate way, if that makes any sense. perhaps the song suffers from hitting the right areas too much, and not providing a moment that surprises you.

don't get me wrong - its not in any way a bad song. it's rather tasty, but in a aalo-gobi kind of way, where you know its filled your stomach, but you're not going to spend the next day dreaming about  it.

Jahiliya - Rana Naved

Usman Riaz - Hum Tum

If you ever talk to any Pakistani fan about fast bowling, particularly those from the 90s, they'll tell you a legend. a legend of a bowler so fast, he made shoaib look pedestrian. a bowler so demonic that lara himself bowed to his greatness. the bowler in question was mohammad zahid, and we'll forever associate him with the refrain - what if? what if his action hadn't caused his spine to shatter, curtailing his career? what if we had speed guns then to measure him, or what if we hadn't spent all our energies taking care of the other express man of that time - shoaib akhtar? what if?

and "what if" is the question that keeps coming back to you in this song.

let's face it - Usman Riaz is a talent of a phenomenal level. its kind of apt that he is such a fragile looking person, because that's the feeling you get from listening to him - someone so precocious and odiously talented feels too good to be true, you fear that this ugly world will devour him.

and perhaps recognizing that, Gumby and Omran were extremely careful with his song. they got the help of the supremely creative Sir Ahmed, they drafted in one of Pakistani pop's best vocalists. they did everything possible to make this work.

but when you listen to the song, you wonder - what if the vocals didn't come in to drown out the gorgeous guitar and piano solos? what if they had gone with a different feel, which wasn't so eager to be catchy? what if usman had just been left to his own devices? what if the collaborator was someone unassuming and unknown, instead of a colossal ego with a beard?

i honestly wanted to refrain from being bitchy in this review, but ali noor's attitude kinda pissed me off. with the utmost respect, the man deserves his ego. but like those tales of senior cricketers snubbing the youngersters in the team they feared would take their places, ali noor doesn't really go out to embrace the wunderkid, instead admonisihing him that the only way to do the song would be his way.

the silver lining of course is that the show has put usman riaz on the map. we all know him now, and perhaps a lot of us would be hungering for something more sublime from him. perhaps we will be more willing to treat him and accept him for the virtuouso he obviously is, and we will make peace that he won't give us catchy songs. i sure as hell hope so, because i don't want to be asking 'what if' with this guy any longer.

Hum Tum - Mohammad Zahid

Athar Sani - Jaane Kyun

"Sometimes in the heart, yes I do wish that I have the same kind of fans that Afridi and Shoaib have, the same fan following. But even then, I am satisfied with the following I have but I am never satisfied with my performance."

Umar Gul is quite an enigma for a Pakistani fast bowler. he has no airs, no tantrums, no controversies. he's a guy who went from here,

to here,

and he still comes across as the most honest, down to earth, sincere person to ever play for our ever-mercurial, self-destructive, attention-whore of a team.

in fact, in many ways he's like an anonymous fast bowler from another country - a bresnan, or an elworthy or a bichel. men who bowl honestly, who always try hard, who hit the right spots, and who you can always depend on. but what makes gul stand out is the fact that he has those amazing yorkers. you might go for a whole spell and spend half of it without seeing anything approaching brilliance, but when he comes good, he reminds you why exactly he deserves many more accolades than he ever gets. he reminds you why he's no forgotten fast men, but rather a proud addition to pakistan's pantheon of pacers.

this song is exactly like that. when you hear it for the first time, or perhaps when you are in a hurry, it sounds like a great song from an indian movie or pop album (which isn't saying much) yet, if you delve a little deeper, its beauty starts to come through. you realise that athar isn't just a good singer, he's a damn good one. you start hearing those subtle strums on the guitar, you feel the synth slowly enveloping you. you realise that the lyrics aren't as obvious as the chorus might have made you think. and you start realising that this song is something special. it won't get the headlines, and it won't make it into the greatest ever lists. yet it will be more than something dependable, something that would require patience. like gul, this song doesn't contract genital warts or smoke pot to get attention. it remains true to itself, and that's a quality that will endear this song to you quite unlike anything else.

Jaane Kyun - Umar Gul

Natasha Ejaz - The Right Way to Fall

I have to admit, i don't have a good analogy for this one. allow me to explain why. the first reaction i get when i listen to this song is how gorgeously smooth it is. there isn't quite another word that explains it as well - this song is like silk-made sharks in an ocean of cream. although i suppose if i am delving into culinary analogies, i should choose something which also reflects how light this song feels. not in a way that is vaccuous, but rather its lightness comes from a sort of whimsical joy it exhibits.

keeping that in mind, the best bowler-fit would be michael holding. if you haven't seen holding in action, click here and understand why umpires would claim they couldn't hear him approach when he bowled because his action was so rythimical it was virtually silent.

but holding's a jamaican. wasim bhai's action was beautifully efficient, but his action was not really the definig feature about him, so that's another analogy that tanks. the closest one that comes to mind is aqib javed.

aqib was a lot better bowler than history allows us to remember, mainly because he was drowned out by the two Ws. but aqib was also all about grace and guile, his approach was simple and yet it masked a ferocity.

in the same way, this song is deceptively simple because it masks an immediate ferocity of talent beneath. along with usman, natasha ejaz stood out as someone voraciously talented in this show. and its quite amazing that she didn't choose to have all of that in display in one go. instead, we got a song which is understated, yet of the kind which justifies why music players have the Repeat One option.

the real beauty of this song is natasha's voice, but you also have to acknowledge the 'techno-hip-hop' bits the producers provided. they complement the song beautifully, and never overstep the mark. trust me on this, you might not immediately shout and scream about this, but this song is something special.

Right Way to Fall - Aqib Javed

RamLal - Naughty Boy

Its almost too easy to find a Pakistani fast bowler who is analogous with a song called Naughty Boy, but let's not rush ourselves.

The bowler in question needs to be a druggie, a rogue, a subversive fellow who hits it with the ladies but isn't quite sure why. A guy who doesn't obviously come across as a problem, yet he is. more importantly, he needs to be a bowler who appears unassuming, and yet has the ability to make you start jumping with joy. someone who has the skills to seduce you without really looking like it.

step forward, Mohammad Asif.

the defining feature (rather memory) of asif's bowling was how the ball would wobble like a nautch-girl delivering thumkas in an item number. you could never tell from the seam which way an asif delivery would go, but it would perform all sorts of sorcery. in another culture, asif would have been a mcgrath - hugely succesful yet no more than a bland metronome. but because asif was pakistani, his bowling would have the same staid pace, but the wickedness of a saasu maa missing her tajori ki chabiyan.

that's what naughty boy is all about. its not in-your-face-rock. instead it has this jazzy, big band kind of feel, which like asif amongst the speedsters, is wonderfully refreshing. the guitars in this song are also delectable, changing tone and rythm deceptively yet decisevely. and the killer, that asif-esque moment of sublime brilliance, is the trumpet, which suddenly takes this song beyond decades and genres. but perhaps you were too busy laughing/being aghast at the subversive nature of the lyrics. its rare for such an honest and casual approach to 'dating' and 'mazay' being seen in the open in pakistan, but naughty boy does it in a way no one else has managed. Naughty Boy is a song that ambles up to the crease and doesn't exert too much effort, and yet its detached coolness kinda blows you away.

Naughty Boy - Mohammad Asif

Yasir & Jawad - Riedi Gul

My first memory of Mohammad Amir was at the World T20 final. till that moment, i'd known he'd existed because i'd seen him in the previous matches. and i knew that pakpassion had been hyping him up like crazy. but then again, they do that with everyone. i hadn't seen anything extraordinary till then. five deliveries changed my mind forever.

let's get the context in here. this was a world cup final. at fucking lord's, which has more history and tradition than the Jews. and at the crease was the small matter of the man of the tournament, the guy they'd just named a new stroke after. and the bowler was an unknown teenager.

this was a moment so huge physicists had to be called in to measure it.

and what did amir do - he siezed it.

no, he didn't just sieze it, he came up with the most surreal spell of momentum shattering bowling i had ever seen on such a huge stage since those two balls at the MCG. and from that moment, you knew that amir belonged. he was young, and raw, and there was a way to go, but he belonged and what's more, he was a superstar. no question.

i think you get my point here. this song, the moment you hear it, the moment the rubab comes in, the moment the beauty of the vocals hits you, the moment that the meethas of the song, the subtleties giving way to the soaring climax, the whole deal HITS you, you know these guys belong. you know these guys are superstars, not celebrities. its the sort of song, which even when you discount for my fetish for pashto vocals, makes you swell up your chest and feel good about living in a time and place where such beautiful music is made. it makes you feel good about yourself, even when all you've done is listen to it. it's that frickin' good.

now let's just hope that this song never meets anyone named mazhar.

Reidi Gul - Mohammad Amir.

Post-Script: Two shout outs remain here. the first is to zeeshan parwez and the program itself, but i'll save that for another post. the second goes out to Gumby and Omran.

its really difficult to truly see just how amazing these two have been for this show. for starters, they're not two-bit hotel lobby musicians, they're absolutely huge stars in their own right. and yet, not only are their egos safely parked elsewhere, they go out of their way to get the kids to relax, and with each of them, they've been brilliant in getting the best ouf of them. that's no mean feat when you consider the constraints of time and the innate pakistani penchant for marroing.

more importantly, they've led brilliantly with their instincts. other than usman riaz, where perhaps there was some overanalysing to blame, each of the songs have been produced but not overproduced. the collaborations are generally inspired - the biggest hit was the trumpet for Ramlal and the tabla for Athar Sani, but the decision to go rather bare with Reidi Gull was just as impressive. with each song, these guys were genuinely eager to get the best thing out there. and for that, a big sabz salam.

Last Stop on the Rawalpindi Express (Part 1, maybe)

when i was young, i had a certain idea about love. to me, love meant contentment. it meant something pleasant, something that did away with your fears and anxieties and worries. something which was soothing, reassuring, pampering even. i expected love to be a natural progression of adulthood, as inevitable and predictable as finding a 9-to-5 job, of finding a respectable spouse, of having a number of well-behaved children living in a well-kept house. i thought love was about the absence of tensions and worries and dread and fear. in my understanding, love was like gripe water, soothing my infantile pangs of pain.

in a way, none of this was wrong. love can, and is, all these things my testosterone-challenged mind had concocted. 

and yet, love is something more.

if sunday was the day the e-mail was invented, then monday was the day the first forward was sent. email forwards are a culture unto themselves, revealing little in terms of truth themselves, but opening up so much more about the person who sent them. the recently politicized student who sends you petitions to sign, the recently married acquaintance who masks her new-found disillusion by swamping you with brainless quotes written on jpegs of blooming clouds, the idiot friend whose much-hacked inbox keeps popping out viagra-extolling viruses, the generally shy colleague who sends you jokes that contain some contrived homily at the end. 

then there is the forward that fathers or uncles usually send. those that are vague attempts at asserting continuity and stability. sometimes this is manifested in ISI-sponsored propaganda that link to the dajjalian conspiracies seeking to threaten the status-quo. sometimes, they arrive as pseudo-scientific studies proving that sleeping on time and driving carefully are the road to wisdom and salvation. and sometimes, they arrive in the form of lists which are meant to showcase and reimagine the 'image' of pakistan. 

usually, such emails contain a host of images and bland facts which are meant to prove how pakistan is not just a haven for terrorism and violence. they are replete with pictures of places like lalazaar, with inane descriptions such as "considered by many to be heaven on earth." they tell of disparate achievements, such as female fighter pilots, and of course this guy.

 inevitably, as they scramble around vainly to find something to impress, they proudly mention that largeness of our army.

it goes without saying that such forwards do nothing to fire up the patriot within me. after all, those lovely places are rendered unvisitable due to the wars. those o'level grades are just past-paper-rattafication taken to a new extreme. and that large army... well, vicariously overcompensate much?

but that's not the reason such a forward, or indeed any discussion on the 'image' of pakistan is so irksome. firstly, because unlike other countries, we are the problem child, the sulken sallow faced one with the absuive history, with the suppressed past and the unpleasant future, with the myriad contradictions and the embarassing realities, with the stunted development and without the full eyes, the perky breasts or the coy smile. discussion of image don't work well with our country.

but more improtantly, it is because the quintessential experience of living in pakistan and actually enjoying life there is notoriously difficult to distill into words and images. if it must be understood, it has to be felt to be known.

milan kundera had written once about how someone in love can be surprised to find themselves feeling hungry, because love has this way of taking over your body, your physical sensations, your internal workings. its the realisation that love is not always a soothing panacea, but instead something which has a way of shredding nerves, jostling your insides, plummeting your breath and squeezing your mind. love can't be understood through words and drawings, through painting and sonnets, through songs and ballads, love must be felt. love is visceral.

and that's how we arrive at our understanding of shaiby.

of the countless eulogies that will be written for him, all will make use of statistics to highlight his chronic absenteeism, all will give numbers to collate his outrageous disciplinary fines, probations and bans, all will wistfully reflect on figures to showcase what could've been, had he been more fit, more committed, more someone else...

which might be fine, but the true joy of shaiby, the love felt for him, is experienced, not written.

cricket is a game of infinite pauses, of starts and re-starts. 

every delivery, the game comes to a rest, and every delivery it starts up again. each delivery builds up a sense of anticipation and each delivery is resolved with some sort of a climax. it is this pattern that makes test matches so addictive, because the whole pattern replays itself for two innings, for ninety overs a day, for five days. inevitably though, most of the time such moments are bland, the buildup tepid, the climax anti-climatic. the toilers toil, the grafters graft, the nurdlers nurdle, and fakmal drops the catch.

not with shoaib though.

every time, every single time he runs in from those colossal distances, there is an exhilirating buildup, a cascade of potential outcomes, each more glorious and disastrous than the next. his run-up whips us into a frenzy that engulfs everyone, his action and delivery are literally an explosion, and the outcome forever brands itself onto your emotional make-up.

what is truly brilliant is that these emotions are not restricted to his team's fans alone, because the inflammable nature of shoaib means that any and every eventuality is possible.

to make my point, take these two deliveries to sachin. i don't even need to link the videos, because you all know what i mean.

the first is from kolkata, where it takes literally an hour for sachin to arrive at the crease while the crowd shits its pants in anticipation, and it takes ages while tony grieng and charu sharma continue to mount incessant platitudes on the little master, and it takes another lifetime for the sachin to get ready and face up, and further eons still for the thundering speedster to arrive at the crease.

and then.

and there is an ecstatic blur as the ball is released. 

and then.

and then there is silence. 

there are flayed stumps. there are broken hearts. there are new dreams and old fears. and there is a new hero.

take your time to digest that.

but as i said, the joy is not for his supporters alone. four years later, the two met again in centurion, in a world cup. it was a moment that sachin himself has been waiting for for over a year. that rabid fans had been praying and cursing for even longer. and once more, as shoaib runs in, it feels that all the world and time and history are collapsing into this one moment and either you or the entire cosmos are about to implode. and when sachin visciously stabs at the ball and it soars in the air, the moment seems to stretch even further, becoming even more unbearable and oppressive, until it sails into the crowd and despair/joy overwhelms you.

those two balls, those two moments - that's what shoaib is about. 

not about five-fors or strike rates, not about tests played or fines paid, but about the moment, the unbearably violent, destructive, overwhelming experience. 

those who know love will know this feeling well, this feeling where everything seems to be in chaos, everything seems to come together and break away, everything rips anew and apart - the feeling we feel when shaiby bowls.

because love is not just rainbows and cookies, love is agony, love is pain, love is delirium. 

love is a shoaib akhtar delivery.

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.

Plugging My Holes

Khatmalites, where are you looking at?

perhaps over to the right? you see that facebook badge thing, right there... yeah. i have a movie out.

it kicks ass.

don't believe me? judge for yourself.

Nawaz Sharif Mujra Scandal

its the season of the IPL and the season of T20. as i have argued previously, this event is a wonderful example of post-modernism, which, in the timeless words of Moe means "weird for the sake of being weird."

of course, for many T20 is an abhorrent, vile, abominable bastardisation of cricket. and many people have expressed such thoughts on twitter, missing the delectable irony of it all.

i started frequenting twitter recently after one of my regular reads migrated there. apart from the grotesque picture which adorns his page (seriously, you couldn't find a better messi picture?) it does provide an interesting insight into the evolving dynamics of this micro-blogging phenomenon.

as far as i can tell, its a bit like facebook for famous people, with the various castes defined by the level of fame.

so for example, there is a clutch of pakistani bloggers who communicate with themselves. and then there are journos, who talk to themselves, and the occasional politicians. who follow themselves, and bigger fish. and it goes on. my favourite sighting was ImranKhanPTI following Jemima on twitter. cue the laugh track.

but it was during this forage into twitterdom that i came across a certain account. the backstory for this was perhaps the greatest story to hit the news media since Nawaz Sharif remembered who butters his bread - the impending nuptials of Sania and Shoaib.

i found this page, which is Shoaib Malik's twitter page. its pretty ordinary, and quite what i expected - shoaib can be seen trying to contact yuvraj and warne, much in the vein of the upward social aspirations of all twitterati.

his recent tweets thank his fans for the goodwill surrounding his wedding, and previously he talks about trying to find a legal team for his PCB troubles. and before that he celebrates the win for Sialkot Stallions etc.

then, i found out, from his future wife, that his twitter page is fake.

WTF?

firstly, we have to believe this, since hopefully she would know better than anyone else. moreover, as someone mentioned, shoaib can never be expected to be this articulate.

having conceded that, we now must wonder - WTF?

try and understand this. there is someone out there who meticulously imagines the feelings shoaib malik goes through. more importantly, said person makes sure to write them within the time frame when they happen. so he makes sure that any important event in shoaib's life is updated asap.

what makes this even more intriguing is that there is no whiff of scandal, of aggrandizement, of mirch-masala here. all the tweets are of the typical mundanity that twitter tweets are comprised of. nothing here that makes you think, hang on, this is fake. and the internet, other than for porn, is meant for people to shout out FAKE whenever they get the chance. we are conditioned to spot fakes.

but... where is the fakeness, fake shoaib malik? what has compelled you to give up your life and your time and devote it to creating a shrine for someone not quite compelling (not until the Sania bombshell anyways) why have you not chosen your position to create mischief or abuse? how are you such a restrained fake personality, that you have actually managed to come across as more respectable than the real person you pretend to be?

perhaps the truth lies in believing in your own hype. in thinking that what you are doing is so right that you forget that your basis was baloney. perhaps when you start believing your own bullshit, you forget the lies you created and accept your own cocoon as the only bastion of reality.

and perhaps you can even make such a charade last forever.

until... until you begin believing your own batshit craziness so much that you decide to hold a grand rally where you promise to proclaim the greatness of your message. and your deluded followers decide to honor your much awaited rally with a rather slickly produced amateur video.

until the day your grand rally to end all rallies, the moment of truth, the launching of the invasion of the infidels, the realisation of existential islamic philosophy, the birth of the United States of Islam, the call of the army of Truth, the greatest moment of history in all histories arrives.

and, like, no one shows up.

This Post is Not an Elephant

I



My wife has a Slovenian friend K who shares a flat with a man named S. S is coloured brown, and learnt his thickly accented English at St. Michael's but/and he assures all and sundry that he is British.



Till recently, S had the habit of hosting raucous parties which would end late, with S rendered comatose amidst an inglorious mess of pasta-encrusted dishes, half-empty beer bottles and bass-blasting stereos. However, after a three day New Year's blinder, S vowed to give up drinking and clean up his ways. As K awaited with bated breath, it appeared that S had changed his life around.



One Friday night, K arrived at home to find another party, with the alcohol replaced by a bubbling shisha. Without bothering to investigate the legality of the ingredients burning within, she went to bed. Saturday saw both flat-mates out of the house, and so came Sunday.



K was having breakfast that morning, when she noticed a black burn mark on the expensive carpet they had paid a 200 pound deposit for. Intrigued and incensed, she investigated further. The linoleum kitchen floor had a similar black burn mark, and the bin liner in the dustbin had a perforated hole the same size as the burn marks, while one of her kitchen towelettes was burnt as well. K would later discover that the size and shape of the burn marks in question closely resembled the circular shape of the specialized coals used for shishas.

And so she decided to confront S. When he came home, she pointed out the burnt carpet and asked him if he did it. And that was when K realised that despite all the distance S had put between himself and his past, despite all the calls with the 92 prefix he avoided, despite all his claims of being one with the west, there was a quintessentially P****tani core to him. And so to repeat, when K asked him about the burn mark, he replied with a straight face, without flinching:



"That wasn't me, I wasn't home last night. Maybe you did it?"





"If you think that a kiss is all in the lips

C'mon, you got it all wrong, man

And if you think that a dance is all in the hips

Oh well, then do the twist

If you think holding hands is all in the fingers

Grab hold of the soul where the memory lingers and

Make sure to never do it with a singer

Cause he'll tell everyone in the world



What he was thinking about the girl

Yeah, what he's thinking about the girl, oh



A lot of people get confused and they bruise

Real easy when it comes to love

They start putting on their shoes and walking out

And singing "boy, I think I had enough"

Just because she makes a big rumpus

She don't mean to be mean or hurt you on purpose, boy

Take a tip and do yourself a little service

Take a mountain turn it into a mole



Just by playing a different role

Yeah, by playing a different role, oh"



II





O wondered, much like the Simpsons for episode 138 "...so, it has come to this."



In a strange little island adrift of a continent, he sat on a perch within a rustic colosseum, wondering how exactly he had ended up with all this toxicity overcoming him.



Hadn't he been the one constantly reminded of how lucky he was? Didn't they all rub him for not doing real work, and yet be green with envy that he was living the dream? Hadn't this been what he wanted to do, to be here, in this stadium, doing what he loved? That boy who would be out playing in the cruel relentlessness of the Jeddah afternoon would have killed to be where he stood today, so why did he feel so pissed? Precisely because he had never seen it purely as work, but as a way of keeping that boy alive.



Well fuck that boy, because all that was left inside O at the moment was pure bile.



Oh how he had hated the cynics! Those vultures who gobbled up the free travel, and the countless passes, and the cheap tickets to seedy venues. Those vinegary idiots who stewed all day in their vile conspiracies, unable and unwilling to experience joy for even a minute, because they were too caught up in their unending quest to spark a fuse, light a fire, twist a knife. He had vowed he would never be like them, never let his passions cloud his rationality, never become overcome with the sheer desire to be a fucking bitch like them.



Well fuck that now.



He couldn't take it anymore. It was one thing being infuriated, frustrated, dejected, resigned, crushed, defeated. He had blitzed through hope and trudged through hopelessness, he had been stoic and he done the 'hiding his pain behind bitter humor' thing. But this was a new low. This was...



30 catches in six Tests.



Fuck. That.



His laptop stared blankly back at him so he decided to stumble for a bit. Had he bothered, he might have gone to his home page, and read the feature by the senior statesman of gung-ho Ozzie-ism, who summed it up quite nicely for him.

Pakistan have long been the least willing of all the Test-playing nations to own up to their failings.

But he didn't check the home page. Instead, he thought maybe he'd try Smiling Buddha one last time. He had last spoken to him a week ago, right after the end, right when his stomach had felt like ripped up ribbons of meat in rancid acid - to put it mildly.



He hadn't the heart to rip into him then, so he had merely asked, why? Smiling Buddha had smiled sadly, and said

"What will a specialist fielding coach do? The same thing we are doing. This is a grassroots problem."



Smiling Buddha better have something different this time, thought O as he walked down the stairs to the field. Out by the boundary, crouched low, was the painfully slow Buddha in front of the Boy Blunder. Someone was tossing lollypops for SB to edge to BB. O stood there for 15 minutes, not saying a word.



When he had counted 50 throws, he turned back. The Buddha had managed to edge five.



O sat in front of his monitor, his by-line already formulated.

There is not a cricket-playing country in the world as backward and as resistant to not just modernity but simple, natural progression as Pakistan.

"The boat yeah you know she's rockin' it

And the truth well you know there's no stoppin' it

The boat yeah you know she's still rockin' it

The truth well you know there's no stoppin' it



So what, somebody left you in a rut

And wants to be the one who's in control

But the feeling that you're under can really make you wonder

How the hell she could be so cold

So now you're left, denying the truth

And it's hidden in the wisdom in the back of your tooth

You need to spit it out, in a telephone booth

While you call everyone that you know, and ask 'em



Where do you think she goes

Oh yeah, where d'ya suppose she goes, oh





The truth well you know there's no stoppin' it

And the boat well you know she's still rockin' it

The boat well you know she's still rockin' it

And the truth yeah you know there's no stoppin' it



You recognize the effect and the wreck

That it's causin' when she rocks the boat

But it's the cause hittin on the Cardinal Laws

'bout the proper place to hang her coat

So to you, the truth is still hidden

And the soul plays the role of a lost little kitten but

You should know that the doctors weren't kidding

She's been singing it all along





But you were hearin' a different song"



III



M stared at his tumbler. It contents were Amaretto, cream and scotch. They'd named a goddam cocktail after him.



His tumbler caught the sun's dying rays. That fiery bastard was going down amidst the hills on an island he owned, himself. His own goddam island.



There was a whole world out there that still, to this day, worshipped him. They swore by him in acting schools. They memorized his lines, sold his face on t-shirts, parodied and pastiched him, revered him. They goddam loved him.



So why did he still care?



He should do what Maria kept telling him to do - give up hope that they'll ever find her, get the scientists to make another one, another dozen ones if he goddam wanted, and live his life.



Why should he keep moping and hoping?



Because, M realised, there was nothing else he could do. Nothing could make him accept she was gone. Nothing left but to keep hoping.



Maybe they thought he was a fool, but what did he care? They'd been saying that about him for over thirty years now. So what that the Americans couldn't find her, the Europeans and the Japanese and the Chinese were all clueless, that even those Afrikaans mercenaries had given up hope of finding her in the thicket of the forest? He still believed, and that was why he had paid every last contender who promised to find his liger Tarita - his half lion, half tiger beauty that was perhaps every bit as monstrous and wonderful as him.



Maria knew that, and she looked out in to the jungle with a tear in her eye. She'd been through the good, the bad and the worse with M, and the worse was pretty hairy. But to see him, so desperate, so broken, so goddam sad - that was...



Suddenly, there was a rustle and a bustle, a bungle in the jungle...



M jolted up, and Maria looked with trepidation as figures began to emerge out of the bushes amidst a fearful commotion. Time froze as they waited, and watched.



And then...



A mighty elephant came roaring out, being beaten senseless by members of the Pakistani police, screaming "Haan main Liger hoon, main Liger hoon, Kassam Khuda ki main Liger hoon!"

Lyrics in italics for "The Denial Twist" by the White Stripes

The Omniblogus - Tangent 3: There was Once a Wasim

[Part One]
[Previous Part: Tangent One - The Man Utd Fan]
[Previous Part: Tangent Two - The Lagaan Discourse]

This blog was written on the 22nd of June. A variety of reasons, most notably my wedding, prevented this from being done earlier. yet i am convinced it retains a timeless quality, undiminished by the fading memory of that glorious day at Lord's, and the subsequent semi-final defeat.

Can you name any movie that James Dean was in? Probably not. Yet most people could recognize this picture of the short-lived superstar.

There are people who come to define not only a profession, but an era. Their essence seems to capture the world around them, the glories and vagaries of their time, the sense of how life was meant to be lived within their context. the word "zeitgeist" was invented for them.
One such person was Wasim Akram.

The Left Arm of God was a man who was plucked from obscurity at 17 and went on to redefine what it meant to be a bowler. Like one of his contemporaries, Shane Warne, his mastery of his art was so great that he left his greatest victims (the English, the Indians) with massive Stockholm syndrome. And yet he was also a playboy, a poster child for diabetics patients, a prodigal son for bookmakers, a partygoer and a scapegoat.
But for my generation, he was, is and always will be – Wasim bhai.

For the longest time, I had not questioned why we called him wasim bhai, Then I saw this again, and immediately i recognized the awe that fills up in the future Ufone salesman you see below.

In fact, this public service message may well have been my first real encounter with Wasim bhai the person, and as the ad makes evidently clear, Wasim Bhai was already a legend.

Remember, this is before the 400 test wickets and the 500 odi wickets, before the tri-series in Australia, before the repeated brutalization of India in Sharjah – heck, it’s even before the bloody reverse swing sodomization of England, both in the test tour and the world cup.
Our cricketing consciousness woke up to an age where Wasim bhai was already divine.
And so while I, and people my age, got to see Wasim Bhai’s greatest years, as well as his latter days, we never saw the awkward young boy who was just learning to make his mark, learning where to bowl the inswinger, when to use the bouncer, how to disguise the slower one.
In a sense, we never really grew up with Wasim Bhai.
Yes he was always there, the ever-protective guardian of our dreams and hopes. Time and again, when the Pakistani team’s collective brain farts would leave our spirits flagging, wasim bhai would resuscitate them faster than Pamela Anderson on Baywatch. Bowl after bowl he would beat the bat, flirt with the edges, and when the slips inevitably dropped the resulting catch, he would glare, call their mothers whores, and return to bowl the batsman out. In a previous era, fast bowlers bowled short, broke bones rather than stumps, and had long, long run ups. Wasim bhai almost ambled in, and bowled them full, but man, did he bowl them well.

But still, he was after all, wasim bhai.
For us, our generation’s hero, our era’s James Dean, came to be in 1996, in a forgotten ground in Nairobi.
It began perhaps the most insane and counter-intuitive love story since Rumi gave up his scholarly trappings after one gaze in Shams’s eyes. Other countries venerated men like Tendulkar, who gave them century after century, or Waugh, who gave them illusions of immortality, or even Hick, because really, they had no one else to support. So what was it about this man then that turned all Pakistanis delirious?

It was not like we were blinded either. Every inevitable failure, every ugly swipe resulting in tame dismissals, every golden duck, every moment of indecipherable stupidity was roundly criticized, chastised, moralized and analyzed to death. Fathers and uncles would make exasperated grunts and evoke memories of Zaheer and Mushtaq, young girls would find their cricket fever suddenly cured, foreign commentators would sound bemused and smug. There would be snide remarks about the stereotypical idiocy of the pathans, and vows that he would never be supported again. Logic, common sense, pragmatism, his lowly average, his sheer uselessness all screamed for him to be banished to the wilderness.
And perhaps that was why we loved him – because he encapsulated best the spirit of what it meant to be Pakistani in our times. He was something no one else could quite understand, he used an approach that no one would dare mimic.

Consider this – the only thing that matches the volume of opinions regarding the failure of Pakistan as a viable entity is the plethora of expert conclusions that his career was finished. And yet, both of them are still around. Because just like Pakistan, he is forever resilient, forever capable of reinvention. When even he could see that the batting was just not happening anymore, he did not slip away into the darkness. He came back as the baddest mothfucker leggy since a fat boy from Victoria.

Once, while I was somewhere up north, a friend and I saw young children jumping across a yawning ravine with death defying leaps. At first we wondered how they could do something so stupidly dangerous. Then it occurred to me that the reason they could pull off such insanity was because the possibility of failure never came to their heads. They had pure faith in their madness.
Mohsin Hamid had written of 1998 that no one believed in consequences anymore.

Every day, as we break red lights and jostle with vehicular madness, as we consume tainted water and questionable food, as we bribe and barter, we live in existence where the possibility of the consequences of our actions can not hope to be considered, because perhaps we know of no other way.

It would be foolish then to expect our Lala to be any different.
We will never be what this game, or this world is supposed to be about. We may never fully democratize, or industrialize, or de-feudalize. He will never learn a method, or perfect a formula, or become predictable.

But when it all seems over, when there is no hope left, when everyone will write us off, we will have our moment of undying glory.
We are “The Boom Boom” generation.