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.

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.

The Omniblogus - Tangent 1: The Man U Fan

[Read Part One]

In 1999, something else also happened. in fact, that event went on to galvanize a certain Mr. Steve Waugh, whose team was almost down and out in the world cup of that year, until he witnessed said event and was inspired to fight back just as heroically.
the event was manchester united's miraculous win against bayern munich in the champion's league final.
man u were dominant in england prior to that win, but after it became larger than life through out the world. for a country like pakistan, where everyone is forever looking to the west as a dream destination, or a source of consternation, man u became a delightful status symbol.

after all, we had just seen the dish antenna become ubiquitous. we had a new ruler hell bent on enlightening and modernizing us.

and so, enraptured by the lures of big dreams and big wins, the upper class pakistani boy decided to become a man u fan.
now he could forever cower over the vanquished, he could always point to being the best, he could become part of something that awkward fans through out the world had in common - unwavering veneration of the theater of dreams, the red devils, the richest, bestest, greatest team in the world.

it didn't matter that united were not even the biggest club in manchester, or that 99% of their pakistani fans couldn't place manchester on a map. it didn't matter that their fans were still learning what the offside rule meant. what mattered was man u.

most man u fans went on to become bankers. because like a bank, a man u fan can invest his faith and joy in his team ensured of steady, healthy returns. there is little risk, you always know that there is going to be a profit at the end of the year.

so what if it's soulless number crunching - you can always gloat and be a shallow bully to one and all by pointing to the number of zeroes in your account, or the number of premier league titles in your trophy chest.

the steady drum of boring seasons of predictable titles helped to deflect any criticism regarding the vacous corporate nature of a club that would prise away a cherished hero with a few shakes of their massive purse strings. say what you want about chelsea, it was manchester united where the red devil bought football's soul.

as time went by, there were other waves as well. the "immortal" season gave birth to the arsenal fan,

the abrahamovich takeover saw the rise of the chelsea fan,

the miracle against milan brought us the liverpool fan.

there were no organic connections, no intellectual reasonings, no risks.

the Big Four all had their rabid fans, all ensured of weekly successes, of midweek champion's league appearances, of fa cup wins and trouncing of minnows, and the endless, endless transfer intrigues.
it wasn't about football - it was about supporting something that you knew wouldn't break your heart, which wouldn't cause your balls to shrivel and tear your nerves, which wouldn't leave your hair tattered in clumps amidst your shaking fingers.

something which wasn't the pakistani cricket team.

[End of Tangent One]

(to be continued)

The Omniblogus - Part One

It begins, like they all do, with 1992.

I had recently moved into a new neighborhood. It was my summer vacations. I didn't know anyone there. So in the afternoon, i went out on the street. There was a game of cricket in progress. My uncle asked the older boys to let me play. i was wearing a replica of the shirt worn by the pakistan team in the world cup earlier that year. i was nine. they asked me to field at third man, and called me world cup.
my cricket playing career moved little further throughout the rest of my life - no one needed to know my name, no one wanted me in their side, and i was always at third man.

i couldn't hope to bat; a fact i blame it on whoever taught me how to bat when i was really young. as a left hander the right handed grip imposed upon me meant that i was forever trapped being a leg-pay-lapparroo type rightie rather than a cover-drive-smoking leftie.

as for bowling, let's just say that most batsmen i got out would say 'i didn't realise it would get to me so slowly...' the people to blame here are wasim and waqar, since because of them i was obsessed with being a fast bowler. unfortunately if i couldn't bowl - for some inexplicable reason - anything which could be classified as fast. i would have had the sense to see that and move onto something new if those two hadn't made being a fast bowler such an essential aspect of being a badass.
i realised the only talent i had was at sledging, and being a crooked umpire.

i also realised - which you may also be able to after reading the above excuses - that like every pakistani, i was prone to blaming every personal problem on nefarious forces beyond the realm of my control.
the sad truth was that i could never ever play cricket.

but that didn't mean i couldn't love it.

10CC - Dreadlock Holiday
Uploaded by manon42. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

i was part of a generation - a generation that first tasted cricket on that wondrous world cup of 1992. it was like watching irreversible, the ending of the movie came at the beginning. my first taste of cricket was at the top. inevitably, the only way to go was down.
but of course, pakistan being pakistan, the journey went down, but it went every where else in between as well.

bitch slapping the poms with the 'dark art',

getting high and tying one day matches in the caribbean,

learning what a bookie meant in bangalore,

scraping past the aussies in karachi,

the ball refusing to scrape through symcox's stumps in faisalabad,

the first time i kissed a man (saeed anwar on the tv screen following that innings)

all out to kumble,

invincible in sharjah

and indecipherable elsewhere,

watching the birth of the batsman-wicketkeeper extraordinaire in a heartbreaker in hobart,

watching the ultimate houdini by razzaq,

realising that jayasuria can hit the fastest 50 and still lose in singapore,

and grounds in nairobi becoming part of folklore...

then, a seminal event took place.

in 1999 world cup, pakistan looked set to conquer the world. the loss to bangladesh meant that we had even satisfied the bookies' hunger.

but then the world came crashing down.

the narrative of pakistani cricket changed course. in ancient times, entire civilizations would die out if a river changed course. now, pakistan too, became to transform.
slowly, but surely, pakistan began to change.

it has often been argued that the pakistani identity - surely one of the most fraught concepts of contemporary times - is best crystallized in the game of cricket, and embodied by the cricket team.

that identity was rapidly coming under threat.

[End of Part One]

(Next Part - Tangent One: The Man U fan)