Out of touch

I clearly do not have my finger on the pulse of Pakistani opinion. I blame myself, of course. Too much time spent in my own headspace and nearly not enough of listening when other people talk. My report cards in school used to be full of teachers complaining that I talk too much in class and don’t bother to listen to what anyone else is saying. It’s that same egocentric approach to understanding the Pakistani psyche that has left me completely out of touch with the way the rest of you approach reality.

For example, I always thought getting President Asif Ali Zardari far away from us was a good thing. In my convoluted way of thinking, the farther away he is geographically, the better we are for it. So if, for example, he decides to take a prolonged journey to France and the UK, then we should be grateful. At least he isn’t here. Let him go and bask in Carla Bruni’s warm retired-supermodel glow for a while. Maybe he will inappropriately flirt with her (as he tried to with Sarah Palin), thus giving us the chance to chuckle at his roguish mannerisms. We could do with the laughter as a means of distraction from our current miseries. In fact, I don’t care how inappropriate it is to visit England after David Cameron’s recent urination on age-old traditions of diplomacy. Does it mean less time spent sacrificing goats in the President House? Enjoy the trip. Take your time. Ride the London Eye and stroll through Hyde Park. Just please stay away from the Speaker’s Corner. But, I was clearly wrong. People want him back here. They are demanding it on every news channel, newspaper column, blog, Twitter and Facebook status update. I’m still not sure why. Unless he has some magical ability to effect positive change, force back floodwaters, examine airplane black boxes and fight crime in Karachi, what possible use could he be here? According to the shouting heads on television, it sends the wrong message. It means he doesn’t care. And here I thought his inability to understand compassion on near-autistic levels was taken for granted. Boy, I’m really out of touch.

The Second Reason I feel I’m not in touch with the Pakistani sentiment: I always thought you mourn your dead with sorrow, prayer, yearning and finding the strength to move past the absence in your life — mostly in that order. I didn’t realise it involved killing over 60 (as of the time this article is being written) random people while creating vehicular bonfires and forcing commercial paralysis. I have clearly been attending the wrong funerals. If that’s the lesson we should be learning, then we have a lot of killing to catch up on. Basic math tells me if 60:1 is the ratio of lives you can take to avenge the one that is lost, then the families of the victims of the Airblue flight are expected to murder 9,120 people. And the death toll caused by the floods is around 1,500 people, then 90,400 more innocent people have to be sacrificed to appease whatever peculiarly bloodthirsty cultural tradition this is. I just don’t get it, but who am I to question societal values?

Reason the Third: If it were me, I wouldn’t go near Afghanistan ever again. Ever. When our previous attempts at meddling in that country resulted in us supporting the Taliban, possibly the most repulsive monsters that human kind ever excreted from its diseased orifices, you couldn’t get me involved in Afghan affairs for all the heroin money in the world. I’d still be scrubbing myself with sandpaper just to get their misogynistic, oppressive, murdering, rapist stink off me. Yet, here our vaunted ISI is caught molesting the very creatures we should spurn. Apparently we are addicted to blow back. Maybe the Wikileaks documents are false. Maybe we have learnt our lessons. Maybe my understanding of the world was right all along.

Somehow, I doubt it.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 5^th, 2010.