Flying pythons

None that I have spoken to — who were in attendance on May 11 — were able to tell me precisely why they were there.

It was long ago and in a land far, far away — Dearly Beloved — that Monty Python had its Flying Circus. It took the form of an anarchic comedy programme on TV and started its life in 1969. Some of the sketches it produced have become comedy classics, politically-charged satire that is today generically referred to as Pythonesque.

It has no equivalent on Pakistani television, nor indeed anywhere else in the world and it remains unique. But it has entered the collective unconscious in many countries and cultures and has become synonymous, in particular with political theatre, especially when it tends towards the absurd.

The sky was thick with flying pythons in Islamabad on May 11, though we saw little of them as we threaded our way through the various security cordons en route to a rather splendid lunch with a friend who was departing these shores for safer climes. See them we did not, but they were much discussed.

There was a sense that money was being wasted in a variety of ways — the cost of providing security for a large demonstration for one — and that there was a strong sense of theatricality, both literal and political, about the whole business. There are few opportunities for the population to let their hair down and have a damn good party, but on May 11, they got one — and they took it.

Unlike some other mass gatherings, this at no time looked like it was going to turn nasty; nobody got injured so far as I am aware and nothing got burned, broken or otherwise smashed, which so far as I personally am concerned, is A Very Good Thing. Everybody went home after some run-of-the-mill speeches in the evening and the few that I have met since are all in agreement that a jolly good time was had by all and that when is the next one.

When questioned more closely about what might have been achieved and why it was that tens of thousands of people came from far and wide to stand in the street for an entire day, there was something of a blank. None that I have spoken to — who were in attendance on the day — were able to tell me precisely why it was that they were there, apart from a vague… ‘for the party’. And when pressed further, it appears that it was a ‘party’ only in the loosest political sense, but quite definitely ‘party’ in the lets-let-our-hair-down-and-whoop-it-up kind of sense.

So how did you get here? “They brought us by bus.” They? “Yes… you know… the party people.” Ah yes… the party people. Squadrons of pythons passed overhead as we chatted, unnoticed by my new, young and only slightly political acquaintances.

Of course, it is entirely possible that I spoke to a completely unrepresentative sample, and that those I spoke to deliberately misled me as to their deeper understanding of why they were there on a pleasantly sunny day in the nation’s capital.

But for the sake of argument, let us assume that they were, in reality, politically naive, happy to go with anybody who promised them a good time and pick-and-drop into the bargain, and would do it again.

There are, I am sure, politically charged, highly educated men and women who are the engines that drive political activity at the grassroots level in Pakistan. The committed foot soldiers that turn up on time, take orders and carry them out, wave banners on poles in such a way as to be media magnets, eye-candy for the hungry 24/7 channels and generally give the impression that somewhere under all that poverty and deprivation and food insecurity and power cuts and corruption and violence — there actually still beats a steady heart, a heart that will magically put the oxygenated blood of change into the veins of the body politic.

I would so wish that to be true, Dearly Beloved. But fly on, Monty Pythons Circus, because the time for something completely different is not yet in Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2014.

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