Sympathy for the bedevilled

Give them your sympathy. Make space in your heart for the empathy they so need. Allow into your storm-wracked life an errant ray of sunlight created by tender commiseration. Too long have the politicians suffered our cynicism, our loathing and our justified venom. Give pause, just for a few brief moments, to consider the terrible burden under which they so tirelessly labour. They have earned, at least, a picosecond of compassion. To be so endlessly callous, to provide such unadulterated cruelty and to be so far removed from your humanity that the distance between you and basic decency can be measured in parsecs; that must be a truly difficult way of existing.

My heart goes out to each and every one of them.

Take, for instance, Federal Law Minister Babar Awan. What a concentrated effort it must have taken for him to not vomit blood and stomach lining all over himself in the National Assembly, during his farcical display of damaged dignity because two soldiers had the audacity, nay the temerity, to raise their guns in the direction of his car. He must have fought a truly epic internal battle against all the demons of rational thought as they angrily tried to point out that sticking a flag on a car is a great way for a terrorist to sneak past a checkpost and besides, ordinary people suffer far greater indignities every time you go to the corner store to buy another fake degree. I weep for the tragedy of Babar Awan’s existence. I ask that you weep too.

Shed a tear too for Chaudhary Nisar, who stepped out of the kabuki theater performance of ‘Opposition’ that he conducts with such method commitment to claim the incident ‘ridiculed’ the sanctity of the parliament. To first let such a statement form in his mind and to then allow it utterance must have taken an act of will greater than any performed by mankind. To allow himself to look so blatantly idiotic and miserably cartoonish is an act of bravery that deserves a medal for its selflessness. For him to then follow it up by saying, “tomorrow if they will stop me, I will not stop” makes me want to build a statue in his honour. As a comedian, I have nothing but respect for someone so committed to the craft.

And finally, light a candle of sympathy for the Sindh Home Minister, Zulfiqar Mirza. For him to have to wake up each morning burdened with the knowledge that he is so surreally out of touch with functioning reality is laudable. To then go in front of the Sindh Assembly and trivialise a problem as culturally traumatic and intellectually damning as karo-kari by claiming, “only love of one’s death can bring an end to honour-killing” is heroic. How exhausting it must be to live inside such a poorly constructed, misfiring brain. The noise of neurons overheating and lobes melting must create a cacophonic din. How else to explain his demand that we all start loving our deaths and that women are also to blame for karo-kari because they raised the men who committed the murders. Oh, but who can we blame for raising you so.

Join me in feeling empathy for these men. To claim to represent the people and to then maintain such ignorance of the daily miseries of those people requires a great deal more effort than we give them credit for. To climb those gilded steps all the way to the top of a tower built of ivory stolen from our screaming mouths must be tiring. But they have given us an opportunity, for if we are to overcome our hatred of them and learn to love them despite all this, we would develop a capacity for compassion that would be nearly divine.

Besides, to hate them anymore is just too bloody tiring.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 11^th, 2010.