The founder of Pornistan

I know exactly who is responsible for the mutilation of the fair name of Pakistan. And today I am going to out him.

I read my fellow columnist Jahanzaib Haque’s piece (“Pakistan’s porn conspiracy” — November 2) with great interest last week. I had initially thought of joining the long line of comment writers, but figured that comment is free, whereas opinion I get paid for. So this makes much more sense. Also, I know exactly who is responsible for the evolution of the land of the pure into Pornistan. It isn’t Fox News. It isn’t the CIA. It isn’t even India — although the department of RAW, sex would dearly love to claim the achievement.

It is one individual, who lurks among you.

Jahanzaib’s article said some dubious trend-spotters had worked out that Pakistanis watched the most smut in the world. He suggested that patriotic Pakistani perverts mask their IP addresses, wipe out trails and so on.

I suggest what any patriotic Indian would suggest to a Pakistani (on any issue, come to think of it): Look within you sir, it is only then that you will find the truth.

I make a further claim. I know exactly who is responsible for the mutilation of the fair name of Pakistan. I know this man reasonably well. And today I am going to out him.

He has been working on the Pornistan project, independently, for the most part of the last decade.

I got to know him in the early days (2004), when connectivity wasn’t that great in Pakistan, partly because his constant plumbing for hardcore was blocking all the pipes. And then, he brought his work to India.

It was stunning work. I remember going to the Nature Morte gallery in Delhi and standing in front of the Veil Series by Rashid Rana in awe.

The caption for the work reads: “In Veil I, II, and III, Rana depicts an anonymous veiled figure dressed in a burqa. Upon further inspection, the work is a fragmented collage made up of thousands of unfocused pornographic stills.”

There were other works. Landscapes, apparently happy homes on the hillside, which, when you broke them down to their building blocks, led you to another world altogether.

Rashid was a guest at our house for a night. I remember asking him two questions. First, how long did it take him to download/collect these millions of pixels. And second, would he get in trouble in Pakistan?

The answer to the first question was: a very long time, during which average Pakistanis would have had trouble sending simple e-mails and Pakistan’s ratings as a porn consumer would spiral upwards. The answer to the second question was that those that might have objected hadn’t (yet) found the time for “further inspection”.

Well, others have. Rashid’s work appears in a new issue of Granta that features a formidable line-up of writers, photographers and artists from Pakistan. I do not use the word formidable lightly.

And yet, I must reconcile it with my memories of Rashid several years ago. I have lost touch with him, though I hear of him from time to time and I remember thinking when we met that I had never encountered a less pretentious, more down-to-earth artist in my life. At home, Rashid was drawn to my (then) 5-year-old son’s doodles. “Will you give me one of your drawings for one of mine?” he asked. (I was foolish enough not to complete the transaction right then, it would eventually have paid for the kid’s education. Now, I have only the comfort of a print bought at his exhibition, the one in which he undresses.)

I wonder what Alexa or Google trends will say about someone viewing a Rashid Rana. And about Fox News, which has never been accused of good taste or good journalism (except in internal assessments), I’ll just say they’ve done it again.

But who the Fox cares?

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