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In Chakwal, which I am increasingly loth to leave as the years roll by, I am ready to go to bed after an early dinner. If I have the energy I have my daily fix of Pakistan Television’s hit show, the nine o’clock news, which I try not to miss because the sight of the Chief Executive and the President of the Republic performing their routine functions (cutting tapes and so on) I find reassuring, the way I find the coming out of the stars and the waxing and waning of the moon reassuring. After that and a bit of reading it is lights out for me.
You will say this is a grave disadvantage. Paris is where the lights are. Provincial places breed provincial minds. It is true that in other climes more salubrious than ours, small town life misses out on a great deal: no opera, ballet, Beethoven, Kishori Amonkar or theatre.
Not even the can-can and the Moulin Rouge. Hard to build rich lives on such poor soil. But in our Republic this cultural distinction between town and country has been done away with and replaced with a perfect equality.
If there is no Shakespeare or Wagner in Chakwal, it is no small consolation to know that there is none in Karachi or Lahore either. If not equality of opportunity at least equality of idiocy.
Regarding such a happy state of affairs what Mencken said of the American South could, with slight variations, be said of the wide spaces of our Republic: “In that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate there is not a single picture gallery worth going into.
Or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or a single theatre devoted to decent plays, or a single public monument that is worth looking at, or a single workshop devoted to the making of beautiful things.”
The South must have had some orchestras, whether capable of playing grand music or not. We have brass bands which play at marriage ceremonies. For the recording of film music there must also be some orchestral playing. But beyond these two exceptions a vast desert stretches.
Reading the announcement columns of the leading English newspapers can be an edifying exercise. In them you get notices of clothing and household linen exhibitions, art shows where pictures for the most part are not worth seeing, seminars and talks presided over by professional scarecrows with all too familiar expressions.
Halaku burned Baghdad. No one has burned the cities of the Islamic Republic. We have simply pulled down whatever little we had. Let’s leave Islamabad out of the reckoning, a city more in keeping with the national temper than we care to think because it faithfully mirrors the aridity and poverty of our collective imagination.
Even half the greenery of this city is false, owing its cover to a single pernicious weed, the paper mulberry. It is a city which does not have its own water supply, is on no trade route, does not earn its keep and is therefore a burden on the public finances.
Its only business is government and administration and even at these pursuits it has proved a signal failure. It is hard to justify such a city’s existence.
But Lahore and Karachi were supposed to be different. If the legends about these grand metropolitan centres are to be believed, they were once home to the better things of life.
Looking at them today it is hard to imagine that such a time ever existed for they have become monuments to concrete and filth, noise and pollution.
We like to believe that we are a people of immense talent. Perhaps even if the evidence for this belief is thin. Do we have a collective eye for beauty? Looking at the Chaghi replicas (in honour of our nuclear tests) and the rocket models we have erected in our major cities it is hard to think so.
Even our parks we cannot keep clean or free of cement. As if there were yet more things for the army to take over, it has taken over the Ayub National Park in Rawalpindi to turn into a Heritage Museum. Don’t be surprised if this last patch of green in that city is turned into another monument to concrete.
What are the three outstanding national achievements of the last twelve months? Turning Gawalmandi in Lahore into a “Food Street” as if there was a shortage of food outlets in that city, holding the much-touted Defence Exhibition in Karachi as if the world needed more reminders of our military prowess.
And the trail-blazing work of the National Registration and Database Authority (NADRA) which has just given a comic turn to national voting lists. Last Thursday there was a NADRA ad in the papers under the resonant title, The Gift of Bright Future (no indefinite article, please, we’re Pakistanis).
Under the picture of a smiling mother and child comes this robust legend: “NADRA is laying down the concrete foundations for a bright future by undertaking the tremendous task of creating a comprehensive national database.
This will bring about a system of government with better coordination and efficiency and help build a just and informed society.” For the syntax alone the author of these inspired lines deserves a sound (and preferably public) whipping. As for the logic, it is impeccable.
Once the last moron in the country is documented, a bright future, not to mention a just and informed society, will be ours for the grasping. And this is another army-controlled organisation.
The larger towns had the advantage over the countryside in two other respects: plumbing and red-light areas. In townhouses if you had the means you had indoor toilets with running water, an inescapable necessity for the reading man (and no doubt, woman) because at least in my experience civilisation and a slow start in the mornings are closely inter-related.
But in the last fifteen years this has changed. Rural artisans have become familiar with the installation of plumbing. If you want an indoor toilet, you can easily have one. This is one advantage, therefore, which is cancelled out.
As for the other that pertaining to the red-light areas — a change has occurred even there. Time was when the amorous soul who had it in his heart to throw money at a dancing girl travelled to cities for this purpose.
Now, largely because of the sham puritanism that has had Pakistan in its grip since Zia ul Haq’s time, dancing girls are happy to respond to invitations even from far-flung areas.
There are any number of occasions when I have been invited to mujras in the surrounding villages of Chakwal and if I have not responded to all of them it may be because of my strict morality or the company (although not necessarily in this order).
Farmers of course I don’t mind (being one myself) but being in my cups with local grandees such as sub-inspectors of police, excise and taxation inspectors and naib and full tehsildars I find less than uplifting.
(Come to think of it I don’t like mixing my pleasures with officialdom of any sort.) This distinction too is therefore wiped out. It is only the greenhorn who now goes to listen to a mujra in a certified shahi mohalla.
I am, however, no expert in this business because vicarious or distant pleasure which is all that one gets in a mujra has never thrilled me.
When in the streets of Kabul a comely woman was pointed out to Emperor Babur he deigned not even to look in her direction, saying that what was it to him if the lady in question was sweet or saltish if her beauty was to remain the beat of a distant drum. In this thing if in no other I am one with the great emperor.
As for moral sustenance, what with the good offices of the local Christian communities, small towns have become self-sufficient in this commodity too, with bottled happiness being just a phone call away.
The only danger is adulteration, widely and perhaps dangerously practised in this business. But then which business is not adulterated in Pakistan? Why then blame the purveyors of moral sustenance alone?
Such being the balance sheet, where is the brave heart who will tell me the advantages of living in one of Pakistan’s great centres of art and learning. What will I find there grand opera or symphony that I am unlikely to get in Chakwal?
(By arrangement with
Dawn)
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