Reality Check

JANUARY 2002 - So after all, the moral brigades didn’t have a ball on the last day of 2001 and were happily absent from whatever passes for merriment in Pakistan. Their customary high handedness of storming private clubs, homes and hotels, vandalizing properties, smashing dozens of cars and shouting slogans of hate, were all missing this time. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Amazing that every year, administration after administration was rendered powerless and pulverized to shivering masses of bad jelly as the hooligans took to the streets. Everyone knows how high the morality barometer sang in those days.

Young people, almost always males – since the happy assumption here is that females need neither fun nor happiness, this time as well, crowded the streets, danced, sang and yelled and rode bikes like crazy bats from hell, watched by grinning policemen, who except for the lathi charge or two, made little show of their considerable prowess with their trusted staves. Nothing terrible happened, no morality codes were violated, gang rapes were not reported and the country’s reason for existence was not threatened. In short, without the out-of-fashion fundos, it was another ordinary, uneventful night in the lives of most people – except that it was the last day of a year most of us wish had never dawned – and to think with what fanfare we heralded it in!

Elsewhere, that is, away from the roads and the roundabouts and the markets, the well-heeled, like all the years before this, even during the black times of Zia ul Haq, had a good time and went on partying till the wee hours of the morning, happily drunk on good scotch, lethal vodka mixes and heady champagne, wherever available. Yet others ended up dead drunk or stoned on the good weed that grows in plenty everywhere and costs less than a bottle of coke with two aspirins thrown in for rocketing about town. There was a spate of balls - which sadly is not quite what some of you might be inclined to think, and there were half a dozen in Karachi alone between Eid and the last night of 2001. Ostensibly to raise money for the dispossessed, and some are well run charities, these were also great occasions to flash solitaires, flaunt designer wear and tool about in fancy automobiles. It was also a thinly disguised excuse to have a ball – literally, and when it happened, nobody did it better than the Karachi crowd. There were pay-and-jam parties and one cool event in Lahore had a Rs 2500 per head cover charge with gallons of the good stuff in abundance and Japanese catering at hand. Who says Lahore is populated by bulls, buffaloes and buffoons?

Frankly one can only rejoice at the little bit of pleasure ordinary people get whenever they can. Most of the time it is gravesville in Pakistan with folks carrying faces longer than a giraffe’s neck at full stretch. There is always so much doom and gloom about that it doesn’t even require an effort to get the blues and go really down in the dumps. There is usually loads of bad and depressing news to go around and it starts at the crack of dawn when the first of many depressing news reports arrive at everyone’s doorsteps. This continues right through the day and doesn’t stop till late at night. At various dinner parties and get togethers, people congregate, eager to circulate more bad news. Information technology may have arrived on this planet but it has also shrunk everyone’s universe so that you can now see up the nostrils of a man in Tibet without trying. This explains why, in most places where people meet, the voices and opinions that are let loose make otherwise perfectly normal people, sound like the dirges of souls lost in hell. One cannot recall an evening where the current affairs – read miseries of the country, and invariably the plight we are in, is not the starters, main course and dessert. There is no shortage of the prophets of doom who announce in somber tones the latest conspiracy that has been hatched against the country. If it’s not the Indians – and on them it is always open season, it’s the Afghanis or the intelligence agencies of every country with whom we have strained relations and who are conjuring the most diabolical plots against us at rates that would even make population planners look good. Listening to these elaborate plans, plots and schemes that are all aimed to undermine us, one can only wonder that were it not for us, the rest of the world would have very little to do at any time of the year and at any time of the day or night. The Mossad may be behind the crash on the Motorway last week, but forgive me if one has failed to spot their nefarious and utterly evil witchcraft at work. If there is no bad news to spread around, Pakistanis will create it just so that they all can have a miserable time, happily.

An entire generation that was in kindergarten during those bleak and despondent years, when Terry Thomas ruled the land, has grown up into young men and women with peculiar mindsets. While what they exhibit may not all be unusual – each generation seems to think it is the answer to mankind’s problems - there is one singular trait that they manifest and that is an utter lack of imagination. Pakistan has turned fast into a very literal society where imagination has no role to play. There was a time when cafes, college canteens, homes, offices all were buzzing places for trading of opinions and discussions stretching hours over such non-business subjects like the existence of mankind and the reasons for being on this planet in the first place. Books were hotly debated, theories blasted to the skies and people held forth on literature, poetry, music, philosophy and the higher pursuits of the mind and soul. Now they talk of trivia. Almost all the various sections of society are transfixed by what is going on in Pakistan or nearby. The single-minded obsession seems to be reserved only for subjects that may be important but do nothing to develop personalities. While there are no simple answers, it is obvious that the new generation increasingly is addicted to television, with its fragmented and chaotic images that run the lives of all who sit transfixed before it for hours on end. A generation which does not read, is a generation which cannot write and the imagination lies imprisoned and in fetters within their narrow minds. Great thinking is unlikely to flow from a 14-inch screen. The possibilities are endless if you let your mind soar, but if you are more or less behaving like a zombie, then you can neither learn nor even begin to experience the world around you. A few years back, in Murree’s Lintotts café, once the harbour for all sailing intellectuals - even social butterflies, we were seated next to four young men who weren’t having chicken sandwiches or coffee, but chargas and cokes. Understandably, they were only talking about a huge scrap deal they had successfully tendered for. Joy was in the air.

With mobile phones, computers, 80 channels and the whole world beaming into your life, at all hours of the day and night, the thought of retiring to a quiet corner and getting lost in a riveting book is as alien as Nawaz Sharif working his way to a Masters degree in Philosophy. Perhaps, as the poet put it, ‘the world is too much with us,’ and the wheels of the merry go round are turning so fast, no one dares to get off, so willy-nilly we are all swept along with the masses. And when there are the masses, the lowest common denominator factor is the supreme reality.