Seductive Dancers

AUGUST 2004 - Now that the good guys have triumphed over the bad guys and Shaukat Aziz has won a landslide victory in Attock and Tharparkar, we can all sleep easy knowing that all is well with the world and God rules in the heavens. Sigh of relief (Sigh). Sure, we are all dancing in the streets, singing rousing anthems and pouring traditional sweets into happy mouths, especially in Islamabad, but I can tell you the nation was tense. Will he win? Will he lose? Politics is so dodgy. Thank God the electorate demonstrated admirable qualities of head and heart as the popular saying goes- although where it goes has always been a bit of a mystery and brought in The Man. Happy days are coming.

The Prime Minister in waiting is no longer waiting and neither should we. It is time we move on to more pressing matters and this is where the nation’s new energy must find its way, namely the crucial matter of the seductive dancers who have taken over Punjab’s metropolis by storm. Nargis, Nadia, Naina, Nasim and Nari or the five Ns as you may like to call them aided by Iram and Amira and duly supported by Zamrud Khan, Hassan Murad, Mumtaz Zareef and Tariq Teddy to name a few, have been setting theatres alight with performances that have shocked the pristine administration. Vulgar and suggestive dances, lewd dialogues, and hot, suggestive and sinful gestures – these have shocked everyone. Our refined sensibilities are bruised. Luckily, the District Government led by its reforming squads and inspired by the leadership of DCO Khalid Sultan has nipped the evil in the bud once again and raided theatres and halls where these vulgar actions were going on in full swing. The matter has now been referred to the Home Department, which if it is at home and so inclined, may take further action. The offending theatres and halls, I am told have been sealed but not before spraying the insides with very lethal doses of pesticides so that any vulgar particles that may be floating about in the air can be swiftly eradicated. I hear that the theatre rats have not appreciated this too much. Most of them being avid theatre-goers with long term lease agreements have said it is a bad day for the performing arts when pesticides have to be used to combat artistes.

The magic stick that immediately recognizes seductive dances is apparently available in large numbers with the District Government which is not afraid to use it liberally in the pursuit of its hallowed policies of disinfecting society and polishing up the city’s falling moral standards. While most of us may have a hard time determining what is and what is not exactly seductive, the District Government apparently has no such, if you’ll forgive the expression, hang up. Of course there is no accounting for what is morally offensive or not. There have been cases where women had to be taken to hospital emergency wards having seen a pile of cucumbers on sale at the grocers. Others have fared no better seeing moral turpitude in streetlights, upright trees and other equally distressing objects. As for men and we all know that Pakistani men have absolutely no control over their leaping emotions, why the very sight of a fruit vendor selling apples is enough to drive them up the wall and if there isn’t one around, they’ll shimmy up a tree, pole or rocket – the last variety present in awesome large numbers thanks to the patronage extended to the arts by the armed forces. There they perch, tongues hanging out gasping for breath. Pakistani men get excited very quickly and once in that happy state, difficult to reason with. Since women don’t have much say in matters such as seductive dancing, performing usually to whoever is footing the bill, it is the men who are at the center of this hullabaloo. As any person half familiar with the state of Pakistan and the state it usually is in, men call all the shots even when there are no shots required. Thus whatever suggestive and seductive things are happening in public theatres is only because the men must be entertained, otherwise they get very testy – no pun intended I swear.

Surf along any evening and stop at any channel where the picture quality is zero and at least two people are visible. This is a channel showing you the best of Pakistani cinema and that only means dances, dances, dances and more dances. These are performed by women who have more blubber than Moby Dick after a night out with the boys, sequined in flesh-encasing and flesh-slipping satin finish tight dresses, something no self-respecting woman would be seen dead in, but it is alright because this is the vision of a Bodi Gujjar, a Butt Gujjar, a Bhola Gujjar or whoever it is that funds the macabre nightmare called Pakistani cinema. The women in these dances writhe, flail, squirm, gyrate, thrust, push, slither and pant like they have a furnace inside. The dance – for that is what we must call it given the Lahore DCO’s happy dispensation, is staged on or around an object. If it’s a tree, the 250-pound plus shimmering, shivering mass of flesh must wrap itself around it. No small wonder that the trees though very shaky from the encounter, manage to stand their ground. Men who obviously have a heavy duty problem with the sex act pen the words of the song – yes there is a song too. Every word has three meanings and each meaning is more suggestive and seductive than the other two and so on. The woman with the tree or bed or stool or table is giving it a good polish and buff using all 250 pounds of her machinery to manage the job and all the time making gestures that would cause most men over 50 to have a coronary on the spot. However art only imitates life and in this case, the men don’t have a coronary. They love the spectacle and most, especially those at the very top of the social, corporate, political and power ladder happily pay enormous sums of money to have these staged for their amusement. In all this, not to be forgotten is the hero, invariably in black, buttons open down the middle to reveal a growth, which would turn King Kong green with envy. He has a rakish look, a luxuriant beard or a debonair moustache, which he fingers most suggestively as he weighs the pros and cons of staging an attack right then and there. He at all times has a bored, indifferent look and as the rain comes down and the woman emerges in the tenth costume change since the whole thing started, more flesh, now wet and clinging is revealed from angles which have to be experienced and cannot be described.

The portrayal of the Pakistani woman is insulting and cheap. She is consistently shown as a half-demented flesh pot whose only role in life – although ‘roll’ would be more accurate is to satisfy the lust-urge in men. She, therefore, must seduce him with words, gestures and moves because she is just a sex object and is only there to satisfy a need, which is more basic than hunger. To think that thousands and thousands of such sequences have gone entirely unchecked through our men only censor boards for years altogether and run on the circuit to further corrode and corrupt the thinking of men, fashioning the way they regard women at home, work place and worse, in marriages without so much as a flicker of national outrage – that is the real vulgarity and that remains unchecked. Banning theatres is holding the stick from the wrong side. This country needs a major (general?) re-assessment by the men about exactly where they place their women. Nothing will change till there is a massive change in attitude. Chances of that I can tell you are the same as Shaukat Aziz losing the election by a landslide.