Strike Up The Band

JANUARY 2000 - The world’s going ape over the millennium and celebrations have been planned in advance months ago. There is the Y2K bug floating about to give the scenario an additional touch of complication and excitement, with no one really knowing what is going to happen, if indeed anything will. Over here, as bullock carts meander across the road, there is no worry about the great bug. The only one we have is influenza which is having a great season now that the Maker has turned the celestial showers off indefinitely.

With Ramadhan in full swing, the party spirit has not exactly hit a high note. The few planned have been low key affairs and there have been reports of some having taken place already last week and the week before that. Talk of making adjustments. What’s the point of having a new year party on the 7th of December ? But then party animals will be party animals and there is always such an air of desperation about people having a wild time at the parties. In effect, more often than not, the evening is one long shifting from one leg to the other, making do with low quantities of the stuff that cheers and futile attempts to keep a coherent conversation going with music – or what passes for it these days, running like a hurricane through the party house. Of course there are plenty of men and women hoping to score on their lucky night. The women, poor things stay cold sober throughout the long evening except for the ones who are rolling with the right spirits and the right smokes. The men, in Pakistan, drink hard to build up the necessary courage to make a pass at whoever is foolish enough to venture with them on the dance floor. Many drink only to cover up their nervousness and fright. No one of course will ever admit such an outrageous suggestion. The general ploy is that if the pass goes bad, the drink can always be used as am excuse aired amidst righteous protests of, ‘No, no, it cannot be. I said that ? What ? I was feeling you up ? C’mon you can’t be serious. I respect you too much.” Women, who have heard these lines react either way. If they are in the mood, they’ll let it go. If they are not, they will serve the errant male with a dressing down, eventually ending with such famous Pakistani bylines, such as, ‘Don’t you have a sister at home?’ No, all said and done, the party scene has been fairly dismal since forever and the parties at the end of the 90s are the same, more or less, as the parties in the 80s and 70s. Just the songs are different and at some places, even the songs are the same.

But as the weary Pakistani nation prepares to battle with another century (is there no end to these things?), there is very, very little to cheer about. Even Shoaib Akhtar is a chucker, so what the hell have we got ? I suppose his fate was sealed when he was dubbed the ‘Rawalpindi Express.’ First, there is no such thing. The last express from Rawalpindi never arrived. Secondly, any fast bowler in Pakistan who is named after a train will end up exactly where the Pakistan Railways is. The shunting yard. No, there is nothing to make anyone stand up and shout except the brass and even they are having a nervous breakdown looking at voluminous files, an exercise where the comfort level will be the same as that on a sunny day in the middle of the Sahara Desert in the middle of June at mid day. The honeymoon is starting to crack and while 11 weeks is not enough except for Kim Bassinger, it is for the sullied nation which has had an overdose of empty promises and cheap rhetoric for the last fifty years.

The great plane case is now fast becoming the saga of a usual PIA flight. There are innumerable delays and no one knows what’s going on. No one also knows why no action is being taken and why there is no one who can tell them why things are not happening. Most people are rapidly losing interest in the case, which was staggering news for just about one week. Since then, there is a collective yawn that’s stretching from one end of the country to the other. The Mian dynasty which is cooling its heels in various jugs around the country, is as corrupt as they come, but while half the population given the chance would establish this in half a day, it seems to be taking the brass ages just to get the Mians spellings in the correct sequence of letters. Instead, they are sinking deeper and deeper into huge pits dug up by the foxy bureaucrats (now there’s a species that will outlive the cockroach) and other equally crafty technocrats and men with strange head dresses. Unfortunately, governing this unmanageable land is just about the most impossible task that no one would even wish upon their worst enemy. Polishing the brass and walking with a swagger stick is easy peasy, but poking through a file with your finger is a very hard matter. The poor khakis are having a bewildering time. While they battle on, which is something they are good at, the common man, that nuisance we inherited at partition time, is lost between prices and a fate where there is not much going his way. Truly, he couldn’t give a flying whatever it is that you can give to whether Mian hangs, flies, falls, swings, drops, decays or bloats out of existence. Neither does it matter to him who is calling the shots as long as they are not coming in his direction. What he wants is the very, very basic things in life and that is not coming his way, neither from the army that runs the country nor from any of his ‘democratic’ leaders, who were neither able to spell the word or pronounce it.

In the next millennium (how rapidly this word has been abused), he is not going to having access to clean drinking water, a roof over his head, two square meals a day, basic health care, education and the right to go about his sorry business. He will also be constantly raped by the forces of law and order, read outlaws and disorder, the petty clerk and in the boonies, everyone from the Tehsildar up and down both ways, all and everyone in whose clutches he will find himself constantly. There will be no respite for him or his children. He will be at the receiving end of everything and it will be quite an end. The good thing is that he will not really comprehend what he is going through and he will never be in a position to understand the game of which he is the victim. The comfort is that he has been this way, more or less, ever since the Indian Plate hit whatever it was that it hit. On that cheerful note, here’s to a great time ahead. Strike up the band, boys and send in the clowns.