The Circus Train

AUGUST 2003 - The sight of Farzand e Rawalpindi inaugurating a train designed to pay tribute to Miss Jinnah must have caused havoc in the grave where she was consigned years ago amidst bickering over how many feet should separate her mortal remains from those of her illustrious brother. Now we wish to commemorate her birthday, a whole embarrassing decade later. What is the divine logic that has inspired President Musharraf and Mr. Jamali to declare this year - the 110th year of her birth as the year of Madar-i-Millat escapes us lowly mortals. What has possessed Islamabad to lay it on now and set some kind of bizarre record in terms of seminars and memorial meetings on the hour every hour, defies comprehension. The train is trundling along and what a lark that is.

We will never know who cooked up this latest aberration in Islamabad, a city that never ceases to amaze those blessed with more than very dry hay between their ears. There have been more harebrained schemes flowing out of its hash-heavy avenues than one can count – and given our dynamic literacy rate we can’t count very far. However what should not send waves of dismay sweeping over the sagging shoulders of the nation is that somehow the government was able to rustle up a walloping Rs 5.8 million for the proper ‘decoration’ of the train. Trussed up in lurid coloured drawings with pop slogans thrown in for good measure, the train is supposed to present a memorable collection of pictures, songs and displays that will bring Madar-i-Millat right back into the hearts of the people. Inside, DVDs, stereos, projection screens, plasma TVs and various other high tech gadgets will charm the public who will throng the three dozen and more stations where the train will trundle into surely late by hours as the PWR legacy dictates. Another special bogey will carry the cream of the nation’s crooners and performers who will sing motivational songs, naghmas, anthems and other milli-infected ditties while the ensemble on board will dance their hearts out and emulate in word and deed, the many values and ideals the frail old lady lived by during her life time. This is true homage and surely Miss Jinnah will clap with delight when Arif Lohar will prance with his cast iron tongs wearing silken outfits belting out numbers in a language that will be as foreign to Miss Jinnah as it would be to her brother. Wonderful testimony to the two siblings who created Pakistan with devotion that was so steadfast and uncompromising that nothing else was allowed to get in the way. And since those who will form the train entourage in large numbers, the performing circus, the stooges that emerge out of the murky shadows to ‘grace’ the occasion and the many free loaders, publicity seekers and aspiring politicos – all will be fed heartily to keep their spirits soaring. Thoughtfully, a dining car has been attached which will work round the clock. A circus like this one, much like the country’s beloved army, marches on its stomach.

Of course the killjoys – and there is no shortage of them given the poverty line’s latest score of 50 million plus and growing, will have different ideas on this whole caper and will know that it will cost far more than the Rs.5.8 million. The endless seminars featuring the same luminaries have been held for months. The same speakers make the same rambling speeches and repeat the same platitudes to the same pliant listeners. A recent comment by a foreign scholar – who obviously was not in his senses, stated that sadly there had been nothing of substance in all the functions that had taken place. Instead of some serious, sober and intelligent research, all that had emerged was bombast and rhetoric, our two major crops, which yield bumper harvests year after year. Obviously the gentleman doesn’t know the Paki psyche well. Here, an emperor can go starkers for years and no one will raise an eyelash leave alone an eyebrow. No one can waste time researching the life and times of Miss Jinnah because that kind of thing has no entertainment value, is dull, boring and doesn’t win you popularity bonus points with the masses. Also, a country where even the self-anointed scholars and intellectuals shun anything that involves the tedium of putting pen to paper, the only research we can produce will not extend beyond Miss Jinnah’s favourite dish, favourite colour and favourite fruit. That is more or less it.

In such conditions, the train is the perfect gift to the memory of Miss Jinnah and her people whom she gave a glimmer of life before she was neatly deprived of an electoral win, her insulting effigy was carried aloft on trucks in Karachi by the son of our Field Marshal who was never in any field to be its rightful marshal and for years afterwards, she was shunned from all official protocol with indifference and contempt. This much is so recent in our history and Big Brother not being quite yet in full control, that we can face the lie that we were all part of and the sham treatment we gave to this frail but spirited lady. Mr. Jinnah’s last moments – the rickety ambulance and Miss Jinnah’s often-discussed mysterious demise are blots on our national conscience, which trains filled with buffoons cannot quite erase. There is indeed irony that the call to celebrate her glorious life should come from a military ruler notwithstanding the fact that the General’s heart is in the right place. Everything Miss Jinnah stood for we have more or less erased from our collective consciousness. Those who are ‘following her footsteps’ as the popular idiom of the day puts it, have the thinnest of connections with her value systems and the ideals she fervently believed in. We have a cobbled together democracy that lurches from day to day, feverishly entwined in such mind benders as LFOs, uniforms and other equally soul-lifting issues. The government at the center is frail and shaky, unlike the sight of the nation’s lumbering eminence, the Prime Minister who is in perpetual danger of rolling off the wall he is precariously perched upon. In a capital short on ideas and big on verbiage, the train obviously has received full blessings and the squandering of money has not been an issue.

What a pity that if for some reason best known to those who are the architects of this caper, the consensus should instead have veered in declaring the year in her blessed memory and allocation of funds towards building schools for girls or maternity homes for mothers or clinics for women, all causes that Miss Jinnah believed in sincerely. How wonderful it would have been to achieve this in 2003 and salute the memory of our founder’s loyal and supportive sister, but then there is hardly any glamour in opening a school in some far-flung rotting corner of Pakistan where the photo op would be lost. In any event who would want to go to the smelly back of beyond? Far better to be a part of the circus right here. Rest in peace Miss Jinnah and please forgive us our trespasses.