Sunday, 27 February 2011
Sovereign Debt
Saturday, 26 February 2011
Friday, 25 February 2011
Thursday, 24 February 2011
A pretty excellent movie version of "the greatest opera" - Don Giovanni - Epinions.com
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A pretty excellent movie version of "the greatest opera" - Don Giovanni - Epinions.com
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A pretty excellent movie version of "the greatest opera" - Don Giovanni - Epinions.com
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A pretty excellent movie version of "the greatest opera" - Don Giovanni - Epinions.com
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Pakistan’s intelligence ready to split with CIA - Arab News
Energy prices: Tax away vulnerability | The Economist
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BBC News - Libya unrest: Violence against protesters backfires
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BBC News - Libya unrest: Violence against protesters backfires
But it is now plain that at a critical mass of violence, imagery and testimony will leak out and be pumped through the channels of the international media.
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Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Eisenhower's History-Changing Speech - Newsweek
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Eisenhower's History-Changing Speech - Newsweek
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Monday, 21 February 2011
Unit 731 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oceanography in China: Who rules the waves? | The Economist
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Oceanography in China: Who rules the waves? | The Economist
American who sparked diplomatic crisis over Lahore shooting was CIA spy | World news | The Guardian
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Friday, 18 February 2011
Granta 112: Pakistan | Magazine | Granta Magazine
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God and Me | Online Only | Granta Magazine
God and Me
One night some years before I was born, my mother balanced a ladder on two thick branches within the canopy of a tall tree and climbed upwards, emerging out of the leaves and flowers, her arms free and outstretched as she arrived at the topmost rung.
The tree was a jacaranda, neelum in Urdu, its high flowers a delicate blue-violet, as though the floor of an English bluebell wood had been made airborne. It stood behind my grandparents’ house in Pakistan, and I have seen it, have imagined a young woman rising above the blue haze of its flowers. Just beyond the furthest rung, her mother was leaning out of a window and she pulled her young daughter into the house safely, the ladder falling away.
Granta 93, in which this article first appeared
That evening my mother had attended a performance of devotional Muslim music at a house in the next street. Her brother, my uncle, had become a follower of a strict unsmiling sect of Islam which forbade such gatherings; on discovering where his sister was, he had installed himself at the front door of my grandparents’ house waiting for her return, a cane in his hand.
On the very first page of my first novel, I wrote about an adult who takes children’s toys from them and hands them back broken. Islam forbids idolatry. Toys can be considered idols and are to be smashed. My uncle did that to me: he snatched from my hands a mask that I had just bought from a vendor in the street and tore it to bits. I can still remember my feelings of shock and incomprehension. My uncle’s version of Islam was the same kind practised by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan three decades later. It would be state policy in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to ban children’s toys, as well as music.
In Turin, Italy, in the spring of 2005, I went to a reading given by the Syrian poet Adonis. He would read a few verses in Arabic and then pause while they were translated into Italian for the audience. I know neither language and yet, not long into the reading, I discovered that my eyes were full of tears and realized that if I did not exert control I would be weeping openly. I was puzzled and when I told my friends about it later, they were amused. It is only now, months later, that I think I know what made me cry.
As a child I was made to read the Qur’an without any understanding of the grammar or idiom of Arabic. I had to learn the words by heart simply because they were sacred. My mind, even then, did not work like that, and ‘I remember him crying out under the blows one day at the mosque...’ I was regularly slapped or beaten with a cane on the hands and body by the clerics for not having memorized the verses. Even more frightening than the thought of being punished myself, was the thought that my brother would be beaten. I remember him crying out under the blows one day at the mosque. My uncle, who was feared by everyone, including my mother, would sometimes wake me at dawn with his loud chanting of the Qur’an. As a result of such associations, the very sound of Arabic came to sicken me.
I cannot be certain but perhaps there is more—another layer to this revulsion towards Arabic. During my teenage years, Pakistan was changing under the military rule of General Zia-ul-Haq, who legitimized his regime by promoting what he called ‘Islamic’ values. The Qur’an came to be chanted on television and radio at every opportunity and people began to give their children archaic Arabic names. These ‘Islamic values’ also meant the flogging of criminals and public hangings, as in Saudi Arabia. This was new to Pakistan and I found it horrific, this brutalization of my country’s civil society.
I loved—and continue to love—the pages of certain copies of the Qur’an: the lovingly illuminated borders, the geometric designs on the title pages; a small chrysanthemum flower employed at the end of each verse instead of a full stop. One of my oldest notebooks has the following sentence: Allah will surely prove his love for his creatures by filling Paradise not only with wine and beautiful girls and boys, as promised, but with arabesques as well. The sinuous calligraphy of Arabic was greatly pleasing to my eyes but I stopped myself from pronouncing the words.
I left Pakistan in my mid-teens. Here in England, I had no real contact with spoken Arabic—any more than with Chinese or Greek—until I began to hear the taped interviews and finger-wagging pronouncements of Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists; and they too were full of hatred and the firestorms of Hell.
I have not lived a very cosmopolitan life. My parents to this day do not know any countries other than England and Pakistan. (They have a few memories of India where they were both born before Partition.) I only started to travel when I became a published writer. And so that day in Italy—on one of my very first trips abroad—when the great Adonis recited the poems I had known in English translation for many years, it was a struggle for me to reconcile the hated sounds with the loved words that were echoing in my head. Her name was walking silently through the forest of letters.
I have read widely in Arabic literature, beginning, yes, with the Thousand Nights and A Night. I have read the Qur’an several times as an adult, and of course there are the novels of the magnificent Naguib Mahfouz; ‘After a few moments he seemed to remember himself and closed his fist around the shape, crumpling and tossing it aside.’ pre-Islamic pagan poetry; the fables of Kalila wa Dimna; extracts from a sorcerer’s manual from eleventh-century Spain; the wounded and wounding lines of Mahmoud Darwish. But I have read them all in English, silently in my study. The aural connection was severed long ago. Until that day sitting in front of Adonis. And then there was confusion because how could a sound that spoke to me of brutality, express words of love, of kindness, of longing? There lay the source of my tears. Qays used to say I have clothed my body with Leila and clothed the human race.
Of course if I can change the other side can too. One day I saw my uncle become fascinated by a small intricate bird I had folded out of red paper and left lying around. After a few moments he seemed to remember himself and closed his fist around the shape, crumpling and tossing it aside. But for a few moments he had encountered wonder and seen the possibility of beauty within something he loathed, something he went on to destroy.
Buy a subscription to our archive now to enjoy thirty-one years of the best new writing. You can also visit the page for our Pakistan issue here.
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See also... ‘High Noon’ I, II & III, work by contemporary Pakistani artists from our print edition; or our cover for the issue, a special commission made to Karachi-based truck artist Islam Gull. Also recently published are a new translation of a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, and ‘Power Failure’ – Bina Shah’s essay on the ongoing electricity crisis in Karachi.
YouTube - Nadia Jamil and Ali Azmat mention PYA
3 | Pop Idols | Granta 112: Pakistan | Magazine | Granta Magazine
2 | Pop Idols | Granta 112: Pakistan | Magazine | Granta Magazine
How to write about Pakistan | Online Only | Granta Magazine
How to write about Pakistan
Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical piece from Granta 92, ‘How to Write About Africa’, is the most popular article on our website. When we were digitizing our archive, Binyavanga gave us permission to put his article up, but only on the condition that it remain free to read and not behind a paywall. ‘Always use the word “Africa” or “Darkness” or “Safari” in your title’, it begins – and goes on to send up every imaginable cliché of writing about Africa.
An equivalent for Pakistan seemed only appropriate for our current issue. Below, four contributors to the issue – Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Kamila Shamsie – tell you, in case you’re thinking of starting out, How to Write About Pakistan.
I
1. Must have mangoes.
2. Must have maids who serve mangoes.
3. Maids must have affairs with man servants who should occasionally steal mangoes.
4. Masters must lecture on history of mangoes and forgive the thieving servant.
5. Calls to prayer must be rendered to capture the mood of a nation disappointed by the failing crop of mangoes.
6. The mango flavour must linger for a few paragraphs.
7. And turn into a flashback to Partition.
8. Characters originating in rural areas must fight to prove that their mango is bigger than yours.
9. Fundamentalist mangoes must have more texture; secular mangoes should have artificial flavouring.
10. Mangoes that ripen in creative writing workshops must be rushed to the market before they go bad.
If you are sick of mangoes then try reading:
Najam Hussain Syed
Afzal Ahmed Sayed
Hasan Dars
All poets? Poets who don’t write poetry in English? Not even in Urdu? You could get your maid or that genius mad uncle to translate little bits for you.
Or, if you like prose:
Ali Akbar Natiq
Asad Mohammed Khan
Shamsu Rehman Farouqi
All fiction writers, some available in English. Ask your Pakistani friends to translate bits for you. Your Pakistani friend can’t read Urdu? Surely she has a maid who can. Or is she too busy serving mangoes?
II
Pakistan is just like India, except when it’s just like Afghanistan. (Has anyone else noticed how we seem to have geographically shifted from being a side-thought of the subcontinent to a major player in the Greater Middle East? Is this progress?) It will become clear whether the Pakistan of our work is Indo-Pak or Af-Pak depending on whether the cover has paisley designs or bombs/minarets/menacing men in shalwar kameezes (there are no other kinds of men in shalwar kameezes.) If woman are on the cover, then the two possible Pakistans are expressed through choice of clothing: is it bridal wear or burkhas?
On the subject of women, they never have agency. Unless they break all the rules, in which case they’re going to end up dead. I don’t think there’s anything else to be said about them, is there?
III
Lying in my bed at 7.48 a.m., laptop on lap. Too much writing in this position over the years has given me neck-aches. I’d do yoga if it weren’t such a non-Pakistani sounding activity. For a Pakistani writer to do yoga feels like questioning the two-nation theory. So I complain, which brings enormous relief and a sense of oneness with my subject matter.
When it comes to Pakistani writing, I would encourage us all to remember the brand. We are custodians of brand Pakistan. And beneficiaries. The brand slaps an extra zero onto our advances, if not more. Branding can be the difference between a novel about brown people and a best-selling novel about brown people. It is our duty to maintain and build that brand.
I know I don’t need to reiterate here what brand Pakistan stands for, but since my future income-stream is tied up with what you all do with it, I’m going to do so anyway. Brand Pakistan is a horror brand. It’s like the Friday the 13th series. Or if you’re into humor, like Scary Movie. Or Jaws, if nature-writing is your thing.
Anyway, the point is that people from all over the world have come to know and love brand Pakistan for its ability to scare the shit out of them. Whatever you write, please respect this legacy. We’re providing a service here. We’re a twenty-storey straight-down vertical-dropping roller coaster for the mind. Yes, love etcetera is permissible. But bear in mind that Pakistan is a market-leader. The Most Dangerous Place in the WorldTM.
It took a lot of writing to get us here, miles of fiction and non-fiction in blood-drenched black and white. Please don’t undo it. Or at least please don’t undo it until I’ve cashed in a couple more times. Apartments abroad are expensive.
IV
Desi Masala
The banyan tree, the gulmahor,
and all mem-sahibs of Lahore –
I sing of you, for love and cash
(for poets need a place to crash,
in Islington, if not Mayfair –
Please God, not Newham is my prayer).
Lahore is fine in winter time,
but when the temp begins to climb
we brave the food on PIA
to pen our eclogues far away.
So, gentle reader, do not stray,
I promise you that same bouquet,
the one I sold you once before,
the spice and smells of old Lahore,
and chauffeured cars and so much more.
***
Nadeem Aslam has also reflected on these questions in his new article ‘Where to Begin’, in which he also traces some of the seeds of his novella Leila in the Wilderness, which opens our new issue. Read also... Binyavanga Wainaina’s ‘How to Write About Africa’, free in our archive.
Buy our Pakistan issue today by clicking here
~CONTRIBUTORS~
– Mohsin Hamid lives in Lahore and is the author of Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007. His story for Granta, ‘A Beheading’, is also free to read.
– Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara. A former head of the BBC Urdu Service, he is the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes, which won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in 2009. He lives in Karachi.
– Daniyal Mueenuddin grew up in Pakistan and Wisconsin, and now lives on a farm in southern Pakistan. His first short-story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
– Kamila Shamsie was born in Karachi and now lives in London. She is the author of five novels, including Burnt Shadows, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009. Her essay ‘Pop Idols’, about the pop music heartthrobs of her childhood during the Zia ul-Haq years, is free to read online.
***
Watch an animation inspired by the issue and its artwork here (by Caco Neves):
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See also... ‘High Noon’ I, II & III, work by contemporary Pakistani artists from our print edition; or our cover for the issue, a special commission made to Karachi-based truck artist Islam Gull. Also recently published are a new translation of a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, and ‘Power Failure’ – Bina Shah’s essay on the ongoing electricity crisis in Karachi.
Power Failure | Online Only | Granta Magazine
Power Failure
While the floods occupy both headlines and international aid efforts in Pakistan, novelist and short-story writer Bina Shah reports on another pressing issue: Karachi’s ongoing electricity crisis, and what it reveals about the country’s power structures.
It isn’t so bad in December, January, February, when cool air and mild sunshine lulled the city into good cheer. Winter in Karachi has the same effect that summer has in Europe, luring people out of their houses to enjoy the beautiful weather; a rainstorm can send them out into the streets, faces upturned to the water and wind. We are not afraid to come out of our houses at midday; whole families zigzag across the city on motorbikes, dressed in leather jackets, woolen shawls, and even the odd snowsuit worn by a toddler held tightly in his mother’s arms. At night a snappy breeze drops the temperature down even further, as the poor light smoky wood fires in the lanes of their slums and the more affluent pull out creaky heaters and don warm socks and vests to guard against winter coughs and colds.
Traffic crawls through Pakistan’s largest city during a power outage
In January, if the lights go out while you are in a store, you can bear with the suspension of the credit card machine, the dim sunlight filtering through the windows. You and the shopkeeper exchange quick smiles, a shorthand comment: Phir se bijli gai (the electricity has gone again). At home, you can’t watch television or use the Internet, because even if you had electricity, the cable operators and Internet providers don’t, so you miss out on your entertainment – but that too can be borne easily enough. The power cuts themselves are infrequent and short, anyway, and you have developed a slight case of amnesia; forgetting last year’s nightmares enables you to survive another year in this city.
But come June, when the lights go out three or four times a day, in temperatures of anywhere from 35 to 42 °C, it’s impossible to imagine or forget your way out of this cruelty. And it’s not just the heat – it’s the humidity, that succubus that pushes the heat index up by ten degrees, makes the roads shimmer with sultry mirages and dehydrates labourers so fast that they collapse and die of heatstroke within hours. Children faint while at school; hospitals are unable to operate incubators and other vital equipment; water pumps stop working. Students can’t study for their exams, factory outputs fall by twenty, thirty, fifty per cent. The city has been crippled like this every day for the last four years, and all signs point to even worse conditions in the future, with Karachi’s population expanding faster than the city’s grid has the capacity to bear.
The daily loss of power is like having a relative in the hospital who teeters between life and death. One minute he’s going, going, gone – and then he suddenly strains back towards life, vital signs up, respiration good, pulse steady. Only, in the case of Karachi and her electricity supply, the patient never dies, never fully recovers; in fact repeats the same feat every day, several times over.
Imagine: you are sitting in the middle of traffic on a busy Karachi street, when the traffic lights suddenly go out. Cars start moving in every direction, smooth- flowing traffic deteriorates into chaos and motorcycles squeeze between the lines to escape the gridlock and into the wild, empty road beyond. A lone traffic cop stumbles his way into the middle of the intersection and tries to rein in the madness; if he succeeds, it’s only because the weary commuters find it easier to go along with his instructions than to forge ahead in their own style. This can happen anytime, anywhere: at night the streetlights will often cut out too, for good measure, so that only the headlights of the oncoming cars stand between you and a fatal accident. And the pedestrians dash across the street: dark, shapeless forms, far too many of them appearing as casualty figures in the newspaper the next morning.
Pakistanis stopped asking ‘why’ a long time ago: slowly but steadily over the last forty years, coups, corrupt governments and military dictatorships have taken away our ability to question. We are like the frogs who jump out of boiling water, but will remain happily submerged if you only turn the heat up on them little by little. The denial of our electrical power is a petty sin in comparison to the theft of our political power.
To appease us, the government offers a myriad of reasons for the shortfall: dry seasons, electricity theft, non-payment of taxes and bills, ancient infrastructure. The government also claims that the power companies are not operating at full capacity, or they’re not selling all the electricity they produce to the government (the rumor is that it’s being shunted off to Afghanistan instead, for the US Army and its activities across the border).
But when the Karachi Electrical Supply Corporation simply triples its rates for home users while supplying one-half or one-third the power they did before, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for the benighted company. And when federal ministers and other government officials are caught red-handed using illegal connections for political rallies and private weddings, any patience you might have had evaporates into the sweltering Karachi air.
During Musharraf’s presidency, he proposed the construction of two major dams on the northern stretch of the Indus River; the political controversy these plans stirred up became one of the major reasons for Musharraf’s unpopularity and eventual downfall. One of these dams, the Kalabagh Dam, would have destroyed the agricultural industry in the southern province of Sindh, where Karachi is located.
This year the United States has pledged one billion dollars to the energy sector; technical support is to come from General Electric and other American power companies in the private sector. But the recent floods have caused even more damage to the power stations and infrastructure, and valuable aid money will be diverted to repairing that devastation for a long time to come.
But Pakistanis are even more suspicious of American promises than they are of GoP ones. Who will accept American electricity when that other symbol of American power, the Predator drone, flies so freely in our airspace? And the people of Karachi need a solution now, not five years down the line.
In the meantime, we are left to our own devices, the tool of choice being the humble but sturdy generator. Silence used to be the sound of a power cut; now it’s the industrial symphony of a dozen Chinese generators, supplying an entire city with its electrical fix.
In his 1999 novel Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid wrote about the air-conditioned classes – the elite – and the non air-conditioned classes – the masses. Today, the divide falls between those who have a generator and those who do not. The moment the lights go out, generators are fired up; they roar and drone like a hundred speedboats, drowning out noise, conversation, traffic, thought. The stench of diesel spreads all around, black smoke belching up into the air and staining walls with soot. At least with a generator, life can go on, hamstrung but not halted. The generator-less come out on the streets to riot against the power cuts every few months or so, but return to their homes, defeated at the end of the day when nobody listens to them or does anything about their plight.
Everyone with a little money in this city has a generator. Every business, every store, every office, every restaurant. The elixir they deliver, uninterrupted electricity, is more valuable than the sixty litres of diesel that a large-size generator can burn through in two days.
The government has announced austerity measures: two-day weekends, forced closures of shops by eight p.m., the switching-off of all billboards and unnecessary streetlights, and the banning of air conditioning in government offices. But businesses and shop owners say that they cannot make any profits if they close down in the cooler evenings when most Pakistanis emerge from their houses to do their shopping. The province of Baluchistan has declared outright they will not comply with some of the measures, especially the two-day weekend for schools, as they will harm an already dire economy and education system. In Sindh, Punjab, Khyber-Paktunkhwa, shopkeepers simply flout the curfew hours, and the government turns a blind eye. Instead, the police concentrate on raiding marriage halls and having the lights closed at midnight, forcing wedding guests in all their finery to creep home in the dark.
In Pakistan, we deal in darkness every day. We get by in conditions that the developed world would find unbearable, unacceptable; in ways that are by turns clever, conniving, original and criminal. Look up at an electricity cable in Macchar (Mosquito) Colony, a slum with over 700,000 inhabitants, and you’ll see a dozen or so wires called kundas hooked on to the connection points. These kundas are ubiquitous in Karachi, siphoning electricity off the grid that never gets paid for and costs KESC about a billion rupees each year. People pay their local electrician a nominal sum to reverse or slow down their electricity meters, or bribe the meter-readers into overlooking or fudging the numbers. Rich industrialists refuse to pay their electricity bills and enjoy enough influence to escape punishment. And corruption within the KESC allows the cycle to continue without end.
It’s a vicious circle that leads to more and more shortfall, but Karachi’s port, industries and businesses must all have electricity to keep the economy going. Pakistan depends utterly on the revenue that Karachi brings in, billions of rupees that far outweigh any other province’s contribution. So deals will be done, both over the table and under it, and life will limp on. There is something particularly dogged and stubborn about the people of this Karachi, who manage to find ways around their obstacles, like vines that break through the thickest of walls: a peculiar sort of consolation for those of us who live in this maximum city with minimum voltage. In fact, I’m convinced that if you were to look at Karachi from a great height, say a plane thirty thousand feet in the air, or even a satellite, you would see miles and miles of darkness, and then suddenly a well-lit city, black in some places but brilliant in others, powered by a hundred thousand generators, rumbling late at night and into the early hours of the morning.
After Mubarak: The autumn of the patriarchs | The Economist
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After Mubarak: The autumn of the patriarchs | The Economist
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Thursday, 17 February 2011
Turing test - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Farrago | Define Farrago at Dictionary.com
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
BBC News - Drug submarine seized by Colombian navy
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Mike Huckabee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Saturday, 12 February 2011
Thursday, 10 February 2011
THE LURE OF LISTS | More Intelligent Life
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
New Zodiac Sign 'Ophiuchus' Should Be Added, Astrologers Say
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YouTube - Bloodhound SSC - Trans-sonic Rocket Car
Egypt's continuing unheaval: The chaos continues | The Economist
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Monday, 7 February 2011
BBC News - A future without car crashes?
Scientist Erik Coelingh has been testing his crash avoidance technology at their test track in Sweden.
'The car has a sensor system that tries to detect where the objects around the car are.
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