A Quick One While You Were Away

why do we - pakistanis - discuss politics non-stop? before you perform some vigilante justice on me, hear me out.

a few hours ago there was a lot of anguish over politicians and journalists baying for another coup. i realise the need to speak out against this. yet i can't help but feel a great futility in such practices. to me, they seem like a way of venting frustrations. since we on the internet are not concerned with the next meal, our drowning lifestock or our dying, starving children, what is the basis of this frustration?

a hopeless future? a poor national image across the globe? a desire to feel superior and important? a reflection of our own personal conflicts - which we have failed to resolve, so we turn to battering the politicians, the generals, the journalists?

there are those who will dismiss this as another example of our elitist chattering class professing disdain for the downtrodden masses. you will paint my rants as belonging to a fiddling feudalistic nero.

i don't give a shit.

because i personally believe that at the end of the day its a question of intelligent. an intelligent society can be trusted to find intelligent answers, and not just those that think-tanks and pol-sci textbooks deem correct. and i don't think people discussing politics are not intelligent - its just that discussing the same old shit repeatedly is an insult to said intelligence.

but ahsan at fiverupees has an interesting point. perhaps my grievances are down to the fact that i don't know the right places to look. there may well be amazing blogs out there discussing non-political stuff, or at least a non-nauseating amount of it and are also written by intelligent people who aren't resorting to copy-pasting whatever the Big Blogs are currently discussing.

so here is my clarion call - do we have intelligent, articulate people out there talking about pakistan, but not about whats on the news, whats in the papers and whats in their faces?

post recommendations and suggestions in the comments below.

Enter the Facebook

A few days ago, my wife and i had an almighty row about something i put on facebook.

now, before i begin, both of us don't particularly like facebook. i could have used hate, but we don't really hate it. we see it for its benefits, such as the ability to be in touch with people we have been far removed from in time, geography, culture and directions. we like that we can get connected to a virtual flowing river of thoughts, and responses, and so on and so forth.

but then again, facebook seems to get under our skins and freak the fuck out of us.
i get seriously disturbed by how people are so feverishly fervent in consuming such copious amounts of details about EVERYONE else's life. once i saw someone update their status as "just got back from dinner, loved for the yummy food" and about 12 people had 'liked' it. what is there to like, what is there to appreciate in such a banal statement? yet i don't judge it really, i get overwhelmed by it, that virtual river slamming down on me and pulverizing me into its bed.

as for my wife, she despises how people turn into vapid sheep blindly embracing the latest 'it' thing on facebook with over-exuberant, psychotic and hollow passion. to quote an example, remember when israel bitch-slapped gaza, and facebook was inundated with status updates 'donated' to the plight of the palestinians? these were the same people who had been under blockade for almost a year at that point, and yet it was only when the showbiz happened (the ka-booms and the bleeding children) when people suddenly became infatuated with fatah and hammy over hamas.
so this was her retort to them facebookers back then.
of course, it was only fitting that no sooner had she done that (the links are all to stories about swat which back then no one gave a fuck about) people began to be interested in her opinion as well, because facebook junkies love to follow anything and everything.

ironically, her rant brought little attention to swat, but a facebook viral video turned out to be the gamechanger in the whole politics of that region.
which proved the power, and emptiness of this whole facebook phenomenon.(on an aside, i love how the earliest status created responses absolutely unconnected to the content, as if the controversy of it had forced a response, but the addiction to banality did not allow any acknowledgment of it.)

now what both of us were fighting about was my decision to post my film on my profile page. she felt that i was whoring out because things that existed on facebook immediately lost all gravitas, all purpose, all integrity. she complained that i was denuding my work of art, robbing it of its purity. that which existed on facebook was meant to be consumed, like a can of pepsi or a box of detergent. it was consigned to be eventually relegated to the trash.
i argued that by being on facebook, i was creating buzz about myself as a film maker. in a country without a breathing institution of cinema, a new comer would need to have people know about him, to have seen his work, to have heard about his reputation in order to be convinced to go out and watch his work. facebook is where viral happens, especially in pakistan. by being there, i was reaching out to an audience i couldn't otherwise reach. my blog for example, generates hardly a pittance in terms of viewership, while my completely meaningless profile page gets a lot more. in essence, what i was arguing was that i needed to 'brand' myself as a film-maker, generate buzz about my brand, so that when my 'brand' offered new products, it would have loyal consumers already present to spread the gospel.
i can feel you cringing.

if you are at this blog, you are probably inclined to have a knee-jerk aversion to brands, and corporations, and marketing and all such concepts.

let me enlighten you.

your aversion is surface deep. you are already a brand.

no, i'm not getting all naomi klien on your ass. remember your university applications? remember how you wrote essays about what drives you as a person, and attached certificates of sporting and artistic achievements which provided proof that you were a well-rounded person, and recommendations from experts who attested to your qualities? that was you branding yourself.

in fact, it's not just university applicants. job applicants do the same. and so do rishta applicants.

it permeates even further than that. foucault had argued that modern society was one ruled by discipline. but one of his contemporaries, deluze, reasoned that modern society was not about discipline, but control.

it is a subtle distinction, but a poignant one. deluze felt the reason behind this was that the institutions which governed society, had in contemporary times become highly diffuse, in the form of corporations. hence instead of the omnipotent state you have the omnipresent corporations.and a society of corporations consists of brands.

you present one brand to your parents, another to your grandparents. another to your first cousin, a far more liberal one to your friends, a far more devious one to your lovers, a far more honest one to your siblings, a restricted and much convoluted one to your boss, a domineering one to your subordinates, a squeaky clean one when you are at a religious ceremony, an unabashed one at the party you were dying to get invited to and so on.
it is far more easier for girls in pakistan to relate to this, as their brands have to switch rapidly depending on who can see them or hear them, and they are constantly on display, within their homes, on the street, in their rooms, on their profile pages, and ultimately, alone in front of the mirror as well.

and so, you are left with the essential question at the heart of this debate - is there a stable core sense of self beneath these ever fluctuating identities, brands or masks that we present to the world? or is our sense of self really an amalgamation of the cluster of brands we are putting out there?

is it possible to know one self, or are there too many selves, each fighting for dominance, each arising when needed, discarded when out of fashion, or possibility of use?

to paraphrase pink floyd, is there anybody 'in' there?

Burger ya Bun-Kebab

A blog I read recently showcased the behavior of young Pakistani males at a concert.

Some might find the scenes described as reprehensible, disgusting and downright creepy.

It also wouldn’t matter which side of ideological divide you found yourself in – men dancing suggestively with one another would offend both the self respecting liberal and mullah.

But to be honest, it is a bit of a rampant problem.

During my time at Pakistan’s premier business school, and alma mater of our previous Prime Minister, this was a recurring occurrence.

There would be post-exam “parties” and post-convocation concerts and beach plan parties and the ever present break time “dholkis.”

During these spontaneous celebrations, women were not allowed to dance. There was no ruling against it; instead, it was a social consensus. The way it worked was that if any girl got up to dance, all the others would shame her into sitting down, and if she dared continue, she would be labeled as ‘loose’, ‘gushtee’, ‘kunjaree’ ‘bay-sharam’ ‘bay-hayah’ etc etc.

Strangely enough, the lack of female presence on the dance floor lent an unbridled sexual explosion to the men. Perhaps to make up for the lack of women, the dancing men would become spectacularly unabashed. There would be vigorous chest wiggles, multiple partner grinding, one partner sliding his open palms slowly down the front of the other, grabbing hold of one’s own body and emitting loud hissing sounds while impersonating a snake slithering along the ground, coordinated thumkays, cat calls, whistles, drooling, licking, kissing, baring, sharing and everything else in between.

I am not making this up.

The question that arose repeatedly in my mind during these sweaty, testosterone choked extravaganzas was: Why?

After much mulling over the facts, there is a simple answer.

A dearth of entertainment.

I mean, what the hell is there to do?

(I think this problem of not having anything to do is fuelling two epidemics at least – the insane use of drugs by Pakistani youth, and the rise in religious Puritanism and so-called extremism. if you don’t have a range of activities, you find one and just go ape-shit with it. But I digress, unwillingly this time.)
The one source of entertainment most of us have access to is eating out.

(The form of entertainment everyone has theoretic access to is sex. But as the starved gyrations made clear, and as I argued in a previous blog, that form is also not available to everyone in the country.)

But even eating out has its controversies. In fact, in true Pakistani fashion, eating out has become a method of class differentiation.

Now I know people with intelligence would argue that no, eating out isn’t about class in Pakistan alone – there are swanky and rundown eateries all over the world.
But what makes us unique is that we use a particular gastronomic term to help establish differences in class – Burger.
To the uninitiated, burger is meant to define… well what does it define?

Is it a social and class difference, or is it a cultural marker?

In essence, burger is meant to signify someone who has burgers. Since the term has been around for donkey’s years, I am guessing that it originated during a time when burgers were a new-fangled concept in Karachi* and therefore referred to people who could afford to have them.

* (I switched from talking about Pakistan to Karachi because I now remember that burger is used generally in Karachi. During my time in Lahore I don’t remember it having the same level of usage, or acceptance.)

But defining who is a burger and who isn’t is notoriously tricky.

For starters, the opposite of burger can be logically understood as a bun-kebab. But it isn’t. The appropriate antonym is in fact ‘maila’ which translates into dirty. There is also “mummy-daddy” which may or may not be synonymous to burger. But the point is that the dichotomy of ‘burger-maila’ means that there is a difference beyond class that signifies who is a burger and who isn’t.

So we understand this difference to be cultural. Thus being a burger means employing a certain attitude towards life, having certain habits, speaking in a certain language, or in a certain accent, living a certain lifestyle etc.
But cultural definitions are notoriously difficult to outline. For some burgers are those that drink expensive brands of bottled waters, for others those who drink any form of bottled water, and for others still burgers are those that know why drinking bottled water makes a difference.
It is also difficult to demarcate it according to where you live – there are as many people who can fit a definition of burger in Gulshan and Nazimabad as there are those who can be described as mailas in Clifton.

And every time you set a certain definition, someone who falls victim to it will cry out against it.

So if burgers are people who studied abroad, you will have a lot of foreign educated folks claiming that it’s not true, they’re not burgers. Fine, so we will make it about those who eat out in Zamzama, until you hear that eating at Pizza Hut or for that matter Copper Kettle is really not the same as eating out at Okra.
Speaking in English can be a sure shot way of defining who is a burger and who isn’t. But even that got me thinking – only 8-10% of the country has Urdu as their mother tongue. So if we expand our definition, Urdu speakers would also be burgers.

Why?

Because ultimately a burger is a way of pointing out someone who has more than you, someone who is part of the exclusive elite parasites we all hate.

Now maybe you find the Urdu argument above weak. But it would mean that you would also be known as a burger then, because this blog ain’t written in Ghalib’s language.
But I know for a fact that people detest being labeled as burgers.* In fact, most of the people I know go to great lengths to point out that they are not burgers. They will point to the Indian movies they watch, or the desi eateries they frequent, or the fact that they are friends with their menial laborers, or drivers or cooks, or that they know dirty jokes in Urdu, or that they don’t have an aversion to eating ‘un-hygienic food,’ or that they don’t live in Defence, or that they got into fist fights, or that they don’t listen to what their parents tell them all as evidence that they are not burgers.

*(One example of bucking this trend was the ‘street-gang’ BUDDOK, which allegedly stood/stands for Burgers-United-Dopers-Drinkers-Of-Karachi.)

Yet I have spoken to others, not in our strata of society, who would define burger simply as someone who wears pants, or studied in a co-education school, or gave their O’ levels, or drives a car.

And friends of mine who refuse to be known as burgers are people who have their own personal room in their houses in a city where 60% don’t even have formal shelters, let alone a house. They have their own TV and AC while most of their city-mates find the cost of rotis unbearable. They don’t ever vote, and generally support the army. They have, and know how to use, computers beyond the level of signing onto MSN. And even if they didn’t study abroad, they did study at universities which are the most exclusive in the country, even if they were full of hip-shaking homeboys.

So does it even matter?

If you think it does, consider this fact.

The best burgers in Karachi are at Chips and Mr. Burger - Desi outlets.
So therefore, does defining someone as a burger serve any purpose other than ripping open cleavages within our society?

Do we really need to pull apart, especially at this time in our history?

No we don’t, but the reason I wrote this blog is this.

WE ARE ALL BURGERS.

You, me, and everyone we are friends with.

Because in a country with 70% of the population living below the poverty line, we who have access to computers and are literate are the burgers. Even if you traveled in a bus, or have relatives in Baldia, or like cricket more than football, you are a burger.

You and I are part of the people who wield all the power, who have all the money, who live the good life, who have what so many others don’t. Yes, you know people who are outrageously wealthier than you, but that doesn’t mean you are not a burger. You are. Don’t deny it. In fact, stop denying it. Even if you dream in Urdu and not English, you are a juicy, warm, luscious, cheese soaked garnished and spiced burger.
So please.

Every time you have a problem with the country, stop to think about how you’re part of the problem. Cuz you are.

Every time you are bemoaning about how corrupt and lousy our elites are, stop and look at the mirror. Cuz you’re bitching about yourself.

Every time you think this country is going to the dogs, check to see if you’re barking, cuz its all going to you.

No, you are not middle class. You are not upper-middle class. You are not middle-upper-middle-class.

You are a burger. I am a burger.

And we need to shut the fuck up and realize this fact.

Stand up, and take responsibility. It’s your fault. And you can put it right.

Queues of Circular Complaints

Many civilizations had created numbers, and methods of counting. But when the ancient Hindus introduced the number zero, it marked a radical shift in human understanding. back when mathematics was still intriguing enough to truly belong to the realm of mystics, the number zero offered a possibility at once frightening and mysterious.

for starters, numbers were symbols used to denote a certain sum of objects, regardless of the nature of the objects. two sticks, three bushels of wheat, five cows etc.

but what was zero denoting?

moreover, when you factor in division, which had been around since --- it gets even more forbidding towards comprehension. try and divide zero by any number, and you still get zero. try and divide any number by zero, and you get infinity.
infinity.

whoa dude.

i always thought the reason behind zero's mystique is partly due to the fact that it is an oval - 0. as in its a circular shape. and because circles are the grand daddies of symbols in relation to their contribution towards understanding a conceptualization of reality.

Circles go a long way towards explaining the most mysterious of humanity's thoughts. Circles are the best examples of divinity. for the plebians, consider Lion King, the song circle of life.What brought me to circles was when i was considering classes - it seems that if you view classes as a spectrum ranging from

absolutely fucking poor - really poor - poor - middle class - upper middle class - rich - super rich

then you have the following range of classes. now if you take this string and make it into a circle, the first thing you will notice is that the super rich and the absolutely fucking poor come next to one another. in other words, the same point marks the end of one category and the beginning of another.

for the bottom of the barrel, access to any entertainment which doesn't involve sex is the realm of the well off. the situation improves very slightly as you move up, accentuated ever more by the fact that the Islamic Republic offers very few avenues of entertainment as it is.

but when you do move up, eating out becomes the primary entertainment source.
in fact, you need to jump up quite a few more notches to arrive at the strata which can afford forms of entertainment that are not based on eating.

one such popular outlet is being the member of a 'club.' like most things pakistani, this is a colonial endowment.

now in karachi, there are several clubs. maybe you belong to kda officers club, or the kw&sb club near karsaz. people who are at such clubs probably tell their neighbors, friends, relatives with great pride about the facilities available at their club. the people they tell are usually not part of such, or any club.

but then those who belong to maybe sunset club, or dha club in phase II, can smugly look down upon them. because after all, those clubs are literally no more than one pit of water posing as a pool, several dilapidated machines pretending to be a gym, and precious else.

but sunset, dha, beachview types are something much better. these clubs came around in what were at varying times the hot, exciting new localities in karachi. they had tennis courts, and courteous waiters, tambola nights, bridge clubs, and for some, the presence of retired generals and brigadiers which certainly afforded a sense of respectability.

but they, even at their prime, could not really penetrate the aura of something like karachi club, or its immediate superior, the gymkhana. these are genuine heirs to the claim of genuine, having of course been around for so damn long, and being gestated in the ideas of the white man, and having long flowing generations within their membership lists. so people from beachview, sunset etc could look down upon the KDA types, but certainly not on KG. and so the ladder of snobs added a few more rungs.

anyways, eventually the KG types were dying a slow death, primarily because 'certain' ethnicities began dominating their clientele. and the problem with that was that those ethnicities had displayed great social mobility - they were not part of the glorious people who had formed the initial crust of the pie that had afforded Gymkhana its prestige. when this anomaly began to exist i.e. exclusive clubs that had lost their aura of exclusivity, a new swathe of clubs arrived, mainly in newer parts of defence - phases V-VIII. these clubs were part of the military's resurgence, were big and promised all sorts of new entertainment, such as enormous domed pools where women constrained by the perils of morality could swim in peace. later, newer, more exclusive clubs also opened up in the hinterlands of the city.

what was different about these clubs was that every year there was a new club that was more exclusive than the last. marina, creek, golf, country, arabian etc etc. each club's exclusivity was determined mainly by the price of its membership, and consequently the clientele was of a more agreeable nature in terms of their affluence and place in society.

people who were members of this club could gleefully sneer at everyone else, because their club was where it was at. they could benignly, maliciously, explicitly or implicitly look down upon each and every other member of the club going heathen. all except one group.
members of sindh club.

when general napier captured the province for the brits, he sent a brief telegram, allegedly because telegrams were priced according to the word count, but i find it unlikely to think that napier was such a stingy little fellow.
his brief telegram was limited to one word - peccavi. its latin, meaning "I have sinned." geddit?

that's a good way of understanding sindh club, because it represents the most exclusive facet of a reality forged primarily out of the idea of exclusivity - the idea of the social club. and the reason peccavi goes well for it is because in any society, the most exclusive of the elite are associated with the most extreme varieties of debauchery and decadence.
i have no statistical studies to show whether that is actually a fact, especially where members of sindh club are concerned, so i will leave that to the reader.

the reason i spoke originally about circles is that when you come to this most exalted of levels, you are out of people to look up to. you can only look down. which of course has many advantages, but gets boring after a while. it also means that the plethora of entertainment available to you loses its luster and sex, which each preceding class had sought to replace as the sole provision of entertainment, is once again back on the menu*.

at the risk of extreme generalization, it stands to reason that the super rich society is where there is the most unabashed hedonism. and from there we arrive at the fact that the only two classes in karachi enjoying the most sex are the top and bottom classes.

moreover, the ones having the least sex are the middle classes, the ones most removed from the point where the best and worse meet.

so now you, the reader, has begun to digest what i was saying, and you are now mentally refuting some of the points i have made. there will be some who will argue that the implication that hedonism equals the super rich is completely, or mostly wrong. however, since this is the blogosphere, i don't expect that sentiment to arrive.

instead, most people would agree. they would also focus on the level of clubs directly above the ones they are members of, or are able of becoming members of, and rail against them with great abandon. they would mock them as the bourgeois, the burgers, the blissfully unaware, the bane of our society. they would all deride how class driven our society is, and proclaim with great scorn and disgust that this is why our country is in the state it is in.

what would escape most is that the fact that they are somewhere amongst the hallowed classes, as their access to the internet, and their ability to come this far on this post implies. and as such they are an extremely integral part of the problem they have just complained of.

but pakistanis will never see that. they care far more about making sure that they have someone to bitch about. someone to hate. someone to complain about. which is why they will always find someone below them that they can look down upon, and someone above them which they can direct their derision towards. the only way that is possible is if we find ourselves in a circle. because a liner path will always have an absolute end, but a circle has no end or beginning.

what pakistanis would hate is if they had no one to complain about. because to be able to complain about someone indicates that the person on whom the complaint is being directed upon has the responsibility to make things better. or to make changes. you can not sit all day complaining until you are at the mercy of someone else. if you are not, then you won't be complaining all day because rationality would dictate that you do something to change whatever you are complaining about.
it is why we love to sit and blame the feudal landlords, the Army, the US or India, or the CIA, or Israel, the Shias, the Wahabis, the Taliban, the Memons, the Bengalis, the Jews, the Jews, and of course, the Jews.
because if someone whispered to us that we are our own masters, it would immediately mean that we have the responsibility to clean up our own shit, and stop complaining.

you can not complain if you are in control.

and that is something that no pakistani would ever want. we are far more content to be part of the order, neither being at the absolute top, or at the absolute bottom. because being at the top means no more complaining.

but what about the bottom? why avoid that? doesn't it allow freedom of unbridled complaints?

well, complaints arise out of spite. otherwise they are just lamentations, such as those that come out of mourning. you lament a death, you can't really complain about it much.

and spite can not survive if you have no one to look down upon. because spite and conceit must drink from that same cesspool of shit.

so you can't be bottom, and you can't be on top.

we're pakistanis - we're glad we've got our own country, but please rule it for us so that we can bitch about you. please.
*(it is for this reason that many of this class complain tirelessly about the country, and wish to move abroad, but never do. mainly because most of them would lose their exalted status in another country, and as such are infinitely more content to be here. if they were to ever stop complaining, they would immediately stop belonging, and if they don't belong to their class, then their class loses its value to them, and they become empty of all meaning, because their humanity died a long time ago.)

The Badmaash of Bambino or President 10%

Back when I was at one of pakistan’s premier business schools, I fancied myself to be quite the whiz kid. As in a smart, intelligent, capable, outstanding student. But by the end of my first semester, I was on the verge of dropping out

WTF, I asked myself.

Then, one of my esteemed seniors intimated how he was soon to graduate with a 3.6 GPA. The game was that he and his friends would take out their professors and their families for meals prior to the exams. They would buy their bratty kids ice creams. They even had reams of cloth from their family’s textile mills delivered to the professor’s house. And et voila!

I was depressed – not because I was morally offended, but rather because it was a system I couldn’t compete in.

So I transferred to pakistan’s premier university. It’s USAID endowed buildings surely would be a hallmark of integrity. And were they ever.


Unless of course you knew how the plagiarism detection software worked. If you were friends with, or as an attractive woman, able to flirt with the teaching assistant. If you signed up for the communist party/Jihadist outfit the professor was fronting in the university. Or, as the most popular option, you were willing to metaphorically fellate the absent minded professors who could be convinced to adjust the grading curve in your favor.

And what struck me was that at both places, these means were not at all without hard work. In fact, it involved more effort than simply studying. But since these methods allowed one to cram six months of efforts into one week of bribing, cajoling, threatening, fellating, it seemed to be far more popular with the students at both institutions.

And at one point it dawned upon me, that this was the Pakistani way. In fact, Pakistanis are world class at figuring out a system’s flaws, and then bleeding it for all its worth. Literally. And it seems to breed a perverse joie de verve (or whatever that term is) within us all.

Points to ponder upon – US funded Jihad, reverse swing, Army financed heroin trade, the group match against Bangladesh in ’99, 58-2 (b), insinuating that rape is a good way to get a Canadian visa, jumping traffic lights, bhatta system, kunda system...




BCCI, running Bedford trucks across the country even though the company that made them shut down 30 years ago, withdrawing money before ramzan to ensure that no zakat is paid etc etc

To further expound upon my point, lets take reverse swing as an example. Scratching the ball etc was not cheating per se, so doing it made sense. The fact that the game was grossly in favor of the batsmen necessitated its rise. And the suspicion that the practice would be cheating as long as the white man didn’t know how to do it was eventually confirmed by 2005.


of course, not all of these arguments are morally correct or ethically sound, but they achieved the purpose.

Its called realpolitik.

In realpolitik, morals and means don’t matter. They’re not supposed to. The end result matters. How you got there is not part of the equation. So sometimes it leads to a just end, and sometimes it leads to a fucked up end. Sometimes it uses just means, and sometimes it uses fucked up means.

But it gets the job done.

And that’s what Pakistan is all about. You can of course admire the sheer audacity of our realpolitik. And like expertly breaking red lights for example, such actions usually get a good laugh as well as being a short term source of happiness.

But what does it do for the long run? No one knows.

But what is known is that the success of realpolitik probably implies that Pakistanis, whether they realize it or not, follow Machiavelli rather than Mohammad.


And so to the point of my blog.

On Saturday, Pakistan’s craziest president yet formally took over the reigns of power. Craziest is not a pejorative term here, he really is certifiably crazy.

All of Pakistan is up in arms. Well, other than those who voted for his party. By all of Pakistan I mean that part which can be heard, either on tv, or in the papers, or in the fledgling blog world, and which usually doesn’t have the time to bother itself with the inconvenience of ‘voting’.

Amongst the most popular rants, we have Mr.10% becoming President 100%. We also have fears that he will sell our nuclear weapons. We are also very afraid that Pakistan will be split up into US serving mini-states, the infamous “Pakistan Khapay” not withstanding. No one doubts that this is a US conspiracy, which itself is funded by a Jewish conspiracy. It is clear to most that Pakistan is being targeted because it is a muslim state. No one doubts that AAZ is a tool of the Americans.

So far so good.

But here’s a little googly.

Didn’t someone involved intimately with the foundation of Islam once say that our leaders are the personification of our own ‘amaal.’ In other words, we get the leaders we deserve? I’m sure someone said that.

And take a look at the Badmaash of Bambino’s story. In less than a year, he has traveled all the way from from A-class jail induced dementia to the top takht in the land.



Very quickly, he used the assassination of his wife to grab the reigns of a party he never was prominent in, used the grief over that assassination to steer his party to power...


...used the slight mandate of those elections to get his own man elected as PM, used the promise of redemption to hoodwink his populist partners into confronting and eventually removing the country’s boss...

...and then broke all his promises to get rid of the coalition, and issued new promises to ensure that he came sailing into the post which is supposed to be ceremonial and yet holds all the power.

You have to admire him.



He took the system and bled that bitch dry. Come on – you have to admire him. And this was just 2008. He has also stuffed swiss magistrates, eluded English judges, duped Dubai sheiks and got each one of his best friends in positions of power. I mean –Advisor to the PM on Interior. Who comes up with this shit? Its brilliant.

Asif Ali Zardari did what every Pakistani does – he looked at how the game was being played, sought out its soft spots, and then cut it to pieces. Its why he’s here. He does what all of us do. It maybe at a different scale, but it’s the same scene.

You have to admit - we all have a little Zardari within us.



So are we going to wait for him to change?