What is Swaish?

Swaish is the answer when you don’t know the question. Swaish is the agreement when there is a fight. Swaish is the word when there is no word. Swaish is the conclusion to all arguments. Swaish is a religion when you have lost all faith. Swaish is the light when there is night. Swaish is I love you when you are feeling shy. Swaish is the beauty we cant find. Swaish is the food which warms our bellies. Swaish is a thank you when you don’t want to thank openly. Swaish is culture, swaish is a code, swaish is everything which is otherwise missing. Swaish is the tradition which separates men from beasts. Swaish is the honor which is difficult to keep. Swaish is the bird when there aren’t two in the bush.

When there is nothing there is swaish, when there is swaish there is everything.

I bid you all swaish!

Of Famine, Douchebaggery & Fat Asses

Read an utterly depressing statistic today; twenty nine thousand children have died in the Somalian famine. Yes TWENTY NINE thousand. That’s a huge number. That is actually a bigger number than the number of people who died of suicide attacks in Pakistan in 2010 and we are all well aware of how gruesomely large the suicide blast death toll sounds like.

But if we take a minute and stop to think about the Somalian statistic, get over the entire brutality of death argument and analyze all the vices these poor Somalian children have actually been spared off through their untimely and undoubtedly painful deaths one can only be a cynic to not realize that these were twenty nine thousand lucky souls who had to part company under wretched circumstances.

Honestly, just take a look at the world around you! In fact you don’t even have to go that far, the average death toll in our own hometown has been 20 per day during the last month. No, that is not a random number picked up for the convenience of my argument, it’s an actual fact! Worse still, the one day we have a death count slightly lower than the horrible number up there, we had an official douche bag commenting on what a pleasant day it has been in the city dripping in red. Yes! Fifteen systematic acts of violence are better than forty in a day so let’s drink to that!

But I digress, it was about our uncalled-for sorrow at the death of thousands in a famine. Before you get sympathetic, become a one minute philanthropist and cry blasphemy; just imagine for a second, what sort of malnourished , dysfunctional and under developed adolescents these innocent kids would have grown up to be. Hunger kills, but worse still it presents you with motivation to kill. Aren’t these kids better off dying with their innocence intact rather than grow up and learning the injustices of this cruel world? How would they feel, surviving the famine only to find out that exactly when they were watching their kin die of hunger some obese fat ass in another part of the world was actually paying a ton of cash for getting the fat sucked out his belly? Why? Not because he would now make a pathetic attempt at living a healthy life but so that he could stuff more burgers down his throat and die of a heart attack while masturbating to a porn movie because he wasn’t really capable of handling all that excitement.

You know what would be a more pragmatic approach to the whole thing rather than absolutely brilliant idea of shaking your head in grief? Ship one fat bastard to Somalia for every ten children who are dying there and maybe these ten will actually grow up to achieve more in life than die with their dicks in their hand and a cheese burger in their mouth. Replace one douche bag politician with 5 kids dying of hunger and maybe they would grow up to be actual representative of people. Hell! Just shoot them in the head and spare them the agony of a slow death. Thankfully, we live in a world where bullets are cheaper than bread.

From Others to Pakistanis

Since my father was in the Army, I have lived my childhood in different parts of the country. In Army the general trend is that an officer is posted to a new designation every two years and that basically ends up in travelling from one part of the country to the other. In essence, because of my father’s profession I have lived in every province of the country, have seen the diversity of the Pakistani culture first hand and have seen and experienced various places of the country.

I don’t like to divide Pakistan on the basis of Sindhi, Baluchi, Pathan etcetera. However, for the purpose of argument, I have to do so here. Among all the places I have lived at and have had friends at, hands down the most hospitable of the people have been the people from the NWFP. They would go out on a limb for you just because you belong to some other part of the country and therefore by default you have become their guests. And by god, among all of their humbleness and conservativeness they would make their guests feel like royalty. It doesn’t take a huge dinner or a sprawling mansion to do that, their warmth is in their attitude, their claims of tum tu mera bhai hai (you are my brother) and in the humility when they addressed my mother or sister as behen (sister). One needs not to have any doubts about either of the brother or sister claim, because the respect and love was extremely prominent.

We have travelled a lot by the GT Road and there have been various occasions when our car has had a flat tyre. I don’t recall once that me and my dad had to change it because some Pathan truck driver would always stop and change it for us. Not just that he would be practically offended when my dad would offer him to pay for his services. Sahab, ab humain hamare mehmannavaze ka paisa dey rahay ho (Sir, you are paying me for my hospitality…)

I talk about the people of the NWFP today because in the world of war against the terror the same race and the same province of which people I have the best things to say about are being slandered. Right now, I am speaking from my own experience and interaction with these people and as far as I can see, something went very wrong somewhere. As much as these people were proud of their Pathan race, heart and soul they were Pakistanis. From my childhood perspective it takes somewhat of a wild imagination to see the same people as people who would kill innocent civilians all over the country.

What I see today is that even when most of us have never stepped out of our birth city. We have opinions, ideas and judgments on people belonging to other provinces. No one has ever had any long-term interaction with each other but a general division continues to prosper based on baseless notions. I have said this before and I will say it again; in the last 61 years our major achievement has been the birth of a generation which on quite a few levels is beyond schism, which is beyond division, which is a generation of Pakistanis. What is sad is that the baseless notions which cause schism continue to trickle down from the older generations and continue to pollute the one hope for unity.

If we could all do one, just one simple thing for our country this year – Not categorize our nation on the basis of stereotypes, not divide each other based on the geographic location and not think of cultural diversity and division. If we could form our opinions based on facts rather than what we perceive others to be, they would not be others anymore. Let us change ourselves from others to Pakistanis.

Masters of the Universe

Life goes on, time doesn’t stay for anyone you know. We may wish, we may even want for things to remain the same or find it difficult to evolve out of a state of mind but we eventually need to move on. For things aren’t always constant and everything around us doesn’t ever remain the same. “Times change, people change” and you can pretend to be the same person you always were but you will be doing yourself a great favor by realizing its not so. We however, prefer the fantasy; prefer to keep things the way they are. A man is a creature of habit they say and that is what we all strive for. We need a routine, we need a schedule, we need a plan and everything around us has become structured in a way that it requires us to keep things in order. It comes as no surprise that given the time available to us for forming a course, we end up chasing the same bus. We are all following the same band wagon only we do it in cults and make ourselves feel like we are different, that we stand out from the rest. Fact is, we don’t. You are just like me and me, I am just like you. We are all driven by the same force, at the end of the day we both want the same thing. I may be better than you, I may be willing to make some compromises and that may take me places where you may never reach but that still doesn’t change the fact that I am still the same as you.

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste”, a mind really is an incredibly terrible thing to waste. The power the human mind possesses is far more than we believe we can comprehend. The mind would always work, it would always want to govern, it is made to do that and when it takes control who knows where it takes us. It is all our choice though, we control who we are. It is entirely our decision to let the body dictate the mind that it is tired and that it would rather be left alone to atrophy or we can let our will take charge of the decisions our mind reaches. A strong will is forged with a strength greater than steel, a strong will is what differentiates the winners from the losers in the otherwise carnival of rat-race and parade of self acclaimed individuals.

We can wish, pray or look for someone to pull us up, but that is worth nothing. We can fantasize about the seductive maiden named luck but fantasies do only one thing for us; they serve the purpose of keeping us happy, they let us imagine an alternate reality but reality doesn’t change till we actually go ahead and do something about it.

And so I dream for my world to change, I wish for a lucky break
But nothing seems to come my way, and I blame you my wretched fate

We Are Pakistanis

On October 8^th, 2005 the northern areas of our country was hit by major earthquake. There was irreplaceable loss of property and life but the earthquake was not the only major thing which happened that October. The people of our country poured out of their homes to help our brothers and sisters in need. Everyone contributed to their maximum potential. During the first week of the quake the PAF Museum, on Shara-e-Faisal, Karachi was swamped with all sort of vehicles bearing supplies and scores of people helping around with those supplies. Among those helping hands there were no class divides, there were no ethnic divides and there were no religious divides. Everyone was a Pakistani, working together to help the Pakistanis in need. The majority of those people were the youth of the nation, they were my generation of Pakistanis.

Today as I turn on any of the local news channel everyone is talking about Sindh, Punjab, Baluchistan and NWFP. Analysts are going on and on about how some provinces feel bereaved while others just don’t seem to care about why there is a growing schism between them. The politicians with their short-term goal of winning the February elections are alienating other province in their campaigning. Call me naïve or call me ignorant but when these are the general elections for “Pakistan” why is there a provincial split there to begin with? Why are we still localized and can’t have a collective thinking for the greater good of the nation? It’s been 60 years, how many more do we need?

This is what I know. The youth is beyond schism. We don’t socialize or refer to each other depending upon the ethnicity we belong to. My grandfather moved to Pakistan in 1947, I don’t even know where to pin U.P. on the map of India, hell I don’t care either. I am home, why should I be bothered about finding some other place for identity? Same goes for the majority (if not all) the people I interact with. Of course there is a sense of belonging and endearment to the place you live at but at the end of the day we are a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural group of Pakistanis. In sixty years, Pakistan has been able to produce a generation which belongs to Pakistan and which might be able to carve a new path for it in the future. Irony is that the major threat we have is the unity fracture among the previous generations corrupting us.

Take this as a request, take this as an appeal but let us remember the unity the entire nation displayed in the events following October 8. Let us turn that tragedy into a day of unity. Let us all take inspiration from the young and the inexperienced. Let us all be Pakistanis.

Happy fucking New Year

Another year gone by. 2007 was good to me, seems my resolution was good after all. Don’t have one for this year yet, at the moment last year’s looks like the best option. However, its not about me. 2007 was bad for the country. It ended with Benazir Bhutto being assassinated; a violent conclusion to a violent story. 2007 was a year marked with think-headed leadership (though calling it leadership is me being thick headed to begin with), political turmoil and terrorism galore. We pushed our society and our classes into a greater divide. I for one find more and more Pakistanis saying, “That’s it for me, I get a ticket and I am out of here.” Little do any of them realize that only country they are moving to is Bangladesh but then again it’s their choice. Point being that with each passing month our youth feels more and more alienated.

So the year ends and we celebrate. Honestly, I didn’t hear that many guns being fired in the days I used to play “Counter Strike”, seemed as if every other house as an AK-47. It was war out there; and one would think that in the wake of BBs death riots somebody would keep a check on the arms in the streets.

So what exactly were we celebrating this year round? I say the entire notion of celebrating the coming of the new year is flawed. We should be celebrating or mourning the previous year depending upon how good or bad it went. But for the sake of argument let us continue with “what were we celebrating?” with the pretext that we are celebrating the coming year. Do we have a brilliant plan to get ourselves out of the dump in 2008? Will 2008 see the coming of some divine messiah? Do all of us who are rattling guns on the streets have a charismatic leader hidden among their ranks who will make himself public in 2008? I mean seriously, what the fuck are we so bloody jubilant about?

Yes I know, none of us really care about what we are celebrating. It’s a bloody party and we are all out having fun. The coming of the new year is basically an excuse to get drunk and maybe get laid. The reason for all the fun and frolic becomes all the more obvious for the citizens of Karachi who had been boxed in for five days thanks to all of our brothers out there setting things on fire. Somehow, this explanation seems a lot better than the fact that we were celebrating new year’s eve.  

Either ways, we continue contributing to the class divide. Oh yes! Marching proudly towards a future where no one understand the other. A happy fucking new year everybody, I sincerely hope 2008 fares well for all of us.

 

P.S. Indeed a thoroughly pessimistic point of view on the coming of the new year but it’s not the new year I am pessimistic about, just the way things are right now.

P.P.S Thank you Mobzilla for the title.

Failure

The doctors had tried everything; they had run all the possible tests. He was a normal human being just like you and me. He could walk, talk, laugh, cry; do everything we can do. Then one day he walked to his bed, lay down and then never moved a muscle again. He just stopped, it all came to an end for him or maybe he bought the end to himself. It just seemed that he quit. No, he did not kill himself, he simply went into a state of, what can only be called, a self imposed paralysis. Why self imposed? Because the doctors were never able to diagnose any disease, all the tests came out negative. Then again, what do we know? The doctors for all practical reasons called it a self imposed paralysis just so that they can hide their own professional failure. I mean who in his right mind would enforce paralysis on himself; and that logic resulted in him ending up in a psyche ward.

All day long he would lay there, staring blankly at the ceiling. He was a vegetable, the physio would come and flex his limbs and the nurses would sometimes wash his body. The only movements he ever made were when these people would pull or push at different parts of his body. For some odd reason he instigated a feeling of fear among the ward’s staff. It was even more peculiar because the same staff had rapist and deranged murders in other wards. Some nurses claimed that they sometimes noticed a shine in his eyes, a shine which seemed like nothing but evil, others went as far as to say that they saw a perverse smile on his face, a smile which would freeze blood in the veins. His physios quit every other month with just an obtuse reason that,”there is something evil about this man.”

Eventually he was moved from psyche ward to psyche ward, city to city, psychiatrist to psychiatrist. None of them never really got any time to understand what he was suffering from and gradually he turned into a vegetable even on his medical records and in the mind of his doctors. His case was finally closed under the pretext that he cracked under pressure. No one actually cared about the falsity of this verdict, it was just an official stamp to what everybody already thought of him – a breathing waste. He was informed of this verdict, some of the psychiatrist were of the opinion that if he learns that humanity has given up on him he might convict himself of the “self imposed” punishment. But that didn’t change anything, his life continued the way it was ; mental institution to mental institution, city to city. Only now the doctors didn’t visit him that often, no one wants to face his failures and this one was a breathing, living failure.

It was then that the killings started. Each ward he was moved to saw a murder. A young nurse would be found raped and brutally butchered. Given his acquired reputation everyone accused him. Even though the possibility of a paralyzed man recovering and then having such physical stamina is slim, one can’t refute people’s belief so easily. The police investigation was going no where, the killer never left any clues, the victims’ families and friends demanded justice, the victims’ colleagues were scared and wanted peace of mind. The police was under pressure and since his presence at each hospital of crime could not be crossed off as a mere coincidence the murder case was solved and the earlier accusations were given an official name by the police. He was now a murder. The police couldn’t accept its failure as a law enforcement agency and he was the carpet the dust was shoved under.

The people wanted blood, the police could not afford a living, breathing failure, he saw the electric chair…
…but he never moved.

Ethics 101

I was reading a chapter titled “Social Responsibility and Managerial Ethics” today, and as ironic as it may sound the book tried to justify bribing in a third world country. Countries where, “government officials are paid ridiculously low salaries…” would be the exact words. So we are teaching ethics but at the same time we are making sure that the firm’s business is not affected. We don’t want our managers to get into the ethics dilemma when they know that the person they can bribe is not earning enough and hey! Its not a bribe, it is just a little money to make sure his kids get to buy new clothes. I think I had better ethics before I read this book’s take on ethics.

Moving on; the book talks of people who actually come forward and raise an ethical or moral issue from their organization. What name does it give to them? Whisteblowers! Now do YOU want to be a whistleblower? For one this name is pretty darn suggestive. Whisteblower, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Here is the irony, the three whistleblowers the book talks of were all women. Don’t mean to offend anyone but I could not keep a straight face as I read “Coleen Rowley blew the whistle on her employer…”

Here is what I infer from what I allegedly learned today. They put in a chapter about ethics in the management book, but they make sure to justify bribing in poverty laden countries and not only make it ethical they make you think of yourself as the savior of the poor. Along with that, they close the chapter with a term like whistleblower and talk of employees who blew whistles to make sure that before you actually raise an ethical issue, the word which echoes in your head is “whistleblower”.

I will sign the deal with the devil, thank you!

Lal Masjid – Season 2

I come home, I log on to the internet and check out the new posts at one of the forums I am a regular at only to see a thread dedicated to Lal Masjid again. Those religious fucks are at it again, demanding that the cross dresser who was caught trying to escape last week be let free and then lead the Friday prayers. Where the fuck do these fuckers keep coming from. I would fucking chop off my balls if I know this is what my seed would turn into.

So no, my anger is not just cause of the Lal Masjid take over. The primary reason I feel so pissed off is the suicide blast which occurred during all the mish mash. So another 12 died today, seven of them policemen.

Apparently there is no stopping these bloody fucking religious fucks. The blow themselves up with the key to heaven in the trigger to the bomb. God bless our sweet sweet mullahs. Fuck they are more dangerous then LSD cause I dont know of a single LSD abuser who thought killing himself along with a dozen innocent people would take him to the pearly gates. However, our saintly mullahs have the divine capability to make people so delusional.

I say nuke the bloody fucking faggots. All the idiots who have been arrested today should be used to for chemical weapon testing. Put them in a room and set the room on fire. Fuck turn the madressas into bloody concentration camps like we had back in the days of WWII. Kill a few, dont worry about the collateral damage and set a fucking example for rest of the puuny little retards.

Hail and Kill!

Windscreen Divide

It’s a scorching Karachi afternoon, the humidity more of an irritant than the heat. I park my car in front of a fast food joint to grab a quick meal. As I browse through the menu a kid taps on my window. I see a wash cloth and a bucket in his hand and since my car is pretty dirty I signal him to go ahead and clean it.

As I wait for the food I turn up the volume to whatever is playing on the radio. And then the little kid who can barely reach my windshield, steps on the front tyre to get better access to it. There he is, right in front of me – sweat dripping from his face as he works on the wind screen. Even then he has a smile on his face, maybe cause he knows he will get paid in a bit.

That is when I realize the irony of the situation. Me in my car – the air conditioner making the afternoon bearable, him on the other side of the glass window sweating it out for a few bucks. Two worlds, so different, so apart and yet in all practicality just on two sides of a car’s windshield.

IT magazines talk of the digital divide between the East and the West. What about this “windscreen divide” we have on our streets?