How To Be A Nationalist in India

1. Be male (if not possible because of gender reason, still try)

2. In the unfortunate circumstance of being female, birth boys only and girls, you abort or kill (May you be the mother of a 1000 sons!)

3. Object to everything you don’t approve of in the name of Mother India/Bharat Mata while swearing teri maa/behan ki all the time

4. If a woman says something you don’t like, start by pelting her with stones, then threaten her with rape, publicly and on social media (your followers will multiply and you’ll get entry to student unions which lead to national politics)

5. Just as ‘Great Grand Masti' is your birthright, ‘Lipstick Under My Burkha’ is ashleel because of “lady oriented” story

6. All soldier-and-soldier-phamily are patriot until they disagree with you
 
7. Logic has no place in life, only Pakistan does

8. India is a great nation with a glorious history which you know best

9. Debate - what debate?

10. Democracy - we are the world’s largest! You disagree? Demo-cracy ki aisi taisi! 

The Hunt For Kohinoor Comic Strip 1

Friends, the wait is finally over. Here is the first comic strip from The Hunt For Kohinoor. India and Pakistan are on the verge of signing a historic treaty, one that will turn the frenemies into allies. 

In case you can't read the above, follow the link to read the comic strip and find out what happens next: http://bit.ly/THFKComicStrip1

Also, Buy your copy now: http://bit.ly/THFKFlipkart

Pakistan on the Brink

This review appeared in the South China Morning Post on Sunday, 6 May 2012

Pakistan on the Brink

by Ahmed Rashid

Viking

4 stars

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

This week, in what is being called the biggest jailbreak in Pakistani history, Taliban fighters stormed a prison in the NWFP province of Pakistan and freed almost 400 prisoners. The raid was efficiently organized – a blockade of all roads leading to the prison kept the security forces at bay even as the fugitives hightailed into neighbouring North Waziristan, a lawless tribal area rife with Al Qaeda and several militant groups that straddle the Afghan-Pakistani border.

If you’re wondering how the Taliban, who started as a militant Islamic group within Afghanistan, morphed into a rallying force for pan-Islamic militants and jihadis operating out of Pakistan, then this is the book for you.

Ahmed Rashid is a respected Pakistani journalist who has reported on the AfPak region for thirty years. Pakistan on the Brink is the third book in a trilogy that has seen him chronicle the rise of Taliban and Al Qaeda beginning in the 80s, the US war in Afghanistan following 9/11, and the lead-up to the current crises in the region. Divided into nine essays, the book examines the conflict from the different perspectives of the parties involved – key countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and USA, and other critical players such as Iran, India and the ‘Stans’ of Central Asia. 

An insurgency is growing within Afghanistan even as the US timeline for withdrawal of its forces approaches. Meanwhile, President Karzai’s government is corrupt and has little authority beyond Kabul. An economy dependent on aid will go into a deep recession upon US exit in 2014, and worse, see a civil war as its neighbours replay the Great Game.

One key neighbour, Pakistan, has contributed significantly to the current Afghan crisis. To keep the US happy, it put pressure on Al Qaeda in the war on terror, received billions of dollars in aid, but continued to provide sanctuary to Afghan Taliban in its Baluchistan province. Pakistan wants to retain leverage on Taliban who, it believes, will be in control once the US departs Afghanistan.

Despite a civilian government Pakistan is run by its Army and intelligence service, the ISI. Rashid worries that the ISI has become a “state within a state” which advocates a hostile foreign policy towards neighbouring countries even as Pakistani society has become increasingly radicalized. The nuclear-armed nation needs a new narrative, “one that does not perpetually blame the evergreen troika of India, the United States, and Israel for its own ills”.

What then is the way out of this quagmire?

Ahmed Rashid has acted as a turkoman for several Western officials looking to understand the region. During the course of this book he mentions meeting personally with Presidents Obama, Merkel, Karzai, and Zardari. Descent into Chaos, his previous authoritative work on the region was a prescient look at the future, one that is aptly captured by the title, Pakistan on the Brink. An update, it attempts to put some solutions on the table, suggesting that Turkey could be a possible role model for Pakistan’s leaders as a nation that turned itself from a “military dictatorship into a thriving democracy”.

However, this might be a case of wishful thinking: the self-serving nexus of Army-Jihadi-spies-political cronies looks unlikely to yield a better ruler.   

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

by Mohammed Hanif

Random House

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, surged him onto the literary firmament, brought him a Booker longlisting, and giddy proclamations of an exciting new voice from Pakistan. Mangoes was that rare thing – a distinctly different voice, wry, satirical, going determinedly against the grain of lush South Asian narratives – which took the mysterious death of General Zia, the President of Pakistan, and converted it into an intriguing examination of the spidery skeins of Pakistani society in the eighties under a corrupt army dictatorship.

Now Hanif is back with his second novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, a book that the jacket cover describes as “written with savage humour and in sizzling prose, a tour de force”. Nothing wrong with that descriptor, picked as it is from a Rolodex of adulatory book blurbs, but it does little to convey the visceral makeup of the book, its simultaneous sense of déjà vu and wonder, its gritty texture and terrifying guts, its godforsaken world created by a God-fearing society.

The book is being described variously as a black comedy, a satire on the bleakness of Pakistan as it exists today. Indeed, it’ll make you sigh, it’ll make you laugh, but most of all, it’ll make you shake your head, especially if you’re a South Asian woman, as you wonder if Hanif leads a parallel life as a ventroloquist. Taking as his central protagonist a woman who is a poor Catholic choohra (a pejorative word for Christians in Pakistan) this male writer from a distinctly different class and strata of that society yanks us into the perverse world of Alice Bhatti, junior nurse and ex-resident of Borstal woman’s jail, penis-slasher and miracle-worker. 

Alice Bhatti works at the Scared Heart Hospital for All Ailments, both nurse and institution try to get by, by masking their religious denomination in a Muslim-majority country. “Leave your firearms and faith at the gate, says another sign under a small wooden cross, slightly askew and not painted in a long time, in the hope that people will forget that it’s a Catholic establishment”.

Alice, whose “body is one of those miracles of malnourishment, which has resulted in a thin, brittle bone stucture with overgrown breasts”, is an untouchable hoping “for the only privilege that comes with being one, that people won’t touch her without her explicit permission”. She wears baggy clothes topped by a baggier white coat in the hope that men will not focus on her breasts; she also carries a Gillette razor in her uniform pocket.

Alice has learnt that cutting up women is a sport older than cricket but just as popular in her cricket-crazed nation and she doesn’t want to attract attention. “During her house job she worked in Accidents and Emergencies for six months and there was not a single day – not a single day – when she didn’t see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive”. Practical Alice wants to stick to her plan of anonymity, temper her feisty choohra self with a nondescript exterior but fate – or the men in her world – has other plans for her.

Enter Teddy Butt, Musla body builder, winner of the title of Junior Mr Faisalabad, police pimp, and honorary member of the Gentleman’s Squad – a group of “like-minded police officers, not really an entity commissioned by any law-enforcing authority”. Teddy is smitten by Alice and lurks around the Out Patients Department hoping to catch her alone. However, since his articulation extends only to cricket, he brings a Mauser to his declaration of love since “people always try to understand when their life depends on listening properly”.

What chance can such an improbable romantic pairing have in a country rife with Islamic fundamentalism, where blasphemy laws have been invoked with increasing impunity against the country’s minority Christian community? In a scene that foreshadows their future together, Teddy Butt rescues a clueless Alice who has been sent to the Charya Ward, their love taking root in a loony bin.

“Just remember it’s called a nuthouse and there’s a reason for that… the whole country is a nuthouse”. Hanif evokes Toba Tek Singh, a lunatic character in a famous eponymous short story on the sectarian Partition of the subcontinent by the Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto. The story, synonymous as it is with Manto, has deep resonance in the region for its vivid illustration of its absurd ways  – in an ironic turn of events Manto ended up in a mental asylum himself, admitted there by his family.

But it is not the inmates of Charya Ward alone who are lunatics – entire Karachi is teeming with nutty folks as Alice and Teddy get married on a nuclear submarine; a Christian sweeper cures ulcers through the use of candles and Musla prayers; a man who waxes his body lectures his wife on the appropriate length of her pubic hair – a grain of rice; the leader of the G-squad, enroute to assassinating a man, stops at a phone booth to give his daughter last-minute Math instructions; an apparently still-born baby comes miraculously alive; Sister Alice become our Lady of Alice Bhatti via a can of acid and a detour through the Burns ward …

The narrative itself moves back and forth in time without warning, which can leave the reader feeling gobsmacked, but the grimness of proceedings are leavened by a dry wit and an ironic voice.

Hanif has mentioned in interviews his amazement at the surprising response his first book evoked. Whenever he encountered senior retired folks – bureaucrats, military generals – they quizzed him on his sources because, they insisted, the novel couldn’t be closer to truth.

The author need have no such fear with Alice. When faced with bitter truth, it is a universal human response to deal with it through outright denial, or laughter. No wonder then that Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is being hailed as a black comedy when Hanif, in this coruscating work, is telling it as it is.

This review first appeared in the South China Morning Post on 23 October 2011

Pakistan's Birkinned Brahmastra

Ancient Indian texts mention the concept of Brahmastra, a weapon conceived by Brahma, the creator of the universe. So potent is it that once discharged, neither a counter attack nor any defense can stop it.

In colloquial terms it can imply deploying an emissary who is irresistible. Think Cleopatra within a rolled-up carpet!

On 27 July, Pakistan, eschewing its nuclear stockpile, launched a brahmastra against India - its winsome new foreign minister. 34-year-old Hina Rabbani Khar was in India to hold talks with her Indian counterpart, the 79-year-old S M Krishna. The foreign ministers of the nuclear-armed neighbours are holding their first talks in a year, hoping to resuscitate a peace process that was snuffed out by the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.

The lone surviving gunman from that attack was a Pakistani national and India has directly blamed Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) for orchestrating the coordinated shooting and bombing attacks.

Lately, Pakistan has found itself facing recriminations from several directions.

The United States ferreted out Osama bin Laden from a villa in a military garrison town a short distance from the national capital Islamabad. Expectedly, relations between the two nations are at a record low. US is the largest source of bilateral aid to Pakistan and pressure is building to cut the high level of financial assistance.

India’s claims have received a recent validation. At hearings in a Chicago court in May 2011, David Headley, an operative of the Islamic militant outfit LeT, has confessed to the role of Pakistan’s spy agency in executing the terror strikes of 2008.

To add to Pakistan’s woes the FBI has identified that Ghulam Nabi Fai of the Kashmiri American Council was campaigning for self-determination in Kashmir at the direction of the ISI which provided him at least US$ 4 million to influence American policy on the issue.

Ahem!

If that weren’t enough the bomb blasts in Mumbai on 13 July have again renewed questions about Pakistan’s willingness to crackdown on militants on its soil. The coordinated rush-hour explosions in India’s financial capital shook the nation and set people hyperventilating on the foreign hand behind them. While the Indian Government has not assigned any blame preferring to let the investigation run its course, the implications for the proposed talks between the two nations looked dire.

Pakistan is, to use a cricketing terminology, on a sticky wicket.

In turn, Prime Minister Gilani has responded on front foot. He has rubbished Headley’s claims that he attended his father’s funeral, and dismissed Fai as belonging to “Indian Occupied Kashmir”. He reiterated that India and Pakistan had no option but to talk and claimed credit for the “no blame game” after the recent Mumbai attacks on account of his interactions with his Indian counterpart. Critically, barely a week before the crucial peace talks in India, he ended a five-month job vacancy by swearing in the nation’s first woman foreign minister, and also its youngest.

In a move that would have won the approval of Groucho Marx, Mr Gilani has shown that he has his principles, and if folks didn’t like them, he could demonstrate others.

If reports in the media are anything to go by, Mr Gilani’s brahmastra has paid off. The charm offensive is working as Indian media - vigilant as a pit bull - is gushing over the Foreign Minister. Her sartorial choices have been applauded, she has been described as “a perfect combination of beauty and brains” and her physical similarity to a Bollywood actress is being furiously discussed online.

“Pak Puts On Its Best Face” noted The Times of India, the biggest-selling English-language daily while a popular Mumbai tabloid remarked cheekily, “Pak bomb lands in India”, referring both to the history of wars between the countries and the strategic use of a brahmastra.

Indian media is agog with new CBMs expected in the wake of the talks. You’ll be forgiven for mistaking CBM as Comic Book Movie discussion - after all we have a running gag about how the two counterparts keep holding talks about future talks when they shall resolve the contentious issue of Kashmir. This time around there is hope that the infinite regress might yield something concrete as the two foreign ministers are expected to announce new confidence building measures (CBM).

Admittedly, the Pakistan Prime Minister’s brahmastra is working. Stay the course you have signaled, Mr Gilani. You’ve made a dubious India media, and by extension, public, believe that henceforth Pakistan shall make love, not war.

The Honourable Killing

My award-winning short story, The Honourable Killing, is now available on Kindle at a special promotion price of 99 cents only.

The Honourable Killing is a powerful 1500-word short story, an edited version of which won a Commonwealth Broadcasting Association prize in 2005.

A rape victim in arid Balochistan struggles to bring her culprits to Court - until she realizes justice might well be in her hands.

So, if you're the lucky possessor of an ipad or a Kindle or any other electronic reading device, what better time to read it than now?!

And here's a sneak peek to get you started.

The Honourable Killing

Mukhtar rose early, surprising her rooster as she slipped outdoors. The air, rested by a night’s sleep, was crisp and light. She paused for a moment to breathe it in, her thin shoulders squaring. Later, the fierce warrior of the Plains, the Sun, would toast it and send everybody scurrying – from Alexander’s mighty army hundreds of years back to the burly tribal bullies of today. Pre-dawn was precious time. Hunching forward, she picked her way through the unlit bramble.


The steel pipe rose from the shrubbery, an eerily glistening python aloft concrete stumps. She looked back and surveyed the brush in which stood her two-room abode – a juniper shrub caught her eye. The concrete stump directly in line with the shrub would do – depositing her hammer on it she pulled herself up. The cool steel made her shiver; its massive girth unsettled her. Momentarily. She steadied herself with the left hand, and with the right, started to chip at the solid steel. The tinny sound made a din in the quiet but Mukhtar knew the sound wouldn’t carry far enough. She worked slowly, each blow unflagging in its force. The claw hammer was not ideal for the job but there had been little time for preparation. The warning had come late. She continued to chisel until the dense steel dented. By the time the faint notes of Azan floated from the village, she had managed a thin rupture. Not a minute too soon. The first call for prayer from the muezzin would stir the entire village, including them.


Back in her room Mukhtar kept the light bulb switched off. Noiselessly, she slipped out of her salwaar-kameez, sat on a wooden slat and began her bathing ritual: little water, much scrubbing. In the arid Baloch region water was a luxury, yet she inflicted twice-daily baths on herself. Her skin, scrawny, callused in parts, did not whimper – Mukhtar had been moulting for five years. Today though, she scoured with extra fervour.



So once you are done reading the entire story, let me know what you think.

Cheers!