Why is Truck Art Cool?

Why is truck art cool?

Because it's pakistani? because it's colorful? because it's made by the 'common man' and therefore has the requisite authenticity that none of the art-school graduates with opiate-addled blood and steroid-addled bank accounts can't ever have?

no.

it's cool because, well, it's cool.

foreign publications use it as the cover of their anthologies, fashion designers make clothes based on them, soft-story journalists have written and shot articles and packages on it.

and to be honest, there is nothing else really in pakistan that gets the goras so excited.

so it must be cool. ergo facto.
 

before we go any further, let's switch gears for a bit.

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you know what i hated about maths.

it was this idea that one day, those abstract numbers and formulae would somehow be important, nay, indispensable for us. that there was some grand meaning upon which these d/dx-es and x-squares were predicated upon, which we might be able to one day experience.

to be fair, i wasn't always anti-maths - i used to love it for its instant sense of validation. when you solve an equation and put down those glorious letters - QED - you feel a wave of your superiority complex gushing across you.

but after a point, it got frustrating and abstract.

in a way, my disillusionment was similar to another disillusionment many of us face - that journey from being a paanch-waqt-ka-namazi to abruptly stopping, no longer able to deal with the nagging feeling that our empty rituals are little more than petty bribes, a crass transactional relationship with God where we seem to be paying him off in rakats and rozas, in exchange for eternal bliss.

and with either maths or with bliss, there comes a point where you feel that you've had enough with the incessant promise of an eventual understanding. you want to feel that transcendence right frakking now.

written down here, this seems like the impatient niavety that seems to characterise our age - a demand for instant gratification, a readily digestible consumable that we can down and burp out before our lips go dry.

but i would argue otherwise. our constant rationalizations are forever trying to ignore the fact that we can feel, that we are tired of being numb.

in pakistan, we are nothing if not an emotional bunch. but we love pretending that our insanely volatile emotions are a consequence of some higher ideal - like a slight to our religion, or our morality, or our sense of justice - rather than being expressions of our readily suppressed desires.

these unchecked emotions more often than not lead to a complete perversion of whatever ideals we might have held, leaving us scarred and bitter. and so to protect ourselves from further damage, we adorn the cloak of cynicism, wherein anything that can possibly causes anyone amongst us to feel anything is immediately ridiculed and mocked.

excited about the cricket? don't you know they are cheats and fixers?

excited about a movement? don't you know its corrupt and broken?

excited about a girl? don't you know women are evil?

now, in some of these instances, there is a scope for gently redressing these endorphin soaked passions. but more often than not, we prefer to ridicule instead.

these days, i seem to have been very sensitive to this idea of ridicule, particularly towards coke studio.

whether its bilal khan's accent, or sanam marvi's lackadaisical approach, or komal rizvi's pitch, or the alleged nepotism in the case of mole, the constant heckling started getting under my skin.

the only thing people seemed to be seeing was what was annoying them, what was angering them, what was making them upset.

not only that, but in vintage pakistani style, they were taking their cynical reactions and spinning elaborate critiques upon its edifice. no one bothered to consider that it was perhaps their own insecurities and fallacies that were being imprinted upon their supposed insights.

i could accept such grievances if they came as part of a measured observation on what it was that they liked about whatever little they did. but if you press on that front, all you get is a litany of tired cliches - awesome, melodious, foot-tapping, mystical, sufi, stoner, amaaaaaaazing.

while the critiques are so eloquent and minutely detailed, the praise is about as sophisticated than the reaction of teenage girls sighting a topless edward cullen in the snow - albeit to be fair to the girls, at least their reaction isn't so lacklustre.

perhaps that was why when safieh wrote her two reviews, she went out to make sure that she put each song in its best possible light, she attempted to make sure that we could appreciate not just the what the song made us feel, but how it helped create that emotion. her reviews sought to pay homage to what were monumental - if not all always successful - creative efforts.

yet when we surveyed the muted responses to her celebratory pieces, and contrasted it to the excitement generated by more invective-laden ones, it felt very strange.

were we the only idiot optimists? 

when it comes to art, safieh taught me that art, whether good or bad, is about feeling. bad art doesn't make you feel bad, it doesn't make you feel at all. and when it fails to do that, or better yet, when it makes you feel something, you can know why, if you only manage to recognise your feelings and what's more trust them, and give the piece a chance to affect you without preconceived reactions.

but then, i began thinking, what does it matter. 

everyone seems to only get negative feelings, and relate them to these massive socio-political causes and pass off as intelligent. maybe that is what its about. perhaps it doesn't matter that most people can't even spot a positive emotion in a frakking lineup.

thankfully, god decided to intervene this time.

an unrelated search in my spam folders unearthed a mistakenly routed email containing the press release for the third episode. coincidentally, a review of the same episode was open in the adjacent tab.

here's what i found.

the picture you see is the article in question pasted on a word document.

the yellow bits are direct copy-pastes from the press release. the green bits are phrases from the press release which have been slightly reworded. the blue bit is factual information regarding the names of band members. the red parts are where the writer is criticizing the songs.

what's left are the positive, original insights the author had to offer. they include: "Some great work on the bass guitar was accompanied by interesting improvisations in the end, and is definitely worth a listen" and "another good piece of song writing by the youngster." as well as "the band sounded great and with the support of the house band, they took their music to the next level"

a cacophony of 'great' 'interesting' and 'good'.

despite clearly feeling that certain songs managed to make the reviewer feel something powerful and worthwhile, the language of emotions was limited to phrases that an advertising copy-writer would throw up on.

why are we so afraid to feel? 

to know for ourselves what we like, what we appreciate, what we are in love with? and what's more own up to it regardless of how it may 'appear.'

see, that brings me back to truck art, and its alleged coolness.

its cool perhaps because it is an extension of folk art and islamic architecture, fused on a canvas which is at once immediate, ubiquitous, and forever fleeting. it is cool perhaps because it exists as a testament to aesthetics, juxtaposed within the context and on the body of the very cogs which keep capitalism's machinery rolling. its cool because it exists as a manifestation of the joie-de-virve, the much-maligned-mercurialism that we pakistanis seem to create as a reaction to the perpetual instability and uncertainty that defines our experience.

but to most of us, its cool because some cool people said so.

because most of us don't ever bother to feel. to think about how the sight of a beastly rhinoceros of a metal machine decked out as an acid trip is at once magical and familiar. 

familiar? yes, familiar.

you have seen this gorgeous monstrosity all your life, and it links to your fears, hopes and guilt across your life. the imaginary horses and angels from islamic mythology, the heros ranging from osama to ataullah to queen elizabeth or whoever else is the folk hero of the season, the idealised hill stations that you never visited in your childhood, they are all symbols and signs of our own fabric.

these are all things that you already feel, have felt, can feel. i'm not saying that everyone should 'like' truck art, but rather, those that do can find a more profound reason than the cover of granta.

there is so much to us, to this bizarre country and its remarkable oddities and unlikely triumphs, that doesn't conform to dictionary definitions and textbooks, and its literally flying by your window, playing on your radio, crashing into your car.

when will you stop being afraid of your ability to love?