Vomitted Souls and Saved Faces

This post was written two months ago, but you know how it goes. A special thanks to The Sarri-alist Movement for really helping out with my picture data bank. 

What's your favourite twitter bio?

It's a sub-culture, twitter bios. Some people leave one politically correct quote, others write entire odes to themselves, while most try and group in as many single words that they feel attempt to describe the different facets of their life. Some even go with ironic statements that poke fun at the categories laid out above. But by and large, most people start or end with something that describes who they are as professionals. Banker, journalist, marketer, 'madvertiser', sufi, sapien. That represents a conundrum for those of us who feel uneasy about using a notion of our supposed profession as a pointer to our self. 

For example, I am supposed to be a filmmaker. I like the title, even though I haven't made anything since I left my Film degree. Still, it sounds pretty cool. Until a Pakistani wins the Oscar, and suddenly, you are supposed to not only be relevant, but also articulate what this means for your country, your people, your self, your profession, your fight against extremism, your fight against complacency and hypocrisy and decency and your struggles with art and the ether and truth and life and death.

And to be honest, I would have expected myself to have some sort of an answer. But I didn't. When people asked me what I felt about 'Saving Face', I could only say:

"I haven't seen it."

Litte did I realise how insightful that statement would be.

But first, do you remember Soul Vomit?

Soul Vomit was the first Karachi heavy metal band to release a music video.

I found out that little nugget of Pakistanica during a concert I was at last night a few weeks months ago.

Even though the concert was being held in London, it was a Pakistani affair, organised by Azme Alishaan. (No, I didn't know who/what they were either.) But here was the catch - it felt exactly like a concert in Pakistan.

As soon as you entered, everyone was dressed in black and had spent a lot of time on their hair and would turn as one to stare at whoever was coming in next, pretending to continue their conversations while they had their share of poondh. 

When the music began, most people stood around awkwardly, and although they seemed conscious of their body's desire to react to the glory of music, they preferred instead to rapidly calculate what the collective reaction to the situation was and how they could conform to it.

There were the three girls right next to the stage who would spend a lot of time lolling their heads as if they had just been injected with a sedative, but spent even more time gazing intently into the eyes of whoever was the lead singer at the moment.

There were muscled up beefy boys who came ready to mingle, but didn't quite know how to use their walnuts-in-a-condom body in a manner which could move to the music, so they chose to stare at everyone around them while grabbing every free T-shirt thrown into the crowd. 

There was the dolled up MC who braved cat calls from the crowd and her own inability to overcome her concern with how she looked long enough to be entertaining. 

There was Dino. 

There was the smell of the desi dawa in the air, even though we were in a closed room, no-smoking club. There were the four fanboys for each group who had only shown up to listen to their band sing, and when they did they were the only ones bawling out all the lyrics and prancing in delirium. There were the constant wisecracks every time the new band introduced themselves, and there was prodigious hooting every time the band trolled back at the wise guys. And even though the sound system was set up by a gora, there were continuous and unending issues with the sound, and the obligatory "chick vun too, mike chick, mike chick, tasting, tasting, vun too, vun too, haylo, haylo, mike chick..." 

But back to Soul Vomit. 

The first performer was a Brit-Paki known as Ali Abbas. He was accompanied by a guitarist who had been previously with Soul Vomit, the band that I knew of because my friends from BVS studied with them. Now, thousands of miles and memories away, here was Soul Vomit. But despite the blast of nostalgia, Soul Vomit's (I  am going to use their name as often as I can) guitarist was ill-suited for Ali Abbas, who was a remarkable performer on his own right. Classically trained, his first two songs acknowledged the two Overlords of Pakistanica - Nusrat and Bulleh. The guitar was present as Abbas's attempt at fusion, and it wasn't going well, but that scarcely mattered because his own talent was phenomenal. He had an excellent voice, but an even greater stage presence and a brilliant sense of showmanship. Immediately, I thought of Nusrat, and Rahat, and Jawad Bashir, and could envision great things for this man. And this was before he did his spectacular spoken-word performance, delivering it in Punjabi and then translating it in English without ever losing his meter or rhythm.

Then there was a gaggle of rappers. First up was Shizio, who despite how that names sounds was a pretty impressive performer and knew how to work the crowd. Said crowd was whipped into a frenzy when Adil Omar came on stage, but the combination of a sore throat and a subdued presence meant that the performance was a disappointment. Even then, I thought of the chequered, miserable, glorious history of Pakistani rap and how we had finally gotten to a stage where rappers were not (consciously or otherwise) a parody of themselves.

Then came on Aziz Ibrahim, a man who had a guitar with purple LED lights on it. Immediately, you would think this is that delicious combination of Sad and Fail that we all love to revel in.

But son, it wasn't that. Wasn't that at all.

I like to think of Aziz as Shoaib Akhtar, or even Afridi the batsman. His lyrics and vocals - the bread and butter of a song - were satisfactory. But his sense of showmanship was extraordinary. He wasn't a lout, preferring an almost dead pan style when retorting to the audience's cat calls, but when he began to play, it was the most brazenly stunning style that you can imagine. Insane leads, strumming with his teeth, spanking the guitar, tap-dancing on different pedals to coax out a whole universe of unheard sounds - he was smacking it. And he had an astounding tabalchi with him, both of them embarking on those gloriously exhilarating duels we first heard from Salman Ahmed and Adnan Sami Khan (not on the same song, of course. Although that would have been interesting. Or maybe not.)

Finally, Bumbu Sauce took the stage, and then proceeded to grab the occasion by the throat, force it to become a murgha and spank its bottom while taking pictures and posting them on your mom's Facebook wall. Or something like that.

Basically, it was their energy and intensity, which didn't waver for a second. They just launched into their songs, and handled the impossible art of maintaing that energy through out their set. It was exhilarating because the band had spent enough time going through the slog of practising their songs that they wouldn't mess up in a live show, because they knew who they were and who they wanted to be and how to protect and project both. They had the ability that all great bands do, which was to take the audience and invade their consciousness, so that soon enough the distinctions between the sounds and the instruments and the performers and the performees is only noticeable to someone on the outside. All of us in the front two rows was having the time of our lives, bouncing with the band, screaming the lyrics back at them, dancing till the millions of pent-up frustrations slowly began to be exhumed from our bodies.

Suddenly, I turned around and realised that the front two rows had also been the last two rows. That most of the audience had already left. That in the grand tradition of Pakistani concerts, most people had shown up to be seen and to see and had left before the best part. And that was when I had my epiphany. 

It made sense for me to have said epiphany during Bumbu Sauce's set. So much of what they do is what I would refer to, gleefully, as 'intertextuality' but what they called 'nostalgic'. Take 'bunnaynza' which irreverently combines a pronunciation of banyan (vest) and transforms it into a word which echos not just the word bonanza, but the retro Pakistani brand Bonanaza. (Later, I discovered that this was actually a poem by a famous Punjabi satirist called Anwar Masood. I know, not the Strings-father guy, but some other dude who brings out the fascist in his Punjabi followers and is really funny. Said realisation kinda ruins the previous point in particular, but reinforces what I was saying in general regarding nostalgia) Mojambo does the same with the childhood super-villain Mogambo, and the song itself is littered with popular slang, such as 'shawky billa kithe oye' and "Mojambo, WHAT THE HUCK?". "Jiggernaut" appropriates the bromantic Jigger and runs away with it, but it's greater triumph is to subvert the inane cliches that surround analytical discussions of Pakistani politics and serve them up in a manner which is ironic yet never forced.

Basically, every single Bumbu Sauce song was irrevocably linked to a generation of memories and memes that can be accessed by the general listener, but can only truly be embraced by those who have lived and grown up with them.

And that made me realise how I could contextualise every act I'd seen so far. The rappers joined the modest and mostly hilarious pantheon of Pakistani rappers and showed that it had come a long way. Both Aziz and Ali Abbas were ostensibly about fusion, but they showed how the genre existed before Coke Studio - that jugalbandis lived in Junoon and Adnan Sami, that vocal pyrotechnics had crossed over from qawwali to pop. And to round it off, there was Soul Vomit, whose guitarist was like Proust's brandy soaked madeliene cake, opening up a remembrance of things past.

Because you see, music has existed as a uniquely and distinctly knowable Pakistani art form through out our lives. We've grown up with it, we've loved it and hated it, we've felt embarrassed by it and we've felt it was the only thing that made us proud. And we know about it. We know it. We know which artists we like, who we revere, who reminds us of him and who is copying her. We know who we want to be when we sing in the shower and who we wish to be with when we daydream. It is an entire cultural cosmos that we are familiar with.

And that's what Pakistani films don't have - for our generation at least.

You see, the immediate reaction about the Oscar was inevitably about everything but the film itself. 

Why? Because we hadn't seen it.

It took me a while, and two emails, to realise the short-sightedness of most of those reactions that found fault with celebrating the win.

One friend wrote to me saying:

"Most of the criticism for the reaction of the majority of Pakistan's online community of elation has been that people are simply responding to Western validation in this regard. That we as a whole are so thirsty for Western validation that we overlook other key systemic issues. However, I find the argument to be inherently shallow. It somehow lays the creative arts at the altar of Western validation while divorcing other endeavours that are equally desirous of Western validation. 

Allow me to elucidate. I find it almost comical that people who attained educational degrees from universities in the West, entirely due to the perceived (and real) superiority of the higher education systems in the West, would find the notion of Western validation for the creative arts to be a negative. The attainment of educational degrees from the West are just another form of Western validation and succumbs to Western hegemony as much as Sharmeen Chinoy's victory does. Though the notion is on a more micro level (i.e. my family will be more proud of my Harvard PhD over my Punjab University PhD), it is nonetheless a key example of Western validation that many of us aspire for (and many critics of the Oscar win have attained).

I find the kvetching over the Oscar win as succumbing to a Western narrative to be terribly discomfiting, especially when the kvetchers themselves have in their own ways succumbed to a Western narrative."

Another friend approached it from another angle, writing:

"I think what frustrated some people about the Oscar win, is that they know that she isn't the best filmmaker Pakistan has to offer, or even one with the noblest of intentions. But to be fair, neither of those two traits win you an Oscar. She won it, because that is what she set out to do, she made the right connections all along her career and because she has always had luck on her side! 

How many other Pakistani filmmakers sent their films to the Emmys or the Oscars? I don't know any. How many hobnob with Emmy & Oscar winning/nominated  filmmakers? I don't know any there either. The fact is, the world over most independent filmmakers do not look to the Oscars for recognition, they look to film festivals. But she always focused on the Oscars and she got it."

These two emails helped me make sense of my own feelings, and realise where I was obfuscating my own issues with the actual Oscar itself. And once I went to the concert, I realised how I truly felt.

I don't know how to react about the film because I haven't seen the film, and I haven't seen the film because I can't see the film.

I mean, aside from the fact that it isn't available online or on local channels etc, none of us really know what to see. We don't know how to judge 'Saving Face' because Pakistani films have dried out and almost died out in our lifetimes. We don't know how to relate to it because we don't have a library of films to choose from, we don't have directors we could grow up with and wish to emulate, we don't have a visual culture for that we can draw upon and make judgements from.

Compare that with music, which has grown up with us, which has always been there when we needed it, which has it's own galaxy of stars we've worshipped, which has it's own rituals in the form of gate-crashed concerts and hastily ripped plastic-coated cassettes and marker-scribbled 'mixtape' CDs and surreptitiously shared mp3s which have a lady saying 'Kool-Muzone' at the beginning and end of each song. Music has been there as a source of inspiration but also as a source of mirth, of bizarreness, of embarrassment and ultimately, of belonging.

Of course, there have been films and documentaries, but an indictment of their situation is how each one makes the news simply for existing. And that's what the problem is with the Oscar. It's not about western validation or American conspiracies or NGO culture or orientalism - although it is perhaps about these things too. At the end of the day, the Oscar confused us because we couldn't see it and because we didn't know how to see it. 

One day, I might be able to Save Face, but till then, I'll let my Soul Vomit.

Vote Me Guuyz

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A Non-Humorous Guide to Dealing with the Spot-Fixing Verdicts

Before you begin, allow me to apologise for this glorified rant, which is quite emotional, and rather profane. I don't apologise for how I feel though, so take that as you will)

 To begin with get off your moral fucking high horse. There is a prevalent sense that the cricketers deserved what they got. I can't disagree with the idea that their actions merited punishment, but to pass judgment from up high on their depravity isn't just ironic, it's a dangerous delusion. 

Corrupt practices are rampant within our society, largely borne out of its reliance on patronage. I have repeatedly invoked the hypocrisy of disobeying traffic laws by all and sundry because it represents the clearest example of a law everyone flouts. But it doesn't end there - jobs, loans, licenses, visas are regularly procured through contacts.

People who are currently passing judgement live on land stolen from Karachi's macheras or Lahore's bastis. And while we’re at it, buying cut price smuggled goods, or exploiting the ridiculously inhumane conditions of our labour force to feed and clothe yourself, or indeed to stay in fancy hotels are also fabulously immoral.

And oh yeah, every time you puff a fat one or drown your sorrows, or even watch a blue ray version of the new Scorcese or even Shahrukh, you’re committing a crime.

These men were a product of our own society. To pretend that their actions constitute evil while your own are borne out of inconvenience is precisely the sort of denial that allows such practices to take root.

Secondly, fuck the po-po.

Or to put it less eloquently, the justice system. As much as introspection is the primary response to this issue, an unquiet rage isn't far behind.

How so?

Forget the fact that other sportsmen have been convicted of fixing without receiving jail terms.

What leaves me all sore and blue is that Salman Butt gets 30 months, while Mazhar Majeed gets 32. That's like sentencing a drug dealer the same amount as the local don.

Butt and the others brought the game in disrepute, but their punishments are added to their sporting bans and the social cost of public and professional disgrace.

But if their punishment is proportional then how are we to make sense of Majeed's sentence: a man who exists as one of the vital functionaries of a global criminal syndicate whose dealings are conservatively estimated at $50 billion?

It seems to tell cricketers that fixing will lead to an end to their careers, while bookies face only a short pause in pursuing their line of work. If it's argued that the rulings were in line with the law then I'm afraid this rancid injustice stems from the entire system.

But I won't be resorting to any hollow slogans railing against said system, because they are an affront to the honesty of my emotions.

To my mind, this ruling represents the same attitude shown towards rogue financial traders - heavy punishment for individuals which can help distract from any uncomfortable questions being asked of the institutions.

And finally, there is hope.

In the 1982 football World Cup, Italy stormed to a memorable win after a sluggish start. The Azzuri’s triumph was engineered by the goals of the waifish Paolo Rossi. Rossi's inclusion in the squad had been controversial since he'd just come off a two-year ban for match fixing. Perhaps it's my biased mind clutching wildly at straws but the similarities with Amir are striking.

Like Amir there was a feeling with Rossi that his naivety had played in his involvement. While Rossi always claimed his innocence, and his conviction was a lot dodgier than Amir’s straightforward guilty plea, there remains a sense of a young, talented sportsman caught in the machinations of sinister men.

What I sincerely hope for is that like Rossi, when Amir has completed his sentence we can all agree that's he's paid for his crimes and welcome him back. It won't be a closure we deserve, because I doubt we'll be changing or even accepting our failings. And it's one that neither Asif nor Butt will likely enjoy because their age, and in Asif’s case prior misadventures, will most likely end any options they might ever have.

But I believe Amir will return, and he will return a hero, because that is a closure he deserves. I don’t want to strike away the severity of his actions, but as several people have pointed out, this young boy was failed as much by his own choices as he was by us.

He, and countless others like him, were failed by a society which forever revels in the exploits of its cricketers, forever uses them as a source of catharsis as pride, forever uses them to construct it’s own identity without providing any institutional safeguards, or indeed any role models to emulate. A cricketer is forever afflicted by chronic insecurity, always a Chairman’s ego or a politician’s grandstanding away from losing their job, or even being banned for life. It’s a bullshit situation to be in, and one that needs to be changed.

There are already a host of narratives emerging which will seek to rationalise this moment, this scandal, in order to allow everyone else to go on with their lives and pretend they have nothing to think about. 

Don’t be a chutiya and join their bandwagon.

What is a troll?

what is a troll?

ostensibly, a troll is someone who does something on the internet to provoke a response, and not just any response, but a down-and-dirty, bitter-and-raw, bile-bursting, gut-wrenching, throat-pharroing emotional response.

but what if we've gotten it wrong.

what if our emotions have so clouded our judgement that we don't realise that everyone we brand a troll is just someone with a different opinion from our own.

but i was still left wondering, why?

that's a funny question - why.

safieh argues that pakistan is a country where no one asks why.

no one bothers questioning why they do the things they do - why we eat what we eat, why we burn what we burn, why we think what we think, why we believe so recklessly in what we believe.

take dance practices for example.

in a sense, they're meant to be a pleasing combination of an opportunity to meet and hang out, to celebrate, to ogle at and mingle with the opposite sex, to let your hair down, to practice and perform a token of your joy for someone's marriage.

yet in reality, dance practices are generally a military drill without uniforms, with lots of anger both suppressed and bursting, an orgy of outbursts both personal and general, an advertisement for the necessity of deodorants, and an extremely tense and volatile atmosphere that pushes friendships and tendons to their respective limits. instead of a shits and giggles, there is a heady resolve to create some colossal work of art that would put the Boloshi Ballet of Moscow to shame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKyr6AdiJeE&feature=channel_video_title

there are those who decide that their will is God, and proceed to embrace the fire & brimstone version of the Almighty, constantly smiting you down for your tiniest transgressions. others decide to assume the entire event as a grand stage on which to play out their own petty squabbles and rebellions. and the entire process is fueled by mini-Geos who go about relaying every faux-pas to anyone and everyone in earshot. in each case, everyone decides not to deal with their own shit, but hijack the social conventions and play out their own drama on it. and no one ever explains to you why everyone turns what is meant to be an expression of joy into a torturous compulsion.

about a decade ago, during one such practice, i came upon a book which for my money remains the most important pakistani book i ever read.

now before i reveal it, let me make clear that this didn't win any prizes, and that it's author has become a favourite whipping post for the rent-an-expert-phenomenon, and that his second book unleashed the maelstrom which is pakistani novels being written for a gora audience.

but despite all that, when i picked up moth smoke during that fateful practice, nothing - not the increasingly shrill screams of the dance masters or the brooding resentment of the dance partners i had abandoned- convinced me to put it down.

at the time, i had never done drugs, gone to any parties (at least those with a decent 'ratio' and sufficient debauchery) or even been in lahore for more than a few days, but the central character of Daru entranced me like a moth to... you know what i mean.

because for every other fantasy that i conjured up subsequently for liking this book - the primary reason why it fascinated me so much was the sense of impotent rage.

like Daru, i raged over the vacuous misogynists who landed all the prettiest girls, i filled up with bile over the well-heeled dipshits who got into colleges abroad, i burnt in resentment at the acne-riddled laundas who roared past me in SUVs chockfull of testosterone-and-bullet bursting guards.

and it was this rage that consumed me so fully that it needed the litany of self-destruction i indulged in, or the relentless cruelty i visited upon others in order to be saked every so slightly, and it was this rage that forever blinded me from even entertaining the thought of why i was doing what i did.

and it's not like i'm the only one saddled with this impotent rage.

you and i can see it all around us.

remember that air-conditioner thesis from moth smoke? if you haven't read it, i suggest you do, but the gist of it was that it was the levels of access to A/Cs that ended up determining the paths took by the various protagonists of that story.

well, the generator is the new A/C.

in the pre-chinese flooding of the market era, the bijli would still go for 8-10 hours, and would depart during the summer vacations for chuttis longer than the one's taken by government offices. and there were a lot of pissed off people then too.

but now, every time the light goes, deep rumblings run out from the first house and race across the neighborhood like a demonic chinese whisper. even middle-class, apartment dwelling, limited salaried families have UPSes now.

all of which means that more of us have greater respite from the call of KESC's/WAPDA's/LESCO's/etc's nature than ever before.

and yet, the outcry is louder than ever previously imagined.

it's not the direct cause-effect relationship of the lack of light here, because as i made clear, things have gotten a whole lot better now.

it's the fact that the promised nirvana that we were supposed to get through the number of our O' level grades, our summer internships, our networking skills, our adherence to devoutness and debauchery never ended up being realised. that for all the year-end bonuses and invite-only passes we still don't feel anywhere near the control over our lives and our futures that we feel we deserve.


it's the fact that we're still stuck here - despite making nuclear bombs and a million news channels, soaring flyovers and roaring debts, lower blouses and cheaper jeans, despite every place we've went to and every place we've been, we're still here, 'powerless' in every sense of the way. 

and this futility, this hopelessness, this impotent rage doesn't burn on fused bulbs alone - it builds up into monstrous proportions because of all the rest of the shit that keeps hitting the fan every single day.


every time that you hear of a young man gunned down at a party, every time you see a politician recreating las vegas in defence for his daughter's wedding, every time you are forced to cut back on a luxury your brothers enjoy, every time you are barred from an entry which others of a higher birth gain access to, every time you get fucked over by a bully you don't have a response for, every time the barrel of a gun or the parchi of a Surname deprives you of what's yours, you are thrown face first into the bleak wall of your impotency, your sheer helplessness.

and in our society, where any breathing space is constantly tightened using the noose of patriarchy, of religion, of class, of caste, of taste clothes and speaking style, of knee-jerk conservatism and monstrously suppressed desires, any one of us from the general TC-ing americans for a few dollars more to the maasi silently suffering furtive fondling to keep her job, are all slowly being infected with this burning pus of a rage most impotent.

and so, like an overripe pimple, we explode.

explode in manners which are incendiary and violent, in ways which hurt us and rip those around us, in a fashion which seeks blood, seeks terror-stricken eyes and parched throats, a way in which we can finally unleash our pent up rage - explode in a way in which we don't ask why.

because if we asked why, then perhaps the college student snapping pictures of his unsuspecting girlfriend performing fellatio wouldn't post them online, perhaps the mob of unemployed young men wouldn't bother with torching every vehicle that dares pass them, perhaps the ambition-neutered aunties wouldn't launch themselves so brazenly at designer lawns, perhaps the smug twitterati wouldn't gang up on the grammatically-challenged ideologue and humiliate them on a public forum.

ask yourself why?

did you feel like a greater stud fucking someone's life over? did the empty stomachs of your family feed themselves on charred-car-corpses? did the lime-green sleeveless soothe your soul? does the now whimpering fanboy stand as a testament to your intellect?

so then why?

well, what would be the fun of asking why?

asking 'why' would only bring us face to face with the sheer futility of our actions, asking why would shower the pointlessness of our ability to achieve justice, asking why would strip bare the fuck-all-uselesness of our attempt to satiate our rage.

asking 'why' would mean not being able to troll anymore.

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.

---------

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?