Tolaha
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Indians tend to read Pakistan through its English-proficient tiny elite, but fail - Economic Times
Follow the link for the complete article. Please move or delete if not in the right section or if already posted.
A article that covers among others, the contrasting views one may have on Pakistan and how those opinions would have been created based on our interactions with different classes of Pakistanis.
One of the most exciting bits of intelligence I heard in Pakistan, and "intelligence" in the parlance of secret agencies, was in the Karachi Press Club's sumptuous conference room with a wall that wore a magnificent MF Husain with vicious pride. India's most expensive signature was already buried in cold London, to be sure, when a Mumbai Press Club delegation was herded into that room, choking its grandeur with Indian volume in November 2011.
The editor of Express Tribune, a dapper, suited Young Turk, Kamal Siddiqi, was making his point on Indo-Pak relationship. Unlike the homilies of the rest of the tired set, Kamal seemed like an IIM MBA with better offers. He made his points quickly. And left early too.
The bit that struck me most was that the Inter Services Intelligence puts out vitriolic anti-Pakistan, anti-Islamic posts with Hindu sounding nicknames, on newspaper articles by Pakistani liberal columnists online, to create an impression that many Indians were actually as bad as the spy agency is telling the Pakistanis.
And what was Kamal's reason for arriving at such a conclusion?
"Well, we know that Indians usually speak and write better English than what these posters put out."
This is one of the most telling conundrums of Indo-Pak reality. Most valuable things about India and Pakistan do not need to be hunted down in secrecy. They are available in public domain and exchanged with the earnestness of plain bazaar chats. No need either for chequebook journalism or spy-world expense accounts, RAW or cooked.
Pout, Pout and Rout
Having written for a Pakistani portal, I was in the thick of virtual Indo-Pak exchanges for a few years. It was easy to overlook defensive Pakistani and offensive Indian nationalism from the twenty nothings. The 30-somethings' occasional forays into any debate would put them in deeply debatable territory regarding personality disorders; some were doves on Tuesday and hawks by Friday. To me, it merely meant they had day jobs.
The most insightful material came from the 40 upwards in age; personal histories, anecdotes not overtaken by the need to be sexy and humourous, and above all, without the animus of the recently Inter-netted.
After the nineties, unfortunately, the filters have tightened for the Pakistanis. Once the Berlin Wall collapsed, Gorbachev dismantled Soviet Russia and India's balance-of-payment crisis blew up, South Asia's reality was irreversibly changed by a polyglot Indian Prime Minister with labia lips looser than Mick Jagger's, and though he was in his seventies and way past mockery, media wags christened his election loss after a full term as "Pout, Pout and Rout".
PV Narasimha Rao went about setting his house right in 1991 with all the Brahmanical wisdom he had gathered playing the second fiddle well for decades, but Pakistani leaders still wore Camouflage of an army that never won a war except against its own people. Or, they alternated between truncated terms for a Punjabi in-your-face male and a statuesque female with an Oxbridge accent.
Cut to my Karachi visit. I am at Pakistani writer Shandana Minhas' fifth floor apartment on the beach front with the sea lapping away on the other side of the road. The Arabian Sea was magnificent from her balcony and as the evening darkened a huge apparition took the form of a giant fountain at a distance. Supposedly, the Qatar government had financed the fountain as a public installation during Musharraf's time. It was lit in green, so we could see it from afar.
Follow the link for the complete article. Please move or delete if not in the right section or if already posted.
A article that covers among others, the contrasting views one may have on Pakistan and how those opinions would have been created based on our interactions with different classes of Pakistanis.
