Al Bakistanis and the stupid look

Free Karma

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Al Bakistanis and the stupid look

Many years ago in the US, an Indian friend and I went to play racquetball at our university's racquetball courts. We chanced upon another pair of desis (South Asians) playing in one of the courts. My friend, not one for political correctness, remarked that they must be Pakistanis because, well, they had what he called the "stupid look". While the remark stung then being as I was (and still am) a flag waving Pakistani, I am convinced, regrettably now, that it was a most accurate observation, especially since Pakistanis have now morphed into a new people called the al Bakistanis.
Why? The proliferation of al Bakistan license plates should give you an idea. Which self-respecting, intelligent people are going to deliberately make themselves objects of irony? Now take for example the latest manufactured quote ascribed to the father of the nation. It has been on billboards and al Bakistanis have been sharing it mercilessly on social media. The quote is "I do not believe in taking right decisions. I take decisions and make them right." This is actually a quote by Rattan Tata, the founder of Tata Steel, :lol: and while in some context it may have made sense for him, per se, it is a senseless quote. Since when did being trigger happy become a quality? It is shameless bravado without any thought to its implications.

Yet some genius decided to appropriate the quote for Jinnah and now Defence Housing Authority and University of Lahore have, without any fact checking, put this quote on their billboards and other paraphernalia commemorating Jinnah's birthday. :D Like the earlier "Pakistan is a laboratory of Islam", this quote too will now be inflicted upon Jinnah posthumously. The tragic fact in this is that Jinnah was a most careful decision maker. His real quote is that one ought to think 100 times before taking a decision and, once the decision is taken, stick by it like one man. Even the decision to ask for a Muslim majority state in the subcontinent was not made lightly. On every occasion between 1933 and 1940, he refused to ask for a separate homeland, calling it a fool's paradise and a chimera. He was not an impulsive man given to decisions at a whim. Jinnah was nothing if not a consummate chess player, evaluating his every move and its consequences. He was thus constitutionally incapable of making a statement so alien to his character.

The al Bakistanis, as a nation, are the exact opposite of Jinnah. They are fascinated by statements of bravado and never of substance. Muhammad Hanif, the author, remarked some time ago that Jinnah was no one's hero in Pakistan. People had misinterpreted it to mean that Hanif was insulting Jinnah. On the contrary, he was arguing that the common sense Jinnah stood for did not appeal to this hapless, witless and wretched nation. We want to make Jinnah into our own image. Therefore, this newly unearthed quote of Jinnah about not thinking before making decisions fits in more nicely with our national psyche than any of his genuine quotes. It is also indicative of a bigger problem because what is at stake is not just the veracity of historical Jinnah but what kind of people we actually are and want to be.

We, as a people, are overly emotional and impulsive, self-included. In very real terms, we make a decision first and then attempt to justify it. The lionising of the Taliban, which ended in Peshawar, is a case in point. The Taliban were seen as hardened warriors fighting against occupation. Imran Khan was the foremost proponent of this misplaced anti-imperialist angst. For the longest time, we refused to accept that the Taliban were behind the attacks on our cities, schools and mosques. Instead, we blamed India, the US and countless other faceless enemies. A more civilised and thinking nation would have corrected their course the day Benazir Bhutto was martyred in Rawalpindi. The massacre of Ahmedis in Lahore would have given them pause. The darkness at high noon that Salmaan Taseer's assassination was would have called for soul searching. The brutal attack on Malala Yousafzai should have opened our eyes but we decried her as "Malala drama". An intelligent people would have ensured that their country, their religion, their values and their culture would not become the laughing stock of the world. We are not those people. We are masters at self-flagellation without even knowing it. What can one say about a people who insist on missing the forest for the trees? Optimism has its limits.

Will Pakistan ever become a modern nation one can be proud of? A people that need 130 dead children to even wake up are a people incapable of course correction. As days pass, the greatest fear one has is that this moment of clarity will be a fleeting one. A nation of fools is unlikely to sustain what is, without a doubt, the most important consensus that this country has. One hopes to be wrong but it requires a miracle. That dumb stupid look you have on your face does not inspire confidence.


The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address [email protected]
 

rock127

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"Pakistan is a laboratory of Islam"
A correction ---> "Pakistan is a laboratory of Terrorists" who receive jannat by the hands of Indian Army on Indian land the Kabristan of Pakis.
 

Rowdy

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Hahaha well I tell you they definitely have a Stupid look. And they are immensely negative in their outlook.
:D
shakal pe maayusi latka ke chalte hai.
 

Redhawk

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Another article on the al-Bakistan phenomenon by Dr Tariq Rahman:

Al-Bakistan

Al-Bakistan

Plain Mr Jinnah, as he called himself, would be turning in his grave at the large number of private vehicles with the number plate of al-Bakistan. He did not even like the name 'Pakistan' in the beginning when it came to his attention. The Cambridge-based student, Chaudhary Rahmat Ali, who had coined it, talked wildly of having a number of Muslim enclaves in India — no matter whether the inhabitants of that area were mostly Muslim or not — called Osmanistan, Bangistan, Farooqistan, etc. Jinnah felt that if there was the notion of 'Pak' (pure), there would also be 'Napak' (impure). He expressed his irritation by calling Pakistan a 'bad name' and said: 'give a dog a bad name and then hang it'. However, his colleagues pointed out to him that the Congress press had gone to town with the name and it would be best to own it now. Reluctantly, Jinnah accepted the name 'Pakistan' for the new country.

So what would he think of the new name al-Bakistan, the Arabised version of Pakistan, which one finds on the number plates of cars now. He would no doubt rail against it, pointing out that we are not Arabs and that we have a /p/ sound in both Persian and Urdu, hence the original name Pakistan need not be pronounced with /b/ just because Arabic does not have a /p/.

One should further add that Arnold Toynbee pointed out in his multi-volume study of history that the subcontinent was in the Persian zone of cultural influence rather than the Arabic one. Islam had been brought in Sindh and Multan by the Arabs in the 8th century no doubt, but it was only after the Turkish rulers had consolidated their rule over north India in the 12th century that it had taken root in Hindustan proper. And it was then that the local language of the Delhi area, the Khari Boli and its sister dialects, picked up Persian words and the ancestor of modern Hindi and Urdu emerged. It is this language — called Hindi for a long time as the name Urdu emerged only in the late 18th century — that is the basis of the composite civilisation of the Muslims and Hindus of north India, called the Ganga-Jamni Tehzeeb (civilisation). It is from Persian that the word Pakistan takes its meaning, even if the letters themselves stand for the various regions of the country.

Now to change that for a would-be Wahabi ideology from Saudi Arabia would be a negation of all our civilisational history. It is a symbolic reversal of our cultural and historical roots in India and Persia. This implies that we are turning our backs to the great inclusive cultural experience of mystic (sufi) Islam in India and to the Bhakti movement and the tolerance and plurality, which were part of some of our most humane traditions. So, if one experiences a sense of alienation, despair and anxiety at witnessing this new experiment in social engineering, which would wipe out our tolerant past and bring in Arab, Wahabi exclusiveness and lack of plurality, one may be forgiven.

The attempt at Arabisation of Indian and Pakistani Muslims is not new though. If one looks at the scientific terms made in Osmania University, one finds that Arabic was the preferred language, not Persian. Moreover, local Hindi-Urdu words, shared by both Hindus and Muslims, were abhorred. In Pakistan, a number of agencies took up the task of making new terms for the sciences, bureaucracy, military and commerce. Unfortunately, these, too, were dominated by the desire to increase the share of Arabic in formal Urdu. I need not quote many examples, but just look at the term 'Qartas Abiaz'. If you do not know the meaning of this, you may be forgiven because it is not Urdu, but Arabic and that kind of Arabic which has not been adopted and made familiar in our language. It means 'white paper' as qartas means document or paper and abiaz is the colour white. We could have called it 'sufaed qaghaz' also, but that would have privileged Urdu and not Arabic. Hence our decision-makers, in this case the committee of experts which chooses neologisms, chose pure incomprehensible Arabic over comprehensible Urdu.

By the way, this is exactly what happens when they make new terms in India. They go to pure Sanskrit, which makes official Hindi incomprehensible for ordinary Indians. This has the effect of moving modern Sankritised Hindi and Persianised Urdu further from each other. The ordinary version of the two languages spoken in the streets of Indian and Pakistani cities is almost the same; the formal, official versions are almost two nearly incomprehensible languages. Does this make any sense? 'Yes' and 'No'. Yes, if your aim is to separate the Muslims from the Hindus, Pakistanis from Indians, and emphasise differences. No, if your aim is to communicate meaning and bring people closer together. Since the aim of the decision-makers among Hindus and Muslims, and now India and Pakistan, is to emphasise differences, they prefer to make their common language incomprehensible, rather than easy-to-understand. Arabic signals a Muslim identity and Sanskrit a Hindu one — hence, the emphasis on these two iconic languages at the expense of meaning and ease of communication.

The al-Bakistan phenomenon is, however, different from the qartas-abiaz one. The latter was state-sponsored and people were never too enthusiastic about it so the terms lay buried in dusty shelves. But the new phenomenon is a civil society one and one sees it on aggressive display. But therein lies the danger of it.

Are we yielding to the Arabised, extremist worldview, which will usher in more intolerance and increased possibility of cultural authoritarianism? If so, and I suspect this very much, we should cringe every time we see a vehicle with al-Bakistan on it. If al-Bakistan has arrived, how long will it be before we encounter 'al-Bunjab'? In fact, I wonder why /p/ and /ch/ are not being abandoned altogether. We may lose our moon (chaand), but we will be better Arabs. Anyone for it?

Published in The Express Tribune, March 11th, 2014.
 

sorcerer

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:D Not surprised..Anther new History in the making... Already Pakis are taking their facts for making history from a comfortable orifice from their body.
Anyway...I foresee this..

Another generations of Indian and Paki DFI forum members will fight over the real name of Pakistan ...probably in 2050.
Indian DFI forum users will quote from wikipedia in 2050 and DFI forum users of Pak will google up the Number plate images to counter Indian reasoning and worldy facts.
Hell will break loosee..
Mods will be on deleting spree...

So sayz the Sorcerer!!!!
 

Srinivas_K

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Do you know Jinnah wanted us to disown the historical name 'India' instead he wanted two countries officially named as Pakistan and Hindustan but got disappointed with that. :rolleyes:
India has three names Bharat, India and Hindustan.

Basically this region has continuity and commonality for thousands of years. This nation is not a newly formed one like Pakistan to change the name accordingly.

This is a basic problem with Pakistanis, they always follow the british theory of India as a land of many kingdoms and was saved and united by british.
 

ladder

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India has three names Bharat, India and Hindustan.

Basically this region has continuity and commonality for thousands of years. This nation is not a newly formed one like Pakistan to change the name accordingly.

This is a basic problem with Pakistanis, they always follow the british theory of India as a land of many kingdoms and was saved and united by british.
He ( @Sambha ka Boss) is right, Jinnah wanted the official name of India to be Hindustan. That would have provided credibility to the 2 nations theory that British India bifurcated into Hindu majority and Muslim majority country. Thus both could have inherited cultural lineage of erstwhile India.

But, India keeping the name India, changed the perception from bifurcation to carving out Muslim areas from India to make Pakistan. India became the sole inheritor of the every thing that was associated to erstwhile India. And that has left Pakistan searching for it's identity. The best identity they could arrange for themselves was an anti-thesis of India or wannabe Arabs.

Too clever by half move, that everyone could read.
 
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Ray

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Pakistan is not Al Bakistan.

I think they are Al Cock-istan.

They are still cocky even though they are in a total mess.

He ( @Sambha ka Boss) is right, Jinnah wanted the official name of India to be Hindustan. That would have provided credibility to the 2 nations theory that British India bifurcated into Hindu majority and Muslim majority country. Thus both could have inherited cultural lineage of erstwhile India.

But, India keeping the name India, changed the perception from bifurcation to carving out Muslim areas from India to make Pakistan. India became the sole inheritor of the every thing that was associated to erstwhile India. And that has left Pakistan searching for it's identity. The best identity they could arrange for themselves was an anti-thesis of India or wannabe Arabs.

Too clever by half move, that everyone could read.
They are still searching.

Lost Babes in the Wood.
 
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Redhawk

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Do you know Jinnah wanted us to disown the historical name 'India' instead he wanted two countries officially named as Pakistan and Hindustan but got disappointed with that. :rolleyes:
Really? That's an interesting bit of historical information.
 

Sambha ka Boss

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Really? That's an interesting bit of historical information.
Jinnah was dreaming too much for just winning in three provinces(Punjab, Bengal and Sindh) in 1946 elections before the power transfer by Brits. He wanted all Muslim majority provinces, entire North-East, all princely states with Muslim majority population and all princely states ruled by Muslim Nawabs.
Finally, we was only given Western Punjab, East Bengal, Sindh and NWFP in Radcliffe award.
 

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