New Year New Sexy

A CIA agent, tied to a chair, beaten and thrown from a window, lands on some bins. Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes explains his avenging action: "Mrs Hudson's been attacked by an American, I'm just restoring balance to the universe". This first episode of the long-awaited second series of the BBC's Sherlock, aired on New Year's Day, is so full of subversive lines and images that quickly rise and fade yet ultimately permeate the memory, that I'm compelled to announce this as a work of some art and artfulness. There's balance and beauty to intent and vision, light surfaces on darker depths - and it's funny, moving and sexy. It does not pall on repeat viewings. Few UK writers, producers and crew are allowed to so playfully experiment in the pursuit of TV creative greatness - a mass medium more safely managed by eyeing domestic and overseas audiences as growing dumb and dumber. Of course here we have only three episodes per series not ten or twenty of the sustained writing quality of certain Danish productions. Yet at nearly 10 million UK viewers, Sherlock ratings are on a par with the highest-rated UK soap, Eastenders (9.8 million Christmas episode), while sales of books, gadgets and clothes related to the first series struggled to keep up with demand. Interestingly, culturally and politically sensitive notions are played up in this Christmas/New Year episode - a dominatrix services a young, high-ranking, female royal emanating from Buckingham Palace, American and British governments secretly collude on highly controversial anti-terrorism measures and a female beheading is visualised on Karachi soil - it's amazing that the only real 'public' (AKA Daily Mail) outcry has been about some tame, pre 9pm nudity - in itself really more tasteful camera trick and luminous skin than hard exposure. Oh and there's alot on interchangeable sexuality and, most heinous primetime TV crime of all, smoking on screen - no nicotine patches here, smoking is a theme. Sherlock moves on a notch from asperger-driven scentist and philosopher to experience love and defend THE woman. He may protest that sentiment is a chemical defect found on the losing side, that the chemistry of love is incredibly simple and very destructive, and that love, as he had always assumed, gives a dangerous disadvantage. Still he restores balance to the universe - he avenges Mrs Hudson and saves THE woman in high peril. Not just brains but love then. That's what we need. Definitely the NEW SEXY.

Vaclav Havel has died

Vaclav Havel has died. I am not of that part of the world, have no Czech blood or connection yet this causes pause for thought and beyond that of the automatic sympathy felt for the passing of a good man of note. Playwright and human rights activist, instigator of THE ''Velvet Revoluton', eventual president of a European country known for its long-standing cultural capital, operating under various, oppressive, foreign influences. Czechoslovakia and the man were rare enough. From dissident to head of government during and after the collapse of the soviet union, Vaclav Havel remained a gentle-seeming, self-effacing man in the face of many slings and arrows. May he rest in peace. Which thoughts bring me to this Hamlet at The Young Vic and London on the southside of Waterloo Bridge. The first real play I ever saw was at the nascent Young Vic more than three decades ago - by Tom Stoppard, another Czech writer with his own take on Hamlet - and a vociferous London campaigner against Havel's mistreatment and imprisonment in the late 70's - Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead was on the English A Level syllabus even then. I remember butterfly anxiety and the slow burn of a special event amassing its pull - the industrial space, a modern play, the intent, mixed audience, actors' entrances and exits - the theatre was a life force, the play a revelation, heady stuff for an inner London youth in the throes of discovering the power and thrill of her city. Now so many years later here I am again. The pull of Hamlet, the pause for thought of a man. It is with regret that I have not yet seen a Vaclav Havel play. According to Sam Walters, director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, the only British theatre to have regularly produced his plays during a 40 year history, Havel plays are masterpieces, "funny, pertinent, wise and enormously theatrical". When I soon make my fourth visit to see Michael Sheen's thrilling, thought-provoking Hamlet at the Young Vic, I will suggest, now do Havel.

A.S.Byatt and Johnny Depp

A.S. Byatt, Magdalen College Auditorium, 3rd Nov 2011

A.S. Byatt spoke about all things related to "The Children's Book"; the most terrifying of which was her belief that the character of Olive Wellwood - a children's story writer - was a typical author-parent and it is not uncommon for children of such writers to commit suicide (like Olive's son Tom does in the book). Kenneth Grahame being one example. She had come into the talk after having finished an excoriating account of Enid Blyton in her daughter's memoirs and was convinced that what made someone a great children's writer made them a terrible parent because that ability to create and imagine only came out of someone who refused to leave their own childhood behind and resented any attempt at making them deal with a reality other than that in their heads. Later on we went up to her and told her about the way we relate to children and she said "I look at them and I don't know what to say to them". It was probably the reason why, she said, she struggled with the language of children and getting it on paper.

It made me think of why moving into my own apartment - after living in halls for so many years - phasing in and out of feeling like home.


Johnny Depp and Bruce Robinson, Oxford Union, 5th Nov 2011

I asked Johnny and Bruce about if they would ever create a politically conscious work that looked at the roles of corporations and oil companies in Africa and South Asia or whether it was a no-go area in Hollywood? Johnny said, yes he would love to and Bruce spoke about past experience in a bitter way talking of how his work on the killing fields in Cambodia went down "like an anvil in the Atlantic". Bruce and Johnny seemed convinced that films don't change a thing; it perhaps creates awareness but you look at the world around you said Bruce and despite work like Battle of Algiers, war continues. Johnny said simply "I don't believe my work changes anything." Which is a fairly bleak reckoning for the film industry. Depp used the word schizophrenic a lot. It made me curious specially in the context of his relationship with people like Hunter Thompson and admiration for Kerouac. He did though come across as someone who was just very good at their profession; there wasn't anything deeper than that, this was a man who was a very good actor. If one had to look for tortured depths, I think Bruce Robinson was more the man.

Bureaucratic Thursdays

Yesterday at work, the guy I shadow for my fieldwork had his office filled with applicants. Two of them were PPP workers there to get leases for the houses of an area they represented. As things go, you can’t just come in an get your work done – even if you are from the party in power at the centre- you have to wait, chat, there needs to be time made for building up to the issue even if you have been coming every single day for 3 months. The official will get to you in his own sweet time; there is no queue. While they were passing the hour of courtship at the altar of bureaucracy, we got into a conversation about …well… Pakistan and its current state (What else?) and one of them riled me no end with his insistent and consistent diagnosis as “the lack of education” engendering intolerance; corruption etc etc. At first I thought he meant education is the sense of tarbiyat or shaour but not, he meant training. He was specifically talking about vocational education as the harbinger of tolerance and morality and an end to corruption. It went on and on and needless to say I disagreed with his generalization of an entire populace as an amoral blunt minded herd and the notion that someone earning 7,000 rupees a month with a family to support and entrusted with the paper work of a piece of land valued at 60 million would ONLY in Pakistan try and take a cut for passing the paperwork on in the system. In those circumstances, if you’re smart you’d take a cut whichever country you were in. It’s not bribery, it’s common sense. Why should the those at the lower end of inequality carry the burden of ‘Islamic’ values of honesty, transparency and accountability?

So the guy took great exception to me saying that the nature of bribery I had seen in the office was alright. Which was basically a kind of market rate depending on the client i.e. you looked at the area of the plot being leased; the financial circumstances of the owner and then charged the unwritten, undocumented fee. Widows were never charged anything; not even the service charges legitimately owed the organization. The amount of bribe offered to facilitate the process of file varied from 200 rupees to 3000 in the field workers and from 5000 to the around 60, 0000 at the higher echoleons of the organization.

At this point of the discussion the man asked me if it was true that I was from the same University as their revered Quaid, Benazir Bhutto and I said yes. And could not resist taking a dig at him saying “Look at Bilawal, he’s so educated, at on the best universities in the country and he can’t speak Urdu and is clearly being forced into this field.” Three of them started in an uproar, how can you say that, he WILL come back and he WILL serve us. I told them about how seconds after Zardari said Lyari will be Bilawal’s constituency in the next elections, the latter immediately tweeted something to the effect “I was born in Lyari, I drew my first breath there and I love it. I will not be standing in the next elections.”

The eyes of the most aggressive of the PPP guys welled with tears that totally threw me off. His voice trembled as he said “That’s not true. He will come back.” I stopped and said “Yes I’m probably wrong. He will come back.” I just could not make myself go on in the face of his fierce, unthinking – what I would like to call blunt minded – loyalty because it was so precious to him.

Today I was meant to meet a fieldworker who has stood me up at various times and I just could not follow the fieldwork ethic of “always at their convenience” (which I have been pretty good at for 2 months to be honest) and ditched him for once.

So I didn’t go to work today and instead felt slow and heavy and hot. There was no internet and the cable operators were also having problems “at the backend”. I ended up forgoing the shalwar for a wrap made of my dupatta and felt so much lighter for it. I stared at the fan and listened to the Friday sermons echoing like voices from the third skies from the multiple mosques in the neighbourhood making trips only to the phone to follow up on internet/cable complaints and to the kitchen for frequent cups of tea. I imagine this is what a house gecko’s day feels like. Minus cable and internet signal problems. Unlike ants. We found a line of them stolidly covering a tomato on the kitchen counter. I told Mama to leave the ants we crushed with our hands as a lesson to further interlopers and she said there is no point “Because a dead ant cannot signal”. It seemed to me profoundly sad that the ants would not recognize their own dead as anymore than a rolling pin lying on the counter. But not sad enough to stop with tossing them off the counter.

Chaand raat in Gulshan

A good many years ago in high school, Mariam, Sana, Siko and I realized the wisdom of avoiding car journeys on Chaand Raat and elected to walk through the throngs of people and knots of honking cars to KDA Market in Gulshan. It was coincidentally the first time that KDA market had also attempted to set up a chaan raat bazaar by blocking the main street of the market to make it a pedestrian zone and double parking makeshift stalls. We had a great time that winter chaand raat. We sipped doodh patti chai from one of the tin stalls; hit out at one of the wastrels who pinched Siko's butt (boys of all shapes and sizes gravitate like magpies to a jewel fest at the chaand raat bazars to tease women and occassionally start a relationship); ordered "may-roon" choorian after stall holder couldn't understand I had wanted maroon bangles. Since that year, KDA market has a bazaar every chaand raat with more stalls every year.

 Last night, at 11 pm  Sana and I, finding ourselves in the same city and country for chaand raat after so many years, walked to KDA market again. The scale was much bigger than I had expected. For one, my residential street was double parked with cars whose occupants had not found a place near the market itself. When we crossed the manic road and got to the bazaar we found a tent set up by the municipal police to make announcements like "Ayesha, please be informed, your mother is waiting at tent for you ready to leave." And more than that, the male stall holders had appointed themselves guardians of women's freedom to roam and jostle in the stall by kicking out every single male who was not accompanied by a gaggle of females; an indicator of his "family status". We witnessed at the stall of chooridar pyjamas a burly stall holder physically hauling a young man out of the street with the bazaar, yelling "Where is your family???"

Family status was like the new National Identity Card. Having been at the end of who is your husband/father at driving license and passport offices many times, I thrilled to hear it served the other way round for once.

We walked around. Sana bought lots of bangles, peach, lime and silver and I bought a sea-green mirror embroidered neckline for my chachi. We got chicken rolls and sat down on the edge of the street halfway down the market to eat it it and check out the crowd. A motley one it was too but my attention was completely captured by the women in burqas.

Sana pointed out one girl who burqa had a Chanel trademark inscribed in swooping crystals on her back. The burqa fashions was the most interesting to observe; no one uses thick cotton cloth anymore. The burqas were made of chiffon or georgette and all the ones I saw were black. Few women covered their faces, the nose piece was replaced by a separate triangular scarf which slipped quite easily off the head. The ornamentation of the burqa was extreme compared to how stark they used to be. It currently seems to be based on using Swarowski-copy crystals or diamantes to edge the sleeves, the cloth framing the face, the hemlines of the burqa and of course to pattern designs along it's length (usually petals and leaves).

It kind of reminded me of girls and women I had seen in St. Petersburg. Their sense of style is quite different, something I would be tempted to call garish. As we had watched a young Russian women in dyed black hair, black suede pencil heel boots and some mink/orange fur contraption for a top  go by, Sofia had said to me "You know I would judge. But then I think, she actually got up in the morning and thought about what to wear and put in all that effort and it is a look she really likes."and that made me feel quite differently about taste. I admire people who bother to invest time and thought into how they look; so much more than those who will wear whatever is handy at the moment and can't be bothered to coordinate or focus on something in their look. That engagement is quite an affirmation of life and self-love.

So we watched some more, watched girls get mehndi on their hands; watch them buy bangles at 30 rupees for 2 dozen (all prices brought down because of chaand raat) as we sat behind a stall holder and ate. When we had finished eating, he turned around and offered us a jalebi wrapped in a newspaper. Sweet gesture but the oil in the jalebi had leaked to the extent of making liquid ink out of the newspaper print. It reminded me of the book "38 Bahadurabad" where a woman rejects the proposal of a man she loves because he comes from a family she hates and in frustration drinks a bottle of ink.

Sana I weren't quite up to masticating oil, ink and jalebi in one lip smacking go yet so we shrank politely and sauntered our way home to get ready for Eid morning.

Ethnic fault lines in Karachi

Image courtesy Dawn Group of Newspapers

Gutters and Books

Someone stole the manhole cover outside Sana's house. It cracked me up. I seem to attract a lot of friends with a repertoire of "aur phir hamara gutter ka dhakna chori ho gaya" stories. First up is Amena who now has a padlock on the manhole cover outside her house because the last time someone stole it, Mona's brother stepped straight out the driving seat of his car and down the manhole. Then there are our neighbours, who tired of the repeated thefts have stuck a plant of massively asymmetric proportions into it as a warning to all drivers and pedestrians.

Over iftar Sana's father said he had been to all the hardware/service shops in the neighbourhood but apparently 16 inch lids are very last season. You need an 18inch by 18inch manhole to be considered. Sana's mum contested the urban myth that charsees steal it to sell it for drugs. Given that the thief took the manhole cover and a water hose (plus as her aggrieved husband noted there was a much bigger and hence expensive cover two houses down), the sheer lack of strategy made us insist it was a charsi for shizzles and her father decided in the end to stalk the peddlers who come by the street because they will definitely have bought it.

Anyway after iftar Sana and I walked down the street (passing 6 schools-built-in-houses on the way, can you imagine with no residential house gaps) on to the main road to the newest Liberty store and it just blew my mind away with the incredible discounts. Books wouldn't be this cheap even at Sunday bazaar or Frere Hall. I made an absolute steal of a find with "The Architecture of Happiness" by Alain de Botton. Whose work on architecture I've been intrigued by since I found out about his Living Architecture project which funds architects to create oddly balanced and shaped retreats for holiday goers. The one pictured below won the RIBA award for 2011.

 

So very excited about going through that. The other find was a book on Mughal Miniatures which I wouldn't usually get (particularly since Pamuk's "My name is Red" bored me to death) except for an artist who has made me uber excited about how miniature art can be played around with. Introducing Soody Sharifi who inserts figures from her photographs into digital compositions of miniatures to produce a fantastic and yet seamless medley.

And a few other books, including Ashfaq Ahmed's Zaavia, the second volume of his collection of essays. On the walk back home from Sana's house to mine I realized that the plant had walked out of the manhole in front of our neighbour's house and been replaced by a locked dakhna. Our street has won the war on Gross Misconduct with Gutters.

Best of Pakistani Television

One of the most compelling Urdu afsana nigaars and oral essayist, Ashfaq Ahmed hold forth in PTV studios about life, discipline, and the mindfulness of a momin.

One the best tele-dramas in recent years to appear on Hum channel "Burns Road ki Neelofar". Shot beautifully and quite reflective of the constant struggle of the multiple, seen-as-contradictory-heritages of the average Pakistani.

The new face of Disco Bakery

Last night Ali came back from a work visit to Islamabad and the Radio Cab service at the airport didn't want at all to bring him anywhere near towards Gulshan. Today I tried to get from the Press Club to this side of Shahra-e-Faisal and spent a good amount of time pissed off and persuading (hardly an ideal combination) local transport to overcome their fears of going beyond Time Medico.

Since when did Disco Bakery change from a hallmark of baked goods coming to Karachi for the first time (and the closest landmark to my home) to a hotspot of violence?

Probably since 2 dead Pathans were left outside the bakery last month as the free-for-all killing spree continues in the city. Since also my family started coming down on any of us going there for tea at the roadside tea stalls and dhabba or the Hot Spicy Rolls. My aunt from a gazillion miles away threw a fit at my brother over his cell phone when he met up with a couple of friends there late at night, fearful of another indiscriminate round of gunfire being launched at dhabbas (mainly owned by Pathans). This strip of road houses not only Karachi historic (and sickeningly over creamed) bakery but also the tailor who has stitched for my family since the 1980s, the guy who frames our pictures, the passport photographer who is always prepared for our last-minute house "app log hamesha askhri waqt  per aatey hain" and on the road opposite is our dry cleaner, the local milk shop and all the little stalls that make samosas and pakoras and jalebis for iftar in Ramzan. It is revolting this association with murder and dead young men and now I can no longer distinguish when it's fireworks going off (which happens pretty frequently in Ramzan usually set off by bored kids in the throes of dehydration) or firing.

The basic gripe of the drivers I spoke to seemed to be that Gulshan now lies at the nexus of the turf war between Awami National Party which commands the Pathan vote bank and the Muttahida Quami Movement with the rival Urdu-speaking vote bank. So all entry points into the area - like medieval battles - provide the plains for the two parties to clash. It is a a simplistic picture of the politics of Karachi as a whole but scarily it maps on to Gulshan pretty neatly. Not much PPP influence I can see here. The other discomfiting bit is as Sans pointed out on our way home today (after a meal out that lessened my bad mood and finances) is that most journalists will tell you that public transport is the way to keep the ear to the ground. If the drivers who generally come from extremely politically active areas and whose business it is to know the best routes on a day are fearful of travelling beyond a certain radius, that can only be indicative of Troubles continuing for a while yet.

I had thought that the clean-up operation launched after midnight yesterday would have gone towards calming some fears but no can do. Even though for the first time the operation was not "announced" in advance on all news channels giving everyone concerned a huge tranche of time to hide/grow beards/get rid of beards or whatever else they like to do to disappear. Unless of course you consider the press release from the Governor House before the raids as a kind of warning in which the glorious Chief Minister Sindh hits out hard with the following paragraph.

"Extortionists and miscreants have been asked to leave the city immediately and go somewhere else otherwise strict action will be taken against them."

Now if that isn't some kind of shitty batsignal I don't know what is.

Beauty is Shoe, Shoe Beauty

Today for the first time I thought of shoes as art. I would never wear these pieces but I would put them in a glass case lit softly by a suspended lamp much like a coveted Ming vase. The title of the post is the title Andy Warhol gave to a sketch that he made when he was working as a shoe illustrator.

He probably made great strides towards making shoes into an object of whimsy. Because they are whimsical. See below.

This is an Alexander McQueen done in cream leather with a sculpted resin leaf look.

Construction genius here. This is made by Dutch designer Marloes ten Bhömer with stainless steel and leather. Apparently wearable.

Absolutely stunning symmetry. Louboutin. Gold and taupe textured leather and that absolute blade of a heel. If I could wear heels, I'd buy this one in a heartbeat. Or to be honest, get someone in Karachi to copy it and then buy it.

This is a Gucci. Hand woven, leather boots with that really unusual peep toe style that would make it look super elegant even with a cocktail dress I daresay.


And the last item on the list

Prada's absolutely hilarious red and nude leather production. I think they would hit just below the knee.

Control Freak

Riding the momentum,

Of a 9 to 5 week

Brimming with alchemy hours and validation,

You glide in expectation

To the chest of drawers

Stockpiled with letters,

Tangled bills and sunny

post-its of caution,

to find a dustless,

ordered life. The spinoff,

a forgotten procrastination,

not so much as a blood test missed.

Its an acid drop,

You steady yourself on the brink

Of a stalwart, self-assured

chest of drawers

against the featureless

rising squall.

How to survive a riot in Karachi

On the 14^th of July, Zulfiqar Mirza went on live television to irresponsibly air an opinion on thoughts about the legitimacy of a leader. While Shahi Syed made attempts to pull him back from the microphone, Karachi erupted in flames once again. My friends, on their way back from the airport, saw cars turning back from Shahra-e-Faisal, and people driving back towards the terminal for safety. The main road was overrun with protestors, the road leading towards Askari-IV and Gulistan-e-Johan, likewise. To the occupants of the Honda Civic - who had to ask my friends to lead them to safety, jostled and bumping over a little known path strewn with dirt and bushes - I offer the following advice:

1. Be informed at all times. Radio, television, twitter or whatever is accessible. Staying inside should perennially be your option number one. Usually that would also apply if your neighbourhood is the hub of violence. Of late however the practice of barging into people’s houses to kill them renders it a less than ideal strategy. In which case, when trouble starts to brew and doesn’t look good for your community: have a back up plan. Appoint a place beforehand you can flee too and know your neighbourhood well enough to plan a route that avoids main roads.

2. For drivers: Learn to pick up the signs of trouble brewing in the city. Cars turning back are usually the first one. Make sure you get a look at the driver’s face, there is a difference in the facial expression that distinguishes between the usual ‘oh a bridge fell’/ 7-hour traffic jam’ as opposed to ‘run for your life’ U-turns made by drivers. Also see where Edhi ambulances are heading. Drive the opposite way. If stuck in a situation where you need to go off the road, as was the case last week, follow rickshaw and taxi drivers. Part of their sales pitch in the last few months has become a promise to know the best way to get out of a riot.

For all those outside, the goal is get to your home or a safe place closest to you. Do not maximize the time you spend in the area of trouble.

3. For pedestrians: Stay on the outside of a riot and closer to walls and buildings. Pick a safe place – meaning it should have at least two exits and duck inside. Avoid main roads and if you can, sidestep public transport (always an easy target).

4. Don’t bother looking for an increase in the number of policemen or Rangers as one of the warning signs. They emerge from the woodwork when the rioting has lost steam and you can think of opening shop in a couple of hours.

5. You will know you’re in the middle of the riot if you can see burning tyres lining the roadside and charred remains of buses and vans. Men will be wandering around with effigies and when they run out of that, they will focus their pyromania on Tigger and various other Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals.

6. Do not try to find out what is going on by asking the young men wandering around with a greater sense of entitlement than usual. Steer clear of being seen by them. Typically you will see them walking in the middle of roads, waving a stick or a gun.

7. Carry small cash with you to pay off looters, bribe policemen or anyone who may be manning a makeshift roadblock.

8. You can avoid a gun but you’re not quick enough to avoid a bullet. So if you see a pointed gun, run for cover. If it’s too late, duck (even in a car), hit the floor, the ricochet effect of a gun fired always jerks the weapon upwards.

9. Unless you have bought life insurance, don’t reason with a rioting crowd, or its members and don’t try to protect any material property. It’s not worth it; your family won’t be able to replace you at the dinner table with a recording of your impassioned speech on national unity. It makes for poor conversation.

An edited version of this post appeared in the Express Tribune

Overheard in Scriptum, 3 the Turl, Oxford

Skinny boy with emo hair and white calf high boots walks in. He is shorter than I am and addresses the shopkeeper.

(excitedly) 'ey mate..mate,, mate! this shop is really fit, is it yours.'

Shopkeeper 'thank you, but its not mine, just minding it for a friend'

Emohead: 'this stuff is like really cool. (looks at a box set of calligraphy pen with small ink bottle, quill and a little 2 inch violin wood ornmaent) 'ooo is this thing for real?' (attempts to strum a string of the violin ornament with his pinky finger) '' 'ey mate... mate, is this thing for real? does it play like tunes an stuff?'

Shopkeeper smiles. 'No its just an ornament'

Emohead ambles over to the stuffed badger standing right behind the shop door. 'OOooo mate what's wrong with this bear?'

Shopkeeper 'no its a badger.'

Emohead 'Its a scary to thing to have, doesnt it scare you...What do you think its last thoughts were before it was frozen?'

Random girl who may or may not have been with Emohead in shop says assertively. 'It's not frozen. It's called being stuffed.'

Shopkeeper 'I don't like it, its just that the owner of the shop is big on taxidermy.'

Emohead: 'What do you think its last thoughts were before it froze?'

The Others (The Economist, Dec 17th, 2009)

FOR the first time in history, across much of the world, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition. It is no more distinctive than being tall, fat or left-handed. Nobody raises an eyebrow at a Frenchman in Berlin, a Zimbabwean in London, a Russian in Paris, a Chinese in New York

The desire of so many people, given the chance, to live in countries other than their own makes nonsense of a long-established consensus in politics and philosophy that the human animal is best off at home. Philosophers, it is true, have rarely flourished in foreign parts: Kant spent his whole life in the city of Königsberg; Descartes went to Sweden and died of cold. But that is no justification for generalising philosophers’ conservatism to the whole of humanity.

The error of philosophy has been to assume that man, because he is a social animal, should belong to some particular society. Herder, an 18th-century Prussian philosopher, launched modern conceptions of nationalism by arguing that a man could flourish only among his own people who shared his language and culture. “Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself,” Herder wrote.

Even an exemplary modern liberal philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, found this sort of emotional logic seductive. “Everyone has the right to live in some society in which they needn’t constantly worry about what they look like to others, and so be psychically distorted, conditioned to some degree of mauvaise foi”, Berlin said in 1992, near the end of his life, explaining his support for Zionism.

And yes, no doubt many people do feel most at ease with a home and a homeland. But what about the others, who find home oppressive and foreignness liberating? Theirs is a choice that gets both easier and more difficult to exercise with every passing year. Easier, because the globalisation of industry and education tramples national borders. More difficult, because there are ever fewer places left in this globalised world where you can go and feel utterly foreign when you get there.

It has long been true in America that nobody can be foreign because everybody is foreign. In the capital cities of Europe that same paradoxical condition has more or less been reached—especially in Brussels, the self-styled capital of Europe, where decades of economic migration have been reinforced by an influx of European Union bureaucrats. There the animosity between Dutch- and French-speaking Belgians makes them foreigners to one another, even in their own country.

To get a strong sense of what it means to be foreign, you have to go to Africa, or the Middle East, or parts of Asia. In South Korea last year 42% of the population had never knowingly spoken to a foreigner. Well, they had better get ready. The country’s foreign residents have doubled in the past seven years, to 1.2m, or more than 2% of the population. And that share could rise: the foreign-born average in the rich world is over 8% of a given population.

Foreigners par excellence

The most generally satisfying experience of foreignness—complete bafflement, but with no sense of rejection—probably comes still from time spent in Japan. To the foreigner Japan appears as a Disneyland-like nation in which everyone has a well-defined role to play, including the foreigner, whose job it is to be foreign. Everything works to facilitate this role-playing, including a towering language barrier. The Japanese believe their language to be so difficult that it counts as something of an impertinence for a foreigner to speak it. Religion and morality appear to be reassuringly far from the Christian, Islamic or Judaic norms. Worries that Japan might Westernise, culturally as well as economically, have been allayed by the growing influence of China. It is going to get more Asian, not less.

Even in Japan, however, foreigners have ceased to function as objects of veneration, study and occasionally consumption. Once upon a time, in the ancient and medieval worlds, to count as properly foreign you had to seek out a life among peoples of a different skin colour or religion. They were probably an impossibly long distance away, they might well kill you when you got there, and if you went too far you might fall off the edge of the world.

At the dawn of the travelling age, writing an imaginary legal code for a Utopian society that he called Magnesia, Plato divided foreigners into two main categories. “Resident aliens” were allowed to settle for up to 20 years to do jobs unworthy of Magnesians, such as retail trade. “Temporary visitors” consisted of ambassadors, merchants, tourists and philosophers. Broaden that last category to include all scholars, and you have a taxonomy of travellers that held good until the invention of the stag party.

To be foreign got much more straightforward from the 17th century onwards, when Europe adopted a political system based on nation states, each with borders, sovereignty and citizenship. Travel-papers in hand, you could turn yourself into an officially recognised foreigner simply by visiting the country next door—which, with the advance of mechanised transport, became an ever more trivial undertaking. By the early 20th century most of the world was similarly compartmentalised.

Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition, but in practice it can be a huge relief

The golden age of genteel foreignness began. The well-off, the artistic, the bored, the adventurous went abroad. (The broad masses went too, as empires, steamships and railways made travel cheaper and easier.) Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief.

Writers in particular seemed to thrive in exile, real or self-imposed. The qualities of it—displacement, anxiety, disorientation, incongruity, melancholia—became the modern literary sensibility. A writer living overseas could shrug off the perceived limitations of country and culture. He was no longer an English author, or an Irish author, or a Russian author, he was simply an Author: think of James Joyce, Christopher Isherwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky. It became, and remains, bad form to pigeonhole a writer by country. All want to be writers of the world, and the world rewards that aspiration. Of the past ten winners of the Nobel prize for literature, five (V.S. Naipaul, Gao Xingjian, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing and Herta Müller) have been émigrés.

An earlier Nobel prize-winner, Ernest Hemingway, set the ground rules for the writer as foreigner when he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris: live in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (or equivalent), work in cafés, meet other artists, drink a lot.

Not everyone can be Hemingway. Many foreigners today are threadbare students, overworked managers, trailing spouses. The male expatriate in Bangkok is a great deal freer than the female expatriate in Jeddah. The lot of unwilling foreigners is far worse still. A life of foreignness imposed by poverty or persecution or exile is unlikely to be enjoyable at all.

Even so, all other things being equal, foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.

An American child psychologist, Alison Gopnik, when reaching for an analogy to illuminate the world as experienced by a baby, compared it to Paris as experienced for the first time by an adult American: a pageant of novelty, colour, excitement. Reverse the analogy and you see that living in a foreign country can evoke many of the emotions of childhood: novelty, surprise, anxiety, relief, powerlessness, frustration, irresponsibility.

It may be this sense of a return to childhood, consciously or not, that gives the pleasure of foreignness its edge of embarrassment. Narcissism may also play a part. While abroad, one imagines being missed by friends and enemies at home. Beneath it all there is the guilt of betrayal. To choose foreignness is an act of disloyalty to one’s native country.

That idea of disloyalty is less bothersome now. But a century or so ago it was a mark of deviance for an English gentleman to admit the desirability of living anywhere other than England. The best argument in favour of spending time abroad was that it gave you a better appreciation of the virtues of home. “What should they know of England, who only England know?” wrote Kipling.

I’m an alien

Nowadays, you might rather say that the more you know of other countries, the more inclusive of all humanity your values will become. You educate yourself, beginning with anthropology.

Every foreigner of inquiring mind becomes a part-time anthropologist, wondering and smiling at the new social rituals of his adoptive country. George Mikes, a Hungarian living in England, wrote a book in this genre called “How To Be An Alien”, published in 1946. It was not really about how to be an alien at all, but about a foreigner’s view of English society, and it was very funny. Mikes rightly saw that most social codes partook of the arbitrary and the absurd. If you happened to stand outside them, as a foreigner always did, then life could be a continuous comedy.

Mikes wrote later, tongue in cheek, that he had expected his English friends to be very angry at the mocking portrait he painted of their country. Instead they seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. Mikes had been making fun of a culture confident enough to laugh at itself, and his underlying admiration and affection for it were clear.

Pay your taxes, speak some English and be nice about the country where you live

Still, it could have gone badly wrong. Foreigners do complain more than they should, and locals do not like it. If you were to write a book called “How To Be An Alien” today, and meant it to be a serious manual of instruction for use anywhere in the world, it might consist of three rules only. Pay your taxes, speak some English and be nice about the country where you live. Exaggeratedly nice. Avoid even trivial criticisms. You do not go into somebody’s house and start rearranging their furniture.

Perhaps foreigners are, by their nature, hard to satisfy. A foreigner is, after all, someone who didn’t like his own country enough to stay there. Even so, the complaining foreigner poses something of a logical contradiction. He complains about the country in which he finds himself, yet he is there by choice. Why doesn’t he go home?

The foreigner answers that question by thinking of himself as an exile—if not in a judicial sense then in a spiritual sense. Something within himself has driven him away from his homeland. He becomes even a touch jealous of the real exile. Life abroad is an adventure. How much greater might the adventure be, how much more intense the sense of foreignness, if there were no possibility of return?

For the real exile, foreignness is not an adventure but a test of endurance. The Roman poet Ovid, banished to a dank corner of the empire, complained that exile was ruining him “as laid-up iron is rusted by scabrous corrosion/or a book in storage feasts boreworms”. Edward Said, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian-American scholar, caught the romance and pain of exile when he called it “a strangely compelling idea, but a terrible experience”. The true exile, he said, was somebody who could “return home neither in spirit nor in fact”, and whose achievements were “permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever”.

The willing foreigner is in exactly the reverse position, for a while at any rate. His enjoyment of life is intensified, not undermined, by the absence of a homeland. And the homeland is a place to which he could return at any time.

Of pain and pleasure

The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent living in America, catches something of this in her novel, “The Namesake”. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, compares the experience of foreignness to that of “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding”.

Illustration by C. Corr

Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it. Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-born intellectual resettled in France, has caught this sense of deprivation by comparing the experience of foreignness with the loss of a mother.

But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.

Players, Bond and the BBC

I have never ever like James Bond as E much as wants me to. We have had arguments on this because E’s friend worked on the script for the Casino Royale and she says it is so different. I disagree, Bond is too much like, I am horny buffalo seeding the world with my sexuality; disgusting bloody locust. But I have grudgingly agreed to watch one of the films because I think he saved my life last night. I was sick, once outside the MCR, once in the parking lot and once back home in the garden. From of all the things, Thai food and a smoke. A menthol at that. But I just couldn’t get up because I felt like my head was full of it. I kept trying to make it come out and E kept ministering to me and then in the midst of miserably staring at my crotch, and walking around the garden with my head down I wailed ‘can’t you do anything ELSE to help me’. And she looked really tentative but then gave me salt water and out it came. All of it. I could finally stand up straight.

“Why didn’t you give this to me earlier? This is brilliant. How do you know this?”

E looks really smug and vindicated. “Bond. James Bond. He had nothing with him and he knew he had been poisoned so he took salt with him to the loo and gagged it all out”

So now I have to watch it with her.

Tonight I go to BBC London to meet Colm Toibin, the author of ‘the Master’. Am not excited because the pre-shoot drinks thing is fairly small and so is the audience (10-15 people) and we have to send our on air questions in before hand and I KEEP thinking I’m going to get so excited he won’t be able to understand what I say. I still have a bit of the book to go. I love Henry James’s dislike for Oscar Wilde. As much as I love Wilde’s writing, the more I learn about his life the more of a git he sounds. Being at Oxford of course only adds to the gitness of him. The Master reads a lot like catharsis for Toibin though I wonder if it’s fair to draw a parallel between James’s and Toibin’s homosexuality because it is defined a lot by context and late 19th century and early 21st century have their own unique chastising mechanisms. Either way I don’t suppose this show is a good place to mention I think homosexuality is all in the head. I really have no rational basis for this belief but I can’t help believing it even at the same time as I believe and feel for the trials and tribulations of my gay friends.

Francis Barakat

It was either an end of term Christmas party or Eid shingading in either class 1 or 2, I can't remember now but I remember wearing a fuschia pink skirt and white lace sleeveless blouse and that was pretty much the only colour left at the entrance to the school. Everyone had left, literally everyone and I was perched on the railings above the bench, increasingly morose, had even stopped wandering to the gate to look out for our trademark Lancer. Quite feeling the betrayed by the father, which at this age is a luxurious feeling I wish he had the youth and I had the short sightedness to feel again. Then at some point Francis who had been keeping his eye on me came over and I remember thinkin Oh god is he going to be one of the Santa Claus variety gate keepers or the bastards who make kids feel they should be brave enough to disregard a late parent (I am unfortunately not one of those sorts, still not am, if you make a child highly emotionally dependent upon you, then you should not be late at the airport. I control the mood better now, but I am still just as upset). He wasn't either and I wasn't surprised. He spoke to my dad regularly and I'd say good morning to him and he'd ask about my dad and that was the extent of our interaction during most of my school days. I just found out about his death, through of all things, Facebook. I haven't been to school for the past 5 years and still it was such a singular shock with instant tears though I can't claim any finality of feeling or experience. Except the last moment felt very much like the time as child I lost track of my mother in the throng on Tariq Road. He was 69 at his death, my father is 65 I think and all I think about nowadays is age and death, which the more I read seem to be the universal themes of those in exile.

Missing toes

Exactly 2 weeks. A breakfast of golden syrup oatmeal and tangy smoothie is surprisingly quite filling. It is a bit odd to think of how many people find cooked breakfasts an oddity. It's as weird as walking in a home without a bookshelf. Like a toe suddenly missing. But I suppose it doesn't feel like handicap if you've always been like that. Probably makes my pity entirely obscure to them.

North and South

The rain is flaky today, very gentle and feather like. It's like looking inside a mill, flakes of cotton drifting.Last night though, it sounded like monsoon. Very very Okara, lying in on springy charpoys in the verandah and drifting through sleep lulled by the rain dripping off leaves in the courtyard.

11th May

This is to make sure I don't have to live with the black stain of not writing publicly for almost a year. In typical Luminite fashion, it is done at the nth minute, the 11th of May.

Bruch at Trinity with Mette and Corwin and Broad Street was blocked off with "churches of Oxford" uniting to show love for the city and Jesus. Mette said first off, "I must apologize for my religion" while the man spoke of Peter's gospels and bones of dinosaurs. Pata nahi kiya link hai? It is odd. I thought the climax of Christianity was Christmas carolling. Everything else secondary. Clearly the convents have much to work on.

Have spent better part of two hours of struggling with waxing on own legs. It is disheartening enough to put one off LBDs.

The 12th of May just does not seem a year ago. This is aging, remembering the past better than the present. Not looking forward to the future, only hoping it will a lot more same like the past. I think it happens at undergraduate, where the mass of memories reaches critical mass and then, whoooosh, look back more than you look forward. I've had trouble living in the present anyway. Pain, physical activity and books. The only time I actually feel like I'm not kernel less. I don't suppose books count acutally.

Lastly: complete befogglement at the existence of fainting goats. I mean seriously??? Taking one for the team, not even team, for another species! Forever though the image of fainting goats will be associated with Vic's impersonation of a goat going down with a salute. Lol.

3:05 pm on 12th May in Karachi

On Friday, we knew it was a holiday tomorrow, what with the government saying they may clamp emergency and MQM and the Chief Justice’s supporters asserting they would all take out a procession of clashing wills and agendas. I think most of us were all set to see modernity and humanity fail on Saturday because Karachi is notorious for both. But I don’t think anyone was prepared for this level of failure or perhaps no one was prepared for this kind of vivid, visual reporting, live, minute by minute.

At 12 pm at a late breakfast, I lost appetite when they said firing had started on the main artery of the city, Shahra-e-Faisal, my favorite road in the city, claimed 8 lives. At 2:30 pm the count was 14 and at 2:45 pm. the count was 15. It’s 3:01 pm now, but it continues. I’ve never had “war reporting” done, ten minutes from my home. I wonder if it was this bad in 1995 but we didn’t have local television channels working from Dubai, so perhaps that’s why we didn’t see images, like the bus driver staggering, bloodied, in the aisle of his bus with a bullet lodged in his throat.

The mythical youths with the guns, that I never saw, but suspected of gunning my uncle in 1995, I can see now. They’re wielding guns without any mark of identity but wearing caps and out of fashion yellow T-shirts with black stripes. Walking amongst burning vehicles with a confidence that flies in the face of the terror on the little boy’s face who is running for cover under the Baloch Colony Bridge.

Karachi is a city where people like Lieutant Vimes often identify where they are not by the name of the road but by the number and quality of potholes on it. I cannot tell you, how crippling it is to be able to name the landmarks of violence.

The same protest was conducted in other parts of the city-in Lahore and Islamabad with no incidence of violence. The extra element in Karachi has only been the MQM. Be that as it may, the Chief Justice has refused to take the helicopter from the airport to the High Court and has also refused to go back. That is how celebrities are made I suppose aaj kal, just on the brunt of their egos; famous for being famous.