The Dawn News - Magzines (2024)

“Dear Mr Jinnah” — 70 Years in the Life of a Pakistani Civil Servant
By Salman Faruqui
Lightstone Publishers
ISBN: 978-969-716-282-6
429pp.

Psychologists tell us impressions formed in formative years influence our thoughts and actions as grown-ups. Reading Dear Mr Jinnah, Salman Faruqui’s memoir, makes clear why Faruqui became what he became. Faruqui was only eight years old when he reached Pakistan after crossing rivers of blood. The roads were impassable and Faruqui remembers his elders removing bodies to make way for his vehicle.

The joy on reaching Pakistan, a passionate love for this country, the realisation that there is nothing more precious than home, and that we must live and die for the country created by the Great Leader are the ideas that dominate Faruqui’s life and work, as the memoir shows.

The book reveals the tenacity and sangfroid in Faruqui’s character, as seen in an interview that turned into a confrontation between him and an 11-man commission testing candidates for the Central Superior Services or bureaucracy.

The session lasted an hour. Faruqui stuck to his guns, annoyed the commission and was given the lowest possible marks to pass the viva voce test because, as one member of the commission later put it, they were impressed by his “eloquent persistence.” The encounter taught Faruqui to be “politically correct and reticent.” On the whole, the book relates a tough bureaucratic life, where his main assets were rectitude and candour.

The memoirs of Salman Faruqui, regarded often as one of Pakistan’s ‘super-bureaucrats’ till his retirement, shed light on many important moments in the country’s history

Because he eventually rose to become among Pakistan’s top bureaucrats, Faruqui’s book gives us a first-hand account of the way in which Pakistani officialdom operates — ways which, in the end, do produce results, though not always very pleasing.

As a student, Faruqui had a hectic leadership role, which brought together student unions in both East and West Pakistan and resulted in the founding of the National Students Federation. He was also elected secretary general of the Inter Collegiate Body (ICB), which consisted of vice presidents and general secretaries of Karachi university student unions.

Headed by Faruqui, the ICB found itself facing government ire on a number of issues, including over its agitation against high tuition fees, the lack of adequate number of cadavers in medical colleges, and the poor maintenance of the Karachi university campus.

In 1955, one of ICB’s great successes was to preempt a visit to Pakistan by Lord Mountbatten, whose anti-Pakistan role, especially with regards to the Kashmir issue, besides the unfair drawing of the boundaries of Punjab and Bengal, had done enormous harm to Pakistan. The ICB mobilised public opinion and said it would demonstrate at the Karachi airport and other places that Mountbatten was to visit.

The public had not forgotten the hostility that Mountbatten had developed toward the Quaid-i-Azam, because the founder of Pakistan had denied Mountbatten the pleasure of being the common governor general of Pakistan and India. The ICB, thus, scored a major victory when Mountbatten cancelled the visit.

Because he was amongst Pakistan’s top bureaucrats, the book is replete with tension-filled events inevitable in the kind of life Faruqui had. Some episodes emerge as dramas involving the highest in the corridor of powers and reveal a fall in rational faculty when everybody is in a febrile state.

One such nerve-racking drama in 2011 involved — just imagine — the president, the prime minister, senior cabinet ministers, those with the swagger stick and Faruqui himself. An indication of the things to come that day dawned on Faruqui when he found the doors to the president house closed with nobody allowed to enter it, even though Faruqui was then secretary general to the president.

Finally, when he managed it, he found President Asif Ali Zardari in bad shape. The president appeared exhausted, his face showing signs of physical collapse, and his speech lacking coherence. He announced he was going to Dubai for treatment but made clear he was going to stay in power.

One man’s presence evoked everybody’s curiosity. He was Hussain Haqqani, the former ambassador to America who was alleged to be behind what came to be called ‘Memogate’. The memo, allegedly written by him to the American establishment, sought the Obama administration’s help because, according to it, the army wanted to throw President Zardari out. Zardari, however, made clear he was no milquetoast, he was not going to be dragooned into resigning and, if necessary, he would use physical force to stay on as president.

The intensity of the chaos cannot be condensed into a few lines. Everybody was wondering why Haqqani was to accompany the president to Dubai. Most officials were reticent, with acting president Farooq Naek giving Faruqui two contradictory orders within minutes.

During his long career, Faruqui had to deal with all sorts of situations and a variety of characters, not all of them kind to him. However, among the persons he had respect for was Z.A. Bhutto, whom he met first as a student leader, when the latter was a minister in Ayub Khan’s cabinet; one day Faruqui would become Bhutto’s closest adviser.

The book gives us a graphic descriptions of Bhutto’s motives and actions, for one day Bhutto would turn against the class to which Faruqui belonged, the Civil Services of Pakistan or CSP. Always an iconoclast, Bhutto abhorred the “might and arrogance” of the CSP and radically altered the structure of Pakistan’s civil service.

In 1972, less than a year after coming to power, Bhutto promulgated a new ordinance and abolished the very nomenclature of an institution that, in his opinion, had blocked progress toward democracy. He promulgated the Removal from Service (Special Provision) Regulation and compulsorily retired over 1,300 civil service officers. The CSP academy was abolished and a joint pre-service training programme and a Federal Public Service Commission were formed. All along, Faruqui was in the picture.

Chapter Four leaves you sad, and you wonder why you chose to read what you cannot help read, because it is part of your history. The chapter reminds us of Bhutto’s glory: the enactment of the Constitution, which has now completed half a century of its chequered existence; the Islamic summit, which saw the Muslim world’s heroes gather at Lahore; the quiet but astonishing technological progress towards Pakistan ultimately becoming a nuclear power; and Bhutto’s tour de force — the famous “Give them passports!” order. Within no time Pakistanis from welders and masons to typists and chartered accountants were sending millions of petrodollars as home remittances from the oil-rich Arab soil.

Then came 1977 and all that it stands for — treachery, cunning and a “judicial murder”, as so aptly put by Dorab Patel, one of Pakistan’s most eminent jurists. Faruqui’s account of the events leading to the 1977 coup is authentic because he was in contact with Bhutto all along — the controversial elections, the violent protest movement by the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), the crucial negotiations between Bhutto and PNA leaders, and the stab in the back: the coup, when the talks had made a breakthrough.

The book has names of common friends, who included Saleem Asmi, my editor at Dawn (2000 to 2003) and an unforgettable character, and Wajid Shamsul Hassan — journalist, author, diplomat and friend par excellence.

Faruqui and I were students in the political science department of the Karachi University, and he was also our elected union chief. Space constraints and book review parameters restrain me from mentioning the names of fellow students, some of whom also became CSP officers; many are enjoying life playing with their grandchildren, while some have met their Lord.

In a lighter vein, I heaved a sigh of relief when I found a single ‘S’ in the name of Dawn Editor Altaf Husain in a caption on a photograph with him sitting beside Faruqui and his bride. Appointed as Dawn Editor in Delhi by Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah he was strict about the correct spelling of his surname. I joined Dawn in Karachi in 1960, and the very fact that Altaf Husain had been appointed by the Quaid evoked in a youngster like me both awe and admiration. If ever a double ‘s’ appeared in his name in some news item, God had to help the staff member, who would get a one-line warning that I enjoy recalling till this day. The reprimand from the news editor would say: “The subeditor doing this again will come to grief!”

I wonder why Faruqui didn’t write the book himself. He narrated the tempestuous history of his life to fellow journalist and editor of Aurora Mariam Ali Baig, and the late Talat Aslam, whom his friends and admirers miss till this day.

It was on becoming the federal ombudsman in 2012, his last assignment, that Faruqui realised the immensity of an ombudsman’s task. There were powerful bodies “with immense authority” to formulate and implement policy, but such bodies often overlooked “the small signals of malaise and malfunction that appeared in the armour of public service.” This made clear to him that a radical restructuring of the ombudsman’s agenda was needed to “sweep away the debris.”

Having virtually gone through the sawmill of the country’s bureaucratic juggernaut with its unavoidable political pressures, combined with temptations and bullying, Faruqui sums up his view of Pakistan in a guarded combination of hope and despair toward the end of the book. Pakistan, he says, is far from perfect but “it can be made perfect by diligence, hard work, and […] moral values.”

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman and an author

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 4th, 2024

Vampire
By Mirza Azeen Baig Chughtai
Translated by Zoovia Hamiduddin
Speaking Tiger Books LLP, Delhi
ISBN: 978-9354478468
152pp.

The history of literature is a complex interplay of remembrance and forgetfulness. This interplay is both fair and unfair. Certainly, some writers are remembered and celebrated purely on literary merit, and history does justice to them. However, it is not a lack of literary merit that causes a group of writers to be forgotten. The fortunes of writers are also shaped by political, social and aesthetic changes.

Mirza Azeem Baig Chughtai (1898-1941) is a forgotten literary wizard. History and general readership have been unfair to him. Zoovia Hamiduddin, the granddaughter of Chughtai, has translated his Urdu novella Vampire into English. This is how we can finally put an end to the general amnesia about the worth and significance of Chughtai’s works.

He was an unorthodox religious researcher, a humourist, a fiction writer and a feminist. He belonged to the generation of Urdu writers from colonial India who daringly addressed sensitive religious themes, rejecting the rigid separation between ‘the profane world of literature’ and ‘the sacred realm’ of religion. The gap between the materiality of the arts and the otherworldliness of religion has not only widened but also been epistemologically endorsed. All divisions give rise to conflict and alienation — it’s as simple as that.

Chughtai was a fearless and committed individual who authored books on purdah, a highly sensitive issue of his age, in the light of the Quran and Sunnah. He was certain that religious guidance could be sought without the mediation of clergy. His books on purdah also prove his conviction that there is a clear distinction between religious texts and their interpretation.

An English translation of a Mirza Azeem Baig Chughtai novella puts an end to the general amnesia about the worth and significance of the writer’s works

The acts and practices of interpretations are embedded in contemporary power structures. Consequently, his books were met with wrath, rejection and disdain from clerics. But he never feared, nor compromised. He kept writing about the miseries and emancipation of Muslim women.

As his sister Ismat Chughtai states in Dozakhi (a pen portrait of Chughtai), Azeem Baig Chughtai’s poor health turned his life miserable, yet his nerves remained strong. Facing the wrath of clerics head-on, he remained undaunted, offering a sharp and enlightened perspective.

He was a prolific writer. His writing is characterised by a sense of spontaneity and hurriedness. He kept producing essays, short stories, novellas and novels. His books of fiction include Adam Khor [Cannibal], Chamki, Khanam, Jannat Ka Bhoot [The Spectre of Paradise], Full Boot, and Malfoozat-i-Tommy [The Sayings of Tommy].

Zoovia Hamiduddin has translated Chughtai’s Vampire. She chose this novella because of its theme. Contrary to what the title may suggest, this is not a horror fantasy. It is, in fact, a horrifying account of the rape of a teenage Muslim girl. In her translator’s note, Hamidduddin makes it clear that Chughtai wrote about the Rape Trauma Syndrome in the 1930s, long before the West first described this trauma in 1974.

However, the feminist movement was gathering pace in the West during the 1930s. Virginia Woolf published her seminal feminist work, A Room of One’s Own, in 1929. In it, she makes the case for a private, safe, uninterrupted space for women to create art. Rashid al-Khairi also wrote about women’s plight in those days. He was known as the “musawwir-i-gham” [painter of sufferings] for his portrayal of women’s miseries.

In Vampire, the main emphasis is on exploring the psychological aspects of rape trauma through the use of a first-person narrative. It could be said that vampires, who are often depicted as ‘undead’ creatures, rely on human blood as a life-giving elixir. In Chughtai’s novel, the rapist is likened to a vampire by the narrator, who is an unnamed 16-year-old girl.

The vampire metaphor serves to illustrate the extent of the damage caused to her memory, imagination and sense of self. It could be argued that this psychological portrayal of human suffering in Urdu fiction during the 1930s was particularly noteworthy. At that time, Urdu fiction was largely characterised by social realism, offering a detailed and accurate representation of the external world.

It could be argued that the metaphor of the vampire propels this novel into the category of horror-dystopian fiction. In the truest sense of the word, dystopia implies that the wounds of rape are irreparable, and that the rapist is never forgotten or forgiven. However, this novel presents an alternative narrative.

Once it is revealed that the rapist is none other than the protagonist’s betrothed, the wounds of rape are healed and the rapist is exonerated. The tone of dystopia is transformed into something that could be described as utopian. Hamiduddin attempts to justify this happy ending by suggesting that what the protagonist experiences after initial shock, disbelief and anger is intense relief.

It would seem that the early Greek writers also employed a strategy of deploying psychological relief after shock. It could be argued that this Greek aesthetic had political consequences. It is thought that, by making the audience experience relief or catharsis after a series of tragic events, the Greek drama writer would instil emotions of sympathy for kings. But it would be fair to say that those in positions of power, such as kings, dictators and rapists, do not always deserve our sympathy.

I would like to take a moment to discuss Hamiduddin’s approach to translation. Rather than providing a literal, word-by-word translation, she offers a meaningful rendition of the story. However, it is important to note that no transgressions or omissions have been made. She has striven to maintain the narrative flow, the spirit of the characters, and ambience of the original story.

While her work is generally commendable, a minor error does occur in the book. In the encomium, Azeem Baig Chughtai’s age is incorrectly stated as 41 years at the time of his death, which is a minor discrepancy.

The reviewer is a Lahore-based Urdu critic and short story writer. He currently serves as Head of the publication cell at the Gurmani Centre, LUMS. He is the author of Naye Naqqad Ke Naam Khatoot and Urdu Adab Ki Tashkeel-i-Jadeed

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 4th, 2024

Allama Iqbal’s Message from the East (Payaam-i-Mashriq)
Translated from Persian to English by M. Hadi Hussain
Illustrated by Shireen Gheba Najib
Shireen Gheba’s Studio
ISBN: 978-969-23158-1-4
247pp.

Given the abundance of literature, venerative, appreciative, contemplative and meditative that Allama Iqbal’s work — with special reference to his Payaam-i-Mashriq [Message of the East] — has inspired, why would there be a reason to go for one more publication of the same?

Add to that collection, the copious illustrative interpretations by some of the greatest visual artists, too. However, Shireen Gheba Najib’s illustrated version of the Payaam comes as one solid proof that, while there is absolutely nothing to counter the iconic status of Iqbal’s brilliance as a poet and spiritual sage, there is always room for further illustrative reading of his works.

Infinitely, Iqbal’s poetry does become more rewarding for the layman when a visual artist steps in. More so when most readers are laypersons — which is this century’s great dilemma when it comes to Iqbal’s text. Thus, in a scenario where Urdu as a language is systematically being swept under the carpet, visual interpretations of the ‘national’ poet’s work come as a saviour.

The human imagination and its imprint on paper is a complex process, as bewildering in its interpretation of text as in how the creative reader chooses to actually paint the words. Iqbal’s poetry being a showcasing of the “melioristic philosophy of the perfectibility of the human condition of the human ego in an existentialist setting of ceaseless struggle and striving” (foreword by Chief Justice (retd) S.A. Rehman) demands an even greater and more deliberate processing of imagination, if you want to picturise the philosophy.

An illustrated and translated version of Allama Iqbal’s Payaam-i-Mashriq opens up the great poet’s Persian work even for the layperson

The artist’s visualisation of Iqbal’s text can hence take many shades — shades of deep intellectual acumen, of a play with the hues that spell the words, or sheer love, to count a few reactions. Either way, the beauty lies always in being able to retain the sagacity and philosophy of the thought between the lines.

Illustrating Iqbal without losing the essential spirit is what counts and this one task is not for the faint-hearted. It takes heavy doses of courage, conviction and commitment to venture forth on the journey.

Turning the pages of this illustrated publication, with its straight-from-the-heart brushwork, shows how Shireen Gheba Najib, artist, author, philanthropist, educationist, blogger and now vlogger, is on the page.

Growing up in a milieu where Iqbal was a household name (Najib was presented a complete copy of Iqbal’s poetry by her parents at a very young age and which became the start of a life-long adventure), it is small wonder that, in the preface of this publication, she could write the sentence, “I have loved Iqbal’s poetry all my life.” But moving on from the emotional to the creative affiliation, the illustrator adds very endearingly, “Whatever I could understand of it!” This is an honesty of admission few would make public.

It is in the same vein that the illustrator’s images have to be viewed: as pure, pristine, first impressions of one who has no pretensions to scholastics. “My purpose has been to share Iqbal’s work with the youth of Pakistan and the rest of the English speaking world. To me that has been very important, because it is the key to solving most present-day problems.”

It was after wading her way through the 1977 English translation of the Payaam by M. Hadi Hussain, that Najib finally sat down to translate her discovery into picture format. Today’s generation should be grateful to her for bringing Iqbal and his spirituality/philosophy closer to them, since there is no denying the fact that visuals have greater impact than the written word.

The over 17 paintings that sit facing the text in the publication, speak volumes for the spiritual alignment of the illustrator as well as her concentrated efforts in what, by her own admission, has been a full-pronged thrust to capture the full spectrum of Iqbal’s thought as expressed in this epic book of Persian poetry. From the readers’ point of view, this enthusiasm and devotion is no less than the translator’s sentiments.

It had to be 50 long years before the twain of this one translator and illustrator would appear as a neat volume, opening with the 1923 preface to Payaam by the Allama himself. This essay is of immense help to both the literature- and art-oriented devotee of Iqbal’s poetry.

Najib’s self-published slim volume displays her unique qualities of observation and sensitivity for literary nuance, as she travels virtually verse by verse, line by line, word by word through Hadi’s translation, to unravel the gist of one of the world’s greatest philosophies. The hues and strokes, the clarity of images and, at times, the haze and mystery of her illustrations almost capture the ‘near full’ spectrum of Iqbal’s thought.

Najib moves from direct iridescent strokes in flashing colour (depicting the section titled Tulips of Sinai [Lala-i-Toor] and Paradise) to, at times, hazy, misty, almost ‘out-of-focus’ brush strokes (in the section ‘Glow-worm, Love and the Song of the Stars’). It is the frenetic use of colours from the pastel to the brooding to the bold that invite us to re-ponder Iqbal’s message in the Payaam.

The brilliance or otherwise of the brushwork takes second place and should in no way be made a case for study in this publication. The book is not an art gallery piece. It is a work of the imagination in cohort with the mind.

The illustrations and the original poetry come a century apart in time and yet are a true reflection of the spiritual enrichment illustrator Najib has garnered. From the ‘inner’ flame that Iqbal’s heart and soul were lit up by, to the serenity and seriousness of the message, to the enlightening balm of serious concern for the rise of possible, potential, human elevation, Najib has tried to retain all in her paintings.

Even if some of the paintings may not correspond directly to the text they are placed against, suffice it to say that the effort to keep an interpretive cohesion of Iqbal’s poetry is worth a million kudos.

The reviewer is a freelance journalist, translator and creative content/report writer who has taught in the LUMS Lifetime Learning Programme. X: @daudnyla

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 4th, 2024

It is perplexing that Muhammad Husain Azad (1830-1910), author of the scintillating, so-called ‘first history of Urdu poetry’, Aab-i-Hayat (The Nectar of Immortality, 1880), chose to leave out Momin Khan Momin from the first edition.

Ustad Ibrahim Khan Zauq, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Momin Khan Momin, three great Urdu poets, were contemporaries. They lived and wrote in the first half of the 19th century. Contrary to the popular belief that the 19th century was a period of zawaal or decline, it was a time when numerous literati glittered in the firmament of Delhi.

The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was a poet as was the heir Mirza Fakhru. Dagh Dehlvi, the son of Nawab Shamsuddin Ahmad and Wazir Khanum, came of age in the environs of the royal palace when his mother married Mirza Fakhru. Some other well-known contemporary poets were Shah Naseer, Imam Bakhsh Sehbai, Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta and Mufti Sadruddin Azurdah.

Momin’s Urdu divan was published shortly after Ghalib’s in 1846. It was compiled by his pupil, Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta and published by Karimuddin Ahmad, author of the Tazkirah Tabqaat ush Shuara. Momin’s letters were collected by Hakim Ahsanullah Khan and published from Matba’ Sultani. Momin’s Persian divan was published in 1854 from the same press.

Thus, Azad’s excuse that he could not find enough information on Momin is shaky. Poet, critic and biographer Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914), who had written Hayat-i-Javed, the biography of Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), and immortalised Ghalib with his Yadgaar-i-Ghalib (published 1896), was a mine of information on the stalwarts of the age and was a contemporary of Azad. He could have provided enough information on Momin (if asked) and eventually did do so in the second edition of Aab-i-Hayat (1883).

In the second edition of Aab-i-Hayat, Azad began his account of Momin with a prelude. In the prelude, he explained that he could not obtain enough information on the poet, therefore, he did not include him in the first edition. He went on to say that he had made amends in the second edition through the generosity of contributors:

“Now a few months before the second edition, my pleas and requests produced fervour. I am grateful to the kindness and generosity of one among the others who with the consent and advice of friends put together a few pages from scattered details…”

But Azad shortened the details provided by Hali. He gave another flimsy excuse:

“I deleted a few sentences that did not add to the account except to make it lengthier. And shortened or omitted some parts of the narrative and a lot of stories that had nothing to do with the nature of his [Momin’s] poetry. The rest I kept as it was in the original.”

I wonder at the conceit on Azad’s part in curtailing a narrative from a highly respected biographer such as Altaf Husain Hali. I am left wondering what those stories were. Why did Azad, the raconteur, leave out those stories? He did include one story about the poor Hindu man who came to Momin asking help in locating a package with money and jewellery that had been stolen.

Azad goes on to say that he received stories like this one and a few others in which Momin’s prowess as an astrologer shone brightly. There were also details about Momin’s pupils that he omitted:

“A gentleman’s letter with this and similar stories reached me. In the letter, many secrets of astrology are sparkling like stars and details of his pupils are also recorded. But I, Azad, am reluctant to include those [stories and details]. Forgive me, we are living in different times, people will say that I was writing a tazkirah of poets and began writing a tazkirah of astrologers instead.”

Fortunately for us, Azad did include a description of Momin’s persona; this description, presumably provided by Hali, became the basis of Farhatullah Beg’s vivid description in Dehli Ki Aakhri Shama. Here is the description that Azad wrote in Aab-i-Hayat:

“Colourful personality. Colourful temperament. Elegant dress sense. Tall stature. Fair complexion with a green hue [sabzah rang]. A head full of long curly hair. He would constantly run his fingers through the hair, as if combing it. Wore an angarkha made of mulmul, and pajamas with wide bottoms. The pajamas had a red belt for the drawstring [nefah].”

While Azad omitted stories about Momin’s prowess in astrology, he did include stories [latifah] about the poet’s extraordinarily sharp mind and intelligence. He admits that Momin was a master at composing chronograms; he gives many examples of this expertise.

I noticed that Azad does not get into Momin’s love affairs, his failed first marriage and his unabashed realism in sharing romantic entanglements through masnavis (long narrative poems). At one point, Azad makes an off-the-cuff remark that, for Momin, writing poetry was a form of enjoyment like astrology and chess:

“Just as chess was a kind of entertainment for him, so was astrology, ramal [fortune-telling] and poetry; he considered poetry as a means of pleasing his heart.”

In writing Aab-i-Hayat, Azad wanted to preserve a culture and its literary output that he felt was being outpaced by “modernity”. Above all, he wanted to make sure that his ustad Sheikh Ibrahim Zauq’s legacy was given the rightful place in the canon.

Azad divided his so-called history into daurs or eras. The fifth and last daur begins with Nasikh, followed by Mir Khaliq, Atash, Shah Naseer, Zauq and finally Ghalib; Momin was a later addition and Qaim Chandpuri is missing altogether. From the prelude to this era, it seems that Azad was keen to showcase both the classical and the new in poetry. Momin’s ghazals are all about love and that too of the majazi [wordly] kind.

Azad did not regard Momin as a serious poet because he doesn’t quite fit into the straitjacket that Azad designed.

The columnist is professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia in the US. X: @FarooqiMehr

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 4th, 2024

Two weeks ago, I gave you a general overview of the Snow White Aglaonema plant. It belongs to the famous Chinese Evergreens within the Araceae family and is scientifically known as Aglaonema costatum.

It is an ornamental plant, with sharp green-and-white-coloured leaves. Surprisingly, this plant can thrive with minimal care. It requires watering every few days, a handful of any fertiliser, limited pest repellants if required, and no direct sunlight exposure. This makes the plant an ideal solution to decorate one’s home and office, even for those who may lack time.

While growing the plant might sound convenient, it does not mean that one can leave the Snow White plant to grow on its own. The concept of leaving behind a bucket of water standing in the pot is lethal for the plant. While any plant would be on the brink of root rot in such conditions, this can be especially fatal for the Aglaonemas.

The Snow White plant is not grown for its flower or produce. This ornamental plant is primarily grown to beautify the surroundings, while highlighting its beautiful dual-coloured green and white leaves. It is, therefore, very important for any gardener to grow and shape the plant in a manner that it appears bushy and full of leaves.

With the dual-coloured leaves of the popular decorative Aglaonema plant its main attraction, it’s important to shape the plant so that it appears full

However, it is equally important that there is enough aeration, limited crowding in the pot and minimal contact between leaves. This reduces the possibility of any plant infection or pest attack. Pruning techniques come in handy in this case and knowing how to prune the plant, while keeping the newly growing pups, is fundamental.

Although the plant has no thorns, it is always better to wear gloves, whether one is shifting the plant to a bigger container, pruning or even tilling or sifting through the soil. Gloves help the gardener to remain safe from unwanted abrasions, allergies, dermal and nail-related infections. Many gardeners prefer pruning the stem just above the selected leaf node mark. This pushes the plant to produce more leaves from the rest of the stem.

Furthermore, one should regularly remove the brown and dried leaves at the bottom of the main stem, to keep the plant sharp, fresh and beautiful. These wilted, dried leaves can be added to the compost bin or even placed on the container’s soil surface, to act as mulch to extend the moisture-retention duration of the soil.

The flowers also need to be removed, since it is a very common belief associated with the Aglaonema varieties that their flowers are likely to sap the plant’s energy, while reducing its growing speed and capacity to grow larger-sized leaves. As shown in the photograph, the flowers of the Snow White are equally striking and beautiful. It takes a heavy heart to cut off these beauties from the plant.

The low-maintenance, drought-resistant plant has its own set of benefits, apart from the overall beautification of the surroundings. Not only is it considered to be an air purifier, by helping to remove the chemicals and air-pollutants from the breathable air, it is also believed to be a good luck charm for the household.

Regardless of the strikingly beautiful leaves of the Snow White plant drawing one’s attention, the leaves are considered to be poisonous and not fit for consumption, even for animals. Therefore, they should be kept away from the reach of children and pets.

The Snow White plant is not easily available at roadside nurseries and it is relatively expensive, compared to other commonly available ornamental decorative plants. This makes the propagation of its pups, to make new and more plants, economically and aesthetically fulfilling for the grower.

In my next column, I will detail how this can be done easily at home without any major expenditure. The column will also highlight some dos and don’ts for shifting the baby shoots of the Snow White plant to new containers and multiplying the plant for its grower.

Please send your queries and emails to doctree101@hotmail.com. The writer is a physician and a host for the YouTube channel ‘DocTree Gardening’ promoting organic kitchen gardening

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

Hello Auntie,
I am a 21-year-old political science student at a university. I am struggling with internal pressure. I am scoring good grades, but everybody says that you have to be very good at community service, extracurriculars and be socially active. I am not good at these things.

I am also not very stable financially, and it’s very common in society for people not to talk to you unless you have the same societal and financial status as them. That’s why I am not very socially active and don’t like people. However, there is a lot of pressure and I worry: what if I can’t make myself financially independent? What if all of it goes to waste?

I am also not able to focus on the present. I am not able to enjoy today because the weight of parental quarrels and family pressure is crushing me. I have a little amount of money and, whenever I try to spend it on myself, I am overcome by guilt and feel selfish.
What should I do?
In a Pressure Cooker

Dear In a Pressure Cooker,
You’re dealing with a lot of pressure from different directions — academic expectations, social pressures, financial concerns and family dynamics. You need to cut yourself some slack and acknowledge how you are feeling.

‘I’m Worried I Won’t Make It’

While extracurricular activities and social connections can be beneficial, they are not the only things that define success. You are already excelling academically, which is a big achievement. In the meantime, consider what your strengths are and try to build on them. You don’t necessarilyneed to enroll in expensive courses and activities. Look for opportunities that align more closely with your interests and values rather than what everyone else is doing. You could volunteer in an area that matters to you or join clubs or groups in university that interest you.

It is also completely normal to worry about financial independence, especially when you feel a lot of pressure to succeed. It takes time to build a career and achieve financial stability. Focus on developing skills and experiences that will help you in the long run, and be patient with yourself as you work towards your goals.

As for your family dynamics, try to find ways to communicate your feelings to your family. If not, find a mentor or friend who can provide you the support you need. It might help to set boundaries with your family in order to protect your mental health. You may also want to find a quiet space in your house where you can study or unwind.

Self-care is not selfish; it is essential. Spending a little money on yourself or pursuing a hobby can be a valuable investment in your well-being. Find small ways to care for yourself, whether it’s taking a walk, reading a book or enjoying a favourite hobby.

In the meantime, if you can afford professional therapy, do go for it. Therapists can provide a safe space to explore your feelings and help you develop coping strategies. Sometimes educational institutions offer counselling services for students, so check if you have this option.

It is important to remind yourself frequently that you are doing the best you can under challenging circ*mstances. Go easy on yourself and acknowledge that it’s okay to feel the way you do. Life has its ups and downs, and you’re learning and growing through this experience.

Take things one day at a time, and trust that you’re capable of navigating these challenges. I wish you the best of luck.

Disclaimer: If you or someone you know is in crisis and/or feeling suicidal, please go to your nearest emergency room and seek medical help immediately.

Auntie will not reply privately to any query. Please send concise queries to: auntieagni@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

The taco is the Mexican equivalent of the paratha roll: ubiquitous, the ultimate street food that is easy-to-make, and the perfect oomph for that ever-elusive chatpata flavour.

How old tacos are is a topic of contention among food historians — there is anthropological evidence that indigenous people ate a version of fish tacos in the valley of Mexico. Dishes similar to tacos were also known to exist in pre-Columbian societies — before the brutal colonisation of the country by the Spanish.

The word ‘taco’ could also be rooted in the indigenous Nahuatl [Aztec] word ‘tlhaco’, meaning half or middle. Other food historians argue, however, that tacos were invented in the 18th century as a worker snack by silver miners in Mexico.

Regardless of its origins, the taco has been shaped and influenced by immigration — various regional and international influences have resulted in different types of tacos. The popular taco al pastor, for example, was invented by Lebanese immigrants to Mexico, who were probably inspired by the shawarma.

The Mexican equivalent of the paratha roll is the perfect light snack for the summers

FISH, CHICKEN OR SHRIMP TACOS

Tacos are quick to make, light on the tummy and can be a snack or a meal — perfect for these hot summers. The best part about tacos is that you can add or subtract any filling and you can’t go wrong. It’s all about adding some delicious vegetables, a protein filling (or not) and adding that extra zing with some salsa or chutney.

Don’t feel up to having meat? Just stuff it with extra vegetables. Craving something meaty? You have your pick of fish, chicken, shrimp or beef (recipes for three of these are given below). Don’t have the time to make tortillas? Just use store-bought ones or substitute with roti.

INGREDIENTS

For the tortillas (makes 10)
2 cups white or wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
¼ cup unsalted butter
¾ cup warm water

FOR THE CHICKEN FILLING

2 pounds chicken thighs, boneless and skinless
1.5 teaspoons or to-taste salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons chilli powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
½ teaspoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon minced ginger/garlic
4 tablespoons lemon juice
4 tablespoons oil

FOR THE FISH FILLING

1½ pound fish fillets (any kind of white fish will do), cut into 4-inch-by-1-inch pieces
1½ teaspoons black pepper
1½ teaspoons or to-taste salt
2 teaspoons minced ginger/garlic

FOR THE FISH BATTER

1 cup white or chickpea/besan flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon or to-taste salt
1 teaspoon chilli powder
½ teaspoon cumin seeds/ zeera
Water, as needed

FOR THE PRAWN FILLING

1 pound shrimp, deveined and peeled
1 teaspoon or to-taste salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon chilli powder
½ teaspoon chilli flakes
1 tablespoon minced ginger-garlic
1 tablespoon finely chopped coriander
1 lemon
2 tablespoons oil

FOR THE COLESLAW

2½ cups shredded cabbage
1 teaspoon or to-taste salt
¼ cup spicy mayonnaise (mix some chilli sauce with the mayo to make your own)
½ cup finely chopped cilantro
2 tablespoons lemon juice

FOR THE TACOS

10 tortillas
Coleslaw
Salsas and chutneys of your choice
Fish, chicken or shrimp filling
Queso Fresco or any other cheese of your choice
1 small onion, finely sliced
1 tomato, finely chopped
1 bell pepper, finely chopped
1 avocado, sliced (if available)
½ cup pickled radishes
½ cup finely chopped cilantro
½ cup finely chopped mint
10 lemon wedges

METHOD

1. Make the dough for the tortillas. These can be made with either wheat or white flour — depending on your preference. Mix all the dry ingredients together. Then add the oil a little at a time while stirring. Add half the water and mix well. Then add the rest of the water and keep on mixing till dry crumbs form. Keep on mixing till a dough forms. Add more water as needed/ if the mixture is too dry.

2. Knead the dough a few times. Stretch the dough, fold it, press it down and repeat. Form the dough into a ball. Split and roll into 10 small round pieces.

3. Set aside for half an hour to two hours in a metal dish or bowl — this will allow the dough to rise.

4. Make the fish/ chicken/ prawn filling.

5. Making the chicken filling: In a bowl, mix all the ingredients and cover the chicken thighs with it. Set aside in a fridge for an hour or two, so that it marinates well. Add oil, as needed, to a frying pan. Fry the marinated chicken well for a few minutes on each side. Put aside to cool. Then chop into small pieces or shred well.

6. Making the fish filling: Rub the seasoning on the fish fillets. Set aside to marinate. Make the batter: add the seasonings and the flour and mix well. Add the water and stir until a thick paste forms. Dip the seasoned fish fillets in the batter and fry them. Set aside to cool.

7. Making the prawn filling: Add all the spices, the ginger-garlic paste and the chopped coriander. Cut the lemon in half and squeeze the juice over the prawns (make sure to remove the seeds). Add the oil. Mix everything well. For the best results, leave prawns in marinade for 24 hours or overnight. Stir fry the shrimp and set aside.

8. Cooking the tortillas: Lightly dust a rolling surface and a rolling pin with flour. Then, roll out each of the dough balls evenly in all directions with the pin. Heat up a tawa or griddle. When it is very hot, place the tortilla on it and cook on each side for 30-45 seconds or until brown spots appear (it’ll look similar to what a roti looks like when done).

9. Toss all the ingredients together to make the coleslaw. Chop all the vegetables and place in separate plates.

10. To make the tacos, simply add the protein filling to the tortilla. Add the vegetable toppings. Spoon over the cheese, coleslaw and any chutneys or sauces as desired. Squeeze some lemon juice on the taco filling. Fold the tortilla. Bend to the taco and enjoy!

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

According to the German professor of law Ulrich K. Preuss, there are four ‘ideal types’ of constitutions. Preuss’ study focuses on what nature of judiciary such constitutions produce. The ‘types’ are named by me.

Type 1 constitution is the outcome of a revolutionary upheaval. This constitution is designed to allow ‘the people’s will’ to impose its political and social ideals upon the whole society. Prominent examples in this regard are constitutions authored during or soon after the 18th century revolution in France, and the Russian revolution in 1917.

There is no place for a constitutional court in such constitutions, nor do they give any other courts the power to interpret the constitution. The judiciary’s sole function in such constitutions is to shape a new polity and strengthen it by implementing ‘people’s will’, as defined by those leading ‘the people.’ These are usually new power elites that have replaced the old elites.

Type 2 constitution is the result of strife between varied ethnic groups who have all been slotted in a single nation-state. The constitution and the judiciary in this regard attempt to shape a collective and consensual nationalism through mediative mechanisms and interventions to keep the peace between the groups.

Type 3 constitution is dictated by conquerors and adopted by the conquered. The most prominent examples in this regard are Japan and Germany, who were defeated by the Western allies in the Second World War and then coerced to adopt constitutions that embodied the ‘constitutional spirit’ of Western democracies. The judiciary under such constitutions works more or less in the same manner as it does in Western democracies.

While Pakistan’s Constitution was formulated with the intention of shaping a collective identity by mediating between varied ethnic groups, it now faces existential challenges as some judges seek revolutionary roles

Type 4 constitution is the outcome of an evolutionary process, in which a country peacefully transforms to become a democracy. The judiciary in this case exercises a process-oriented use of law to aid the transition and then strengthen it.

So what type is Pakistan’s Constitution? I would say, Type 2. Launched in 1973, it came on the heels of a fallen authoritarian regime and a vicious civil war in the erstwhile East Pakistan that had a Bengali majority. The state lost the war and East Pakistan became Bangladesh.Yet, what remained of the country still had multiple ethnic groups, the largest being Punjabi.

Smaller groups blamed the ‘Punjabi elites’ for undermining and usurping the rights of the Bengalis and causing the ‘East Pakistan debacle.’ And, although the country’s population was overwhelmingly Muslim, these were divided on sectarian and sub-sectarian lines. Each one had a history of being theologically antagonistic towards the other.

However, it was ethnic fissures that had triggered the civil war in 1971, which the framers of the 1973 constitution were most conscious of. So the constitution is largely a mediative document which expresses an understanding of Pakistani nationalism that was consensually formed by the representatives of various sections of society.

However, unable to fully come to terms with the fear of this consensus collapsing (and along with it the federation), the authors of the constitution put Islam at its core, believing that a stronger emphasis on the country’s majority faith (through official media and curriculums) would weaken the importance of ethnic identities and strengthen Pakistani nationalism.

Pakistan did not face any further fragmentation. But, by the 1990s, as ethnic turmoil somewhat began to recede, it was replaced by sectarian and sub-sectarian violence, and violence by Islamist militants. The constitution had no answer, because it had continued to be ‘Islamised’ across the 1980s and 1990s — so much so that a large part of it became an unabashed expression of ‘theo-democracy’ (fusion of theocracy and democracy).

The military establishment (ME) was squarely on board this project and, therefore, so was the judiciary, which had always willingly legitimised the ME’s political whims. This went on till 2022, when the project’s last major marionette, Imran Khan, had a falling out with the ME. The ME became concerned by his absurdist/populist style of politics. By then, the country was not only being impacted by sectarian, sub-sectarian and Islamist violence, but ethnic fissures began to open up again and the economy started to reel.

The ME partnered with major anti-Khan parties to formulate a plan to reverse the process. But this was also the moment that the judiciary (or at least most judges) decided to become ‘independent’. What timing, indeed. Whereas judges such as the current chief justice dove into the Constitution to find a resolution, others began to climb the populist Khan’s shoulders to announce their independence.

Though conscious of the Constitution’s theo-democratic nature, the chief justice seems to be the clearest in constitutionally contextualising political cases. On the other end, many of his colleagues are being criticised by the anti-Khan lot for ‘rewriting’ the Constitution to aid Khan (as a way to rebuke the ME).

According to the American jurist Stone Sweet, such scenarios emerge when legislative politics becomes ‘judicialised’. This limits the powers of the legislative. Politics moves from the floor of the parliament to the apex courts. Preuss uses the word ‘juristocracy’ to explain the shifting of the powers of the government to the courts.

The former Hungarian president and lawyer Laszlo Solyom wrote that sometimes judges take it upon themselves to initiate actions that come under the jurisdiction of the parliament. Therefore, according to Solyom, the motto ‘we the people’ is replaced with ‘we the court.’

The Pakistani Constitution may seem dated about certain issues and requires revisions, but it is quite clear about who best manifests the ‘will of the people’: the parliament. Yet, we are now seeing certain judges waving their fists and declaring thattheywill impose the will of the people. We are still the kind of country that produced the Type 2 constitution. If it is to be rewritten in any way, the rewriting can only be done by the parliament as a consensual exercise. Not by the courts.

Instead of applying the 1973 Constitution’s inherent mediative mechanisms to amicably resolve issues of a deeply polarised polity, some judges have decided to pose as revolutionaries and that too (allegedly) at the behest of a controversial populist. A constitutional collapse is now very much a possibility, unless these judges stop undermining the current parliament, no matter how much they detest it and feel it is not manifesting the will of the people.

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

The Greek term cherophobia [fear of rejoicing] describes the fear of participating in activities that would be fun or make one happy. It does not describe a depressed person but is an irrational fear that, perhaps by embracing a happy moment, something tragic will follow.

Some feel guilt at being happy when so many are suffering. For some, happiness is an immoral emotion. Calvinists taught children that “to be happy is to be doing wrong.” Some artists and poets fear being happy will lead to a loss of creativity. The Japanese fear that being happy will make them inattentive to their surroundings and lead to a loss of control over their emotions.

And then there is Bhutan, which in 1729 declared: “The purpose of the government is to provide happiness to its people. If it cannot provide happiness, there is no reason for the government to exist.” In the 1970s, Bhutan’s king introduced gross national happiness

(GNH) as being more important than gross domestic product (GDP), as happy people are productive people.

Bhutan’s initiative inspired many countries who only equated well-being with GDP. Even the renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs established the Global Happiness Council. In 2013, the United Nations declared March 20 as the International Day of Happiness.

For some countries, national happiness is a goal worth striving for. The Pakistani state has ignored the importance of a happy populace — but that does not mean that the masses lack cheer

Sociologist Claire Wallace asks, “If money doesn’t make us happy, what does?” Instead of the usual work, family, housing, health paradigm, Wallace suggests socio-economic security, social cohesion, social inclusion and social empowerment.

These factors resonate in the context of Pakistan, which values ‘deep social ties and networks of mutual support.’ Adequate income is a subjective measure: a low wage earner is happy if he can buy his little girl a plastic doll; a wealthy man is happy if he can afford a booking at a hotel for his son’s wedding.

Being denied social inclusion is a fundamental factor in the sense of deprivation experienced by the migrants of 1947 or the province of Balochistan. The whole country feels disempowered, both internally as well as globally, leading to demotivation and a deep-seated despondency.

Pakistanis may not be a happy people, but they are a cheerful people. No gathering of college students is complete without someone with a half decent voice being coerced to sing to a beat drummed out on a wooden desk. Villagers in Hazara gather to harvest grass for winter feed for animals to the beat of a drum and shehnai, accompanied by dancers and folk singers, to make the work less burdensome. Pakistanis know how to entertain themselves, and entertainment is an important conduit for happiness.

Entertainment can be cathartic or a temporary respite from stress. It connects people, refreshes the mind and creates a space for reflection and creativity. Large numbers of people attend ghazal or qawwali evenings, mushairas, weeklong Sufi urs celebrations or village festivals.

Pakistanis love to eat out at the many food streets or chic restaurants. Games such as kushti, kabaddi, kite flying, kanchay, street cricket, gili danda, kho kho and barf pani have helped adults and children from village to city snatch moments of happiness in an otherwise gruelling life.

Cinema, once an essential part of life, has been replaced by television dramas. A whole generation grew up with comedy shows such as Fifty-Fifty, Alif Noon and Loose Talk, or the side-splitting satire of Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi, Umar Shareef and Anwar Maqsood. At the worst of times, social media is flooded with satirical memes that turn helplessness into the illusion of empowerment.

While people find their own forms of entertainment at every possible occasion, the state maintains a deafening silence towards leisure and entertainment, with the exception of the PIA Arts Academy that shared Pakistani dance and music across the globe from 1973-1977, and a few sporadic attempts at developing culture policies that were never implemented.

Christophe Jaffrelot, in his book The Pakistan Paradox, presents an explanation that differs from the usual reasons given for the status of entertainment, such as the shock of Partition, the pressure to focus on economic stability, or religious reservations. He links it to the end of the Mughal Empire, whose vibrant state-endorsed culture was ejected by the British Raj.

The displaced and beleaguered Muslim elite became “those having a Mughal past losing to those with a British future.” The loss of empire was equated with years of ‘dissolute’ kings entertaining themselves with dance, music and poetry gatherings — reinforced by films such as Shatranj Ke Khilarri, Mughal-i-Azam and Umrao Jaan Ada — ignoring the great administrative achievements of the Mughals.

There continues to be a reluctance to provide spaces, facilities or funding for healthy public entertainment and the arts. The government has no track record of caring for the well-being of the people, only the fiscal progress of the country. It ignores the connection between a happy nation and progress.

Perhaps the ones who are afraid of happiness in Pakistan are not its people but the government.

Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist.
She may be reached at
durriyakazi1918@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

The concept of perception is a universal force, influencing everyone regardless of their background. This theme is central to ‘Heart of the Matter,’ a three-person exhibition that opened at Canvas Gallery on July 23.

Featuring Safdar Ali, Faheem Abbas and Munawar Ali Syed, the exhibition brings together artists from diverse areas of Pakistan with varied educational backgrounds and artistic practices. Despite these differences, their work converges on a shared exploration of perception and meaning.

The importance of perception in art is eloquently discussed by art critic, novelist, painter and poet John Berger in his seminal essay, ‘Ways of Seeing.’ Berger challenges readers to reconsider how they view art, advertising and media, urging a deeper reflection on how images shape our understanding of culture and society.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by Ali’s captivating installation of mini terracotta domes. Titled Ninnanway [99 in Urdu], the piece references the 99 names of Allah and prompts a moment of contemplation. Ali — a multidisciplinary artist from Tando Jam, Sindh, whose academic journey includes a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and an M.Phil in Art and Design from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, completed this year — draws inspiration from his

Three artists with distinct styles explore ideas of perception and meaning

own confusion, once, in distinguishing between a mosque and a temple because of their similar dome-like structures.

His work challenges fixed interpretations and invites viewers to engage in a dialogue about the fluidity of symbolism and perception. Ali’s large-format digital prints, such as Samajhne Mein Kuchh Reh Gaya [Lost in Translation] and Perfume Caps, further explore these themes by presenting familiar forms

in unexpected contexts, encouraging viewers to question their assumptions.

Abbas, another featured artist, transitioned from a career in chartered accountancy to the visual arts. A graduate of Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, with a gold medal in BFA-Visual Art, Abbas’s recent works consist of seven small-sized concrete objects in white cement.

These pieces featuring basic shapes, as seen in the artworks Fish, Bird, Pomegranate, and House, exemplify Abbas’s ability to transcend conventional genres. His refined subtlety, sophistication and expert use of minimalistic elements result in a remarkable level of artistic expression.

Syed, the senior artist in the trio, is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator based in Karachi. With a BFA from the National College of Arts (1999) and an MA in Art Education from Beaconhouse National University (2017), Syed’s works for ‘Heart of the Matter’ include the series Talash-e-Gumshuda [Search for the Missing] featuring meticulously crafted metal wire sculptures.

These wall-mounted pieces resemble puzzles, inviting viewers to decipher the overlapping shapes. Syed deconstructs mundane and functional objects to transcend traditional dichotomies such as structure versus agency, and the sacred versus the profane. His artist’s statement reveals his intent to challenge these dichotomies through his work.

Additionally, Syed’s linear sculp­tures highlight the environmental crisis. By juxtaposing animals, birds, everyday objects, toys and furniture, his work underscores the urgency of recognising the chaotic state of our world. The inclusion of a young toddler in several sculptures emphasises the impact of environmental degradation on future generations. Through this compelling blend of elements, Syed’s work calls for immediate awareness and action against the environmental turmoil we face.

‘Heart of the Matter’ successfully brings together the distinct yet interconnected works of Ali, Abbas and Syed. Their exploration of perception and meaning invites viewers to reflect on the complexities of interpretation and the urgent issues affecting our world.

This exhibition not only showcases their artistic talents but also prompts a deeper understanding of the cultural, religious, social and environmental contexts in which we live.

‘Heart of the Matter’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from July 23-August 1, 2024

Rumana Husain is a writer, artist and educator. She is the author of two coffee-table books on Karachi, and has authored and illustrated 75 children’s books

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

Zainab Bibi* noticed her infant son was often listless. He barely cried and was too weak to move his limbs about. He was rapidly losing weight, had a sallow complexion and could hardly drink the diluted milk his mother would try to feed him. It was time to take him to the hospital.

The doctor took one look at Zainab’s son and told her he was malnourished and at extreme risk of stunting, or worse, child wasting — the most evident and life-threatening form of malnourishment, when the child’s weight is too low for their height.

He was immediately prescribed the Wawa Mum sachet, a lipid-nutrient supplement launched by the World Food Programme in the wake of the 2010 floods in Pakistan. Zainab was able to acquire sachets through a Benazir Noshunuma Centre, a programme to increase health and nutrition services under the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP).

“His energy levels have changed so much. He wants to eat. He wants to play. I couldn’t even imagine he’d be where he is just a few months ago,” Zainab Bibi tells Eos. Her son will turn two later this year.

That Pakistan has an unacceptably high rate of child stunting is not news. There is a crisis marring children’s nutritional levels which, while not unnoticed, remains pervasive. Over 40 percent of children in Pakistan are stunted and the country ranks third in the world for this tragic and entirely preventable phenomenon.

The abysmally high rate of malnourishment and stunting among Pakistani children is alarming, with the situation made worse by ad hoc interventions. Now, an ambitious project is attempting to remedy the problems of fragmentation and unsustainable financing…

According to the 2018 National Nutrition Survey, an estimated 45 percent of all deaths of children under five years of age are associated with malnutrition, stunting and wasting, indicating the alarming levels of risk to Pakistan’s children.

THE COST OF STUNTING

The human cost of stunting aside, in the long run, the country will be impacted by high healthcare expenses, illnesses, deaths, decreased physical productivity and impaired cognitive learning, thus perpetuating a cycle of poverty and underdevelopment — adding up to a $7.6 billion burden on the economy.

Stunted children rarely make for productive workers in the future and the cost to Pakistan’s human capital is estimated to be nearly $2.24 billion a year.

Champions for better children’s nutrition (and there have been many in government) have long tried to frame it as an investment in a country’s future. Dr Zulfiqar Bhutta, a leading expert in children and public health, famously said that “a healthy population cohort of children are also your scientists of tomorrow.”

Better human capital means a better economy. With every $1 spent on nutrition, a state can expect $16 in return. It remains one of the most cost-effective drivers of development.

Considering the scale of the problem, remedying child malnutrition and wasting will take years, if not decades. It requires patience and a willingness to forsake immediate credit.

This gap will only widen if Pakistan keeps looking at nutrition as an ad hoc, developmental project or a humanitarian issue, inconsistently funded through short-term projects that collapse the moment its leader moves to a new position or the most recent natural disaster has passed.

As with most crises, a consistent multi-year financial strategy is a necessary prerequisite to improving child and maternal nutrition, to avoid relapse and help children outgrow the menace.

THE CURSE OF AD HOCISM

The nutrition sector receives insignificant budgetary allocations, with up to 90 percent of maternal and child-wasting funding coming from humanitarian donors. Across Pakistan, provinces spend less than $4 per person on healthcare.

In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, spending on maternal and child care is less than one percent of the health budget. The provincial health department’s ‘Multi Sectoral Nutrition Strategy’ bluntly acknowledges that “until recently, nutrition has not been given its due place and is generally considered the business of all and the responsibility of none.”

This diagnosis provides insight into the arbitrary nature of most nutrition interventions. Instead of being a consistent line item in the health budget, financing ends up fragmented and responsive to ad hoc programming.

This leads to inefficiencies in the planning process, making supplies of therapeutic foods unreliable. Worse still, it belies the well-meaning intentions of many in the public sector that are working tirelessly to make this an issue of the past.

STRUCTURED SOLUTIONS

Donors, cognisant of this, have been pitching in to solve the problem, but this support also varies.

Unicef’s Child Nutrition Fund (CNF) offers to match any budgetary allocation made specifically by the government to overcome malnutrition. Its conditions are that the government’s budget be allocated and the procurement of the therapeutic foods is done through CNF. Provinces could double their funds and not be limited by the financial constraints, as they have often been in the past.

Pakistan was amongst the first subscribers of the Child Nutrition Fund in 2022, but most provinces have not been able to utilise it. Advocacy, at the highest level, for nutrition-specific interventions is key to get the interest and willingness to take up these initiatives.

Investment in nutrition can be a powerful catalyst for achieving a range of global health and development goals. Improved coordination between donors, federal and provincial health departments, bolstered by research experts, could collectively lead to more efficient allocation of resources, and healthier children.

As an encouraging step in the right direction, the Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives and its Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) secretariat in the federal government launched the Pakistan Nutrition Initiative, or PANI,

which has a budget of Rs8.5 billion (about $31 million) and targets 36 districts burdened by stunting.

The project, launched in September last year, brings various projects such as the National Nutrition Action Programme and the Benazir Noshunuma Programme under one umbrella platform, working to address issues of fragmentation and unsustainable financing.

PANI recognises that a multisectoral approach is necessary to address Pakistan’s child malnutrition. It is well-designed and emphasises iron and folic acid supplements. It also introduces a critical monitoring and evaluation component.

While it is currently billed as a three-year programme, PANI has the opportunity to be reconfigured as a permanently institutionalised programme, offers a promising future to Pakistan’s children and sets a precedent for sustainable health interventions for the region.

Zainab Bibi is a fortunate woman, as is her son. With consistent and meaningful effort, Pakistan could turn them into chapter one of the story of how it overcame this crisis.

**Name changed to protect identity*

Rimmel Mohydin is an associate director at CERP, a research-driven organisation. X: @Rimmel_Mohydin

Anum Irfan is a research associate at CERP

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

Until a year ago, the old hockey ground at Khadda Market in densely-packed Karachi’s upscale Defence locality was mostly a deserted venue, sporadically rented out for tape-ball cricket matches and, of all things, weddings.

Now, it’s unarguably the city’s most popular multisport arena, the Legends Arena, with its pay-as-you-go model attracting an average of 750 visitors on weekdays, with the facility’s management saying that the number crosses the one thousand mark on weekends.

While the arena offers various sports, including football and cricket — albeit in a smaller space — as well as tennis, volleyball and throwball, its biggest crowd puller is a sport that was unheard of in Pakistan until a year ago: padel.

WHAT IS PADEL?

In simple terms, padel is a combination of tennis and squash. The court is about three-quarters of the size of a tennis court, with the game most commonly played in doubles. The court has a net in the middle, but it is enclosed with walls on the sides and at the back, which are part glass and part metal mesh.

Padel is arguably the fastest growing racquet sport in the world. And it seems to be growing in popularity by leaps and bounds here in Pakistan as well …

The serve is underarm, with the server required to let the ball bounce once and then hit it before or at waist height. As in most racquet sports, the serves are delivered diagonally and the ball must land in the opposition’s service box.

The ball has to bounce before hitting any of the side walls, though players can return the shot on the volley, except on serve, and even after it ricochets off the side or back walls. The scoring is the same as in tennis, with matches played as best of three sets.

The game is played with a bat, or paddle, which is perforated and smaller than a tennis racquet, although it weighs slightly more. The ball has a lower pressure and slower bounce compared to the ones used in tennis.

This makes the game slower in pace and intensity compared to other racquet sports, which is widely believed to be one of the reasons for its popularity, especially among recreational players.

RISING POPULARITY

Fareha, 31, first played padel during a visit to Dubai last year. “It is easy to grasp, helps one stay in shape, and allows players to interact and socialise,” she tells Eos.

Soon after her return, Legends Arena opened its doors and Fareha has been a regular here ever since. “I come here almost every day, except on weekends.”

While courts are available in the morning as well, Fareha prefers to play in the evening, in order to wind down after a long day, and “maintain her physical and mental health.”

But it is not always easy to book a padel court.

Raza Zaidi, a news presenter, tells Eos he had to wait two months for an evening game as “they couldn’t get a booking in the evening.” Since then, the number of courts at the Legends Arena have increased to five, while two others are under construction.

Yousuf Ghaznavi, who is the chief marketing officer at the facility and an avid padel player, says another reason for the game’s popularity is the close proximity between players, making it interactive and social.

“Not everyone who wants to play has a partner, and we have helped people pair up for matches here,” says Ghaznavi. “And we have seen people who started playing together randomly become really good friends.”

Fareha is one of the people who found friends while playing padel. For this, she credits the management at the facility for creating an environment where it was possible. “In our city, mostly members-only clubs have adequate sporting facilities, and where one could play without worrying about the surroundings,” she continues. “But here, the environment is not just safe, but also extremely inclusive.”

A look around the arena, particularly in the evening, illustrates Fareha’s point. On one padel court, a mixed doubles match goes on; at another, a woman in a burqa trades shots with another in a tank top. On the adjacent futsal pitch, a bunch of young boys are busy with their match, while

next to them, a girl’s football team is holding a practice session. On the cricket pitch, it seems like a boisterous family affair;

while joggers, and the odd sprinter, go around the track.

WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

The first padel court is believed to have been constructed at the resort residence of one Enrique Corcuera, a wealthy businessman in Mexico, in 1969.

Depending on the account, he either did not have enough space for a tennis court or he wanted to experiment: either on the various racquet sports he had encountered on his travels in the United States of America or on froton, a game that is played by striking a ball on to a wall with bare hands.

In the seventies, either Corcuera or one of his friends brought the game to their native Spain, where it has now enjoyed decades of popularity. It also found favour in other Spanish-speaking countries, especially Argentina and Uruguay. In 1991, representatives from the padel associations of the three countries came together to form the International Padel Federation (FIP).

While the sport was gaining in popularity, its popularity in Europe skyrocketed during the pandemic, amidst a ban on contact sports. The end of the pandemic provided another surge, with the game becoming the rage in Gulf countries.

Last year, Qatar Sports Investment (QSI), the owner of French football club Paris Saint-Germain, acquired the World Padel Tour, the official international circuit, to merge it with the QSI-backed Premier Padel circuit. The influx of money and sponsorships has seen a growth in the number of tournaments, prize money and players.

There are reportedly 25 million players globally, spread over 110 countries. The FIP is targeting recognition from the International Olympic Committee to have the sport become part of the Games by 2032.

WILL IT CATCH ON?

Currently, the demand for padel courts in Karachi far outstrips the supply. This is despite the sport being on the steep side.

A one-hour session at the Legends Arena costs Rs5,000 in the morning, and Rs7,000 in the evening. Split four ways, it comes down to Rs1,500 per head. This cost includes racquet and ball rental, although players prefer to buy their own racquet.

The racquets start from Rs25,000 and then the prices increase along with quality. Similarly, a box of three decent quality padel balls costs Rs2,500, with balls starting to lose bounce after two to four matches.

Developing and managing the court is equally expensive. The net, turf as well as the glass for the sidewalls is imported. According to Ghaznavi, it takes up to Rs15 million to build a padel court that meets international standards. “Even if materials are sourced locally, it would still cost close to 10 million rupees,” he tells Eos.

Despite the cost, Legends Arena continue to scale up their facility in Defence. It also manages two padel courts at the Jahangir Khan Squash Complex, and has set up padel courts at two members-only clubs, the Sindh Club and the Karachi Gymkhana.

Meanwhile, at least one padel facility has already opened in Lahore, while another is expected to open soon in Islamabad. Even the Legends Arena has plans to expand to multiple cities.

But demand has to keep pace with the investment and those supporting this sport have to ensure that it doesn’t reach a saturation point.

Sweden is a cautionary tale in that regard, where the padel craze saw the number of courts go from 300 to 3,500 between 2018 and 2021. Now, padel centres in the Nordic country are being turned into warehouses. Last year, at least 90 padel-related companies in Sweden filed for bankruptcy, according to data from credit reference agency Creditsafe.

This is something that facilities like Legends Arena, being the pioneers of padel in the country, need to be wary of.

The writer is a member of staff.
X: @hussainydada

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

Imagine a future where your phone pings with a message that your dead father’s “digital immortal” bot is ready. This promise of chatting with a virtual version of your loved one — perhaps through a virtual reality (VR) headset — is like stepping into a sci-fi movie, both thrilling and a bit eerie.

As you interact with this digital dad, you find yourself on an emotional rollercoaster. You uncover secrets and stories you never knew, changing how you remember the real person.

This is not a distant, hypothetical scenario. Thedigital afterlife industryis rapidly evolving. Several companies promise to create virtual reconstructions of deceased individuals, based on their digital footprints.

From artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and virtual avatars to holograms, this technology offers a strange blend of comfort and disruption. It may pull us into deeply personal experiences that blur the lines between past and present, memory and reality.

As the digital afterlife industry grows, it raises significant ethical and emotional challenges. These include concerns about consent, privacy and the psychological impact on the living.

An eerie ‘digital afterlife’ is no longer science fiction. So how do we navigate the risks?

What is the digital afterlife industry?

VR and AI technologies are making virtual reconstructions of our loved ones possible. Companies in this niche industry use data from social media posts, emails, text messages and voice recordings, to create digital personas that can interact with the living.

Although still niche, the number of players in thedigital afterlife industryisgrowing.

HereAfterallows users to record stories and messages during their lifetime, which can then be accessed by loved ones posthumously.MyWishesoffers the ability to send pre-scheduled messages after death, maintaining a presence in the lives of the living.

Hanson Roboticshas created robotic busts that interact with people using the memories and personality traits of the deceased.

Project Decembergrants users access to so-called “deep AI” to engage in text-based conversations with those who have passed away.

Generative AI also plays a crucial role in the digital afterlife industry. These technologies enable the creation of highly realistic and interactive digital personas. But the high level of realism may blur the line between reality and simulation. This may enhance the user experience, but may also cause emotional and psychological distress.

A technology ripe for misuse

Digital afterlife technologies may aid thegrieving processby offering continuity and connection with the deceased. Hearing a loved one’s voice or seeing their likeness may provide comfort and help process the loss.

For some of us, these digital immortals could be therapeutic tools. They may help us to preserve positive memories and feel close to loved ones, even after they have passed away.

But for others, the emotional impact may be profoundly negative, exacerbating grief rather than alleviating it. AI recreations of loved ones have the potential to cause psychological harm if the bereaved ends up having unwanted interactions with them. It’s essentially being subjected to a “digital haunting.”

Othermajor issuesandethical concernssurrounding this tech include consent, autonomy and privacy.

For example, the deceased may not have agreed to their data being used for a “digital afterlife.”

There’s also the risk of misuse and data manipulation. Companies could exploit digital immortals for commercial gain, using them to advertise products or services.

Digital personas could be altered to convey messages or behaviours the deceased would never have endorsed.

We need regulation

To address concerns around this quickly emerging industry, we need to update our legal frameworks. We need to address issues such as digital estate planning, who inherits the digital personas of the deceased and digital memory ownership.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)reco­gnisespost-mortemprivacy rights, butfaces challenges in enforcement.

Social media platforms control deceased users’ data access, often against heirs’ wishes, with clauses like “no right of survivorship” complicating matters. Limited platform practices hinder the GDPR’s effectiveness. Comprehensive protection demands reevaluating contractual rules, aligning with human rights.

The digital afterlife industry offers comfort and memory preservation, but raises ethical and emotional concerns. Implementing thoughtful regulations and ethical guidelines can honour both the living and the dead, to ensure digital immortality enhances our humanity.

What can we do?

Researchers have recommended several ethical guidelines and regulations. Some recommendations include: obtaining informed and documented consent before creating digital personas from people before they die age restrictions to protect vulnerable groups clear disclaimers to ensure transparency and strong data privacy and security measures.

Drawing from ethical frameworks in archaeology,a 2018 studyhas suggested treating digital remains as integral to personhood, proposing regulations to ensure dignity, especially in re-creation services.

Dialogue between policymakers, industry and academics is crucial for developing ethical and regulatory solutions. Providers should also offer ways for users to respectfully terminate their interactions with digital personas.

Through careful, responsible development, we can create a future where digital afterlife technologies meaningfully and respectfully honour our loved ones.

As we navigate this brave new world, it is crucial to balance the benefits of staying connected with our loved ones against the potential risks and ethical dilemmas.

By doing so, we can make sure the digital afterlife industry develops in a way that respects the memory of the deceased and supports the emotional well-being of the living.

The writer is Associate Professor of Digital Strategy and Data Science at Monash University in Australia

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

Fifty-year-old Zarmina* has been suffering from rheumatism for the last several years, making her mobility extremely difficult and painful. She lives in Shamshaki, a village in Karak, a southern district of the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP).

Despite her age and health, she wakes up in the wee hours every day, often when all her co-villagers are asleep, to fetch water on donkeyback from the well that is two kilometres away.

Zarmina tries to complete this task before the sun rises above the horizon, with one reason being it’s a conservative and tribal society. More importantly, though, if she gets late, it could take hours for her turn to fill the two jerry cans, of 40 litres each.

Each morning, it is a race among the village people to reach the well as early as possible, and it usually takes Zarmina 90 minutes to complete the roundtrip. Some of the villagers have small domestic ponds, roughly around 20 square feet, where they store rainwater for animals, and to wash and clean.

Until a decade ago, this wasn’t the case, says Muhammad Sohail, another villager. “We would fetch water from running streams and wells, which have since dried up,” he tells Eos.

Rising temperatures, forest fires and unpredictable weather events have reduced the once verdant Shamshaki valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Karak district to a shadow of its past, with villagers migrating out in large numbers…

A community organisation even tried installing a tubewell, going down to 500 feet, but water was not available, adds Sohail.

CHANGING LANDSCAPES

Shamshaki was once a lush green valley, surrounded by wild olive jungles, orchards of peach, plums, apple and citrus. Now, only a handful can be found. Two decades ago, nobody could have imagined that the lush green fields — where once wheat, barley, maize and watermelons grew — would turn barren.

It also resulted in an exodus, with only 500 or so villagers now left in Shamshaki, with the majority of its 3,000 inhabitants forced to move elsewhere.

This is despite the three tehsils, or sub-districts, of Karak being rich in minerals. The rugged barren hillocks and mounds of tehsils Banda Dawood Shah and Karak are rich in oil, gas, gypsum and salt. Tehsil Takht-i-Nasrati is mostly a desert, with high temperatures and huge uranium reserves.

The villagers have their own stories and myths about how their fertile lands were rendered useless. Some of them blame the excavation of oil and gas and other minerals for the weather in their area soaring to unbearable degrees. Others blame the increased installation and use of solar panels. One recurring reason that villagers cite is the excessive deforestation, which has considerably changed the average temperature and rainfall ratio.

While the story seems to repeat in every second village in the region, the situation is dire in Karak district which, unlike the rest of the southern districts in KP, does not border any river or water reservoir.

Karak town doesn’t have a water supply, and its roughly 55,000 inhabitants are dependent on water tankers to meet their drinking and other needs. Meanwhile, the groundwater that is available has been declared unfit for drinking, because of the presence of multiple salt minerals, according to Dr Muhammad Nafees, an environmentalist at the University of Peshawar

Syed Kaleem, an expert with the provincial environment protection agency, tells Eos that the materials used in digging and oil extraction have a direct impact on the environment and the processes cause air pollution which, in turn, causes a depletion of the ozone layer, and the resultant rise in temperature.

There are at least four oil and gas exploration sites in Karak, with more in the adjacent districts of Kohat, Hangu and Mianwali, that have made the air quality worse, although there is limited data to quantify the change.

According to a 2012 study by Dr Samreen Baber, a doctoral researcher, the round-the-clock use of gas furnaces increases the local temperature, with the data suggesting that KP witnessed between 0.3 degree Celsius to 1.2 degree Celsius rise in temperatures in the 30 years till 2010.

Worsening the problem is the lack of rain, with data from the regional office of the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) in Peshawar showing extremely unpredictable weather patterns over the last two decades.

COMPOUNDING CRISES

The change in temperature has resulted in multiple challenges for the locals, who have seen their crop yields go down drastically, while others have started to migrate.

“Until a few years ago, we would grow wheat, which would meet our requirements for the whole year,” says Kamran, a schoolteacher in Shamshaki village. “Now, we are lucky to get even a quarter of that,” he tells Eos. It has also impacted cattle breeding; the low precipitation and brutal deforestation has resulted in green pastures turning barren, continues Kamran.

At the same time, there has been an increase in skin-related complications, including a high incidence of cancer cases, including in areas around the uranium extraction plant in Tehsil Takht-i-Nasrati, according to local doctors.

Dr Kashif Kamal is a skin specialist from Karak who currently works at the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, but visits his hometown every weekend, where he also runs a small clinic. He says most cases of skin-related complications and chest allergies are scattered around areas where exploration and mining is taking place.

WHITHER AFFORESTATION?

The ‘Billion Tree Tsunami’ project, launched by the KP government in 2014, and expanded to the national ‘Ten Billion Tree Tsunami’ project by the federal government in 2019, envisioned afforestation of at least 3,000 hectares of land in Karak.

However, the residents of Shamshaki and adjacent villages say they have not witnessed any changes. “Instead, deforestation is on the rise,” says Shamshaki resident Fahim Uddin.

Two major threats to afforestation are forest fires and the ‘timber mafia’, a loose term referring to various groups and individuals involved in the illegal cutting and transportation of trees.

The Billion Tree project also hired ‘nigahbaans’ or ‘protectors’, locals who were paid an amount to protect the forests. During 2016-18, at least 11 nigahbaans were killed in clashes with members of the ‘timber mafia.’

Locals say such criminal elements remain active and thriving, oftentimes with the collusion of authorities.

Salar, another resident of Shamshaki, tells Eos that the families leaving the village often sell their share of the jungle land to these unscrupulous elements. “In one case, the forest of a whole sub-tribe was sold off to them,” he adds.

In the past, there used to be a village committee to oversee the collective forests of different clans. A member from every clan was part of the committee and, if anybody was found guilty of stealing timber, he was punished, charged financially and handed over to the police. “But with the rise of the mafia and the migration of the locals, the committee is no longer functional.”

Karak tehsil mayor Azmat Khattak says that he wants to conserve the forest, but has little to offer in terms of solution except a complete ban on deforestation and timber transport.

Meanwhile, the threat of wildfires remains, with the area suffering from it in summers and in winters as well, when the bushes are dry. This past April, a massive fire engulfed the rainforest in the Shamshaki valley, and hundreds of hectares of wild olive trees were incinerated within 48 hours.

Dr Nafees, the environmentalist at the University of Peshawar, says deforestation is a key reason for the rise in temperature, which also decreases the annual ratio of rainfall. “Forests are the lungs of nature and they absorb carbon dioxide gas,” he tells Eos. “When the green surface is eroded, less carbon dioxide is absorbed and [the ground] also traps heat energy from sun rays. Hence, the overall temperature of a locality is increased,” he explains.

Recently, the southern parts of KP experienced an extreme heatwave, followed by an unexpected late winter snow spell in Karak. Climate expert Syed Kaleem warns that locals will now increasingly deal with uncertain patterns of weather.

The situation is grim and challenging, and yet another reminder that nature deserves its due.g

** Name changed to protect identity*

The writer is an MPhil scholar interested in climate change and the environment. He can be contacted at hussainalikhattak@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024

At the Wana Press Club in South Waziristan in late 2023, a reporter spoke of the need for having a trauma centre for journalists based in what are now the “merged districts” of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. I was researching a report on the state of media in the merged districts of the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and this interview came during what was the last stop in a series of visits to Pakistan’s north-western tribal areas and districts bordering Afghanistan. The journalist said, “The government, both at the provincial and federal level, promised us a trauma centre for the tribal journalists, but nothing came of it.”

It took me back to 2014. That year, the journalism school at the University of Peshawar (UoP) had established one such centre with help from the DW Akadamie, the media development and training centre of the German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle. At the time, the erstwhile Fata areas were still that — a semi-autonomous buffer zone on the border with Afghanistan, governed by the centre and its representatives.

The discriminatory Frontier Crimes Regulations, a legacy of the British era under which the tribal areas were ruled long after Pakistan’s independence, did not allow freedom of speech and assembly, and enforced collective punishment for individual actions. There were no courts or police, no local media and political rights. For more than 70 years of Pakistan’s independence, the people of the region lived without fundamental human rights while citizens in the rest of Pakistan had access to them under the Constitution. The merger of former-Fata areas with KP in 2018 promised to change that.

The trauma centre at the journalism school was built in December 2014, the year and the month that saw the massacre of children at the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar, a devastating culmination to 14 years of a bloody conflict — the so-called ‘War on Terror’ — that befell the region post 9/11. The APS attack, claimed by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), was in retaliation to the military operation, Zarb-e-Azb, against the TTP militants active in North Waziristan. The operation, launched in June that year, displaced close to a million people from the tribal agency, including journalists.

Six years earlier, in 2009, another military operation, Rah-e-Rast, against militants in Swat had displaced 2.2 million in the month of May. At the height of militancy in Swat between 2004 to 2009, detentions, displacement and killing of journalists had been common, as was the debilitating psychological trauma of covering a protracted conflict with widespread death and destruction.

The merger of the former tribal agencies into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018 was meant to usher in a new era of protection and constitutional rights for its citizens after being deprived of them for more than 70 years. But it seems not much has changed for the people of newly merged districts. And the toll on journalists reporting from these frontlines of conflict, caught between pressures from all sides, is the most severe…

To the trauma centre at UoP came journalists suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), both those local to the KP province and others from the neighbouring Fata. A story in Dawn, covering the trauma centre, said this was a region where journalism had become immersed “in the extreme violence and daily threats” of a relentless conflict.

When the trauma centre was launched that December, News Lens, an online news cooperative with which I served as an editor for KP and Balochistan — a province with its own history of a simmering conflict, and where, too, journalists were, are, frequently targeted — did a story to cover its inauguration. In the story, a Peshawar-based journalist, Muhammad Irshad, said that he had “not been able to sleep properly lately.” Irshad said he had been “suffering abnormal sleep patterns due to covering violent incidents day after day.”

A RECURRING NIGHTMARE

Nearly a decade after that inauguration — and five years since the much-hyped merger of former Fata with the rest of KP in 2018 — I turned to a journalist at the Wana Press Club that day and asked a question I knew the answer to only too well, if only because he was not the first person I had spoken to: “Why do you think the journalists in the merged areas need a trauma centre?”

Having had numerous conversations about how the conditions had changed for the media in the wake of the merger, I had little doubt about the legitimacy of the demand for a trauma centre for journalists in the merged areas. By late 2023, the region’s slide back into terrorism was well on its way. It was the year when, according to the East Asia Forum write-up titled ‘Explaining the Resurgence of Terrorist Violence in Pakistan’, the country relived “the scary spectre of 2013” — when terrorist attacks “peaked at nearly four attacks a day, with nearly 2,700 total fatalities.” With a growing incidence of terror attacks after TTP militants were brought back from Afghanistan to “mainstream” them, the spectre of Talibanisation is haunting the region again.

Once again, the border regions of KP are in the news for all the wrong reasons — not that they ever emerged into a peaceful, hopeful place after 9/11. And nowhere is that sense more palpable than in the merged districts, with localised military operations, suicide bombings, targeted killings, extortion by threats and violence, attacks on military and police installations. And the consequent tightening of security and restrictions on civil liberties happening all over again, amidst increasing militarisation of the region.

With journalists at the forefront of living and reporting on the volatile situation, it is the state of the media and journalism in the region that illustrates the immensity of that threat like nothing else. But instead of active and sustained support from media organisations and the authorities, given the situation on the ground, now, as then, local journalists walk the tightrope of a hazardous profession. It is a witches’ brew of hostilities they face, stemming from tribes unhappy with the absence of peace and opportunity, the pro- and anti-state militants active in the region, state institutions, the authorities governing the region and, most of all, journalists’ parent organisations in mainstream media.

Once again, the border regions of KP are in the news for all the wrong reasons. Nowhere is that sense more palpable than in the merged districts, with localised military operations, suicide bombings, targeted killings, extortion, attacks on military and police installations. With journalists at the forefront of living and reporting on the volatile situation, it is the state of the media and journalism in the region that illustrates the immensity of that threat like nothing else.

Tribal journalists insist this “lack of support” from their employer media organisations — a grievance that surfaced in every single interview with journalists — in the face of rampant odds and threats, has directly contributed to their vulnerability in the field, exposing them to harm.

Even though not “hostile” to their workers in the real sense of the word, media organisations’ disregard for the safety of their workers has placed them on the side of “harm”. Just as the race for breaking news and a focus on conflict jeopardised the life and limbs of journalists in the ‘War on Terror’ years, they once again threaten the well-being of journalists during the renewed spike in terrorism-triggered insecurity. And it’s not just the journalists that are at risk, but the very cause of journalism and public interest is imperiled in the region.

Not much has been learnt from the blood-soaked decades of the ‘War on Terror’, whose history is often written in the blood of journalists who died in the line of duty. That war may have morphed in its global context but, for the people — including the journalists in the region — it continues like a recurring nightmare, coming back to haunt the region and its people.

According to the journalist asking for a trauma centre, “Ours is a region amidst another cycle of the ‘War on Terror.’ Bomb blasts and targeted killings have virtually unhinged our minds.”

And then he added something that echoes the predicament of journalists in the region not long ago. He pulled out a strip of sleeping pills from his pocket and, like that journalist in the 2014 News Lens story about the inauguration of the trauma centre at the journalism school, he said, “Sleep has abandoned us.”

LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES

In 2006, when he came to receive us at the Mir Ali market in North Waziristan on a hot summer afternoon, Hayatullah Khan, the journalist from North Waziristan who was slain later that same year, looked more like a gun-toting militant than the friendly tribal journalist I knew.

Both Hayatullah and his brother had around their shoulders that great mower of men in these parts, the AK-47. “Why the gun, Hayatullah?”, I asked him, amazed that he was armed. “The government has told us it can’t provide security to journalists,” he said, adjusting the white cap he always wore on his head. “We are left to our own devices to protect ourselves.”

It was July, an uneasy time, when the memory of several journalists killed in neighbouring South Waziristan was fresh. Usually not the safest of professions anywhere in Pakistan, journalism had turned deadly for reporters who stayed the course in the tribal areas. Others had simply packed up and left for towns in the “settled areas” where they could report on developments in the troubled region from a safe distance.

“Let’s go home,” Hayatullah said, grabbing me by the elbow, pulling us in a hurry out of the little ice cream shop near the bus terminal. It was as if he was fearful of being in a public spot. Quickly, we got into his old but sturdy pick-up truck. His brother got in the back, gun on the ready, vigilantly scanning the landscape, as if expecting a threat to materialise out of the desolation of the dusty plains and villages we were moving through.

As we drove through the market of Mir Ali — one of the three subdivisions of North Waziristan, then, as now, a tense setting for targeted killings, terrorist attacks and military operations — a signboard announced that carrying firearms was prohibited in public places. I asked Hayatullah if his brother went everywhere with him to watch over him. “He has to, I can’t drive and use a gun at the same time, should something go wrong,” he answered.

I asked, “But that means staying with you all the time. Doesn’t he study or work?” “He does,” Hayatullah explained matter-of-factly, “but someone has to take care of us. If it is not me, it has to be him. That’s the way it is.”

Now in late 2023, I was pulled out of a roadside tea-stall in Tank, even before I had time to bite into a piece of cake. What was it that my hosts saw, by way of a threat, that I couldn’t? Later, I observed and learnt that the government had provided armed police guards to journalists for security. As we drove from Tank to Wana to meet journalists at the press club there, the journalist who took me there had an AK47 placed by the driver’s seat.

“The conditions are far from safe here. To be a journalist here is nerve-racking,” he said when I asked the question I had of Hayatullah Khan years ago — why carry a gun? “In March this year [2023], there was an [alleged] drone attack in the south, and a militant commander there called me to say that two children of his family were killed in the attack. He wanted me to carry the story on my channel. I couldn’t. Nobody [in the mainstream media] is willing to carry news from the militants. When I refused, he threatened me, saying we, the journalists, were paid minions of the state.”

His heightened threat perception — by no means exclusive to him, but common to the entire journalism community in the tribal regions — is also borne out by a written statement issued by the TTP in August 2023.

It warned journalists in the Khyber and Waziristan districts to desist from being “lackeys” of the police and the military. It said militants killed in the conflict should be honoured with the title shaheed [martyrs]. In September, warned the letter, the TTP would be targeting journalists in the two districts.

While there were no attacks on journalists, and some journalists say the announcement was fake — not issued by the TTP — it caused alarm and panic among journalists of the merged districts. Come 2024, and already seven reporters have been killed in the country, including Khalil Jibran in the Khyber district and Kamran Dawar in North Waziristan.

GUNS AND ANTI-ANXIETY PILLS

Over the years, a continuation of the precarious conditions in which tribal journalists live and work raises the uncomfortable question: if 2006 was when the government wanted journalists to take measures for their own safety, and 2014 was when journalists were losing sleep for want of peace, what has changed for the media and journalists in the tribal regions in 2024?

Five years after the former-Fata was merged into the rest of Pakistan, with legal and constitutional guarantees spelled out under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan, it seems not much has.

“It is up to us to care for our safety and well-being,” said the journalist, as we left the plains of Tank, the district neighbouring South Waziristan, and entered a mountainous terrain on our way to Wana. “We work in a region where always one or the other party [to the conflict] is unhappy with us. We tread with care, but we also have to take measures to protect ourselves.”

It was when I asked him how the conditions around him affected his psychological well-being that I learnt it wasn’t just the “gun” he kept for safety, but he also took “pills” to sleep. “You cannot report here as you do in Lahore or Islamabad,” he said. “It’s a state of constant mental torture and anxiety. Once I took Lexotanil. Now I am on Citanew [both anti-anxiety, anti-depression drugs] and Rizek [for anxiety-related gastro-intestinal reflux].”

Guns and addictive anxiety pills — one could be forgiven for having an unsettling deja vu. The troubles that journalists and journalism — indeed the hapless, long-suffering people living in the tribal region — have historically faced in the region are far from over. And with it, a lingering question mark hangs over prospects for peace and progress, and participatory, transparent development, as promised under the merger.

As a journalist in Bajaur put it: “Asleep or awake, ours is an anxious existence.”

THE HAUNTED PRESS

It’s no surprise that the Miranshah Press Club (MPC) looks haunted by its own emptiness. Most journalists from North Waziristan district have been displaced, left fearing for their lives, while others feel safer working from home. The gate is opened not by a journalist but a police guard.

Like with most press clubs, it is common for protestors to hold dharnas [sit-ins] in front of the press club in Miranshah, the district headquarters of North Waziristan. Other sit-ins happen on the roadside between Mir Ali and Miranshah — tribesmen gathering to protest a lack of services, the military’s takeover of a school or madrassah and, more frequently now, to demand peace or the dead bodies of kin killed in security operations. They expect local journalists to take their voice to the media.

In 2023, when a Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) sit-in in front of the MPC demanded that its arrested activists be released, one of the journalists got a call from the administration that the press club was “facilitating the dharna, giving food to PTM activists and allowing them to use the press club toilets.”

According to the journalist, “I said if the administration does not want the dharna, it could always stop protesters at Sidgai [the main security check post at the entrance to the district] but, once people turn up at the press club, it becomes the media’s responsibility to listen to their grievances.” He says the authorities accused him of working against the state.

Within the decades of violence that have crippled life in the region, it is not hard to know where to place North Waziristan. It has always been coded “red”, as the alert signs remind one at the heavily guarded entry gates and military establishments. The region today continues to seeth with danger and discontent.

Even though one does get to see in mainstream media frequent news about soldiers and militants dying in security operations, a visit to the district reveals that people’s protests against the government and the district administration are just as common. Alternatively, one can also witness and ascertain this from social media platforms, in independent posts from the community, which makes citizen journalism a risky undertaking — as the death of Dawar in North Waziristan in May 2024 illustrates.

The rise of the PTM coincided with the merger of the former-Fata in 2018, when the social movement, with leadership from former-Fata, took to the streets to protest the state’s violation of human rights in the border regions.

The government’s stiff response, and its no-holds-barred policy, of arresting PTM activists and denying it mainstream media coverage is well-established. What is less debated is that, at a time when the media and freedom of expression in the region should have transformed for the better — after the much-hyped constitutional merger, allowing equal rights to the tribal people in the wake of seven decades of a constitutional limbo — it has instead slid back into alarming chaos.

WALKING a RAZOR’S EDGE

Five years on, the policy of snuffing dissent and controlling information, amidst a renewed wave of terror attacks, bombings and targeted killings — with the region remaining as its chief theatre — continues to shape the conditions undermining media freedoms in the merged tribal areas of erstwhile Fata.

Journalists are caught precariously between the forces out to quash freedom of expression and their duty to uphold it. In a region where journalists themselves are tribesmen, they also run the risk of being labelled “a traitor to the tribal cause” if they do not give voice to tribal dissent in the face of decades of militancy and attendant militarisation.

The region has been, and remains today, a dangerous and volatile zone, where journalists walk the razor’s edge, a plight brought home by the fact that a record seven journalists have already been killed in the country in the first six months of 2024. The deaths of journalists such as Dawar and Khalil suggest an alarming spike in the trend, and many others fear a similar fate as they continue to work under conditions of threats and harassment. Consider the recent case of Gohar Wazir, the displaced tribal journalist who used to report from Bannu, the district adjacent to his native North Waziristan.

Kidnapped in April 2023 and physically tortured, Wazir now lives in fear and anonymity, with no job and little support from his media organisation. He was released after promising his abductors that he would not criticise the authorities. No one knows of his whereabouts, as he lives in hiding, away from his children and family, facing threats and fearing attacks on his life.

This wasn’t the first time he was targeted for his work. In 2019, he was also briefly detained for covering a PTM meeting. In a career spanning 15 years, Wazir has covered public protests, militancy, military operations and displacement in the troubled tribal region. “I was repeatedly told to stop covering protests, where the issue of dismantling pro-government militant groups is always a major demand,” Wazir told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in May 2023. “They can kill me at any time.”

This struggle to give voice to dissent against systematic suppression could be seen as a barometer for freedom of expression — more so because, as a woman journalist from South Waziristan puts it, the PTM demands are also what the people want — an immediate end to insecurity, targeted killing, kidnapping, extortion, the free movement of militants in the region, etc.

Authorities in the tribal areas invoke the exigencies of an emergency situation, arguing in support of curbs on freedom of expression. They claim emergency measures are required to fight militancy — desperate times calling for stringent, desperate measures, even at the cost of civil liberties, they argue.

But it is precisely this state of emergency, where local voices and sentiments are silenced, and little is known and debated in the rest of the country about the actual conditions, that emphasises the need for hearing and heeding independent voices. Their expression or suppression become important indicators of freedom of expression — even more so given the grave, persistent threats to the lives and livelihoods of common people caught up in an unceasing conflict for decades.

The writer is a journalist based in Peshawar. His research report, ‘Newstribes of the Northwest’, was published by Freedom Network in June 2024. X: @aayzee

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024.

There are three distinct, interlinked worlds associated with The Glassworker, Pakistan’s first (and I hope to God, not the only) anime-inspired, traditionally drawn animated film.

There is the world of the quiet waterfront town of an unnamed country that’s braving the silent bedlam of a never-ending war. Then there is the world of composer-writer-producer-director-animator Usman Riaz’s imagination that runs parallel — and deeper — to the world of the film itself. And finally, there is the all-too-real world of us, the viewers, a diverse melting pot of incisive, ill-informed or intuitive opinions that sometimes shifts perspectives of even the most insightful of critics.

Case in point: two young women walking out from Nueplex Askari IV — a cinema that, with the closures of other venues, is the default caterer to much of the middle class audiences of Karachi (all other options are non-existent at this time). The time is after the first day’s first show — a near-housefull showing that included (I may be wrong), a smattering of youngsters who, from the sound of the chatter, were either vaguely or intimately associated with the film.

At first the two young women recalled the obvious: that the colours were fantastically vibrant, and the animation was breathtaking (we’ll discuss this later), but then came the unexpected clincher: at the end of the day, one of them mused with half-a-sigh, they had seen a melancholic romance-drama of a boy and a girl — an inescapable genre whose clasp dominates Pakistani television serials, films and now even animation.

The eavesdropping stopped me dead in my tracks because, irrespective of the sheer brilliance of the enterprise, the opinion of two lay-women, far removed from the technical and business matters of the film, highlights one of the chief questions The Glassworker raises: who is this film for?

Usman Riaz’s The Glassworker is a visually stunning but thematically heavy film about love and relationships that chooses reality over fantasy

Is it for Usman, a wunderkind who strong-willed the film into existence (and that’s no easy task)? Is it for global acclaim and personal triumph of achieving something that no one has even imagined to attempt? Or is it for the masses — and if so, is it for the masses of Pakistan (animation is not for everyone, and anime-ish animation less so) — or the dedicated followers of sombre and mature anime the world over?

The answer wildly varies from person to person, despite being obvious from a logical perspective.

Usman’s film is inspired by the works of Studio Ghibli — perhaps one of the more immediately recognisable anime studios in the world, known principally through the works of its founders Hayao Miyazaki (Oscar winners Spirited Away, The Boy and Heron) and the late Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday).

Like Ghibli’s films, The Glassworker is anchored in human relationships. However, unlike the more popular of the studio’s films — Ocean Waves and Whispers of the Heart — the plot prefers reality over the metaphysical.

Usman’s film’s trailer featured the presence of a djinn. However, that aspect is flung far back as a mere supporting peg of the story. An early scene explains away that every town has its own djinn, and their presence — manifesting through hollow reverberating sounds, drawings in the sand that come alive (that no one but the audience notices) and aerobatic sparks — is mostly felt rather than manifested.

Replacing the supernatural are the socio-political beliefs and circ*mstances of the unnamed country, and the gradual emotional maturity of its cast of characters.

Vincent Oliver (voiced by Mooroo in Urdu and Sacha Dhawan in English), an adult when we first meet him, is a glassworker who moulds glass into intricate works of art. His designs are to be featured in an exhibition — a recognition that certifies his (and I gather, Usman’s) belief that there is a hard line between artists who make original creations and professionals who are only adept in following others’ artistic triumphs. For instance, the difference between being Mozart and someone who can only play Mozart.

The core reason for Vincent’s belief is never deliberately fleshed out, as we shift to-and-fro between his youth and his adulthood. We see him falling in love with Alliz Amano (Mariam Riaz Paracha and Anjli Mohindra), the spunky, strong-willed daughter of a celebrated army man — Col Amano (Ameed Riaz, Tony Jayawardena) — who eventually pressures Vincent’s father Tomas (Khaled Anam, Art Malik) to create a glass housing for a weapon that would help turn the tide of war.

Tomas and Vincent are pacifists — a stance that’s sneered at in their waterfront town, a picturesque, fantasy amalgamation of Eastern and Western cultures, where buildings take a cue from European architecture, yet the bazaar reminds one of Empress Market in Karachi.

Here, people dress in shalwar kurta, dresses and ponchos, Urdu appears to be the primary written language and gulab jamun is considered the favoured delicacy of youngsters. Given that Usman’s film has no inclination to trigger religious conversations, there isn’t a fixed bias in naming conventions (you have a Vincent, Tomas and a Malik — voiced by Dino Ali); the class divide, however, appears to be a universal issue.

Vincent is mostly friendless — his only other companion, other than his somewhat stern and overprotective father, is Alliz and the djinn — and his solitude gives the story a sense of detachment.

Vincent’s love story with Alliz is neither romance-heavy, nor action-driven. Here, matters of the heart do not rally against the impossible — and depending on the tastes of the viewer, it may be a deterrent. Vincent himself is not a particularly likeable character, despite being the peg of the story.

Again, Vincent’s approach is a deliberate creative call that adds to the thick, almost tangible, tonal ambience of the story that makes one more or less an observer and not a part of the world one is seeing.

The Glassworker’s screenplay (credited to Moya O’Shea, based on the story by Usman and O’Shea) is prejudiced against war and those who aren’t gifted artistically. For the former, at least it understands the need to surrender to greater pressures and circ*mstances; for the latter, there is little to feign remorse for.

The astuteness of the story’s approach carries intricate themes with relative ease — though, and I point out again, the realism of Usman’s world-building pushes the supernatural aspects of the plot to an after-thought position. This, I believe, robs The Glassworker of an additional layer of magic.

At this point, one does not have to discuss the intricate details of animation — that would be a bore. The film is rich in design and colours (it never once goes off-palette), and the animation, if not exactly excellent, stands one step below on the near-perfect scale; in fact, the film has better animation than some animated series and films I’ve seen (yes, animation studio Mappa and their Altair: A Record of Battles — I am looking at you!).

The noticeable difference in the movement of characters is owed to the animation style The Glassworker employs. Traditional animation — or even computer-generated animation — in Japan works on a pose-to-pose style; Western animation, instead, relies on the 12 principles of animation that forces emphasis on the minute details of a character’s facial and body motion.

Both styles lie on different ends of the spectrum. However, given the overbearing visual onslaught of American animation (which mostly the world follows), the anime-inspired movement may take a moment or two to get used to.

One other aspect that may need attuning to is the voice acting. Although I haven’t seen the Urdu language version, I have been told by keen-eared observers (and the director himself) that both films carry a slightly different aesthetic.

The Urdu version is not a literal translation of the English, the director has told this reviewer (he penned the Urdu dialogue himself, he says). From what little I’ve heard, the Urdu dialogues sound more deliberately penned and delivered, as if they belong to an old novel; the English language version is more free-flowing and natural.

The phenomenal, if at times overwhelming, score by Usman and Carmine Diflorio — which immediately brings to mind composer Joe Hisaishi’s orchestral-heavy themes from Howl’s Moving Castle (another Ghibli production, directed by Miyazaki) — diverts enough of one’s attention to miss out on these and other minor snags.

These include, perhaps, the idea that, at the end of the day, one is merely watching a thematically heavy film about love and relationships, which chooses reality over fantasy. And no, for those who’ve seen the film, the last scene — as fantastical as it is — doesn’t count.

Released by Mandviwalla Entertainment and Geo Films, The Glassworker is rated U and features mature themes of the heart and one’s belief in them; it will bore kiddies to sleep

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2024

Lady in the Lake opens with a classic mystery premise: a man unceremoniously dumping a female corpse under a midnight blue sky. Less conventionally, it is narrated by the voice of Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), the dead woman herself.

In this speech, Cleo directly addresses Maddie Morgenstern (Natalie Portman), the woman who will later play investigator, for having professed to care about her, but “truth is, you came at the end of my story and turned it into your beginning.”

While spiking the viewer’s interest, such an opening also challenges how tales of murder are more usually framed. When told through the activity of an investigator, a victim’s story can only be pieced together through fragments of evidence. By contrast, this drama will be all about agency, notably the agency of women constrained by the ties of family and community.

An Apple Original, Lady in the Lake was adapted and directed by Alma Har’el (Honey Boy), and is based on a novel by Laura Lippmann that was itself inspired by two historical murders.

Apple TV+’s mini-series Lady in the Lake is a stunning show that uses murder and mystery to explore the parallel lives of two women — one Jewish, one Black — in 1960s’ Baltimore

The action is set in Baltimore in 1966, a divided city made feverish with civil rights tensions and in which a young Jewish girl, Tessie, disappears during a Thanksgiving parade. While we know Maddie will investigate Cleo’s death at some point, this narrative line is postponed. Instead, the first few episodes of the series parallel the events in both their lives during the period leading up to Cleo’s death.

Maddie is a bored, troubled and affluent Jewish housewife, who once dreamed of becoming a journalist. Cleo is an African-American woman struggling to hold down several jobs and bring up two sons, exasperated by her work-shy husband, Slappy (Byron Bowers).

The two women’s lives begin to intersect in ways that are significant, but of which are not immediately aware. One early instance comes when their eyes make fleeting contact as Maddie chooses a dress modelled by Cleo, who is working as a live mannequin in a department store window.

The deference paid by the shop staff to Maddie reveals the unequal power that each woman enjoys. However, later incidents reveal similarities in the way each is held back or propelled towards a different outcome.

Maddie escapes her marriage, leaving her son behind and moving into a flat in the relative freedom of a black district. At the same time, Cleo is drawn reluctantly into a dangerous underground world, in order to support her sons.

1960s’ Baltimore is recreated with impressive scale. More intangibly, the mood of the time is conjured up through a pointedly evocative soul and jazz soundtrack, cutaways to billboards and scenes fleshed out with a hazy colour palette of moody blues and browns.

Har’el’s direction and storytelling is visually ingenious and keenly paced.

Occasional surrealist dream sequences offer insight into both women’s private anxieties, and feature metaphors of innocence (lambs) or entrapment (fish, both in and out of tanks), often culminating in rhythmic, synchronised dance routines.

Surrealism itself is mentioned explicitly, recalled in flashback by Maddie as a “search for the marvellous”, a way to convey the inexpressible. Aptly enough, it is by conveying something of the two women’s inner lives and complicated cultural identities that the drama really finds its mark.

For this, the show’s “mystery” element seems to be a pretext, simply a way to link the two stories. The real gravitational pull on the plot, at least in the first few episodes, is the doomed playing out of events leading to the inevitable.

Thematically, there is much reflection on Baltimore’s social groups. There’s a lot of active questioning of the black and white opposition that came to define relations in the city. To the black communities, Maddie is often, simply, white, but to white gentiles (non-Jewish), she is one of “you people.”

More acutely, perhaps, Cleo is caught between rival promises of black power. She is drawn to her rightful “destiny” — supporting equality through desegregated education and other strategies advocated by councilwoman Myrtle Summer (Angela Robinson). But she must rely increasingly on the patronage of Shell Gordon (Wood Harris), a local gangster running the “numbers game” (an underground lottery) and owner of the Pharaoh, a club at the heart of the city’s jazz scene.

It is relevant, I think, that feminists of that era were later accused of ignoring racial differences between women in order to write their own narrative of subordination as “universal”. In contrast, Lady in the Lake is keenly aware of those differences.

Arguably, the series manages to highlight common ground in Cleo and Maddie’s experiences, while acknowledging crucial differences. Maddie’s character has more agency, it seems, and more nuance is given to expressing her equivocal relationship with her own Jewishness. However, none of this lacks self-awareness, or surprises, and suggests that she too has something to learn.

The writer is an Associate Professor in Television Studies at the University of Bristol in the UK

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2024

Throughout Deadpool and Wolverine, the third film in 20th Century Fox’s Deadpool continuity that forcefully smashes head-first into Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, the merc-with-a-mouth (aka Deadpool, played by Ryan Reynolds) is constantly reminded that he is not the universe-saving type.

Yet, for all the negativity that’s flung his way, the unkillable, wisecracking wise-guy doesn’t lend an ear to the hogwash and christens himself the messiah who will fix timelines — and you know what, he does just that.

He fixes about-to-be-obliterated timelines in the most spectacular, bad language-ridden, cameo-filled fashion. The mad escapade is fun and funny and it trumps both prior Deadpool entries and the entire phase 5 of Marvel’s releases.

Wade Wilson (that’s Deadpool’s real name, by the way), uses Cables’ time machine to travel to Marvel’s main continuity in 2018, because he wants to join the Avengers and make a difference. Acknowledged as having a sincere heart by Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) but rejected, he returns home, loses his relationship with fiancée Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), and begins a new life as a car salesman with a normal human buddy Rob (Peter Delaney).

...Until he is whisked away by the Time Variance Authority (TVA, the main villains of the Loki series), whose agent Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) informs Wade that he will be spared and given a home in the regular Marvel timeline while his own will be eliminated since its main ‘anchor’ — the person whose life gives meaning to the timeline’s existence — Logan (Hugh Jackman), was killed in the critically acclaimed 2017 film Logan. (One now understands what Logan’s actual timeline was).

In the ghastly, comedic opening titles, Wade finds out that Logan, all skull and bones and buried, really is dead, and so finds a replacement in an alternate timeline of Wolverine, who is considered one of the worst variants of the character — a drunk loser whose claws don’t come out all the way (at least for one scene), and whose past includes a lot of remorse.

The two join forces, escape the TVA, are left stranded on a trash-dump of a timeline — a graveyard with a giant half-smashed stone logo of 20th Century Fox, featuring a cast of long-forgotten 20th Century Fox characters (none of whom I will name here), and a villain non-comic book readers would have never heard of: Cassandra Nova (an excellent Emma Corrin).

Cassandra is the evil twin of X-Men mentor Charles Xavier — the world’s greatest, bald telepath mutant — and given her potential for destruction, was strangled to death by her brother in their mother’s womb (yeah, that happened in the comics).

Cassandra is a worthwhile baddie in a screenplay that doesn’t shy away from throwing dirt and vulgarities left, right and centre; as I wrote earlier, it is all in good-natured fun — though that’s not the only thing the film shines in.

Deadpool and Wolverine doesn’t waste either character with an entry that is only meant to be gratifying, easily forgettable, two hours of fan-service (though, in a way, that is what it is). The story gives both characters reason and sincerity amidst the hacking, slashing and gunning down of heads and genital parts. Best of all, it shows how one can tell a good story about time and paradoxes without blowing the fantasy and logic out of proportion.

One hopes Marvel is taking notes, since all it takes to make a good film is to have a bit of fun while telling a good story. The studio knew the trick up until a few years ago and now, thanks to Deadpool and Wolverine, they may have gotten a timely reminder.

Written by Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells and Shawn Levy, who also directs, Deadpool and Wolverine is released by Disney and HKC, and is rated A (as it should be). The film features excellent performances by Reynolds and Jackman, and more surprising cameos than one can shake a dead MCU-timeline at

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2024

THE WEEK THAT WAS

Hum Dono | Hum TV, Tuesdays 8.00pm

It is hard to believe that an acclaimed writer such as Bee Gul, known for her keen observation of human behaviour and out-of-the-box projects, would write such a basic story.

Wealthy and naïve Wafa Durrani (Kinza Hashmi) is madly in love with the middle class Asad (Azaan Sami Khan), who is a prize-winning architecture graduate. Wafa is not just naïve, she comes across as silly, a two dimensional “bholi larrki” who has no idea that her father, the powerful businessman Durrani (Naumaan Ijaz), is determined to marry her off to Shehroz (Zaviyar Ijaz). Also in the mix are Samar Abbas as Asad’s carefree younger brother and Rabia Kulsoom as Wafa’s cousin, who carries a torch for Shehroz.

Although the dialogues are well-written, the actual story does not rise much above the average soap opera plot. Much of the initial episode was focused on Wafa visiting Asad at odd hours of the night, and begging him to run away without a plan, or any idea of life after marriage. One positive is that Azaan has been working on his craft and gave an initially promising performance compared to his previous forays.

Noor Jahan | ARY, Fri-Sat 8.00pm

Noor Jahan (Saba Hamid) is a strong woman who overcame the trials of widowhood and rejection from her aristocratic in-laws by building up a jewellery business. Success has made her proud and arrogant. She has raised her sons to be subservient and only allows controllable women from weak backgrounds as their wives.

Her lust for revenge leads her to encourage her youngest son Murad (Ali Raza) to marry her arch-rival and brother-in-law Mukhtar Shah’s daughter Noor Bano (Kubra Khan). Noor Bano becomes her nemesis; wealthy and strong, she refuses to put up with ill-treatment, plus her husband Murad is actually concerned about his wife’s welfare. Noor Jahan’s little kingdom begins to crumble as she makes increasingly avaricious demands of her sons.

Saba Hamid is adept at playing such roles and gives a fine, measured performance that is the linchpin of the show. The entire cast is well chosen and each character is given ample time to develop and play their part in pushing the story forward. This soap opera-style script from Zanjabeel Asim has been elevated to a very watchable serial by director Musaddiq Malek, with attention to detail and a restrained hand.

Haq Mehar | Geo TV, Daily 7.00pm

Middle class Virsa (Yashma Gill) is the kind of girl everyone wants — sincere, sweet and sensible. Her good-for-nothing cousin Farman (Haris Waheed) wants to marry her to control her father’s money, while another cousin admires her from afar.

To avoid family rivalries, her mother tries to find her a groom outside their family, namely Waqar (Shehroz Sabzwari). Waqar falls in love with Virsa but her family deliberately creates an issue over the haq mehar [dower money] on her wedding, thus complicating her life. Waqar will not bring her home as a bride till he can pay her father the haq mehar he is forced to promise. This gives many people opportunities to weaken their marriage, which Virsa is determined not to allow to happen.

This story has many toxic, commercial soap-style elements combined with some terrible acting from Faria Hassan as Zubia, Waqar’s wannabe bride. On the plus side, interfering relatives and arguments over haq mehar are cultural issues that will easily resonate with audiences both at home and in the diaspora.

What To Watch Out For (or not)

Sunn Mere Dil | Geo TV, Coming soon

Written by Khalil-ur-Rehman Qamar and directed by Haseeb Hassan, this show boasts a star-studded cast, including Wahaj Ali, Maya Ali, Hira Salman and more.

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2024

If you knew Bob Newhart only as an actor — most notably as the star of the legendary Bob Newhart Show, but also in a minor though memorable role in the movie Elf — you may not have thought of him as a literary figure.

However, Newhart, who died on July 18, 2024, at the age of 94, began his rise to stardom as a stand-up comic, crafting and delivering such brilliant monologues as Driving Instructor and Bus Drivers School. In those bits, he demonstrated a mastery of diction, dialect, character and dialogue worthy of the title “literary master.”

In my view, there is perhaps no more fitting recipient of the Mark Twain Prize than Newhart, who received it in 2002.

As a literary scholar, I typically study traditional poetry and fiction by canonical authors such as Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. But the mastery of language and character is not the sole possession of poets and novelists. Newhart demonstrated that stand-up comedy could also be an art form.

‘The old humble bit’

One of his masterpieces is his Abe Lincoln vs Madison Avenue stand-up routine, built around a quirky but timely premise.

Bob Newhart was more than an actor or comedian — he was a literary master

Having witnessed the rise of advertising and public relations in the 1950s and 1960s, Newhart imagined a scenario from an earlier age. What if, he asked, there had been no real man with the mind and stature of Abraham Lincoln during America’s Civil War?

The advertising industry, he goes on to say, “would have had to create a Lincoln.” He then performs a one-sided imaginary telephone conversation between a press agent and someone employed to play the part of this manufactured Lincoln — introducing it with a line that would become iconic for Newhart, saying the conversation would have gone “something like this.”

The “something” that ensues is a tightly crafted, six-minute routine worthy of the term “poem.” Indeed, Newhart deployed some of the same literary devices wielded by previous masters such as Twain and Alexander Pope.

Like Twain, Newhart had a marvelous ear for dialect and seasoned his monologue with little bits of slang and jargon to capture the breezy speech of a stereotypical press agent.

“Hi, Abe, sweetheart, how are you, kid?” he begins. “How’s Gettysburg?”

Delivered quickly and offhandedly, the lines, like so much of Newhart’s stand-up work, are subtle, but effective — dead on without being too on the nose. Throughout the bit, he deploys similar little touches of diction — as when the agent refers to “Four score and seven,” the famous first words of the Gettysburg Address, as a “grabber.”

Herein lies another, even more effective, source of humour. Lincoln’s opening is famously lyrical and formal, the epitome of elocutionary eloquence, and the agent has reduced it to a “grabber.” This kind of deflation echoes an old satirical genre known as the “mock-epic.”

As practised by the Enlightenment-era English poet, translator and satirist Alexander Pope and others, it draws its humour from the contrast between the sublime and the mundane or even ridiculous.

Newhart returns to the device when he has the agent try to explain to the made-up Abe the logic behind the line “The world will little note, nor long remember.”

Lincoln’s original line is graceful, alliterative and nearly perfectly iambic — an oratory gem if there ever were one — but, for the agent, it’s simply “the old humble bit.”

Character is key

Master writers of humour or, for that matter, fiction in general, will tell you that character is key. Get the characters right, and humour — or drama — will follow.

With more of his delightfully subtle touches, Newhart paints a hilarious picture of the naive bumbler the agency has to craft into a Lincoln. Again, as is often the case with humour, irony helps to achieve the desired effect — in this case, humour.

Lincoln was an eloquent, noble figure. He was larger than life — and certainly larger than this dimwit, who doesn’t even get the joke when one of the agency’s “gag writers” supposedly dashes off a line on Gen Ulysses S. Grant.

The agent shares it with the fake Abe, saying, “They got a beautiful squelch on Grant. The next time they bug ya about Grant’s drinkin’… you tell ’em you’re gonna find out what brand he drinks and send a case of it to all your other generals.”

After a short pause, the agent says, with Newhart’s famous stammer, “Uh, no, no, it’s, it’s like, like the brand, uh, was the reason he won.” Finally, after another short pause, the exasperated agent snaps, “…use it, it’s funny.”

Give the audience credit

This last “exchange” demonstrates the most ingenious aspect of Newhart’s humour: his signature one-sided conversation, which he also used to hilarious effect in Driving Instructor and other routines.

Now you know why the opening sequence of The Bob Newhart Show has Newhart answering a phone — an homage to his then-famous stand-up gag.

We never hear the voice of “Abe” but rather hear only the agent’s side of the conversation. It might seem like a minor detail, but this artifice means that we, as the audience, have to play an active role in the comedy.

We hear the agent’s side and have to imagine what he is hearing. Sometimes the agent repeats what he supposedly hears but, in this instance, when the agent is trying to explain the punchline of the Grant joke, the burden is on us.

Here again, Newhart was employing an old device. In a dramatic monologue such as Robert Browning’s serious poem My Last duch*ess, the poet leaves out key details, forcing us to detect them and complete the only partially told story.

The device is especially effective in comedy because, as Newhart knew on some level, we all like to feel smart. By putting us in the position of filling in the blanks in the conversation, Newhart gives us the opportunity to feel a little extra satisfaction, and to create some of the humour ourselves, by crafting our own sense of the rube on the other side of the conversation.

It was the master stroke for a master craftsman. With this brilliant touch, Newhart turned us all into comedians.

The writer is a Chancellor and Professor of English at Indiana University Kokomo in the US

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2024

slu*tty menswear — GQ magazine’s senior style editor’s words, not mine — otherwise known as short-shorts, are seemingly hot this summer.

A great proponent of this thigh-skimming look is Gladiator II star Paul Mescal, who caused a media frenzy as the king of short-shorts in a tiny, Gucci striped cotton pair for the brand’s menswear show during June’s Milan Fashion Week.

This recent fanfare is far removed from the advice of fashion designer Hardy Amies who wrote in his 1964 work, The ABC of Men’s Fashion, that men should only be seen in shorts on the beach or a walking tour. In fact, up until the 1950s in the US, the wearing of shorts by men was banned entirely in some states, due to concerns over common decency.

So how did the short go from indecent and functional to short and sexy?

The conversation around the rising hemlines of men’s shorts

Historical accounts tend to trace the origin of shorts to the 18th-century schoolboy. These shorts were usually baggy and gathered at the knee, similar to the style of breeches, which were the height of fashion during the Regency period for both young boys and gentlemen of the aristocracy. According to American historian Ann Lombard, breeches allowed boys the freedom to run and climb.

Breeches evolved into a very similar style called knickerbockers, defined as loose fitting trousers to the knee or just below. Knickerbockers became popular in the 19th century and were eventually adopted by women.

Back at school in Britain, however, boys were seeking more freedom in their clothing and they started to favour shorter shorts than the knickerbocker. Apparently, because they were much easier for going to the loo.

While shorts were getting… shorter, they were still relegated to boyhood and, for men, sporting or casual events, until the first and second world wars.

In 1914, the British Army were stationed in Bermuda and found themselves in much more tropical conditions than they were used to. Lucky for them, Nathaniel Coxon — the owner of a local tea room — had invented a formal short that ended just above the knee to keep his staff cool. So was born the Bermuda short.

The late great British prime minister Winston Churchill, purportedly said, following a visit to the island in 1916, that shorts were a bad fashion choice, except if they came from Bermuda.

Bermuda shorts became fashionable in the US during the 1920s and 1930s, as they were associated with travel and leisure and so were a symbol of wealth. Bermuda shorts were first mentioned in American Vogue in 1948 and, by the 1950s, had become a staple item in American suburbia.

Bermuda shorts, while perhaps a more conservative approach than short-shorts, are still a key style in contemporary menswear. This year they are a dominant trend in womenswear, with Vogue declaring Summer 2024 as the summer of the nu-metal Bermuda short — baggy tailored shorts that fall just below the knee and have a ’90s grunge feel.

However when it comes to really upper-thigh-skimming hems, it was during the 1970s and 1980s that men started to wear very short and tight shorts, influenced by a growth of casual wear in men’s fashion and the fitness craze of the 1980s. This trend is perfectly encapsulated by the pair sported by actor John Travolta in the 1985 film, Perfect.

It was the era for the garment. In a celebration of the greatest short wearers of all time by GQ magazine, their short-short’s celebrity hall of fame included Elton John, photographed in shorts while leaving New York’s iconic Studio 54 in the 1970s.

He was also joined by Hollywood actor Tom Selleck who, in his role as Magnum P.I. in the 1980s, was a great supporter of tight shorts — despite reportedly having been criticised for wearing shorts that were too short.

From the catwalk to the streets, from the beach to the gym, the rising hemline of men’s shorts is undoubtedly making its stand once again in contemporary menswear. Style guides are awash with features on how best to wear short-shorts, including the Mescal look, with button-down shirt and loafers.

Has the rise of hemlines created an objectification of the male thigh, and — as The New York Times recently questioned — how short should shorts really be? Well, that, according to global fashion and media brand High Snobeity, is one of the world’s eternal questions. How short or long shorts should be depends on two important factors — height and how confident a man feels.

Thigh-baring does take confidence, and certain people calling them “slu*tty” has been associated with a celebration of “himbos, hotness and health kicks” — again in the words of GQ’s style editor. Feeling sexy in what you wear should be a component of men’s fashion as much as it is of women’s.

Such positivity and redefining of masculinity with fashion began in the ’90s with Calvin Klein’s hugely successful men’s underwear range and advertising campaigns. Academic Shaun Cole noted how the move of menswear from functionality to fashionable and sexy, as epitomised by Klein, coincided with a cultural change in the representation of male bodies.

So why not be a bit daring and make like Mescal and beat the heat in some short-shorts because, this summer at least, they are king.

The writer is an Associate Professor in Fashion Marketing and Branding at Nottingham Trent University in the UK

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2024

Swiss Misses

Television host Nida Yasir and her husband, director Yasir Nawaz, were vacationing in Switzerland, from where they uploaded images of the trip on their YouTube channel. It resulted in a series of harsh comments from netizens who thought it was hypocritical of them to be holidaying in Europe after performing haj earlier. To this the duo responded that they were in Switzerland to observe the beauty that the Almighty has created. We can only say trust social media to bring together the most whacked out commentary and unnecessary responses from all concerned.

The Qamar Trap

What happened to playwright Khalil-ur-Rehman Qamar recently is well documented now. We’re referring, of course, to his alleged honey-trapping, kidnapping, and being assaulted and held for ransom. Almost everyone known on social media either made fun of him or tried to make him understand that he is stewing in his own juices. While we condemn criminal acts and torture of any person under the sun, Khalil Q should also realise that his overly self-righteous and judgemental opinions on certain matters have earned him a large number of detractors. That’s never a good thing for anyone associated with showbiz. And let’s not even get into his absurd explanations for how he got into the incident.

Tabu Subjects

Finally, Tabu has revealed why she and Shah Rukh Khan have never worked together in a film. In an interview, the A-list Bollywood star said, “I was offered numerous films with Shah Rukh Khan, but I declined. I believe Shah Rukh also turns down many projects.” By this she meant, she wanted writers and filmmakers to “craft roles that suit me.” Well, in that case, she wouldn’t have had any problem with SRK, because his acting doesn’t require crafting a role for him. It just involves a stretching out of the arms and a bit of stammer.

Man To Man

Do you know why Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor-Khan’s marriage is a whopping success? No? We shall tell you. It’s because of actress Rani Mukerjee’s advice that she gave to Saif A K when he had started going out with Kareena K. According to him, the advice was: “Just behave like you are in a relationship with a man. She meant, don’t get into the gender of it. Treat it like equals, like you’ve got two heroes in the house, two people working, and then you will have no problems. And I think she is absolutely right.” Hmmm… wonder, what advice Kareena K got and from whom.

Childless and Mindless

The Republican vice president nominee in the US, Senator J. D. Vance, has given a nasty statement about “childless cat ladies.” He is quoted to have said that childless women should have no direct stake in political decision-making. Obviously, this hasn’t gone down well with most people in the US, including the Friends star Jennifer Anniston. The actress retorted: “Mr Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.” Oh, #MeowToo, Jennifer A!

Well Paid

A new list of the highest paid actresses in India has surfaced and is doing the rounds on mainstream media and cyberspace. According to it, the two most handsomely paid female Bollywood actors are Deepika Padukone and Alia Bhatt. Deepika P charges between 15 crore rupees and 20 crore rupees per movie project and Alia B, 15 crore rupees. Wow! This is super impressive. Equally impressive are the husbands of the two stars, Ranveer Singh and Ranbir Kapoor. The boys married well!

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2024

Aziz Jindani — call him the creative director, executive producer or the heart and soul of The Donkey King — doesn’t like calling animation production in Pakistan ‘an industry’; he’d rather call it a ‘tribe’ — one whose best days are still out there, in a hopeful future.

Aziz’s film has been one of the few animated movies Pakistan has produced. In fact, one can count the titles on their fingers: there are three 3 Bahadurs, two Allahyars, a Donkey King, Tick Tock, and now The Glassworker. Each title is novel and ground-breaking to a degree (and yes, one can count the abysmally animated Tick Tock as far as premises go).

The 3 Bahadur films showed how far one could stretch the rupee in production, and integrate product placements that could help turn a profit. Allahyar: The Legend of Markhor holds the distinction of being the world’s first animated film that is made entirely in Unreal Engine — a videogame engine that is currently all the rage in Hollywood for its quick and cost-effective photo-realistic rendering (ie output of frames) for animation and visual effects. The Donkey King proved that cute animals and witty socio-political commentary can lead to box-office gold.

The Glassworker, out now in cinemas — and apparently doing pretty good business-wise — defied conventions by being Pakistan’s first traditionally animated film, a practice that is considered too labour-intensive and unfeasible by Hollywood standards (that’s the way big-budget studios perceive hand-drawn animation since the Disney/Pixar CG-boom).

Animation is one of the most lucrative businesses in entertainment media worldwide. But in Pakistan, despite the periodic release of homemade feature films, its landscape is bleak and most animation studios have been forced to work as contractors for international clients. Is there any hope for the future?

Looking past the seemingly sun-lit aspirational success stories, one realises that things are far from hunky-dory when it comes to the business of animation.

There is a reason Aziz calls the business a tribe. “There are only a handful of animators in Pakistan — animators who know what they are doing, that is,” Aziz tells Icon during a late-night phone call.

“There is a difference between character animation, ‘dabba ghumao’ animation [flipping animated boxes in advertisem*nts], and visual effects.” Pakistan has only a few professional animators, he clarifies, and their schedules are often taken up by producers such as Uzair Zaheer Khan (the producer and director of the Allahyar films), whose company, 3rd World Studios, works primarily on animated films and series. Since there is a waiting line, delivering quality work that stands up to global ‘A-tier’ productions is neither feasible nor practical.

Neither Uzair nor Kamran Khan, the animation director and writer of the 3 Bahadur films disagree with Aziz’s facts.

Uzair explains that the problem partly stems from inadequate education. “People have always learned on the job,” he says, citing Post Amazers and SharpImage’s contribution in developing raw talent when the animation business became the new ‘in’ thing during the early 2000s.

There are programmes that want to churn out new 3D animators in three months’ time. That time, he states, isn’t even enough to learn the programme. In comparison, an international animation-specific course takes at least a year of dedicated training — and even then it takes ages to be good at it.

“Universities and institutions would always provide rudimentary, at times superficial or even wrong education,” he says, pointing out that most graduates’ skill-sets — and their lack of interest in learning — limited them from becoming anything but software operators.

Kamran, who has taught in most universities’ education programmes and is a part of new education initiatives, couldn’t agree more. He says that there are programmes that want to churn out new 3D animators in three months’ time. That time, he states, isn’t even enough to learn the programme. In comparison, an international animation-specific course takes at least a year of dedicated training — and even then it takes ages to be good at it.

Kamran explains that 2017-18’s IT boom stole many aspiring animators from the business. “I just fail to understand how an IT company makes this much money,” he says. Animation graduates, who knew little about IT, were offered three times as much salary — how could an animation studio that has to deliver a project with highly constricted budgets match what was being offered, he exclaims.

“The human resource stopped, and those who were genuinely interested in the art of animation left Pakistan for greener pastures,” he says. Some talent he recently interviewed said that they would be happy working for nothing on weekends, but that is simply not feasible when it comes to production timelines.

Kamran used to head Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s now-closed Vaadi Animation, and now provides animation services for most Pakistani and international studios. His current projects includes the Dubai-based Barajoun Studios’ series Ajwan, which was broadcast on MBC Shahid, Knorr’s web-series D-Land by Uzair’s 3rd World Studios, Team Muhafiz with ISPR and a lot of advertisem*nt work.

He says that he isn’t too hopeful when it comes to Pakistani animated films. “There isn’t a market, so most studios have to shift their business strategy from creating original productions to providing services for international studios.”

Services that, one should clarify, are often sublet down the line by semi-major studios. Providing services on sublet does not guarantee credits, but it helps run the shop.

Aziz’s Talisman Studios, where he currently functions as a non-interfering executive director, has two specific wings: one for Pakistan’s feature-length projects and one that provides animation services for international clients.

Post-Donkey King — which has so far earned over 24 crore rupees in Pakistan, and around $300,000 worldwide (the film was released in South Korea, Spain, Greece, Turkey, China, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ecuador, Peru and Columbia) — Aziz says that, while the original intention was to create a studio that produces original films, he was left with no choice but to venture into the services industry.

Uzair’s 3rd World Studios and even Usman Riaz’s Mano Studios — which made The Glassworker — are providing services for international clients, because there is no business for animation in Pakistan.

Aziz, once considered one of the mavericks of the advertisem*nt business (he was responsible for the co-creation of Commander Safeguard), estimates that Pakistani brands spend about three billion rupees annually for production of advertisem*nts. In comparison, character animation work is somewhere around seven crore rupees. “Local studios cannot sustain themselves if the demand is [nearly non-existent],” he says.

Working for international clients may sound lucrative, but Pakistan hardly qualifies to top-tier work, Aziz explains. “Pakistan may be cost-effective, but the quality we provide is only suitable for tier-two or tier-three productions.” The lack of refinement, Icon is told, comes from a lack of experience on the talent’s part.

“Experienced animators are hired on salaries of around 300,000 rupees per month. So, on a gross-level, an animator is expected to deliver between five and ten seconds of work every day, otherwise the hiring would not be justified,” he says. “By this standard, if someone judges our work on an international scale, we would rate between three to five on a scale of 10. It’s as much a capability issue as it is an issue of circ*mstances.”

Uzair affirms Aziz’s point-of-view, and adds a cricket analogy to the thought. “An aspiring cricketer first plays in a gali [street], then local clubs, and then graduates to national and international levels. In Pakistan, the limited talent we have are playing in galis, and one cannot expect them to deliver quality that’s beyond their present skillset.”

Continuing that train of thought, Uzair adds that animation is a global business that accommodates different levels of quality, and so services become an important part of an animation studio — especially if the film one made for one’s own studio doesn’t return the investment. “However,” he adds, “making one’s own film does help get international jobs. If someone comes to me to make a film, they would have made a judgement based on the quality of what I’ve already made.”

Uzair, Kamran and Aziz had one unifying answer when I asked about possible solutions that could help reinvigorate the industry: the government.

“Government support and infrastructure is essential,” Uzair declares. “Animation as a medium could serve as one of the most lucrative exports of Pakistan,” he continues. “Live-action films are only watched by desis — and we all know how they’re received internationally — but one can dub the animation and that frees it from the label of Pakistan,” he says.

“The stories they offer are also universal,” he adds. “If you want to indoctrinate children, there is no better medium. Children are influenced subconsciously by animation. My son is inspired by Ben 10, as I was inspired by cartoons in my youth. Through animation, one has the means to deliver education to the children everywhere through the internet — one doesn’t even need television,” he says.

“Animation can overcome language barriers, because a majority of children in Pakistan do not speak Urdu [and again] several versions of an animation can be dubbed to accommodate more languages. And let’s not forget, mass-producing content would get more people attracted to the medium,” he continues.

Aziz, who is currently the edible oil brand Dalda’s CEO, finds a parallel between his two businesses.

“They’re both process industries,” he says. “Like the edible oil business, which goes through its stages of processing and refinement, an animated film goes through voice-overs, followed by storyboard, modelling, rigging, animation, lighting and rendering — there is an intricate pipeline,” he says. “And like all pipelines, the work needs labour. Labour that could only be supported if there is a continuity of production, and continuity of production can only be achieved through indigenous production. So, making indigenous content on scale is the way, even if done on the shoulders of bad animation.

“India has achieved that,” he continues. “Despite [atrocious] quality, the wholesale production of local content has developed businesses that will only get better as time passes — and only government facilitation can make that happen,” he says. “Until then, one can only make films on personal risk.”

Aziz’s sequel to The Donkey King is a few years away, he says. However, his new film, My Daddy My Hero, is now slowly ramping up its production. The film, which stars the voice of Fahad Mustafa, is made by a “lean staff” of 12 — an eight-person team in Pakistan, and a few international specialists (he has had enough of local modellers and riggers, he says). The Donkey King also had a staff of 12 as well, he says — a good production can only afford so much.

Although My Daddy My Hero is announced to be released sometime in 2025, they’re working at their own pace and deadlines, he says. Since the project is self-funded by Mir Ibrahim — the film’s executive producer with Aziz — there are no timelines.

Uzair, when free from professional commitments, plans to refine Allahyar and the 100 Flowers of God for its international release, before eventually starting a new film, while Kamran is looking for potential partners to produce one of his three scripts that are ready for production.

Despite the bleak, disheartening reality of the business currently in Pakistan, animation is still, by far, one of the most lucrative of businesses in entertainment media. All it needs is the right support to come alive.

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2024

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 3rd, 2024

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 3rd, 2024

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 3rd, 2024

I am sure you all must have had a wonderful time during these holidays, playing a variety of games, whether it’s your favourite board games, exploring virtual adventures or participating in any outdoor recreational activities. Isn’t it wonderful how games can turn our leisure time into unforgettable experiences?

Though, it’s hot these days, many of you cannot resist the urge to play outdoors during the holidays. Despite your mother’s warnings, some of you still sneak out during the daytime to play outside with your friends, ignoring the advice to wait for cooler evening hours.

Most of you already know about the benefits of playing outdoor games on your physical well-being. Like when you play hide and seek or simply run around, your bones and muscles get stronger, your energy level increases, your metabolism improves and you can maintain an overall healthy weight. Moreover, actively participating in physical activities not only boosts our brain power, but also enhances cognitive abilities and improves memory retention.

Isn’t that simply marvellous? Of course, it is. Let’s look into how this all happens.

No doubt, engaging in any form of physical exercise and activities of interest, such as cycling, swimming, skipping, cricket, soccer or any other sport, improves brain function. One of the most immediate effects is a sudden transformation in our mood, leading to the heightened feelings of optimism and happiness. This is because when we play any physical game, our brain releases hormones such as dopamine and serotonin, which not only makes us happy, but also shifts our focus and sharpens our attention significantly. The most exciting aspect is that we can maintain this elevated level of energy and sense of optimism for the next two hours simply by playing any sports of our interest.

Moreover, engaging in physical games or sports has yet another benefit: it significantly enhances our memory and amplifies our retention period. This is because our brain’s prefrontal cortex and hippocampus serve as essential storage hubs for facts and events. When we run and play, these areas generate new cells and strengthen connections, improving our cognitive abilities.

In other words, playing physical games helps us remember the tiniest of details for a longer period. Imagine how sports and games can help you remember everything you’ve learned at school and increase your chances of passing your exams because your memory has sharpened.

So kids before taking any digital devices in your hands and spending the next couple of hours playing video games or scrolling the feed, step back and engage in sports and physical activities at least for 30 minutes a day. You will notice a rejuvenated energy busting through you; you will be more optimistic and active than those who do not engage in physical games.

Keep playing and keep growing!

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 3rd, 2024

March passed by in a blur, as a new wave of hysteria marked the arrival of April for many students. I’m not referring to all students, but specifically to those who had to sit for their CAIES examinations by the end of April. I was one such student.

It was my first time taking the CAIE examinations, so, naturally, I was on an emotional rollercoaster since the timetable was published sometime in November last year. As ambitious as I am, around September I began planning for the revision of the subjects I’d be tested on. I endeavoured to adhere to my rigorous schedules while covering most of the syllabus. However, I failed to do so. There are various reasons for my shortcomings, including lack of consistency and poor time management.

Eventually, I resorted to cramming, which, I must confess, isn’t the most effective approach. The final months coincided with the holy month of Ramazan and the festive occasion of Eid. Even during Ramazan, I made every effort to cover the entire syllabus, utilising various study techniques and consistently revising my study schedules. Sadly, I remained inefficient and couldn’t quite crack the code of effective studying during Ramazan.

Finally, the day I had been dreading for so long arrived. It was April 26th, the day of my first exam, the Islamiyat Paper 1. The day before, I made one last effort to cover as much course material as possible. I was fine for half of the day, until the realisation of the paper being the next day hit me hard, and anxiety came rolling back, embracing me in its cold grip. My mind started to recall all the ominous things I’d heard about CAIE examinations. However, I knew I couldn’t let that stop me from doing my best.

Sitting for exams can be an emotional rollercoaster ride, one that we can never be well-prepared for, despite all our planning and sincere efforts

So I took a shower, offered Isha prayer and, with great difficulty, pushed aside all my revision notes and flashcards to retire to bed.

The next morning, I woke up slowly with a heavy head. I double-checked that I had my Statement of Entry, my ID card and my writing supplies with me. Since it was a morning exam, we had to leave early. I suppose that’s how we students approach exams — feeling unprepared and doubting our overall knowledge and abilities. I knew we had arrived even before my dad told me, due to the swarm of cars around the examination centre, like bees around a hive.

Moments later, I found myself inside the examination hall, as spacious as an open prairie. It was vast, with hundreds of chairs and desks arranged in neat rows. I walked across the carpeted floor to my seat. The air conditioner hummed softly, casting a serene ambience.

Everywhere I looked, I saw faces weary from the hard work they had put in. At the front of the hall, three digital clocks illuminated the room with their precise time displays.

Time passed quickly there. One moment, I was sitting, doing some breathing exercises I had learned to calm my nerves, the next moment, I anxiously awaited the invigilator to hand me the question paper. I filled in all the necessary details as I received the paper and sat still until the exam supervisor announced the start of our exam.

Suddenly, the once quiet room filled with the sound of everyone turning their pages as if a flock of birds had taken flight all at once. When I saw all the questions and realised I could attempt all of them except the last one, which I could leave since I had to choose between two questions, I felt a hundred times better. With that, the exam went smoothly because my brain knew I could handle it.

On my way back home, I realised something important. The examination hall wasn’t as scary as I had imagined. Previously, I had been apprehensive about how I would fare in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people. However, contrary to my previous beliefs, I actually liked the place, and it was even comfortable. My teachers had always stressed the importance of managing time, staying stress-free and doing our best. But I realised that, in the end, all exams were just exams. The only significant difference was the location where we took them.

I learned a lot during this exam season, and hopefully, these lessons will make my second round of CAIE papers next year less stressful. The best approach is to start revising early, so you won’t worry about how much syllabus is left uncovered, and you might avoid falling into the unproductive trap of cramming.

Secondly, stop fretting about exams — they’re essentially like the ones you sit for in your school. And if the thought of unexpected questions bothers you, remind yourself that the examiners know you’re a 10th grader; they understand your age, capabilities and abilities, so they don’t expect you to perform extraordinary. I also want to emphasise the importance of enjoying and learning from exams, because they teach us a lot.

It’s just that the whole exam season is so tiring that we fail to appreciate their value. No matter how absurd I might sound, now that I’m done with my exams, I swear I miss those exam days because I know they won’t come back again.

In the end, I want to say that, yes, during exam time, hearing “This too shall pass,” seems awful. But my dear readers, the truth is, it does pass and you are only left with memories of it.

So, if you’re someone who will be in my shoes in the upcoming years, do not repeat the same mistakes I did by worrying too much. Wishing you all the best of luck!

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 3rd, 2024

“Are you crazy? That house is haunted!” thirteen-year-old Hassan exclaimed to his best friend and schoolmate, Ali.

Ali had dared Hasan to go inside that deserted house notorious for being haunted. The house was just a few blocks away from their own homes.

“What nonsense!” laughed Ali. “There are no ghosts, these are just rumours. Our neighbourhood guard has already checked out the place and says there is not unusual there.”

In the end, Hassan relented and accepted the challenge.

This house was a mystery in every sense of the word. A generous business family, the Maliks, had lived there since a long time. They had a boy named Kamran of their age. Ali and Hassan were friends with Kamran and they often played together. The family was very involved in the neighbourhood social and philanthropic work. But for the last two months, no one had seen anybody in the house, they seemed to have just vanished in thin air.

There were all sorts of rumours regarding the house and the family itself — from a secret base for spying, to paranormal beings and spirits living in it, which was by far the most interesting and popular theory.

Now the two boys were playing a game of dare and Hasan was challenged into going inside that deserted house, while Ali waited outside.

“It’s been 20 minutes now,” thought Ali. “Why hasn’t he come out till now?”

Ali was becoming more worried and impatient as time passed. After all, he was the one who dared him, if something bad happened to Hassan, Ali would be responsible. But the wait was making him more worried, so Ali decided to check matters for himself by going in, taking a bat with him for self-defence. He too entered the house by climbing over the low boundary wall.

The house was quite well-furnished, lit up probably by Hasan who entered a while ago. Ali noticed some paintings on the walls, but all were covered with dust.

Ali was growing more desperate and worried for Hassan. He slowly walked and peeked inside the rooms, but couldn’t find any sign of his friend.

Suddenly, Ali heard footsteps. He hid behind the curtains and peeped to see if it was Hassan. But instead of Hasan, there was an old lady, slowly walking and yelling before entering the living room, “Who is there? Come out now!”

Ali had never seen this lady before, he remained silent. The woman, fortunately, had not seen him so she walked to another room and close the door. Ali realised that the situation was far from simple.

He remained silent, then he took out his phone and called his uncle, Javed, a very loving and caring person. In hushed tones, he told him everything.

Trying not to create noise that would alert the old lady of an intruder in the house, Ali continued his search. Ali then entered the main master bedroom of the house. There was something odd and different about it. There was a big bed and a dressing table, but the room was not in a good condition. Some dirty clothes were lying on the ground, along with picture frames of the Malik family.

Just as he was about to leave the room, Ali heard cries for help from somewhere below. He tried to search in the direction of the sounds, and then he found something — a hidden trapdoor underneath the carpet that covered the floor!

By then, Javed uncle had also come inside the house stealthily. They both quietly managed to lift the heavy door, which had wooden stairs leading to the basem*nt. The sight below shocked them to the core. There was a well-lit room and they saw Hassan, along with the whole Malik family, tied there! It became clear that these people had been kidnapped and captured by the old lady, who might be part of any gang.

Javed uncle, without wasting a second, called the police and told them the situation. As Javed uncle turned, he saw the old lady standing there with a gun in her hands, Javed uncle, instantly grabbed the bat from my hands and knocked her down.

I closed the trapdoor immediately so that we could stay indoors until the police came. We heard the hasty footsteps and some men talking.

“Keep quiet, they must be the gang members,” Javed uncle said. I was scared.

The men knocked on the door and asked the old lady if she was inside. We remained silent. Thinking that the old lady must be sleeping, the men murmured and left. A few more minutes passed and we heard the police siren. The men inside the house ran in confusion.

We heard the banging of doors and men running, but we remained silent. Next, there was a knock at the door, and a voice said, “Open the door, you are all safe now!”

Javed uncle opened the door and we saw police standing. They came in and rescued the Maliks and Hasan.

It turned out that the police had been looking for this criminal gang for a very long time. The gang would break into random people’s houses, blackmail the occupants to hand over their entire fortune.

The mystery of the Maliks’ deserted house was solved, they got their house back and all that the gang took from them. It was only through the courage and bravery of two friends, Ali and Hassan, along with Javed uncle, during a simple but daring game.

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 3rd, 2024

The whispering shadows

This is regarding the story “The whispering shadows” by Pareeshay Emran (YW, June 22). The story highlighted the courage and effort of a student who uncovered the dark reality of evil people looting innocent passer-bys.

The story gave us a lesson that instead of losing courage, we should face every situation with bravery and seek guidance from elders.

Shahid Ehsan,
Lahore

II

The story “The whispering shadows” by Pareeshay Emran taught us to conquer fear and not allow it to dominate our minds. Fear often originates from our imagination and can be magnified by our emotions. Furthermore, at times, wicked forces exploit our vulnerabilities for their own gain. Just like in the story, the girls didn’t let their fear control them, instead they showed bravery and exposed the robbers to the police.

Azam Inam Dharejo,
Khairpur

Spread kindness

This is regarding the article “Spread kindness” by Maham Aaqib (YW, June 22).

It was a heart-warming story! It perfectly captured the true essence of kindness, which is about being present and supportive during someone’s difficult times.

It also highlighted the ripple effect of kindness, where one person’s good deed can inspire others to do the same. Even small acts of kindness can have significant impact on someone’s life, bringing joy and happiness to both the giver and receiver.

Bisma Sheikh,
Karachi

An important life lesson

This is concerning the story “An important life lesson” by Hafsa Shaikh (YW, June 8). Eid is considered the most important festival for Muslims, but the rising inflation has confined it to mostly the rich people, who can easily afford to buy sacrificial animals.

So those who sacrifice animals must consider the poor also by sharing the sacrificial meat with them, to make their Eid special too!

Hassnain Ali,
Sukkur

Compassion for animals

This is regarding the cover article “Compassion for animals” by Shahmeer Asif (June 8, 2024). The article focussed on animals and how they should be treated.

The writer suggested that because this Eid is all about sacrificing animals, so one should treat them with compassion, which aligns with the spirit of Eidul Azha. Animal sacrifice should be done with respect and kindness towards the animal, and care for the environment.

Nabeel Nabi Shahbaz,
Jacobabad

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 3rd, 2024