Saira Khan's Pakistan Adventure

The sister feature to Sanjeev Bhaskar travelling through India has Saira Khan travelling through Pakistan, the first episode of which takes place mostly in Karachi. Full Disclosure: I know nothing about Pakistan. A friend asked me a while ago whether the food in Pakistan is significantly different to the food in India. I had no real idea. Perhaps the fact that everything presented was so new to me is one reason why I found the show compelling.

I really appreciated the way in which Saira embraced Pakistan, which is a very difficult thing for someone part of the diaspora. They grow up hearing stories about their homeland and what they experience rarely matches what they've heard. It didn't feel like she was an emigrant returning home. She embraced the contradictions that Pakistan presented. She seemed to go out of her way to eliminate the distance between her and the country, be it in the dressing room with the cross dressing talk show host, or in the women's shelter. It wasn't reporting as much as she was trying to get us to experience the country with her.

She didn't try to show the country in a positive or a negative light. Some of the things about Pakistan shocked her and moved her well out of her comfort zone but she hardly recoiled from the country that she was covering. The show never lowered itself to presenting a caricature of the place. She really went beyond the media representations of the country, which from watching CNN is a country filled with Muslim men protesting the West but it still felt like a different part of the same country. Everything she showed appeared to be firmly within Pakistani society.

Ordinary people pushing the boundaries of a soceity is to me what is interesting. Ordinary lives lived in unordinary conditions. Ordinary jobs in places where those jobs take on far more significance and Saira does a great job of exposing all these features in the first epiode. I unfortunately missed the second episode as out satellite reception was out due to a storm. Hope it gets replayed on some night.

India With Sanjeev Bhaskar

Monday evening saw the beginning of India-Pakistan 07 on BBC2 with India With Sanjeev Bhaskar. One of the reasons I love BBC is their plethora of programmes about India, which are invaribaly good. I find the programs present India in ways that are unfamiliar to me, all the while showing it as itself, complete with all the contradictions that it is.
This program though mostly misses the mark. Some of the show was great. The tour thorugh the recycling industry in Bombay was eye-opening. The bit about the beauty contest for married women was uncomfortably funny. The firm producing India comic books in bangalore was fascinating (I'm not into comic books, if that's what you're wondering)
What struck me as strange about the show was that I had been to all the places that the first program visited and none of them looked anything like the places I had visited. It wasn't that the a new side of the cities were shown but the cities seemed white-washed, sanitized. They were places safe for Sanjeev Bhaskar's cooling glasses (sunglasses for those of you unfamiliar with late 70's indian-english slang)
Cochin among the most beautiful places on earth? Come on. I can name a few place in India that are up there (Jaisalmer, Dal Lake, other parts of Kerala) but the megapolis that is Cochin hardly qualifies. He's taken the India that's in the media and re-hashed it together to tell you what you want to hear.
I would've loved to have seen more of the India that isn't portrayed in the media (which, let me say again, they do a bit of and do quite well) The campus of Infosys gives me no more insight into India that going to campus of Cisco in San Jose (where there are as many indians working) Watching a taping of Eastenders on acid is no more enlightening either (unless they were actually on acid. That, I may have found interesting)
I hope the second episode is less hollywoody and more real.