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.
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