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.

Bright Lights, Big City

"You're not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning" ranks for me among the best first lines of all time. Books, movies, plays, you name it. I can't remember before or since reading a novel written in the second person and its done brilliantly and to great effect in this book. This novel is more or less the story of all wanna be writers who aren't really writing, who're stuck at jobs they're terrible at (pick any floor at any large company and you'll find at least one of these dudes in one of the cubicles), telling themselves that the life they're leading is simply the experience for their opus, their Trainspotting, their high Fidelity, when in fact the life of the writer that they fantasize about is just a distraction them from the precipice they face, in their jobs, in their relationships, in their need for their version of Bolivian marching powder.
It also addresses many of life's essential mysteries: Is a ferret a good pet? Why do we love trash news? (coma babies aren't my thing but I'm a sucker for English royalty gossip) What is the household dust mostly made of? How terrible do you have to be at your job before a company will actually fire you? (In Germany, being terrible at your job actually has little impact)
The book ripped down to its essense is that a writer needs to write. Otherwise, you're drinking and doing drugs. You're running after your old flames. You're stuck in a life that you will regret. You're chasing a dream which will always remain that. The story told in Bright Lights, Big City only works because of the book. The life lived without the book is a void.
Oh yeah: The movie's not bad either.

Salman Rushdie's Knighthood

With the controvery that has wrapped the knighthood awarded to Salman Rushdie, people in the west who question the award forget that he wrote one of the greatest books of the 20th Century, Midnights Children. The knighthood isn't being awarded for writing Satanic Verses but rather for his body of work which includes some of the best novels in the english language.
Disregarding the protest of the Muslims or inflaming them is clearly no way forward but then neither is rescinding the award.
Its clear there are certain things that get under Muslims skin: the war in Iraq, the status of the Palestinians, the state of Afghanistan, the war in Yugoslavia and those are all things we in the west need to address. Rescinding the knighthood will in no way alleviate any of these festering grievences. Regardless of whether the award is rescinded or not, we will all hear about the award for years to come as a point of insensitivity to Islam, as a point of how the west does not understand Islam. Or the plight of Muslims.
It could well be that the west may not understand Islam but in turn, Muslims do not understand the west either. To westerners, this is purely an issue of freedom of speech. Muslim belief does not extend freedom of speech to matters relating to the prophet Mohammed but again, that is a cultural issue which needs understanding on both sides. Rescinding the award would send the signal that the misunderstanding is a one way street when there's clearly work to be done on both fronts.
The best that can be hoped for under the current situation is for a muslim cleric of high respect to try to explain what freedom of speech means in the west. People who are already enraged and burning effigies will not be sated but at least its a step forward. We should also ask from the Muslim community what can be done in cases like this in the future. Its clear that we need to take their views into account before rather than after such incidents are played out.