The two visible faces of Pakistan

I am trying to decide what America should be called, Master, Sahib or Miss, Madame or Teacher, Ustad or Ustani: one or the other of those is what we generally use to refer to those giving us dictation.

In a front page report in the Pakistani daily Dawn on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino is quoted as saying “…we are urging strongly to President Musharraf to get back on the path to the constitution. And the other political parties in Pakistan should all be working towards that goal together.”

Thank you Miss Perino. How exactly do you spell democracy again? And will we be getting that gold star on our foreheads or our buttocks? 

Although the broadcast media in Pakistan is currently under siege, the print press is as dynamic and aggressive as it has ever been.

Having weathered storms, monsters, apathy and mass desertion (when the idiot pox appeared on the epidermis of the Pakistani media scene all the young reporters tried to turn in their pens for microphones), it is not about to be cowed by a declaration of emergency.

Every time a new e-mail from friends abroad appears in my inbox asking about the ‘emergency’, I start grinning like a monkey (not the mad monkeys that have been attacking people in Delhi though, how scary is that!).

To me an emergency is what happens when your three-year- old declares he has to pee in the middle of a traffic jam on a crowded city street, or in the centre aisle of an uppity store, and refuses to hold it even though he can because he’s tired and cranky and wants to pay you back for not getting him those chicken nuggets.

Perhaps it’s not so different after all.

Although the situation up north has been relatively volatile since the issue of the Provisional Constitutional Order, Karachi obeys only the momentum of the metropolis: myopic city planning.

But it is still doing a good impression of a well oiled machine that keeps on going and going and going no matter what.

The day before though, PPP activists in Lyari- a traditional Bhutto stronghold, expressed their ire with fire and bullets at the government’s clampdown on a planned long march.

Two days before that, members of ‘civil society’ held a candlelight vigil at the press club for a return to democracy. Fire and bullets or candlelight and black armbands, that’s the two (visible) faces of Pakistan for you.

(Shandana Minhas is a Karachi-based writer, her first novel, Tunnel Vision, is published by Roli Books, India)