Happy new what?

I have never had a ‘real’ (read ‘lucrative’) job but lately circumstances have been nudging me to seriously consider getting one. My demands are simple.

My ideal job, as I communicated to the creative head at a local news channel recently, would have flexible (read ‘short’) working hours and require no intellectual or emotional investment on my part. Oh, and I shouldn’t have to do any writing but would like to tap into hitherto unexplored skills that nobody, especially me, even considered I had. For example I could be an expert on Islamic banking. I’m Muslim. I once had some money. How hard can it be?

I am still waiting on her reply.

There was a window of a few hours the day after Benazir Bhutto died when I felt I had found my calling. A speechwriter for the PPP, that’s what I wanted to be. I would be at the forefront of the peoples revolution about to sweep the nation, I would be cresting the crisis precipitated by the tragic demise of democracy’s greatest local leader. Then the will was read, and it was revealed that while the PPP was indeed going to bring the fruits of jamhooriat to the masses to munch on in their hour of need (we have an artificially created flour crisis), they would sadly not be applying its finer principles within their own ranks.  

The speechwriter plan has hence been temporarily shelved, but if any progressive Pakistani wants to launch a movement for reform and the things that really matter and happens to be reading this, let’s do lunch. After a few days of riot induced shutdowns it’ll be impossible to get a reservation at Okra but we can always flow with the Flo (both are great restaurants off Karachi’s trendy Zamzama Street).

Before I narrowed down my list of professions worth inhabiting, I test drove a few on strangers. To one gentleman I met in the back of a car I confided that I was a doctor, a gynaecologist actually. He bought it for a time, till some careless remark on my part about how the one organ that could be removed from the human body without short circuiting its functioning was the gall bladder created a crisis of credibility.
 
I then confessed that I was a lawyer just pretending to be a doctor. This was accepted without question. In a certain segment of society in Karachi recently, black is the new white. Selfless in thought and pure of motive, in protests by ‘civil society’ before the lifting of emergency younger lawyers had practically been lining up around the block to get arrested and earn their radical chic spurs.

It is precisely for that reason that I then told him I was in fact a teacher. Was it Groucho Marx who said I do not wish to be a part of any club that would have me as a member? So there you have it, food, work, the gullibility of strangers. Ignore the BBC and the Guardian, this is what we’re actually thinking.

(shandanaminhas@yahoo.com)