I had almost forgotten that I was added as an author on Lahore Metblogs, but today’s three hour long electric shortage cured my whats-the-word-for-memory-loss amnesia and finally provided the motivation that I needed to write my first post on LMB. Here is the link.
Year: 2008
Visual Pollution in Lahore
I often spend my early mornings on the porch, recounting the wires outside my house (twenty-four in total, including the electric, phone, cable and a couple of unidentifiable ones) while I take in my morning nicotine hit. My neighborhood is a closed ‘colony’ with no shops or commercial activity allowed inside its premises, so I was surprised to find a billboard advertising the “naturally thick relationship of Haleeb with Pakistan”, along with a Pakistani flag right outside my house on one of my favorite poles last week (true, the pole isn’t exactly pretty, but the billboard was uglier).
So, in the evening, when my son asked me if ‘our neighbors would think we have started selling milk and come to buy some’, I started thinking of my options to get rid of the hideous billboard.
- There was the pacifist approach – going to the colony committee (or whatever they call themselves) and asking them how and why they allowed these hideous billboards inside and how much money was involved.
- There was the vandalistic(?) approach – taking a can of black paint and painting them all black (ala The Rolling Stones)
- There was the extremist approach – taking a knife and slashing away the billboard.
- There was the activist approach – pasting these “You don’t need it” stickers from the Anti-Advertising Agency on all the billboards and taking a picture, and perhaps contacting the agency handling Haleeb campaigns
As I did not have a printer readily available, so I was inclined towards the one that let me use a knife. Before I could hack and slash however, the billboards were gone on the 16th of August.
I used to think that we do not have underground electricity in most of Lahore due to the high installation costs, but my new conspiracy theory is that the advertising agencies probably pay LESCO and PTCL to make sure they have plenty of poles available.
We should take a long and hard look at Brazil. Before we can solve a problem, first we have to identify it and acknowledge its existence. Only then can we come together and draw the lines to make our city/country a better place and improve our quality of life just a tiny bit.
Haleeb, by the way, is not getting any more of my business in the future.
FBI is Confused About Dr. Aafia Siddiqui
While a tiny percentage of our Pakistani population is protesting for fair treatment to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, it looks like the US FBI is as confused as we are about the truth regarding her case.
The official FBI page on one of the most wanted women in the world has her picture with the caption “In Custody”, and on the same page it states:
“Aafia Siddiqui’s current whereabouts are unknown.”
The page also says:
“Although the FBI has no information indicating this individual is connected to specific terrorist activities, the FBI would like to locate and question this individual.”
Maybe the FBI’s left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, or maybe their webmasters are too busy working on more important tasks. Either way, some God-fearing media monitor from their government should poke the FBI to change/fix the text before people start getting the wrong impression from this slip.
I found the link to the FBI page from Mind Hacks, a neuroscience blog that I subscribe to, which also has a summary of her area of research. The research topic does not have anything to do with the military application of neuroscience (an area that Uncle Sam seems to be an expert at). The Mind Hacks page also has links to her thesis and research papers, in case anyone is interested.
The Many Faces of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui
I have always been impressed by the mainstream media’s expertise in selecting the perfect image of a person with just the right expression to support what is being said in the text. For example, in his pictures, Musharraf may look proud, happy, confused, tired, sweaty, adamant, dancing, drunk, defeated or victorious, depending on the publication and the affiliation of the publisher (just search google images if you don’t want to take my word on it).
I think the big media guys accomplish this by using high-speed cameras to take a few hundred images per session, and then tagging each image with the expression it conveys before putting them into their image archives. This way, the authors can probably pick up the right image by a simple tag search.
If my theory is correct, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui has four popular images on the internet right now, and they are probably tagged…
“Normal Aafia”
“Muslim Aafia”, “Taliban Aafia”
“Convict Aafia”, “Guilty Aafia”, “Prisoner Aafia”
and finally “Victim Aafia”, “Latest Aafia”
The last picture the least used. In fact, I have only seen on a few Pakistani websites and have yet to see it used by an American publication. Do let me know if there are any more images around and I can add them to this list.
Censorship is Good
A couple of days ago, I had the misfortune of attempting to take my son to the Lahore Museum. The weather was pleasant, I was relatively free and had promised him this visit last month, but the one variable that completely skipped my mind was the schedule of our overlord, Mr. Asif Zardari – and I’m still cursing myself for this blunder.
The Lahore Museum is approximately a 25 minute drive from my home, but when we reached the Punjab Assembly building on the Mall, the road was completely blocked by the police, with the traffic being redirected to the right. On the second road that runs parallel to Mall Road, there was another block, and after the policeman asked me where we were going, he ‘recommended’ that we take some other road further ahead. After a very long and slow detour on crazily overloaded single lane roads that I would never enter in normal circumstances, sprinkled with a generous helping of muttered curses, we somehow reached the museum after more than one hour.
During the journey, my son kept asking me “Are we there yet?”. Since I did not want to trouble his tiny mind (he’ll have plenty of opportunities for such troubles in the future, without me adding to them) by trying to explain to him how the mere presence of a single pure bred homosapien in an area can create problems for a few thousand human beings when you live in Pakistan… so instead, I had to convince him to drop his idea of “burning the roadblocks and making the police let us pass” (no, he’s not a terrorist in the making, not yet – he just watches a lot of Ben10).
My estimate is that the Mall usually has traffic density to the tune of 1 car per second, now multiply it by a few thousand and you will get an idea of the magnitude of disruption, not to mention the loss of time (60 minutes for me) and fuel (atleast a couple of liters) that a single VIP visit / Provincial Assembly may cost to the Pakistani public.
In the museum, I saw an intriguing poster on display in the Freedom Movement section of the Lahore Museum. It said something along the lines of
When Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah Rehmatulah Aleyh was taking his last breaths, two words came out of his mouth – “Allah” and “Pakistan”.
I have been thinking about it, but still do not understand why this (not an antique) poster has to be displayed in our museum. Jinnah’s actions, vision and beliefs should be enough for anybody to respect the man, without the need of half a dozen prefixes and suffixes around his name to put him on a pedestal.
The drive back home, after three hours, was not much different. The Mall was blocked again, this time, near the Governor House, with traffic crawling at 5 Km/h.
The incident gave me a much better understanding of how terrorists are born. It also made me sort of agree with Zardari when he calls the long march a “mere carnival” – I would have given anything to see a tiny percentage of the long march attendees block the road upon Zardari’s arrival.
If you boil water in an open pan, it boils and evaporates. Watching water boil is boring stuff indeed. On the other hand, when you boil water in a closed container, steam starts building up, which could result in an explosion, or a steam engine. Either way, it is certainly much more interesting than watching water evaporate. I may be going senile, but I think that instead of long marches, what we actually need is more censorship, more injustice and more roadblocks for the government officials VIPs – roadblocks that make a few thousand people curse and think for a few minutes. After a few hundred such roadblocks, either the whole Pakistani nation will be trained into submission, or we will collect enough steam to purge the system for good. Either way, it will be a good change from our status quo of toad-dom.