The Ethics of Fine Dining

I had iftar at Pearl Continental today. My first and hopefully last iftar of the year. It was as bad as I had expected. Instead of being seated in some tastefully decorated room or hall we were led to a massive air-conditioned tent draped with fairy lights and crammed full of those awful caterers chairs and tables. The usefulness of this arrangement by my estimation was that we get to enjoy an Arabian Nights meets tacky shaadi experience (complete with a man strumming a sitar in the corner) and Pearl Continental manages to squeeze in five hundred people instead of a mere fifty or hundred every evening. At Rs. 950 per head (without tax) one can just hear the money cascading into the hotel’s back accounts.

The food, it goes without saying, was insipid. What’s more is that we were evicted within two hours. People broke their fasts around eight and by a quarter to ten Pearl Continental decided that we had had enough and merrily proceeded to switch off the lights and fold the tables around us.

But hey a mediocre evening at nosebleed prices? Well that’s just Karachi.

What really incensed me was that while I was paying five-star prices for a middling experience, Pearl Continental was making even more money by shamelessly advertising to its guests. The tent walls, apart from adorning large Quranic ayats had larger and certainly more numerous banners for a whole host of products. There were, among others, banners for Dalda, ARY, SriLankan Airline, Olpers, PTCL, Turkish Airlines, Coca Cola, FM 107, Jam-e-shireen and some diabetes gizmo. Plus, all the tables had little brochures marketing Sucral. In essence, I paid over a grand so that companies could market their hearts out to me for two hours.

These days we are used to being bombarded by advertisements 24/7 but at least in most instances ads are justifiable. We usually get a free or subsidized service in exchange for being exposed to ads. Think about television channels, newspapers, websites like Google, YouTube and Facebook, even plays these days have corporate sponsors to recoup their costs. But Pearl Continental had no need for advertisement. Its motive was pure and simple greed. Yes we are increasingly becoming a consumer society but must we really put up with this kind of unbridled corporate avarice?

The Fallacy of the Authentic Other

Last week I had written a post about making our national identity more inclusive. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about how rich English-speaking Pakistanis are excluded from the national identity by the discourse of authenticity. This discourse is most obvious in the Urdu media where columnists and talk show hosts enthusiastically denounce English-speaking Pakistanis as traitors and dupes of the West. But what is a bit more surprising is that this discourse is equally prevalent in the English media and among English-speaking Pakistanis, who also tend to see themselves as less-than-authentic Pakistanis.

This past Tuesday Koel Gallery put up a photography and video show by Maazin Kamal and Ahmed Omar titled “Bereft in the Fatherland”. It was as apt an example of this discourse in English speakers as I could imagine. The photos were high contrast black and white portraits of orphan children from Machar Colony, the largest slum in Karachi. In each photograph an orphan stared out with large doleful eyes, the image framed so tightly around the child that the background was invisible. Under each of the dozen or so photographs were Urdu couplets that read like plaintive pleas from the children. The one on the brochure, which if memory serves is quite typical of the rest, reads:

میری حساس امیدوں سے لرزتا ہے زماں
پر میرے دیس کی مٹی پہ میرا نام نہیں

At the opening, people, including myself, were hunched over the couplets struggling to decipher them. Later, over doodh pati and dhoklas, people clucked about these unfortunate souls captured so poignantly by the intrepid photographer. The whole show, consciously or subconsciously, was aimed to remind the viewer of the ‘real Pakistan’ outside the air-conditioned art galleries and cafes. The insistence on using Urdu for the poetry when most of the people there were much more comfortable in English further emphasized those children’s authentic pakistaniat.

Perhaps, someone will argue that the poetry was giving voice to the disenfranchised children and their voice of course cannot be in English. In that case it would have been more accurate for the poetry to be in Bengali, Sindhi and Pushto, the languages most heard in Machar Colony. But the fact is that those photographs had very little to do with reality. They were more interested in constructing the authentic other. The expressions were consciously selected by Maazin – it is hard to believe that these children, difficult as their lives are, never smile. The poetry was carefully crafted by Simi Kamal, Maazin’s mother and is tantamount to putting words in the children’s mouths. The decision to make the images black and white further aesthetizes them adding to their carefully calculated poignancy.

The photographs were the visual embodiment of ‘the masses’ whom the rich so airily talk about: the illiterate masses, the unfed masses, the helpless masses, the masses that need our sympathy and assistance. They put forward an utterly uncritical, patronizing and reductive view of the children of Machar Colony. The photographs reminded me of those NGO ads that pop up during Ramzan exhorting people to give zakat. They too use especially pitiful images of the ‘helpless masses’ to loosen people’s purse strings. But at the very least the money NGOs collect goes to people with similar needs to the ones who had excited the viewer’s sympathy. The money earned from the sale of these photographs goes straight to the photographer and the gallery, which strikes me as little more than exploitation.

But there is more to the story than Maazin and Mom’s dubious use of the orphans’ photographs. These images appeal to English-speaking Pakistanis. We like casting ourselves as saviors of these orphans. These images evoke noble (and thus pleasurable) sentiments in us. They simultaneously confirm our superiority over that other Pakistan. And equally crucially they stir in us a delectable guilt over our privilege and our inability to relate or even communicate with this other Pakistan. It becomes a delicious exercise of self-flagellation. Evoking the unfortunate but authentic other becomes a form of masturbation for English-speaking Pakistanis: a quick and easy way to revel in and relieve our feelings of guilt.

Tellingly, what is missing from rich English-speakers’ conception of the authentic other is the Pakistani middle class. The middle class is equally conspicuous in its absence from Pakistani art. But this is wholly understandable. The middle class is a bit too much like the rich and their antagonism is a bit too palpable. They wield economic and political power and frankly the rich don’t really know what to make of the middle class. This is not to imply that the two groups are hermetically sealed or entirely antagonistic. There are way more familial links connecting the upper and middle classes than between the upper and working classes. It is more that we (not just the rich but Pakistanis at large) haven’t quite made sense of who the middle class is as a social group and what its role, character and capabilities are. It is easier then to cast the authentic other as the helpless poor Pakistani and leave it at that.

Ahmed Omar’s video, on the other hand, was a refreshing contrast to the photographs. It was a long clip of children playing in a street in Machar Colony. The strength of the work lay in the freedom it gave to the subjects. The camera lay stationary, the shot was uninterrupted by cuts and the children played without interference or apparent direction. They bounced all about the street and every so often came up to the camera and boldly peered in. They asked for no sympathy and were in fact extremely relatable. Their exuberance and curiosity immediately reminded me of my own three-year-old sister. In Omar’s video, the aesthetized other of Maazin’s work recovered their humanity. The other it turns out is not so different after all.

Corrigendum: The post incorrectly notes that sales from the exhibition went to the artists. Profits, in fact, went to the Hisaar Foundation, an NGO that works in Pakistan's slums. Furthermore, while the post attributes authorship of the photographs to Maazin Kamal and of the video installation to Ahmed Omar, they were both collaborative efforts.

Useless!

Everyone understands that the security barriers that people install on their streets are because they feel the police cannot protect them. Since all this fuss has been made by the government about how the barriers impede movement of fire engines, ambulances and police vehicles, it is also clear to everyone that they prevent these emergency workers from doing their jobs.

So since everyone knows why the barriers are up and why they are a problem, then the government should just go ahead and solve the problem if they want the barriers to come down. To force people to take the barriers down without taking concrete steps to better protect them is unreasonable. We all know how miserably useless and entirely self-serving our police force is. If they can revamp their image from corrupt, high-handed and brutal to efficient, respectful and dedicated, Karachiites will be more than happy to take the barriers down. We will be on Cloud 9, in fact.

But the government has no intentions of sincerely addressing the systemic problems that plague our law-enforcement personnel (poor payment, understaffing, poor training, lack of equipment, lack of gender sensitization, politicization of the police force, unmerited appointments and the list goes on and on). It is happy just kicking up a big fuss over this one issue and making headlines in the city pages for a week. Then it's all back to business as usual.

Note to Karachi Drivers

When you hear an ambulance wailing somewhere behind you, please, please don't just continue to sit at the red light. When a man is having a heart attack or a woman a stroke in the ambulance behind you, the traffic laws are temporarily held in abeyance for that person's life. So people when you hear an ambulance, make way for it, break lights to clear the path for it or stop even if your light is green so that the ambulance on the other road can go past.

In case you were not aware of this before, please know that not only is it okay to disobey traffic laws to let an ambulance pass, it is in fact required, ethically and (hopefully) legally too.

Just now, I had to wait for two painful minutes at the Teen Talwar signal with an ambulance behind me desperate to drive through. But there were dozens of cars ahead of us that just would not break the light. All of a sudden, the usually cavalier drivers of Karachi turned into stubborn traffic light observers. They sat there oblivious to the ambulance siren and the honks of several conscientious drivers and moved only when the light turned green. Of course, the ever present traffic police did nothing either. They were busy fleecing some poor motorcyclist in a corner.

As the ambulance whizzed past, I saw the face of an extremely worried young boy inside and I could only hope that his relative lying there next to him would make it to the hospital in time. If that person does survive, it certainly won't be thanks to any of us at the Teen Talwar signal, but if that person doesn't make it, their death will certainly be on all our hands.

The Lucky Irani Circus

It has been in town for the past two months, in the field outside Aladdin Park. It is now up in the Clifton Beach Park for the next week. If you have an hour to kill over this week, I strongly recommend that you check it out. They have everything from contortionists to trapeze artists to clowns and midgets. One of the performances involved a young girl climbing a twenty feet ladder that was balanced on a man's forehead. She climbed to the top, took a bow and climbed down, while the man balanced the ladder without his hands. Scariest thing ever!

Well isn't this a big relief!

According to The News, "The Sindh coalition government has decided to revoke the Police Order-2002, and expressed a unanimous view that no political party was behind the recent ethnic violence in Karachi, and only those elements who did not want political reconciliation in the province were behind the mayhem."

Well, isn't that just dandy. How nice to know that after the riots in which 50 Karachiites were murdered, the government has vindicated every political party of all blame. What a relief that our irreproachable political parties were not responsible. And how very shocking it is to learn that those who were responsible – these unnamed spectral elements, who will surely be caught and tried in public very very soon – were actually out to sabotage our poor helpless political parties' big group hug moment.

Shucks! Lead me to a polling booth so I can vote this unfairly victimized government right back into power.

Rumors

The rumor is that Karachi is up in flames because of some MQM-Pathan tussle over land around some new expressway.

The rumor is that the police, which has received shoot to kill orders from Sindh's Interior Minister Zulfiqar Mirza, is standing by as activists of political parties shoot people down in front of them.

The rumor is that this was all planned well ahead of time, with months of hysterical talk about Talibanization of Karachi, which sought to blur the distinction between Pathans and the Taliban.

The rumor is that Pathan students from some college in Karachi were asked to leave. When they didn't people put Elfi super glue in their eyes, ears and noses.

The rumor is that there are people out for blood slicing ears off people of other ethnicities for no reason other than, well, their ethnicity.

The rumor is that some men broke into an Urdu-speaking colony – Raees Amrohvi Colony in Orangi – entered a house and shot everyone inside.

These are all rumors, unverified stories that are spreading like wildfire across the terrorized city while our glorious media is busily giving us a minute by minute run through of what happened in Mumbai five days back. The best that the media can give us about what is happening in our own backyard is the following:

"Members of two ethnic communities [notice how the ethnic communities are not even named] went on a rampage and attacked each other." Dawn (01/12/2008)

The Daily Times talks repeatedly and vaguely about "miscreants" wreaking havoc in the city in yesterday's paper regurgitating the rumors that are circulating in the city.

From all this it would seem that, much like in some B-grade horror flick, an entire city has suddenly lost its mind and is going around mindlessly killing each other. Any kind of insight into why the riots started, who is behind it and why the law-enforcement agencies are unable to stop it is apparently too much to expect from both the government and the media.

Meanwhile, there are more rumors about why mum is currently the word. The rumor is that the media is terrified of the MQM. That after the MQM censored Geo twice over the past month or so, it has decided to not stick its neck out.

The rumor is that since most of the big media outlets' head offices are in Karachi, they prefer not to piss the MQM off.

The rumor is that the MQM made certain that another episode of May 12-like heroic reporting would not occur and that the ransacking of Aaj's office is still too fresh in the media heads' minds to offer more incisive reporting.

The rumor is that the troubles are in such out of the way areas of Karachi – Orangi, Sohrab Goth, Banaras etc – that for cameramen to go out there would be like going into Fata. Therefore, the TV coverage of the riots is also minimal.

In the meantime, the death toll climbs up each day, as violence collects more half-lived lives.

In the meantime, as rumors and bloodthirsty rioters overrun the streets of Karachi, we, the ever-stoic and ever-ignored people of Karachi, stay quietly in our homes hoping for yet another crisis to quickly loosen its grip on our beloved yet battered city so that we may pick up our lives again and guiltily thank our stars that it wasn't our turn this time around.

Lack of confidence

With bombs exploding almost daily, Pakistanis are united at the very least in their concern for their safety. How does one stop the terrorists from striking? Surely additional police security and random checking of vehicles seem like appropriate measures. We can all bear the nuisance of worse traffic jams if it means that the police will prevent more bombs from going off. At least, that was my opinion till very recently.

Now, ever since the Marriott blast, security has been tightened in Karachi, but not, it seems, to protect the public. The roads in front of the Governor House and Bilawal House have been barricaded causing major inconvenience to commuters but not really protecting the public as such. It seems like we are keeping up our end of the bargain and the government is not.

Then there are the hordes of policemen stationed at every corner. They often pull commuters over for 'random' checks, but in my experience most of the people pulled over have been motorcyclists, who serve as easy targets. The policemen always wear this smarmy grin on their faces, like they cannot wait to harrass the next person and get their next hundred rupee bribe.

How can we, the public, entrust the police with extra powers to search us, when for 61 years the public and the police have had an antagonistic relationship. The police has always taken advantage of its position of power, taking bribes, arresting people at will, refusing to register FIRs and executing people in "shootouts". How are we today to trust them not to abuse the additional powers we give them to protect us from the terrorists.

It seems to me to be a Catch-22. Do not give power to the police and face the terrorists unprotected or give them power and be victimized by the police. Either way the public suffers and the poor and powerless more so than the rich. The police always avoid harrassing the powerful and the terrorists, in attacking crowded places, always disproportionately kill the poor.

The western countries have faced a similar dilemma and have mostly chosen to surrender their liberties to the state to protect them against the terrorists. Take for example America's Patriot Act, which allows intelligence agencies to access email, telephone, financial and medical records more easily. But where citizens of those countries can trust their own institutions, we cannot say the same for our institutions.

An overheard conversation

Yesterday my baby sister was invited to the birthday party of a two-year old girl from her pre-Montessori. My other sister went with her to the party and reported back events that went something like this:

Setting: The vast if slightly wilted garden of a massive if slightly dull DHA bungalow. Two-year old boys and girls are jumping in a bouncing castle, rocking merrily in swings, running enthusiastically around the garden, scraping their knees on the driveway: in general doing what two-year olds usually do at a birthday party. Running behind this clutch of children – perhaps ten or twelve in number – are an equal number of very harassed looking Filipino nannies. They are holding the children's hands as they test the bouncing castle, bringing them food and water when they demand it and soothing the occasional temper tantrum. In one corner, the mothers, young women in their mid-twenties are sitting in comfortable garden chairs. They are wearing light, spring-coloured shalwar kameezes and huge branded sunglasses. In their bejeweled hands they are holding virgin pina coladas.

DHA homemaker 1: It is just horrible! My nanny ran off last week without a word.

DHA homemaker 2 (lowering her sunglasses): You don't say!

DHA homemaker 1: I have been running after Shahrik this entire week. I am so completely exhausted. You know this was the first time in these two years that I had to change a diaper. I just didn't know what to do. I had to call the sasu ma and you know how much she likes to gloat about these things.

DHA homemaker 3 (wrinkling her nose): Oh ho bichari! I don't know what I would do if I had to clean Zainab's poo.

DHA homemaker 1: Hai na? I was so furious. I called the agency and demanded an explanation. And you know what they told me? [dramatic pause] They told me that she has runaway with my neighbours' driver!

DHA homemaker 3 snorts. DHA homemaker 2 looks appalled.

DHA homemaker 2: Where was this woman from?

DHA homemaker 1 (struggling to remember): I'm not sure. I think she was Muslim. She wore a hijab. Indonesia, maybe.

DHA homemaker 2: Oh no! That's where you went wrong, dear. Always go for the Filipinos. They're all Christians or Buddhists or something. They wouldn't dream of running off with someone from here.

DHA homemaker 3 (nodding towards the Filipino nannies): But still. Even these ones are so problematic. Did you know by their contract with the agency, they can go home only once every two years. But mine had a little kid back home and she really wanted to visit. So Saleem – the senti man that he is – he agreed. Sent her back twice last year. And now she is always wanting to go back. I just called the agency before coming here. Told them that she was giving me too much trouble.

DHA homemaker 2 (sipping her pina colada): You just cannot give these people any freedom. The moment you do, it goes to their head. I don't let mine mingle with anyone. She doesn't leave the house without me. Why let her make friends with strangers? Next thing I know she'll come back with all sorts of demands. She stays at home. Buss. But then I have such a soft heart. I feel bad for her stuck in the house all the time, so every month or so I take her with me when I go shopping. [a contemplative pause] But they do lead a pretty good life.

All the other homemakers nod and murmur their agreement.

DHA homemaker 2: Can you imagine allowing a Pakistani masi to live in this kind of luxury? Still they show no appreciation. Always wanting more of this and more of that.

The homemakers all shake their heads in disappointment. DHA homemakers 1 and 3 fill their napkins full of hors d'oeuvres, clearly determined to smother their sorrows with food. A nanny in the background gets kicked in the shin by an exuberant little girl, who then promptly dissolves into tears. The party continues.