Where's the change?

At noon I stood at a deserted Liberty roundabout with two other friends who had come along with me for the ride, both jalsa virgins there to absorb the atmosphere. But there was no atmosphere (or too much of just the atmosphere) to be had at this early hour so we did what any self respecting PTI-supporter would do in such a situation, we drove down to Espresso; can't undervalue the need for a hearty breakfast on one's march towards inqilaab.

I had been an inadvertent and spontaneous attendee at the last PTI rally in Lahore and the joyous spirit of that day and the unique way in which I experienced my city was enough to goad me to return, as reporter, observer and latent hopeful for change. Wearing an Imran Khan t-shirt that I was coaxed into by a PTI-jiyaala friend who has been volunteering for the party from early morning to midnight for the past two weeks, I constantly shifted gears between laughing along with my politically skeptic friend, there just for the anthropological experiment, and my passionately devoted, single mindedly inqilaabi pal.

Around 1 the roundabout began stirring with some burger activity (not talking about the food any longer) and a truck and few jeeps laden with the usual chest-thumping Insafians went off to Defence to gather greater momentum while the eight of us piled into two cars and made our way directly to Minar-e-Pakistan. The streets were nearly deserted in comparison with the 30th October rally that had clogged the Mall Road, which meant that we reached the Government College roundabout in no time, near where we parked our cars to walk all the way to the Yaadgaar (as Minar-e-Pakistan is known in Lahorispeak). I remember many, many more women on the streets walking towards the ground last time and men shouting at others to pave way for them. I also recall an atmosphere much more festive and considerably more inclusive, a spontaneous overflow of people from all walks of life instinctively coming together for a change that at that very moment they were helping shape into a viable and vibrant possibility. This rally in comparison was a more hard-nosed affair with an assortment of political workers, loiterers and party-goers making up the bulk of the crowd.

Compared with the last one, this was a more hard-nosed affair with an assortment of political workers, loiterers and party-goers making up the bulk of the crowd

Outside Minar-e-Pakistan chaos reigned and we (seven men and one woman) were directed to the 'family entrance' (family in Pakistan being a loose term for any kind of group containing a woman), choked with men of all variety trying to push their way in as the police tried to push back from the other direction. Calling my reporter's wit into action I sandwiched myself between two of my friends and using them and my PTI flag and stick as protective shields staved off pinches and gropes to finally be able to thrust myself past the beeping gate into the Minar-e-Pakistan ground. This being the price a Pakistani woman has to pay for wanting to participate in public life.

Once inside, the scenes in the ground also seemed more anarchic to me than last time. In the vast 'family enclosure' that we found ourselves in there was the usual variety of young, affluent PTI supporters but less flag-waving, sunglasses toting Defence aunties than before. Religious slogans came fast and thick from the loudspeakers with a recording of Imran Khan reciting a chunk from Surah Fateha a particular favourite, only to be interrupted for azaan break with the following impassioned plea for respect from the emcee, 'after all, all of us here are Muslims', the irony of the jalsa ground being a stone's throw away from the accursed Joseph Colony completely lost on him (and a crowd drunk on the rhetoric of change).

Imran spent the first fifteen minutes cementing his Islamic credentials

Once I felt I had absorbed enough of the crowd around me I decided to go forth on my own and make my way to the elevated press box to capture an aerial view of the crowd, something I hadn't been able to do last time. Almost everyone readily made way as I brandished my press card in front of me and threaded my way through the crowd only to be confronted with barbed wires and a long alternate route from outside the gates to legitimately get to the press container. Loath to get anywhere near the gates again, and that too alone, I agreed to be led by two men who took me safely through a complex maze of trampled wires and enterprising short routes to the press container, once again safely through to my destination thanks to the benevolence of men.

The ocean of people and flags that I witnessed from above was well worth the effort. If this crowd was not any bigger than last time's then it was certainly not any smaller. From my elevated vantage point I could see hundreds and thousands of people amongst a sea of thumping flags stretching out as far as the eye could go, with the grand Badshahi Mosque sprawling in the background and the lit Minar-e-Pakistan rising high in front of me. It was a sight. But a sight woefully marred by the messages that emanated from the political stage. Abrar-ul-Haq's 'new' song for the occasion, 'Imran Khan de jalsay tea ajj mera nachnay nu ji karda ae' sung to the tune of an Indian Punjabi number 'Saun di jhari de vich teray naal nachnay nu ji karda ae' proved to be the best metaphor of the night for me -tweaking a few words to an old tune does not a new and original song make.

The change Imran Khan talks about never addresses any of my concerns as a secular, female citizen of this country

There was a parallel to be drawn between Abrar passing off someone else's song as his or watching Salman Ahmed set the same old Junoon riffs to repeated chants of InshAllah and Shah Mehmood Qureshi's desperate and thoroughly cynical attempts at rousing the crowd with anti-India and anti-Bangladesh (a new low even for him) rhetoric. In every aspect of this year's rally it was visible that the idealism of a year and a half ago had been replaced with manipulative attempts at realpoiltik, spearheaded by old hands like Qureshi who think that they can win popular support by moving the crowd's basest metals, all a far cry from Strings' Mayn Tau DekhooN Ga whose sincerity had drawn even cynics like me to go misty eyed at the last Lahore rally. Instead this political gathering delivered spent old musicians trying to revive their careers through political injections and out of touch old politicians falling back on rhetoric from the '80s that sounds hopelessly outdated post widespread mainstream and social media attempts at people-to-people harmony.

Imran Khan, whose sincerity I trust but whose political vision I fear, came on to the stage when a real downpour was beginning to look imminent. According to my PTI friend that prompted him to mutilate his speech which would otherwise have focused on hardcore agenda issues first rather than the rhetorical 'promises' all of us were subjected to. He spent the first fifteen minutes cementing his Islamic credentials, something he found of greater import than the actual manifesto PTI was meant to unveil that day. In an uplifting moment during his speech, though, the breeze picked up and people instinctively raised their flags to the wind creating a soaring ocean of stiff flags fluttering strongly against the gust, but soon the drops began to fall. Imran Khan is perhaps the only public figure in the country who can inspire people to stand in the pouring rain to listen to him finish his speech but after 10 minutes the rain became so hard and driving people inevitably fled for their lives.

Perched atop a steel container with the freezing wind and rain slapping me hard across the face I scrambled to find the makeshift steps in the dark that would get me one step nearer to exiting the grounds. Someone thrust a cardboard container into my hand as they saw me shivering in the cold and in a futile attempt at staving off the cold I wrapped it around myself while I blindly made my way in the dark. Yet again a man came to my rescue, guiding me safely out of the grounds in an otherwise menacing atmosphere full of testosterone and frustrated energy let loose. In the following days I read that a lot of women had not been quite as lucky as I, facing severe sexual harassment at the hands of fellow ringers of change.

That is the strongest impression I took away from the whole experience, that the change Imran Khan talks about never addresses any of my concerns as a secular, female citizen of this country, as a woman who wants to experience public space without fear, an individual who wants the business of religion and state to be separated or at least not have self-righteous religiosity thrust upon me as the one-size-fits-all panacea for all human beings. I desperately wanted to believe in the change, I really did, for myself, for the country, for the sake of friends with immense faith in Imran Khan, but too much at this jalsa pushed me in the opposite direction.

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Published in The Friday Times (March 29 - April 4)

Chinaman and Spiderman

The News on Sunday asked me to write very briefly about one favourite book and film in 2012. Here are my picks:

If you’ve never seen a cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you. — Excerpt from Chinaman.

I first heard about Chinaman from a tweet by Mohammed Hanif, a befitting introduction, considering this is the funniest and most mould-breaking South-Asian novel I have read since Hanif’s own debut, ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’.

If you are a cricket fan (by which I don’t mean the kinds who crawl out of the brickwork before every Pakistan-India T20 match), this book will thrill you with its humorous references to the game’s legends and unknowns, commentators and controversies. The elderly narrator and his best friend come to blows over whether Muralitharan chucks, cricket games ‘overlap like stories’ in a Sri Lankan park, euphoria lifts a divided nation upon a world cup triumph. But even if you aren’t a huge cricket fan, Karunatilaka’s irreverent insights into life as it is lived everyday, full of disappointments and little heartbreaks and the small ways in which we fail ourselves and othersaround us, is a profound and imminently readable treat.  

Like any good piece of fiction this one too is essentially about life, which in this case also happens to be cricket.

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I am not a prolific movie watcher partially because I only like watching my movies in the cinema. Since Pakistani cinemas are partial to big budget thrillers, I rarely catch a Hollywood film in genres I would prefer.

Having never seen or read anything Spiderman, I tagged along with a friend to watch ‘The Amazing Spiderman’, and was very pleasantly surprised. It didn’t garner as much media hype as other superhero films this year like ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ or ‘The Avengers’, and more knowledgeable friends tell me it wasn’t the best Spiderman movie either. But I loved Andrew Garfield’s reticently sexy Peter Parker — a more desirable 21st century incarnation of the nerd, as well as the surprisingly leisurely pace of this superhero movie.

Relying less on CGI effects and more on the sensitive high-school hero, who is just beginning to discover his powers, ‘The Amazing Spiderman’ resonated with me in several ways. I enjoyed how the movie used the superhero mask sparingly to help the audience relate more directly to the character, reflected best in the climactic moment where the hero removes his mask to help rescue a frightened child from a car perched fatally on the edge of a bridge. Emma Stone as Gwen Stacey, a capable science student, who is Parker’s intellectual equal, also added a great touch to the movie. It is sad that it turned out to be the lowest grossing Spiderman movie ever.

Litfest Day 2: For the love of literature

Lahoris thronged Hall II at 9:30 on a Sunday morning to hear Mohammed Hanif speak about The Baloch Who is Not Missing and Others Who Are. The crowd’s enthusiasm was presumably not shared by the session moderator Rashed Rehman however, who failed to show up, prompting the organizers to hastily replace him with HRCP Director I.A Rehman whose self-deprecating sense of humour proved to be the only bit of relief in a session fraught with guilt-by-association for the Punjabis in attendance. A visibly affected Hanif set aside his one-liners for this one and dwelt at length upon the plight of the missing persons in Balochistan whose families’ continuous protests outside the Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad press clubs have been met with a stony silence by the media. That Hanif himself couldn’t risk discussing the political reasons behind the kidnappers’ motives remained an inescapable irony, however, forcing him to talk about the issue purely in terms of the personal toll it takes upon families. The establishment’s brutal crackdown on what is essentially a separatist movement remained the elephant in the room everybody tiptoed around though there was no shying away from criticism of the army in general, made especially scathing by an Urdu/Punjabi poem penned and recited by Hanif that sought to burst the myth of the ‘Punjabi army’, replacing it with the idea of the institution as a monolith that serves the sole interest of the institution itself. Despite its refusal to mention the Balochistan separatist movement one couldn’t help feeling that just the holding of this session was a bold move on the part of all involved.

Hall II emptied out the moment star attraction Mohammed Hanif exited the stage leaving a handful of people who stuck around for the ‘Narratives in Urdu Fiction’ session with Khalid Toor, Ali Akbar Naatiq and Musharraf Ali Farooqui. A good choice for moderator for this one, Ali Madeeh Hashmi comfortably straddled the Urdu/English divide, enabling him to reach out to the more ‘burger’ members of the audience without alienating those who actually knew something about the subject at hand. Khalid Toor’s reading of his story about a couple of villagers on a buffalo cart attempting to seek shelter from a strong wind proved a superb introduction to his work. The aandhi , not a full blown tornado nor just merely a strong wind, is so indigenous a phenomenon and Toor’s capturing of the rural idiom in a young boy’s voice so authentic that one couldn’t help but rue the possibility of a complete disappearance of such narratives because of the marginalization of local languages. Both Toor and Natiq laughed off such fears, however. Toor refused to ghettoize himself on the basis of the language he chooses to express himself in calling all literature the literature of the world, regardless of language or place, whereas Naatiq felt that the Urdu language is in a more healthy state than ever before thanks to the news and drama boom in the country. The festival, organized for and by the elite, with its inordinate stress on the English language bothered neither author as much as it did the 60-70 people in the audience.

Next session on another Urdu writer, but one who has been embraced by the English-speaking elite in droves, filled all of Hall I. Simply titled ‘Manto’, Ayesha Jalal’s session on her celebrated uncle also served as a vehicle for introducing her upcoming book ‘The Pity of Partition’. In a rather bizarre twist, Jalal’s defense of the idea of Pakistan riled up certain members of the liberal audience who attacked her vociferously for defending the Pakistani ideology.  Even the usually abrasive Jalal had to take a few steps back to try and parry the blows. Ali Sethi, the moderator, stepped in at this point to defuse the tension with his characteristic humour and the eventful session came to an end.

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Published in The Friday Times here

Sufi Music Festival at Peeru's

To say that Lahore seems to be slowly recovering from the terrorist attacks that ground all its cultural activity to a halt a few years ago would be to tempt fate, and if there is one thing I have learnt as a Pakistani, it is to keep optimistic hopes for the future to a minimum. Luckily for us, the people at the Rafi-Peer group have always held a less pessimistic view of things, remaining constantly involved in carving a livable present for the people of Lahore.

After the initial shock of cracker bomb blasts at the World Performing Arts Festival at Alhamra Cultural Complex that brutally ended a decade of vibrant International and local performances, the Rafi Peer people took most of their work to their outlying café, Peeru’s, which  is where their latest Mystic Sufi Music Festival was held. Peeru’s is a long trek for most Lahoris, so we got out early on the second day of the festival and reached well before time to a now fortressed Peeru’s. Last time I had been it was a charming, open space on the outskirts of the city. Now it is sealed on all sides with high, concrete walls and huge metal doors. Hazards of making a living through art in the ‘cultural capital’ of the city.

I was glad to find that once inside, the open grounds, wrought iron chairs and macabre puppet décor still retained their allure. Walking past shops selling quirky folk trinkets we arrived at the clearing for the festival itself, the stage swathed with bales of cloth in Alif Laila fashion, topped with a small dome. Opting for the farshi nashist in front and watching people trickle in slowly, we were assured by the organizers that the evening would start on time regardless. Exactly at eight, the first qawwals, whose names were unfortunately left unannounced, began proceedings. Particularly unfortunate since they were better than many of the advertised acts that figured on the festival brochures. Their one qawwali, a mashup of a Ni Mayn Jogi De Naal and the ever popular Akhiyaan Udeekdiyaan, proved an impressive beginning to the show.

The last strains of their harmonium mingled with Usman Peerzaada’s voice welcoming the crowd to The Mystic Sufi Music Festival, the synonymous sufi and mystic probably cobbled together to provide dual protection against the satanic influences of just plain old folk music, and to make the festival palatable to diverse audiences. This cynicism was frequently upended by the four days of music itself that provided a robust blend of spirituality, romance, heretcism and playfulness in a potent subcontinental mix honed over centuries. While the organizers may have felt the need to speak the rhetoric of Islam to appease the ghosts of potential terrorists lurking in the shadows, the crowd responded equally enthusiastically to both ‘Allah Hoo’ and ‘Sharaabi Mayn Sharaabi’.

The charming Bushra Marvi from Sind, dressed in a psychedelic, Shazia Khushkesque traditional ghagra, was the second act that night. Her voice, however, could not quite live up to the expectations raised by her striking appearance, though in choosing the familiar ‘Maahi yaar di gharoli’ she managed to elicit some response from the half -capacity crowd. Zarsaanga, the KPK stalwart also seemed lacklustre, partially because the rock concert speakers often overpowered her melody. They sound system seemed particularly excessive on a day the venue wasn’t full to capacity.

Shaukat Dholya from Chiniot performed next with his drumming partner. What a delicious name that, encompassing his passion, profession and identity, a living embodiment of the sufi concept of oneness: Ranjha Ranjha karday ni mayn aapay ranjha hoee. It is impossible to imagine a similar union of music and being in the western musical tradition, where a rockstar by the name of David Singer or John Drummer sounds like an absurdity.  Usually percussion alone leaves me a bit cold, especially if unaccompanied by a more melodious instrument, but the peaks and troughs of Shaukat’s beats created an elaborate, transporting rhythm that echoed boundlessly without being monotonous. The two dholiyaas came together on the stage, foreheads nearly meeting, beating their drums each to each in a perfectly synergetic visual and stylistic crescendo. As if this wasn’t enough, Shaukat added another layer of spectacle to an already spectacular performance, swiveling his drum around his neck like a hula-hoop, then adding his partner’s in a magnificent conjuring feat that combined spinning himself, his drums and his beat in flawless harmony.

The only international participant of the festival, the Syrian Ahmed Altir from Aleppo joined the two drummers next with a graceful dance reminiscent of Turkish whirling dervishes. Ahmed’s romantic foreignness and more elegant, but no less skillful whirling, made for an engrossing contrast with the earthy dhamaal dancers of sub-continental shrines, but his biggest draw was a light-bulb dress with components that could be taken off to twirl umbrella-like above his head in varying degrees of difficulty. Ahmed got warm response from the crowd and he was the only artist to perform on all four days of the festival.

Saturday and Sunday saw the place buzz with a more festive feel as visibly greater numbers turned up over the weekend. Despite that, it was hard to shake off the feeling that deprived of the grand cultural stage of the Alhamra, the festival had been robbed of a lot of its magic and reach. Nonetheless, a group of first time festival attendees sat on my left and giggled away, hushing each other from time to time in a suitable display of coltishness and reverence. A girl with gorgeous long curls banged her head to Mithu and Goonga Saaein’s drums and in the grand old tradition of Pakistani parenting 4-year-olds frolicked around the lawns at midnight on a Sunday. More than the somewhat insipid performance turned in by Pappu Saeen on the third day, Goonga and Mithu Saaeen captivated the audience on the last day, exciting the audience into clapping and smiling and creating a communion of strangers that is becoming increasingly difficult to experience in this city of confined spaces and suspicious insularity.

Of my favourite acts of the next two days, one was the saarangi player, Israr Nabi Bukhsh.  Saarangi is considered a difficult instrument and is on the verge of extinction due to a lack of patronage. The festival brochure stated this fact but despite that the sarangi player was only given one song to play. He chose the popular tune Dama Dam Mast Qalandar but a bias against instrumentals by a strongly lyrical populace meant the performance was perceived as merely an instrumental filler which people used as an opportunity to catch up with their smart phones. A pity, but an expected response in an age where folk music needs to be served with healthy dozes of fusion and glasses of Coke in order to be noticed.

Saaein Zahoor, a crowd puller, was captivating with his Toomba but a bit overshadowed by some of the other spectacular performances in the festival. Also perhaps because the more commercially successful sufi singers have been commercialized by Coke Studio but the likes of The Shajo Rag Faqirs who have been performing at the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai in the traditional manner that was created by the Shah himself 400 years ago and which they consider a sacrilege to tamper with, retain a more ‘exotic’ charm.

Surrayya Khanum was another easily recognizable face who delivered a surprisingly soulful rendition of Maae Ni Mayn Kinnu Aakhaan followed by Bulleh Shah’s poetry that never fails to be relevant to our current situations:

Haaji loak Makkay val jaanday, saaday dil vich nau sau Makka

Vichay Haaji, vichay gaaji, vicha chor uchakka

(Haajis go to Mecca but I have Mecca within my heart

Haji, sinner, thief, pickpocket all reside within me)

The heavily decked, sinewy Krishan lal Bheel from the deserts of Sind and the light, feminine sounds of the Bazm-e-Liqa troupe from Hunza, Chitral and Gilgit showcased two opposite spectrums of our land’s diversity. While PTV had for years tried to foster this kind of unity through provincial dance tableaus, the organic performers of this festival did a lot more to bring home to me the vastness of Pakistani cultures. Akhtar Chinaar Zehri’s Balochi, Bazme-e-Liqa’s Burushuski and all manners of strange languages, cultures, dresses and music all a part of Pakistan that from Lahore seems like a homogenized country solely obsessed with politics and revolutions. That is what the Rafi-Peer people have always done remarkably, opened my eyes to a world beyond my own, from a time when they brought artists from all over the world to perform theatre in Lahore tonow that they have been restricted to showcasing only local talent. A lot has been said about their alleged financial fraud due to which they have lost all sponsorship and had to curtail the list of performances from abroad;  all I know is they are one of the few who have kept Lahore’s cultural identity alive over the decades, and for that alone I am indebted to them.

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Published in The Friday Times here 

The LLF City

Fears of a Lahori elite schmoozefest coupled with the counterintuitive idea of a festival about reading, essentially a solitary activity for solitary people, had me sceptical about the first ever Lahore Literary Festival. However, the two days of the event ended up charming me for several reasons, chief among them the festivity they returned to the Lahori spring.

Watching my bevy of students, who had recently been assigned Mohammed Hanif’s ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ as extra reading, brave the pouring rain to get their pirated copies of his book signed at all costs must also have gone some way towards the softening of my stance. A sea of black LLF-logo umbrellas bobbed from Alhamra’s Hall I to II, from the grounds to the food stalls, helping stave off the downpour while keeping the determined spirits of culture-seekers and people-watchers alive. Nothing less than this level of organisation was required to smoothly pull off a festival of this magnitude, attended by 30,000 people over two days.

The evening before, the festival was declared open by the Chief Minister of Punjab who, in an attempt to distance himself from the legacy of General Zia, rued the disappearance of strolling couples on The Mall Road, the Parsis who once formed part of the Lahori landscape and the lost cultural vibrancy of the city and gave his support to this attempt at the revival of Lahore’s cultural landscape.

Tariq Ali’s well-attended keynote speech threw the festival open to the public on the morning of March 23 and in a subsequent session the famous left-leaning intellectual declared his intent to vote for the PTI, an announcement that was apparently met by a hallful of cheering Lahoris. Far from the madding political crowd, however, I attended a session with barely thirty people in attendance, that of Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka on his DSC Prize winning first book, ‘Chinaman — The Legend of Pradeep Mathew’. Moderated by Owen-Bennett-Jones this was an excellent session to attend. Shehan turned out to be just as disarmingly charming as his book and Jones asked him all the right questions, a circumstance that made the pedantic audience’s ‘questions’ even more painful to bear.

The first man who got up did not allow any qualms about clearly never having heard of the book to hinder him from announcing his credentials as Assistant Professor of English at a local college and a member of its Literary Society, no less, in a loud, authoritative tone before asking Shehan something unintelligible. Nonplussed by this attack, the sprightly student volunteers quickly handed over the mike to a middle-aged woman who turned out to be a member of the same cult and pressed on even more urgently about the aforementioned literary society whose mere membership seemed to confer a sense of accomplishment upon its members.

Meanwhile Shehan looked on bemusedly. If there was any residual doubt left in my mind for the need for such a festival, it was cleared up by this practical demonstration of the service such platforms render in updating foggy old professors beyond Hardy and Frost.

Speaking of old, the Lahore in Literature session was marred by an excess of very old and frail panellists (Bapsi Sidhwa, Intizar Hussain and Pran Neville) who should have been balanced out by a few younger faces. Sidhwa, whose work I have a healthy regard for, suffered from a lack of preparation for the session, launching into a never-ending excerpt that did not seem to have any direct bearing upon either Lahore or its Literature.

Rafay Alam the moderator, being young and polite, failed to take the proceedings into his hands as the droning panelists refused to acknowledge the need to connect with the audience. This is where the conflict between the written and spoken word reared its head, writers aren’t meant to be performers and they cannot be judged on the basis of their ability to read their works in a manner as engaging as their writing.

Sometimes though, this is reversed. Moni Mohsin’s accented inflections while reading from her ‘Diary of a Social Butterfly’ enhanced the flavour of her writing brilliantly. The satire session in which she read her work, in fact, turned out to be the best session of the day. The crowd roared at the banter between Mohammed Hanif, Shehan Karunatilaka and Shazaf Fatima Haider facilitated by the irrepressible William Dalrymple. Each of the writers read out a humorous piece from their writings, some bawdy, some satirical which made for a light but thought-provoking session.

‘The Literature of Resistance’ session saw a video message from Arundhati Roy being played on the screen. For me its star attraction was Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh who spoke with great clarity and grace about the problems of being a writer attempting to explain a conflicting situation to the outside world. BBC’s Lyce Doucet was also a star attraction on this panel who spoke about her experiences reporting the Arab spring and her views on Lahore and Pakistan.

If there is one thing the festival did for me, it was to dispel the myth of the writer as unattractive nerd slaving away in a corner on his laptop, unwilling and unable to communicate with a world beyond his words. Most of the authors I listened to, with the exception of the very old ones, were savvy crowd-workers with ready wits and charming personalities, often quite different from what one might have imagined from just reading their works.

Daniyal Mueenuddin, for instance, with his gora looks and accent made for an odd contrast with his subject matter, i.e. the lives of ordinary villagers in rural Punjab. William Dalrymple whose works I haven’t read I had always slotted in my mind as a historian (the word conjures up very dry associations), so his affable charm came as quite a surprise. Writers like Mohammed Hanif and Musharraf Ali Farooqui dispelled my notion of authors as self-obsessed narcissists unwilling to engage with the less accomplished.

On the second day of the festival three back to back sessions left me with little energy to do much else post-lunch so I decided to sit out the rest of the afternoon on the Alhamra steps reading, people-watching and soaking the sun’s rays after a long week of rain and dreariness.

That my city allowed me to do that, for once, without any prying eyes or groping hands was cause enough for celebration, add to that people listening to authors, buying books and engaging with ideas without a bomb blast in sight and I was a happy trooper.

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Published in The News on Sunday here 

The Night Bookmobile

The ‘adult’ graphic novels at The Last Word stick out for their neat, hardbound calm among the dizzying jumble of superhero comics, baiting the desultory afternoon browser to pluck one out just for the joy of engaging with a beautiful book. I pick Audrey Niffeneger’sThe Night Bookmobile. A woman in a bright blue dress and crimson nail polish clutches an open book to her heart; eyes squeezed shut, a strained expression on her face most often associated with fervent prayer. Behind her from floor to ceiling stacks of vibrant books fill a room that’s too snazzy to be a library, too sombre for a bookshop. This is a book designed with the express purpose of enticing bibliophiles and the trick is working on me. Between the fishing out of the debit card for a (relatively) cheap book I had picked out earlier and the last wistful glance at the room’s enchanting motley, I lean over and grab this one I cannot afford. I decide it’s worth the purchase for the cover alone.

The lyrical quality of the jacket echoes in the novel’s poetic style which opens with its protagonist wandering the streets of Chicago ‘at that quiet time of morning when the cicadas have given up but the birds haven’t started in yet’. Wandering aimlessly to clear her head after a fight with her long-time boyfriend she chances upon the Chicago Version of the Alif Laila Book Bus blaring ‘I Shot The Sherriff’ from the corner of a street. Against her better judgment she engages in a conversation with the bus driver who invites her in with a card that reads ‘Night Bookmobile—Hours Dawn to Dusk’. The room she slips into is subdued and pleasant, smelling of ‘old, dry paper, with a little whiff of wet dog’; books stretch out endlessly within it. All the ones in the first shelf are children’s books, some have catalogue numbers on their spines, others don’t, and the numbers seem to belong to different systems. She wonders if Mr. Oppenshaw, the bus driver and librarian has been running around stealing books from different libraries. Further exploration of the library leads to the discovery that all the books on its shelves are familiar ‘from Jane Austen to Paul Aster, from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook to college biology textbooks’, even her personal diaries. That’s when Mr. Oppenshaw tells her that the bookmobile is a complete collection of everything she has ever read in her life, a concept as fascinating to the protagonist, Alexandra, as it would doubtless be to anyone who is an avid reader. At dawn the librarian promptly turns her out after which the next appearance the bookmobile makes in Alexandra’s life is nine years later. Thus the stage is set for a rather fascinating tale of magical realism and fantasy.

The urge to own books and the ways in which our reading defines us is at the core of The Night Bookmobile. Imagine being led to a place that contains every single word you have ever read including cereal boxes, periodicals and newspapers, even your own diaries. Imagine a librarian whose sole job it is to keep track of all that you read and keep updating your personal collection of books accordingly. How would that change your reading choices? What kind of connection would you feel for a person accessing all your thoughts in the form of all you choose to read and write, however discretely? For those captivated by alternate worlds where does fantasy end and reality begin? Do books bring us greater clarity or further confusion? What we read, what we highlight and what we leave unread can be as intimate as our dearest thoughts and it is a fascination with all these ideas thatThe Night Bookmobile successfully manages to capture in its first half. All the more disappointing when such an intriguing concept is left criminally underdeveloped and the book fails to explore any of the questions it raises in any depth.  Hardly has the book begun when it ends, the text not even as long as most short stories, leaving its overarching metaphor dangling and incomplete, but despite that the nocturnal ambience of a big city that it evokes so movingly, the life of a lonely woman increasingly consumed by the books she reads, a dreamlike Chicago of late rainy nights, music concerts, baseball games and a fantastical night bookmobile that comes and goes of its own whim; the narrator's almost imperceptible sexual tension with the balding, asexual-looking eternal librarian- a distant, ethereal man who knows her more intimately than anyone else, and the idea of a place filled with all the books you have ever read and thus been shaped by, is enough to call this a good purchase. 

The Night Bookmobile is like walking through someone's dream, with all the escapist thrill and incompleteness of one. A dream you don't want to let go of as you lie there in the early morning twilight zone between sleeping and waking, vainly fighting against the demands of the real world pressing down upon you.

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First published in The News on Sunday here

Legends -- Personal and Traditional

Legend has it that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was so impressed with an aerobics display by school students in Korea that he came back and ordered it to be replicated in Pakistan. This show was successfully staged in Islamabad on 14^th August, 1976 which motivated Bhutto to ask Punjab’s Education Secretary to hold a similar affair in the provincial capital. The whopping estimate of 3 crore for the Lahore event, to be staged on 23^rd March, 1977 involving 20,000 school children put the Punjab Education Ministry in a unique quandary since it did not have the legal right to spend more than a crore on an event of this nature. The Secretary’s consternation trickled down to his staff, one of whom –Dr. Kibriya, Chairman Punjab Text Book Board – assured him that 3 crores was an exorbitant amount and entrusted with the task he could do it within 50 lakhs. The Secretary looked skeptical and the subject was dropped. A few weeks later, however, he handed the Chairman a cheque of Rs. 1 crore from the Chief Minister’s Office along with a letter making him in-charge of the event. Dr. Kibriya reiterated his pledge of working within 50 lakhs upon which the Secretary transferred 59 lakhs of the total amount to the Chairman’s personal account. The show was staged impeccably on Pakistan Day as promised at a total cost of 34 lakhs. The burden of a surplus 25 lakhs of taxpayers’ money in his account weighed heavily on my taaya, Dr. Kibriya’s conscience. He wrote a letter to the Secretariat requesting them to return this money to the national exchequer but his letter was taken as a joke and dismissed. Soon the Education Secretary got transferred and a new one took his place. Dr. Kibriya kept sending reminders to every subsequent Secretary till such time as he retired from his post with the amount still lying in his National Bank account at the Secretariat. Finally one Secretary who knew him personally paid heed to his queries and relieved him by taking the money off his hands.

These and other such legends were told with great relish on occasions my father’s family got together. My father and uncles— the first daastaan-go I heard growing up—delighted in the stories they weaved of their lives, planting themselves unabashedly in the center as swashbuckling slayers of authority, deadly-honest romantic ideologues and achievers against all odds, who prided themselves not on their proximity with the rich and powerful but in taking them on. These central narratives collided with my father’s own fight as a young man against his eldest brother’s disdain for the humanities as a suitable career for a boy born in poverty, complicating the overarching central daastaan of my family, immediate and extended.

A wish to rediscover these oral narratives (having passed from my life since my taaya’s death and due to a lifestyle revolving increasingly around the keyboard) took me to the aptly titled ‘Daastaan Goi—The Lost Art of Urdu Storytelling’ on two consecutive days last weekend. Following closely on the heels of Naseeruddin Shah’s packed ‘Ismat Apa Ke Naam’, the country’s ‘cultural capital’ seemed to be suffering from theatre-goers’ fatigue, or maybe bragging rights of attendance at the Rahat Fateh Ali concert at Lahore Gymkhana trumped these relative unknowns from Delhi. Whatever the case may be I walked into a half-full Hall II presenting a stark contrast to the capacity crowds Shah and co had attracted at double the ticket price just a week ago. Interestingly, Daastaan Goi’s ethos turned out to be quite similar to Shah’s Motley Theatre group – same sparse set, similar focus on theatrics of the spoken word and a comparable fervour for bringing Urdu’s dying heritage to a larger audience.

The invitation cards stated that daastaan-gos Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain would present Daastaan-e-Ameer Hamza and Daastaan-e-Chouboli that evening. The debonair Mahmood Farooqi walked on to the stage in regular attire beforehand, however, to clarify that they would only recite the Rajasthani Daastaan-e-Chouboli that evening, a tale that he promised would fill us with nostalgia for the land it had sprung from. Before going offstage to change into his performing gear Farooqui instructed the audience on the adaab of the mehfil—the audience were to express appreciation only with waah waahs. Clapping would be considered the equivalent of tomato throwing in certain other traditions. This marked out the evening as magical and distinctly Eastern even before it started.  A short while later, now dressed in white kurta pyjama with a traditional white cap and a similarly attired Daanish Husain by his side, Mahmood Farooqui unfurled Daastaan-e-Chouboli.

Instead of evoking any special feel for Rajasthan the daastaan seemed to be set in an Eastern Neverland of cheerful polygamy that could be situated anywhere from Baghdad to Delhi to the fervent sexual fantasies of male story tellers who must have helped hone this daastaan over the ages. Despite this, Thakur, the male figure who sets the tale in motion becomes progressively marginal as the story moves forward, almost ending up as the fool, while increasingly the women surrounding him arouse sympathy, awe and romantic desire. In the grand tradition of heroines who escape the limitations of their fate through male disguise, the female protagonist of Daastaan-e-Chouboli dresses up as a fresh, appealing young man who endeavours to make the stubborn but beautiful princess Chouboli speak four times in one night to win her hand in marriage. Twenty four virile young men have tried before her but none has had the wherewithal to crack Chouboli’s cool emotional exterior with the weapon of storytelling. Enter our protagonist, combining Rosalind’s heart and Scheherzade’s wit to reaffirm within the daastaan the importance of being able to tell a gripping daastaan. She narrates such fascinating tales with endings so contentious that Chouboli cannot help but speak up to set the narrative straight.

This emphasis on stories as the most effective weapon in the armory of the romancer reminded me of a paragraph from Tarun Tejpal’s The Alchemy of Desire. I came back home and looked it up to find that it reflected exactly the spirit of both Daastaan-e-Chouboli and the art of Daastaan-Goi:

“Passionate love has nothing to do with any obvious attributes of the lover – class, intellect, looks, character. It has everything to do with the stories the lover can tell. When the stories are stirring, complex, profound – like great fiction they need never be crudely true – then so is the love.

The stories lovers tell each other are tales about themselves, their past, their future, their uniqueness, their inevitability, their invincibility. Stories about their dreams, fantasies, the nooks and crannies of their fears and perversions. Those who can tell their stories with power create powerful love. Those who can’t never know the emotion.”

In this both Farooqui and Hussain succeeded marvelously. The waah waahs in the hall flowed freely at each bit of verbal trickery, every plot twist; egged on, I suspected, not just by the beauty of the story and its masterful rendition but with a certain self-aware delight at giving daad in a manner so archaic, so sophisticatedly unpunjabi; the spectators tickled by their own role-play as audiences from a different time and space.

***

Tales that my father and uncles told never touched on love and romance, topics too debauched to be dwelt on in front of children. The details of their youthful exuberance emerged only amongst whispers and nudges from the more gossip-oriented retellings of the female members of the family. No grand personal narratives were ever heard from the mouths of the women, cementing the daastaan in my mind as strictly a male affair. Daastaan-e-Chouboli’s greatest personal gift to me was to turn that framework on its head.

***

The next evening at The Avari was a very different affair, not just because the daastaan narrated that day was a modern-day one but also because the expensive charity event catered to a crowd different in its eliteness from the one at Alhamra, the financial elite as opposed to merely an intellectual one. The irony of attending Mantoiyat (a collation of Manto’s life from different sources) within the luxurious entrails of a five-star hotel seemed lost on most of its fashionable attendees. The need to relate to the artist’s personal life, however, has never been a pre-requisite for enjoying great works of art, thus most who attended seemed to enjoy this break from whatever they otherwise do at such dos. Manto’s three daughters were also in the audience for this recital, clearly something the daastaan-gos themselves considered an honour.

Mantoiyat, literally and figuratively, did not have the magic of Chouboli. A friend was disappointed in it as merely an oral retelling of all he had already read in print, but for people like me, (who, I imagine were in the majority) familiar only with Manto’s major works and some sketchy details of his life, Mantoiyat was a literary treat. It placed the legend within his context, casting astonishing light on his life’s achievements amidst formidable difficulty. For me personally, Mantoiyat’s greatest strength lay in bringing to life a supporting cast of literary satellites who often get overshadowed by the giant fame of Manto and Chughtai.

For those with intellectual pretensions Manto and Faiz are Pakistan’s Che Guevaras, icons whose mere names symbolize rebellion and romance. Their fame in Pakistan rests on precisely the opposite reasons to officially patronized authors like Iqbal. While conservatives pick and choose from Allama’s poetry to perpetuate his holier-than-thou image, Manto is romanticized by liberals as the perpetually colourful sympathizer of prostitutes, fighter of obscenity trials, despiser of boundaries and speaker of truth to power. In these distilled portrayals the three-dimensional man is often dismissed as an inconvenience, never allowed to be less than larger than life. The daastaan technique, however, allowed Mahmood Farooqui and Daanish Hussain the freedom to dwell on the domestic Manto, with his concerns for his wife and daughters and his in-depth pregnancy advice to Ismat Chughtai, delightful little details literary criticism and political ideology have little room and taste for.

The daastaan was concluded by Majeed Amjad’s poem on Manto, the man whose verses my father never manages to recite without being overwhelmed with emotion, who is inextricably associated in my mind with my father’s lifelong efforts to bring him to the limelight. I’ll leave you with this poem in Sarmad Sehbai’s English translation:

 Tossing the empty bottle he shouts,                                                          

‘Oh world! Your beauty is your ugliness.’                                                  

The world stares back at him                                                                  

Their bloodshot eyes rattle with the question                                          

‘Who nabs the pillar of time                                                                        

By the noose of his drunken breath?                                                      

Who dares to break into dim corridors                                                        

Of twisted conscience?                                                                            

Who intrudes upon poisonous dens                                                            

Of demonised souls?                                                                        

Through icy glasses his rude glance                                                                    

Chases us like a footfall                                                                            

Foul monster!’                                                                                        

Bang! Bang! 
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A version of this was published here in The Friday Times

Ismat Apa ke Naam

Naseeruddin Shah received a standing ovation from the capacity Lahore crowd at The Alhamra Art Centre on Saturday. This was before he started performing. Those pouring into Alhamra’s Hall No. 2 since 5 pm to watch the ‘Naseeruddin Shah plays’  knew little more than that they were dramatizations of the great Urdu writer Ismat ChughtaI’s short stories and that Naseeruddin Shah was performing in them. The latter was enough for most.

A documentary on Faiz Ghar began the evening exactly at 6, as stated on the invitation card, after which the Bollywood star strode on to the Alhamra stage to great applause, cutting a charismatic figure. White-haired and elegant, Shah’s crisp Urdu diction (peppered with only an occasional smattering of Hindi) distinguished itself immediately in a country officially the flag-bearer of Urdu in the sub-continent but with an urban population increasingly indifferent to the language. Heeba Shah, the first of the performers walked on to the stage, coffee mug in hand to begin narrating ‘Chhui Mui’, the tale of an upper middle class shareefzaadi ‘s protected upbringing that renders her nature so delicate she is incapable of taking her pregnancies to full term and providing her in-laws with a much-desired heir. Bhabhijaan, as she is called by the young but precocious narrator, is juxtaposed with a wretched harlot who gives birth to her child in a train compartment with an ease and unabashed pride that horrifies the shareef khaandaan looking on. Bhabhijaan is so affected by the spectacle that she miscarries once again. The performance and the writing blended so seamlessly it was difficult to say you hadn’t just witnessed a play with an ensemble cast instead of a short story recited by a single person. This sense of the stage peopled with a variety of characters and not just a single narrator only grew with subsequent performances.

Ratna Pathak’s narration of ‘Gori Bi and Kaley Mian’ turned out to be a virtuoso performance, restrained and mellow. Pathak allowed Chughtai’s words to take centre stage, letting them weave a web of their own without permitting imposed theatrical compulsions to interfere with the narrative flow. The injured pride of a dark man married to a fair woman finds release in a refusal to consummate the marriage unless the bride lifts her marital veil herself, an unheard-of travesty in the strictly mannered mughal setting of the story. Chughtai’s sharp pen reveals the psychological wounds society inflicts not just upon women but also men who do not fit into prescribed norms of beauty, and the fallout of such societal attitudes on individual lives.

In the last and longest performance of the evening, Nasseruddin Shah starred as a lonely, middle-aged nawaab fighting hopelessly against the charms of Laajo, a generous and promiscuous young woman who comes to work at his house. Shah took the crowd along on a raucous jaunt of irreverence and lasciviousness with obvious personal delight in the portrayal of the nawab’s sexual yearnings, kept from degenerating into bawdiness by Chughtai’s refined, literary Urdu. Marriage sounds the death knell to romance in this story; the nawaab and Laajo’s state of romantic Eden destroyed by the shackles of an institution for which Laajo is singularly unsuited. Once the unhappy interlude of marriage is gotten over with, however, and the nawaab divorces Laajo, they return to their happy state of coupledom without many qualms.

The largely upper-middle class, English-educated audience that shows up for such events reveled for two evenings in the dexterity of the Urdu language. I felt a pride I rarely feel these days about anything indigenous. For two days The Faiz Foundation made Lahore feel pre-9/11, pre-Sri Lankan cricket team attack, pre-Rafi Peer Theatre Festival closure, and within the confines of the theatre, perhaps even pre-1947. 

Writing Harry

Straight from Pakistan's 7-0 drubbing by Australia at the Olympic Park, still wearing my green Pakistan cricket team t-shirt, I took the tube to King's Cross St. Pancras to catch The British Library's 'Writing Britain' exhibition. I didn't think wearing a particular team's t-shirt right in the thick of Olympic season would be considered any kind of curiosity. But it was. For the first and only time in London I got a lot of pointed glances on the street, mostly amused. I suppose with the racist slur 'Paki' in England, a Pakistan tee becomes an automatic statement, intended or not.

There isn't an English writer I can think of who wasn't represented at the 'Writing Britain' exhibition, except P.G Wodehouse, and that is a notable omission. I took many pictures of the rivetting things on display but was made to delete them all by a rather rude security guard, who I was predisposed to view as racist considering the aforementioned Pakistan t-shirt. So, I have no pictures to share of John Lennon's scribbles or Jane Austen's neat but illegible handwriting.

However, there is this picture of a small portion of the 6th chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone that The British Library made available on its site:

I love the way Rowling has doodled those inverted hearts around the margins in that squiggly, childlike fashion. It is a glum realization that these insights into writers' personalities will no longer be available in the age of the word processor. For me the most fascinating aspect of this particular manuscript was the bits Rowling had crossed out. What made her do so? Also, Hedwig was called Widicombe at this time!

I noted down one chunk of text that Rowling had crossed out, since I found the hows and whys of it so fascinating. Here it is:

"He fixed a piece of paper on the wall with the days left before September the 1st marked on it and he ticked them off every night. On the 31st of August he thought he'd better speak to his uncle about getting to King's Cross next day, so he went down to the living room where the Dursleys were watching a quiz show on television."

The difference between the first and final draft of the first page of Hanif Kureshi's The Budha of Suburbia was a soothing sight for any aspiring writer. The first was horribly amateurish, the final one polished and captivating.

There was so much to see that despite spending nearly 3 hours inside I couldn't really process everything properly, at least not without the aid of pictures to remember it all by, or visiting often to really interact with all it offered. But it was a temporary exhibit so even if I were a permanent London resident I would not have been able to access all of it whenever I pleased. And this all was apparently just a fraction of The British Library's treasures. I have no clue why they keep it all hidden away most times and what the point of this whole proprietorial attitude is.

In any case, just to chronicle it for myself:

• First edition of Five on Kirrin Island Again by Enid Blyton.

• A draft of William Blake's 'Tiger' written in his personal journal that originally belonged to his late brother.

• Manuscript of Persuasion opened to a description of Bath, a passage I clearly recalled from my reading of the novel (so particularly thrilling).

• Philip Larkin's handwriting. I have written in the notes in my diary that I'm uncomfortable with the notion of author as rockstar. And so I am, but this exhibit turned something that could have been an exercise in mere celebrity-worship to a lesson in history, since it chronicled England's changing landscapes through the writing it showcased.

• Manuscript of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• Arthur Conan Doyle's handwriting (though not a Sherlock manuscript.

• Virginia Woolf's neat handwriting from a chapter of  'To the Lighthouse'.

• The manuscript of Thomas Hardy's Tess, a text I read in my MA and I kind of love/hate.

• The strange, strange manuscript of James Joyce's 'Uleysses', all crossed out in red and blue crayon through which the words were still legible. 

• Manuscript of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss turned to the last boat scene. The scene where the author kills Maggie off and reveals her inability to deal with the larger than life female character she had created.

• There was also something by Dickens that I wasn't able to look at clearly since the menacing bodyguards had called out time.

• An unbelievably meticulous manuscript of Alice in Wonderland with elaborate cartoony drawings by Lewis Carroll. 

I loved this little line I read at the exhibit. It made me think of all the marginalized:

Berger notes how 'poor and therefore uneasy districts...are pushed in the imagination of those who are prospering, further away than they really are', and thinks 'today's Islington is far closer than it used to be'.

(Islington being a London neighbourhood considered a dump at one time, but now a hip and happening place.)

The Lighter Side of London

England exerts a hold over the imagination of many a youth as the mythical land of tea and scones, where children frolic in and out of enchanted woods, men in funny costumes march on stage sprouting unintelligible English, criminals run amok in lamp-lit streets ready to be nabbed by the most famous detective in the world, and polite gentlemen in coats and ties applaud crisp cover drives on the lush green fields of Lord’s.

With so many stimuli to pique one’s fancy, who with the capacity to recognise the English alphabet (and some with even less) can resist the thought of visiting the land of our ex-colonial masters?

I am no exception to this desire. A desire thwarted not too long ago by the British embassy’s childish refusal to recognise my brown memness (the female equivalent of the brown sahib in case you didn’t know) and refusing me a visa. This year, though, in due recognition of my services as guardian of English language and literature in an Allah-forsaken commonwealth state, the British Embassy, nudged along by the British Council, sent me back a duly stamped passport in time to avail my scholarship for a short course at the King’s College, London.

And thus I ended up there for six weeks this summer.

The British Summer

The first, most pressing and inescapable fact, about London is its weather, which is more unpredictable than Prince Harry. No wonder the British seem obsessed with it. Many outdoor events announce themselves with the caveat, “subject to weather.” My first three weeks there were marked by persistent rainfall, not the kind that in Lahore prompts children to splash in puddles and dance and sing in the streets, but a slow, constant presence that permanently weaves itself into the fabric of everyday life.

In London, necessity, not fashion dictates the carrying of a large bag at all times, with umbrella, sun cream, cardigan, sunglasses and other such seemingly disparate accoutrements to brave the notorious four-seasons-in-one-day weather of the city. I watched ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ production at Regent’s Park Theatre in cold conditions under an intermittently pouring sky, but the rain wasn’t considered heavy enough to cancel the show. The dauntless actors went on prancing and lying flat on the wet stage in their skimpy garments, spewing mouthfuls of Early Modern English without missing a beat. I came to realise that they brave the rain the same way we deal with long summers filled with loadshedding, after a while no matter what the conditions, you just have to get on with it.

One of the things you want to do most when you are in the land of The Beatles and the bard is to soak up the culture. West-End musicals cost an arm and a leg but not one to be daunted by difficulties, I decided to attend at least one for the experience. I bought my tickets online for 30 pounds, a steep amount for one who earns in Pak rupees, but managed to soothe myself with thoughts of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Well, it did turn out to be one.

Image taken off the net by some lucky people close to the stage

I found myself gasping for oxygen on the top tiers of a theatre as high as a football stadium with one pound worth of rental binoculars next to every seat. Along with the distance from the stage the dividing bar in front of me assured that I had to crane my neck to catch the little dots on the stage singing and dancing with what I am sure must have been great gusto. Thankfully, the acoustics of the hall did not discriminate against the poverty stricken. The toe tapping numbers of Franki Valli and The Four Seasons and the lively electronic backdrops made for an enjoyable experience overall.

Shakespeare's Globe before the start of a performance

I had slightly better luck at Shakespeare’s Globe where you can buy ‘groundling’ tickets for five pounds apiece at the added physical cost of standing for the whole length of the performance. But at least it means that you are right in the middle of the action. Due to no fault of the impeccable Richard III production, I felt I needed to rest my tired feet after the first hour of non-stop standing. I hadn’t even managed to make myself fully comfortable before an elderly woman, who bore too strong a resemblance to my convent school teacher, came rushing out of the stands to haul me back to my feet.

Apparently modern groundlings aren’t allowed to rest their legs in pursuit of Shakespearean entertainment. Rather unfair when you compare it with the privileges their 16th century counterparts enjoyed who were at liberty to hurl shoes and tomatoes at the stage if the bard failed to live up to their expectations.

When one thinks of London, its architectural wonders always figure alongside, and celebrated marvels like St. Paul’s Cathedral, Big Ben and The Tower Bridge are worth every bit of their global hype. Only problem is you have to squint very very hard to blur the ugly backdrop of utilitarian tower blocks from the 1960s and 1970s against which these architectural icons stand today. Atop these unsightly office blocks reside cranes permanently frozen at grizzly angles, suggesting that post World War II Britain’s aesthetics also plummeted with its fortunes.

This hodgepodge of architecture makes for an incongruous city with flourishes of ornate beauty amid clusters of Soviet-style functionality. The 21st century architectural contributions include the phallic Gherkin and the all glass and steel Shard, built with Qatari money. If your premier cultural city looks to the Middle East for aesthetic inspiration, you don’t really need the stock market to indicate your downfall.

London’s architectural incongruity is symbolic of the city which is, by no means, some quaint bastion of Englishness today. It is a huge metropolis where people of all types exist alongside in a cacophony of cultures, languages, races, orientations and religions.

Nowhere is this more obvious than on the London underground, London’s complicated and sprawling subway system, where you often run into mixed race, mixed orientation couples from a range of ethnicities; or occasionally catch Asian women wearing garish saris, or shalwar kameez full of bling, probably off to some formal function or wedding, with not a person in their vicinity batting an eyelid. I remember being particularly in thrall on the tube one day when I came across a woman in a hijab bent over her little Quran, muttering its verses fairly audibly under her breath as the one on her right nonchalantly flipped through her copy of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’.

All fantasies that are fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to collide with reality are bound to adjust and change shape, and so my experience of the living, breathing London both diminished and enriched the land of my romantic imagination. Dr. Johnson said about London, “Tired of London, tired of life.” I am glad to report that my six weeks there proved that for all their rough patches, I am tired of neither.

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A version of this piece was published in The News on Sunday on 9th September 2012