The irony is undeniable: areas that had hitherto been struggling with a scarcity of water, with little access to even

drinking water, are now held hostage by floodwaters that stretch out for miles on end. The current monsoon rains have rendered over 6 million people homeless, and caused losses of billions of rupees. Hundreds of thousands of livestock are dead and many settlements completely wiped of the face of the earth. The rains which started on the 8th of Ramadan have wreaked havoc in Sindh, and the debris and destruction are only a visage of the long term devastation that has been unleashed on the area and its people.

District Umarkot is one such victim, with majority of the district’s villages fully submerged and many swept away with the swirling waters. One of these is the village in which I was born, and studied till primary after which I re-located to a nearby city. While I may have moved away, the village and its people will always be my own. The village lay 20 km north-west of Kanri and 7 km south west of Nabisar Road. Made up of 70 houses, which amounts to around 175 rooms, and housing a population of 328, there is now little to tell of its existence. The only lingering sign is a lone mosque, standing desolately in a stretch of dark still water.

One night the people reported having been subjected to a 10 hour onslaught of torrential rain. The water level started creeping up as the already standing water was steadily fed by the rain and it soon swelled into a full-fledged deluge. The village, although situated on a dune, was not spared as the flood found its way to this raised platform. With great difficulty, the villagers set out to save their lives. They waded through the waters, at times submerged up to their necks, carrying their children and struggling to keep their heads above the water. One can only imagine what was going through their heads as they watched the houses, and lives, they had built with their own sweat and blood swept away before their very eyes.

A number of women, children and aged people suffered innumerable injuries in the process. Along with physical hardship, the material damage is also immense. The majority of the villagers earned their livelihoods through farming, and the incessant rains have destroyed their crops and snatched away their sole source of income. Additionally, in a rush to save themselves, they were forced to leave behind all their valuables – their jewelry, furniture, money, clothes. A number of women were anguished because the dowries they had painstakingly

prepared for their daughters had been washed away. This sense of loss was compounded by the fact that no help was extended to them. They took refuge in nearby city Nabipur, my current sojourn, where they were provided neither tents nor food nor dry clothes to wear. My own house in the city had suffered considerable damage, but I managed to arrange for some basic shelter. But I cannot ease the pain of these individuals who were my own, and I look on, powerless, as an air of hopelessness settles upon them. One old man, Basi, lies stricken with malaria but mourns more for the death of his pet animals than his own suffering. More than diarrhea and the lack of food, he feels pain at what he considers to be a failure of his duty to protect these helpless creatures. He says, “Our lives have been saved. Our wounds will mend. New clothes will be procured. But we failed in our

duty to protect animals who always remained loyal to us.”

I wish the same emotion was shared by our rulers. The broken-hearted gaze and parched lips of the flood victims ask the question: where is the government? Why are their elected representatives tucked away safely in their distant mansions? The Pakistan military would rush anywhere at the notice of a few hours is it was a matter of personal gain or power. But it has not come to the rescue of helpless P a k i s t a n i s despite the P a r c h o o r C a n t o n m e n t being situated only a few miles away from the flooded area.

While no answers will be given to these q u e s t i o n s , these brave, h a rd w o r k i ng and proud people will set about building a new world

the minute the floods recede. They will slave away, rebuild their lives and soon after, another flood will swallow up what little possessions they were able to collect and the cycle will continue. From the creation of Pakistan, 10 floods have visited the nation and brought unspeakable devastation. But the privilege classes of Pakistan are yet to experience the devastation of floods. Perhaps this is why no aid is flowing in. Or maybe they are not aware of the extent of destruction? Or maybe its just an icy indifference has seized the hearts of these people. The city of Karachi has no relief camp. Any activity remains limited to grandiloquent statements by politicians in newspaper. Meager attempts can only be seen in smaller cities like Nawabshah.

The point of awareness needs to be given some attention. And the question that needs to be asked is, why is there a virtual media brownout of

the flooded areas of interior Sindh, such as Jhudo, Naukot, Nabgali, Talhi, Nabisarwad, Hassan Rin, Kanri, Bhotsan and Samaro? The emergency is showing no signs of abating yet the media’s eyes remain averted. The Prime Minister has announced that

aid has been dispensed to 150,000 out of 4 million affectees. But the real number of affectees is 6 million which means that 5.8 million affectees are still without tents, medicine, food or clean water. Hundreds of thousands of dead animals float in the open water, substantially increasing the risk of a plague. Immediate measures must be taken else ‘photosession aid’ will soon be dispensed to corpses, rather than people.

Sunday, 23 October, 2011the review2 The anatom

y of corruption 6 The Bull and the Boulder

Illustrated & D

esigned by Babur Saghir

PML(N)’s flood politicking

While the people of Sindh suffer, ignored to an extent by the media, there is a dire need to take those guilty of negligence to task

Sunday, 23 October, 2011 08

On 13th June 2011, the Paki-stan Meteorological De-partment communicated monsoon rainfall will be 10% below the average.

On 8th September 2011, Sindh was hit by rain. And it continued to rain for two days straight. The Sindh floods had begun. Badin bore 284 mm of rain, Nawabshah bore 353.2 mm of rain, Dadu bore 348 mm of rain. Their monthly averages of between 17 and 30 mm had been shattered. Sindh stood inundated. Over 8.9 million people were affected with over 1.8 million displaced. 22 of Sindh’s 23 districts were inundated. And no one cared. The year before there was a huge hue and cry over the floods. For two straight months, the floods were the single most important subject covered. Coverage had its problems, but the flood victims were at least centre stage. How-ever, after the floods ended, media follow up on the Flood Commission reports and prepa-ration for the next monsoon was almost non-existent.

Flood managers ‘unprepared’The Sindh High Court and Sindh govern-

ment to their credit (and to critique Punjab) released the Sindh Flood Commission Report 2010 as soon as it was compiled. The docu-ment (that could be critiqued otherwise), however, was also not acted upon.

The one province that had the time to prepare up for the floods was not prepared. Starker still was the non-preparedness of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). Specifically tasked with pre-plan-ning for floods, the NDMA chairman admit-ted before the Senate that there was no “coher-ent plan of action” or “national disaster policy” to deal with the floods. He had claimed that since the magnitude of floods had not been predicted by the Met department, they had not bothered to prepare. Despite such a major lapse, the NDMA chairman was let go with just a rap on the knuckles. He stood there

representing the same NDMA that had told the United Nations and international donors to ‘stay out’ while the NDMA managed the floods – before it finally admitted the floods were out of their control. However, the same NDMA chairman still had the audacity to complain before the Senate that the Sindh government had refused to let NDMA man-age flood relief. In response to questions of aid, the NDMA has responded by furnishing statistics. In reality that is all the NDMA has had to offer: statistics. Despite such callous-ness, it is unlikely anyone at the NDMA is likely to be taken to task.

The Met department director, whose or-ganisation had submitted the ‘less than usual’ rains prediction, claimed to a reputable news-paper that, “We had given early warning of heavy spells well in time to all stakeholders if only they had heeded.” Whatever the truth may be, either of the two, and more so both departments, must be taken to task. But it is unlikely that any shall suffer from more than a reprimand, a polite slap on the back. The bureaucratic backbone to save Pakistan from the next set of floods had failed.

The meagre responseIn the meanwhile, flood levels rose in

Sindh. More drains were breached, more villages inundated, more infrastructure sub-merged, more people displaced. Badin, which had played host to the 2010 flood victims, was one of the worst sufferers of the flooding. Over 6,000 villages were submerged and over 800,000 people in Badin alone faced the brunt of the floods. But on the television channels, in newspapers, on the streets, there was little to suggest things in Sindh were anything other than normal. There were more camps in La-hore for dengue patients than flood victims. Reports from Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Ka-rachi suggest donation camps were marginal.

It was not merely the government and bu-reaucracy that had become apathetic. The me-dia, civil society organisations, ordinary citi-zens – and even ever active religious groups had decided that Sindh’s floods victims were irrelevant. The more important issues were – dengue, the Karachi killings, the political squabbling, Imran Khan, US-Pakistan rela-tions – and amongst these the fate of 8.9 million people was almost forgotten. Donor agencies, called in late, complained that only 20 percent of funding requirements had been met at $64.5 million from the $357 million required. The UN coordination office subse-

quently announced that the provision of relief supplies to flood victims may end in Novem-ber since given stock is expected to end at the end of the month. The fate of Sindh’s flood victims is not likely to be pretty.

Floods and politicsThe one thing about the Sindh floods

has been, that while aid has not flowed into Sindh, Punjabi politicians, supremely PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif have flowed into interior Sindh…and for the first time. Contributing nothing substantive in terms of aid, Nawaz Sharif began to use the shoulder of the flood victims to fire pot shots at the federal govern-ment. The federal government – or the PPP – in return did not say much but discredit Sharif ’s existing standing in Sindh. But nei-ther of the discussions was important at all. During the period when the floods spilled,

both the President and the Prime Minister, were known to have been out of country. In the meanwhile, again, the flood victims were made victims to their politics.

Drainage crisis in the Indus basinOne of the most pertinent and simple

questions to ask is: why is the standing wa-ter not draining? Again, this is not a question without a context. The context is the billions of dollars in loans taken from the World Bank and IMF to build up the Salinity Control and Rehabilitation Project (SCARP), Main Nara Valley Drain (MNVD), LBOD, National Drainage Programme (NDP) and the Right Bank Outfall Drain (RBOD), only for it to collapse miserably to flood the entire Sindh. And the context is the very reason for these drains: the problems of water-logging and sa-linity created by the last generation of hydro-logical changes in Sindh: the barrage-ifaction and canal colonization of Sindh. The prob-lem-solution matrix conjured by the connois-seurs of modern hydrology has shown to have

completely collapsed. And now the pertinent question is of accountability. The drainage cri-sis in the Indus basin needs a sustainable solu-tion and the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and IMF must be held accountable for the death, disease and destruction in Sindh.

And what of the victims?As it stands, NDMA figures report 369

people have died, 1.4 million homes affected (500,000 completed destroyed), 60,000 plus cattle have died and some 4.5 million acres of crop destroyed. Only 3,000 relief camps cater-ing to 716, 698 people have been set up. Most families remain camped on embankments and roadsides under open skies. The financial cost of the floods is expected to be above $5.5 bil-lion. As some campaigners in Sindh have be-gun long marches to raise a voice against their plight, the majority remains silent awaiting

the waters to be drained away. Drainage how-ever is expected to take 20 to 45 days where government implements a flood water evacu-ation plan. The four districts Benazirabad, Sangarh, Mirpurkhas and Badin have been selected for the first phase.

With no hope of water draining any time soon, and aid coming to reserve levels, the flood victims of Sindh face a perilous future. A UN report reports 2 million people are suf-fering from flood-related disease in Sindh. On a single day last week, eight people died in dis-trict Badin due to flood related diseases and accidents. A total of at least 290 people have died in Badin alone due to water borne dis-eases. This is as over 1 million people are suf-fering from malnutrition in Badin alone. And district Badin is just one of Sindh’s 22 flooded districts. However painful it may be to say this, but if a radical re-orientation of thought towards Sindh does not take place, the cries of the forgotten flood victims of Sindh shall become another silent blot on Pakistan’s not-so-checkered history.

By Hashim bin Rashid

No peace for painEYE-WITNESS REPORT

It looks like the ring of Pakistani politics has got its Mohammed Ali back. A month or so ago it was a dismal picture. With next to zero “exciting” developments to sell

to the audience, our news channels were parched with a slow influx of fiery political duels on the local front. It was at this helpless juncture that Mian Nawaz Sharif came to the rescue of the nation. Lest we die of boredom, Sharif packed his suit case and set up a tent down south in the flood-hit province of Sindh and began raining (no pun intended) a series of verbal punches on his political opponents that were an entertaining watch to the bone – money-back guarantee.

And it so happened that the pre-election travels of Mian Sahib took place, complete with controversial statements and cheap political card-play, all happily covered by the country’s electronic media. Most of us must have been taken

by surprise when the PML(N) chief took the southward route outside of his stronghold – upper Punjab – into the province’s neglected southern half. Many still would have been appalled when his journey took him beyond the boundaries of the province itself into the southern province of Sindh. But the strangeness of this new development vanished for most when they saw footages of him in areas like Badin and Mirpurkhas, setting up tents and telling a handful of desperate homeless people that the government, their very own PPP’s government, is responsible for their deplorable state – they are the absconders, we are the messiahs.

The picture took shape. It was slightly reminiscent of the MQM’s loud entrance into Punjab, threatening the province’s established parties of breaking their voter piggy banks and having a bite for themselves. It seemed to be a similar message that PML(N) wanted to deliver to Sindh’s established parties – we are here for a slice of the pie. The picture grew starker still when reports of the PML(N)’s attempted contacts with the PML(F) leader, the Pir of Pagara, Mardan Shah, the former Chief Minister of Sindh, Liaquat Jatoi and Jacobabad’s Saleem Jan Mazari surfaced. It was evident that PML(N) was there with a plan – to make a deeper dent on Sindh than their rivals managed to make

on them in Punjab.The result? Statements began to

proliferate from within the MQM and the PPP – the major stakeholders in Sindh – branding Nawaz as an opportunist, a ‘duper’ of the miserable flood-hit people who was trying to fool them into rejecting the current government and its coalition partners by exploiting their misery. Altaf Hussain, the MQM ‘Quaid’, also stated that his party was to contest elections in the whole of Punjab – a blow to the face, saying ‘we can play our nuisance card in your stronghold, too, so you better back off ’. The fist fight between the two parties manifested itself in reality when the elected members of both the parties attempted to physically assault each other inside the National Assembly, either side having verbally touched upon issues held sensitive by the opposing party. The PPP may not have physically taken part in the fight, but it was – and still is – very much

a part of the war of words. Even Imran Khan and Pervez Musharaf are giving in their share of verbal blows to the bare-teethed lion of the N-League – the first clearly in a bid to save what little hold he has in upper Punjab, and the latter maybe just looking to make the most of the on-going sparring between his country’s leading political parties to stage an improbable comeback. They knew not then, but they were soon to find themselves down on the mat.

Fate – or maybe merit – saw to it that PML(N) was to win this particular round of political boxing. On October 13, the people of Sahiwal cast their vote in a by-election held for PP-220.

With a seat in the Provincial Assembly of Punjab at stake, the campaigning was done energetically, despite the barring of one candidate from contesting the election and disallowing Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi from campaigning for Muzaffar Shah Khagga, the joint candidate of the PPP and PML(Q). The voting was completed with no more than a few polling breakdowns (the usual pattern), and the results came out. Khizar Hayat Khagga, the PML(N) candidate came out victorious – and that, too, after amassing nearly twice as many votes as his opponents’ put together, at nearly 40,000 with reports ranging between 39,900 and 41,000. Muzaffar Shah Khagga, the joint PPP and PML(Q) candidate received a vote count in the 21,000 range, while a third independent candidate – reportedly “supported” by Imran Khan – could not even manage a count of 3,000.

The voting might have been contested for a seat in the provincial parliament, but the fact the PML(N) emerged victorious in a region not quite its stronghold of late – and that too with a roar – has wider implications. Couple this development with the new Gallop survey declaring the Sharif Brothers as the most popular leaders of the country, and we see that the Punjabi lion is not as toothless as some of us may have thought. The first round to the PML(N) – by a knock-out.

By Naseem Rao

By Natasha Shahid Kunwar

Umarkot, Sindh’s red-chilli district, remains inundated and unaided as the human element of the devastation unleashed by the floods has been largely ignored by the media

There are still plenty of rounds more to go in this fight. All parties are busy putting on their gloves, and we must anticipate a thoroughly ‘entertaining’, and many-sided political contest ahead

And it so happened that the pre-election travels of Mian Sahib took place, complete with controversial statements and cheap political card-play, all happily covered by the country’s electronic media

The question that needs to be asked is, why is there a virtual media brownout of the flooded areas of interior Sindh…The emergency is showing no signs of abating yet the media’s eyes remain averted

Starker still was the non-preparedness of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). Specifically tasked with pre-planning for floods, the NDMA chairman admitted before the Senate that there was no “coherent plan of action” or “national disaster policy” to deal with the floods

Oh God of birds, don’t gift feathers to eagles;if you can’t stop rain, then stop giving mud houses to the poor. (Couplet from a Sindhi poet)

The anatomy of corruptionBy Umair Javed

Mu h a m m a d Israr collects scrap for a living. He scours j u n k y a r d s a c r o s s

Lahore’s Sabzazar area, sorts out material of value, and then proceeds to sell it to people who profit from such things. He lives in a squatter settlement, which despite promises and threats, has neither been regularised nor razed by the government. He, along with two hundred other heads of households, pay five hundred and fifty rupees a month to the local numberdaar, who then uses (part of) that money to line the pockets of the local municipal corporation officer. The TMO then obliges and looks the other way. The squatter settlement lives to fight another day.At a very basic level, this is corruption of a very obvious kind. A public official is

b e i n g

bribed so that rules can be bent, and land, which has been demarcated for other purposes, can be used to house a bunch of squatters. Naturally, these squatters have nowhere else to go. The nature of urban development in Pakistan, and the third world in general, is such that cities are custom-built playgrounds of the elite. Roads will be widened to cater to their cars, and housing societies will be gated to cater to their aesthetic sense, while the vast underbelly of the city, the silent helpers, drivers, cleaners, the people who open doors and wait on tables, will naturally be left to fend for themselves. In the

harsh milieu of urban poverty, a working class household is left with two choices: either move out of the city and spend a considerably portion of your income on transport, or enter the informal housing market. Most people, like Muhammad Israr of Sabzazar, tend to opt for the latter.When we use the word corruption, we tend to paint our rhetoric with imagery of submarines, power plants, factories, public utilities, and public corporations. The more articulate talk about ‘procurement fraud’ or the ‘bypassing of merit’. Invariably, politicians and bureaucrats will be named. Occasionally, more

so now than before, a General or two will

be mentioned. (It should be noted

that while pol i t ics

as a process i s

considered corrupt, a corrupt armed forces officer is, more often than not, considered to be an exception in an otherwise ‘clean’ institution). What’s interesting is that corruption has ended up becoming the single determining shade in which the state of Pakistan, and its government is usually imagined in public discourse. What’s even more interesting is that this shade is macro, i.e. it focuses on elite-processes, which in turn conspire to eat away at the soul, livelihood, and comfort of the common man. The middle class urbanite speaks for the muted common man in the Urdu and English press, the electronic media, and on the Internet. When a television anchor loudly proclaims that a corrupt politician is less of a representative of the awaam than he is, he’s not being facetious or flippant. He is very, very serious.Yet, the truth is that Muhammad Israr is as common as men come, and corruption is the only way he can ensure a roof on his, and his family’s head.As with any social phenomenon, there are multiple facets to the corruption debate as well. For starters, middle class discourse on the issue is one

determined largely under the premise of ‘economics’ and ‘national development’. Corruption, in this framework,

acts as the largest impediment towards the overall progress of Pakistan as a nation. It causes

inefficiencies, and promotes shortcuts and mediocrity over

talent and hard work. Hence, it needs to be taken care off without remorse; those who indulge need to be punished, and the system needs to be cleansed. These refrains are fairly common in the press and in our homes but they all portray corruption as a problem external to the system; a result of nothing more but a collective climax of greed, incompetence, and unpatriotic dispositions harbored by bad men and women.The remarkable clarity, and

internal coherence of this discourse demarcates anti-corruption sentiment as an actionable form of politics. It is what drove Anna Hazare and his followers to demand an iron cage-like accountability system for India, and it is what drives the urban middle class into Imran Khan’s embrace. The calculus is fairly simple in so far that corruption is treasonous,

When we use the word corruption, we tend to paint our rhetoric with imagery of submarines, power plants, factories, public utilities, and public corporations

The corruption of squatters to ensure

roofs over their heads is something I cannot

stand against. It is the sole existing safety

valve in a system that by its very nature

is designed to exclude

Occupy Wall Street movement: ‘US democracy’s primal scream’

Despite being denounced as senseless rabble rousers and nothing but a bunch of hippies, the Occupy

movement continues to steadily grow. Numbers have reached 60,000 on Wall Street and are increasing and occupations are springing up all over the globe from Rome to such obscure places as Wauwatosa. So far 950 protests have sprouted up in over 80 countries. One of the more active occupations is in Washington D.C. Washington D.C.’s occupation continues to make camp in McPherson Square, located just a few blocks from The White House. Many people have begun to live in the park full time. They’ve pitched tents throughout the park and set up booths. Several tents provide specific services: there’s a medical tent, a

welcome tent, and even a food tent (which is actually pretty decent). The Park has begun to look more like an upscale refugee camp than a park and a clear sense of community has emerged. In just two weeks Occupy D.C. has grown from a ragged group of 20 or so people to an organized force; which attracts 150 to 200 people daily, for marches during the week, and 500 plus on the weekends. Its organization is free of hierarchy, but grapples with the threat of becoming overly bureaucratic as its numbers grow. But so far, its organization has been its most impressive feature in the philosophy it seeks to exemplify.The decision making process begins in committees, which comprise groups of people who have a specific task such as food, outreach, media, food, sanitation, et cetera. Committees draft proposals to deal with issue their committee is supposed to resolve. After the committee has agreed on the proposal it is brought to the General Assembly, where it is discussed. The group’s decision process is based around the General Assembly. The General Assembly opens with the

Agenda followed by an introduction into the decision making process. Following that, committees give their reports, which lead to proposals. This is followed by announcements. The discussion consists of three parts, clarifying questions, concerns, friendly amendments followed by a consensus decision. Clarifying questions are the time where participants make sure they fully understand the proposal by posing questions about its nature. Concerns is when discussion arises and people state what they dislike about the proposal a n d

o t h e r s defend it. If necessary, this is proceeded by friendly amendments; and this is when the proposal is amended to achieve consensus. If consensus is achieved, meaning everyone agrees to the proposal, then it’s enacted by the group. However, many proposals do not pass, in which case two things may happen. First it may simply fail and be stopped completely. The other possibility is that it will be tabled and sent back to committee where the process starts over again. This process is a testament to the mindset of the protesters. The protesters have turned to consensus, in place of voting, because of deep seeded distrust of the United States political system. It shows just how disillusioned with the United States political system they are. The fact that the group has completely rejected voting also shows a deep community bond. The consensus process is tedious and only succeeds if those involved trust each other, and it seems to be working here. This is evidence of the close-knit community that Occupy D.C. is becoming. Meanwhile, the daily marches continue and their

destinations say a lot about the general

direction of the movement. One of the earlier marches targeted Koch industries, owned by the Koch Brothers. The Koch Brothers are notorious for their excessive spending in politics. The controversial Supreme Court decision which granted corporations the same legal rights as people has led to an exponential increase in corporate spending on elections, leading many Americans to feel their politicians are bought and sold. Another favorite target of the protesters is banks. It is not uncommon for marches to spontaneously stop in front of banks and for a chant of “Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!” Banks have been an object of the occupiers’ rage because they were largely responsible for the economic meltdown of 2008. Additionally, the largest march the protesters have had so far was in solidarity with labor unions and civil rights group. The occupiers went on a march spanning a few hours. This began with them converging on a local branch of Bank of America and shutting it down for the day; followed by a march to the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. This march gives one a look into the influences of the protesters, many of

whom see Dr. King as an inspiration of the movement. How long this movement will last is something even the protesters themselves don’t know. When asked how long they plan to stay, most of the protesters reply, “Until it works” or “As long as we need to”. While normally such bravado could be dismissed as hollow talk, the outlook is positive in this case. All the ingredients of a successful movement are there with a solid organizational structure, growing support and energy, and ripe global and domestic conditions. The police have so far been kept at bay and the camp has already survived a couple severe thunderstorms. One can only marvel at their stalwart determination. Yet the question of whether or not this movement will be successful remains. The answer to this is blurry as success is hard to define and many in the movement would define it differently. Regardless of that, the fact that it has already affected politics in the United States is undeniable. Since the beginning of this movement it has shaped the political discourse and energized the democratic party’s attempts to bring banks and businesses under control. This is a success for the Occupy movement, because one of the primary goals of the movement was to ensure that the voices of the people were heard.

Yet the question of whether or not this movement will be successful remains. The answer to this is blurry as success is hard to define and many in the movement would define it differently

while denouncing corruption is an act of patriotism. This black and white equation, however, can be greyed out if one posits that corruption is not only endemic to politics, it is also all-pervasive, and for many, an important source of socio-economic salvation.You see, despite what people from the first-post partition generation will have you believe, corruption is not a new phenomenon. It is, by all accounts, merely growing as society expands, urbanization increases, and capitalism becomes further entrenched. Similarly, corruption is not merely restricted to the act of taking or giving a bribe; it is also found in the preference of particular people for certain jobs and activities, without due regard to impersonal rules. Under this more expanded definition and a longer historical outlook, corruption is seen to stem directly from our experience with colonialism, when a society, organized under various social collectives (religion, tribes, biraderis, quoms, castes), was placed under the command of a system, ostensibly formed on the principles of impersonal relationship between the state and the individual. The principle of impersonal rule, a phenomenon alien to South Asia in general, was then further twisted under the guise of ‘nativism’ to prefer certain indigenous groups over others.One of the best examples of systemic preference of some over others is in the Land Alienation Act of 1900, whereby the deputy commissioner had discretion to anoint certain groups with the permission to hold and cultivate land. The result was that a vast majority of the rural poor were excluded from land ownership, and were made dependent on individual holders or village groups. Similarly, till 1937, codified law declared that women were excluded from holding land for the purpose of continuing with ‘native custom’. The British not only introduced the modern bureaucratic state, they further hybridized it to suit their social and political purposes.Thus, the relationship between state and society in a post-colonial country such as ours is hardly organic. The state is seen as an entity that floats above people, in the hands of a few, serving the purpose of even fewer. The aim for the vast majority is to co-opt the state at any level, make use of its resources, and ensure that their particular collective, be it a family, tribe, dhara, or even a neighborhood, is taken care of. The middle class talks about corruption as this distant threat, but never admits that their own kith and kin, distant or otherwise, are equally guilty of indulging when given the chance. After all, the grade 17 bureaucrat, pushing paper at the Procurement office of the department of civil works is, by all accounts, a middle class citizen. The phenomenon of corruption emerges in a society where resources are fought over, where some are more privileged than others, and when the state is not mine or yours, but theirs. Nothing is more indicative of the state’s alien perception than the mere fact that private gains are made from the public domain.In the absence of a consensus on ‘national interest’, and more than that, on what constitutes a nation-state, or a federation, such co-option will continue. I will go on the record and state that the corruption of squatters to ensure roofs over their heads is something I cannot stand against. It is the sole existing safety valve in a system that by its very nature is designed to exclude. The other forms of corruption, political or in the private sector, are merely a result of our history, our failure to institute representative rule, and to come up with a shared understanding of Pakistan and its state. We can jump up and down, ask for greater accountability, swap stories of who stole what from the national exchequer, send text messages about the President and his henchmen, but nothing will change the fact that a society divided along primordial, communal, and other faultiness will continue to privatize the state and public resources till it sees them as its own.The writer is a researcher/governance specialist, and blogs at http://recycled-thought.blogspot.com. Tweets @umairjav

The author has produced a labour of love in the anniversary year of the renowned poet

Sund

ay, 2

3 Octo

ber,

2011

By Syed Afsar Sajid

By Anum Yousaf

“Life is a tragedy for those who feel, a comedy for those who think”

– Horace Walpole

It wasn’t love at first sight. But it was love nonetheless. The book Catch-22, if it can be called a book at all as it is more an experience than a few pages bound cover to cover, has had its way

with the psyche of a couple of reading generations. The simultaneously iconic and iconoclastic book is the definitive anti-war book. Calling it A Great ‘American’ Novel is an injustice of the highest order. It is a Great Novel, cross-cutting and universal in its anti-war didacticism. That it is American is merely an accident. As Stephen E Ambrose, the eminent historian wrote to Heller, “For sixteen years I have been waiting for the great anti-war book which I knew WWII must produce. I rather doubted, however, that it would come out of America; I would have guessed Germany. I am happy to have been wrong. Thank you.” Thank you, indeed, Mr Heller.

Both Joseph Heller and his book are compelling subjects. Thus, the fiftieth anniversary of the book, celebrated in the second week of October, was an opportunity to talk about both. The occasion was marked not only by a special edition of the book itself but by a biography of the author by Tracy Daugherty, Just One Catch: The Passionate life of Joseph Heller, and another by his daughter Erica Heller called Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was dad and life was a Catch-22.

Both books trace the life of the man from very different perspectives and the central place that the book had in his life. And how could it not? The book had an eight-year long genesis, troubled and protracted (not the creative process as according to Heller, the book came easy to him after

he saw the famous first line clearly in his mind’s eye but the writing is nonetheless labour, sometimes of love and sometimes of odium). After that, finding a publisher was an uphill task as many first receivers scorned and spurned the book even awarding it epithets such as ‘shallow’, ‘crass’ and ‘feckless’. And, indeed, the book is not without its shortcomings. These labels are true in part if not entirely. But the flaws are not fatal. And the book is still what it is. Which is why his agent Candida Donadio and editor Robert Gottlieb could feel they were onto something and picked it up and stuck to their editorial guns.

Even after that, there was the drudgery of editing and re-writing. Heller and his team spent much time pruning the book. Even the title was first called Catch-18, then Catch-14 before finally being called Catch-22. The reason: the number 22 was deemed ‘funnier’. Go figure! The editors and his team created a buzz around the book and when it came out, the reviews were mixed. But those that were good were very good; the book was christened at the outset by many as one of the greatest anti-war books, if not the greatest. It was recognised as both timely in some aspects and ahead of its time in other aspects. The reviews were mixed but it was read and it was read widely. 50 years later, it still isn’t out of print and has sold millions. Because no matter what the critics said, it worked. It worked on many levels. On a deeper primordial level. On an intellectual level. And on a totally ephemeral level due to its surreal component.

And what is it that makes this book work? Some people called it a crackerjack of a book. Others called it jaded and dyspeptic. It is an instance where both of these opposing viewpoints would be right. The book is cognitive dissonance on paper. It melds together many disparate elements and what could be more disparate

than humour and horror. Death and d e s t r u c t i o n a r e j u x t a p o s e d with absurdist comedy and s a r d o n i c observations. The pairing is unsettling but to unsettle is what the book sets out to achieve.

T h e r e are the c h a r a c t e r s . Yossarian, the p r o t a g o n i s t (if he can be called that) and a B-52 b o m b e r like Heller himself, is etched in p e o p l e ’ s minds even though it r e m a i n s f a c e l e s s t h r o u g h o u t the book’s proceedings. There so many others: Nately, Dunbar, the soldier in white, Havermeyer, Nately’s prostitute, Major Major Major Major, Milo Minderbinder .... The narrative structure is as convoluted as the book’s subject matter. And the twisted mien of the book is mirrored in the twisted mindsets of its characters. The book is unapologetic in its pervasive cynicism and even more so about not offering hope to the reader and redemption to its characters. This is an

Dr Hafeez-ur-Rahman Tahir Taunsvi is a dynamic literary figure. He has added another feather to his

already studded cap by compiling the present work (under the aegis of Muqtadira Qaumi Zaban, Pakistan) intended to dig deep into the sources of the wide-ranging studies on the renowned Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984).

In his preface to the book, Dr Anwaar Ahmad, the Muqtadira Chairman, has commended the exercise deeming it a souvenir of the ongoing year of Faiz anniversary and hoped that it would be of immense use to the students, researchers and scholars working on the celebrated poet.

The compiler’s foreword to the book contains a comprehensive survey of the tradition of indexing in Urdu literature bearing on the vast but disparate sources of Faiz studies.

The Urdu word ‘ishariya’ has been equated to the English word ‘index’ which implies a detailed reference to the book, article or entry (without of course reproducing their contents) forming an authentic source of the desired subject or topic. Thus it facilitates access to the relevant material in a short space of time.

Besides classifying indices of sorts, the compiler has also spelt out the essential difference between an ‘index’ and ‘bibliography’. While both are referential in character, the one is meant to catalogue a piece of information or document and the other, to provide access to a list of books on a given subject.

After delving into the mechanics of indexing and bibliography with suitable illustrations, the compiler has neatly indexed all of the available sources of bibliographical material on Faiz, in the following order: 1.Faiz’s literary contributions; 2.Sources of Faiz’s biography; 3.Criticism of Faiz in Urdu; 4. Allusion to Faiz in Urdu/Punjabi critical writings; 5. Critical work on Faiz and translation of his work, in English; 6. Allusion to Faiz

in books of criticism in English; 7. Articles on Faiz in English; 8. Special issues of Urdu literary journals/magazines on Faiz; 9. Similar issues of some other literary j o u r n a l s / m a g a z i n e s on Faiz; 10; Dialogues on Faiz; 11.University theses on Faiz; 12. Faiz on Internet.

The compiler, himself a researcher of repute, seems to have undertaken an exacting but rewarding academic exercise in collecting the requisite material from a large variety of sources, both indigenous and extraneous. The work is thus a reliable, authentic document with an enormous allusive value --- equally beneficial to the academia and the common admirer of Faiz.

Both Joseph Heller and his book are compelling

subjects. Thus, the fiftieth anniversary of

the book, celebrated in the second week of October, was an

opportunity to talk about both

Des

ign

ed b

y Sa

na

Ah

med

Title: Mutala’ey Faiz Kay Makhizat (Ishariya)Compiler: Dr. Tahir Taunsvi

Publisher: Muqtadira Qaumi Zaban, PakistanPages:188 – Price:Rs.170/-04

- 05

Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution waxes cosmic on the origins of faithBy Peter Manseau

Despite its generic title, Religion in Human Evolution is not like so many other “science

and religion” books, which tend to explain away belief as

a smudge on a brain scan or an accident of early hominid social

organization. It is, instead, a bold attempt to understand

religion as part of the biggest big picture—life, the universe,

and everything

Sellers of the Week

About an hour into The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s meditation on nature, grace, Brad Pitt’s crew cut, and the laying of the

foundations of the Earth, I turned to my wife, snuck a Twizzler from the bag in her lap, and said, “I knew this was going to cover a lot of ground, but I really didn’t expect the dinosaurs.”

I had much the same sensation—minus the Twizzlers—reading Robert N. Bellah’s massive account of how such a peculiar thing as religion could have come to play an enduring role in human history. Despite its generic title, Religion in Human Evolution is not like so many other “science and religion” books, which tend to explain away belief as a smudge on a brain scan or an accident of early hominid social organization. It is, instead, a bold attempt to understand religion as part of the biggest big picture—life, the universe, and everything. Like The Tree of Life, it doesn’t work flawlessly from the titles to the credits, but when it does, it leaves you looking at the world in a different way.

Bellah built his reputation—which, for those outside the realms of sociology or religious studies, is second to none in either discipline—on his ability to locate and examine religion where it is not immediately apparent. The general acceptance of the phenomenon of American civil religion (the notion that there is a genuine religious dimension to patriotism and its exhibition) comes to us thanks to Bellah’s treatment of the subject beginning in the 1960s. Not content to point out the similarities between the rituals of church and state, Bellah pulled back the curtain on the nation’s evolving spiritual tendencies to show how biblical tropes had been transformed into a distinctly American theology—a theology in service not of God, no matter what our money says, but of the apotheosized ideal of America itself. His 1975 book, The Broken Covenant, wondered if the faith of national pride was finished (civil religion at the time, he wrote, was “an empty and broken shell”). But the years since, particularly the last ten, have proved the prescience of his original observations.

Religion in Human Evolution is a continuation of Bellah’s project of identifying elements of religiosity that many of us share, even if few of us recognize them as such. This time, he hopes to find a common cause

behind all religions, civil or otherwise. To do so, he follows the lead of the icons of the field, dissecting religious environments that are far removed from current concerns. Émile Durkheim had his aborigines, Max Weber had his Calvinists, and Bellah mines data mostly from civilizations of the so-called Axial Age, the period from 800 to 200 BC, during which humanity developed, with near global simultaneity, the capacity for “questioning all human activity and conferring upon it a new meaning.”

Like Durkheim and Weber before him, Bellah is not looking for answers to Big Questions, but is instead seeking to disinter root causes. However, in his attempt to place the story of the origins of religion within an expansive history of the world, Bellah takes a longer view than any prior theorist could have imagined. Drawing on hundreds of recent sources, ranging from theoretical physics to evolutionary biology, Bellah reminds us, “Even the possibility of thinking about this story . . . is only a little over 150 years old.”

Though his focus for roughly half the book is the Axial period, Bellah shifts freely through the ages. “History goes all the way back,” he writes. To him this means, first of all, that “any distinction between history and prehistory is arbitrary”—and, moreover, that in order to get to the bottom of how something came to be, one needs to find the earliest possible point of entry to the problem. “We, as modern humans trying to understand this human practice we call religion, need to situate ourselves in the broadest context we can, and it is with scientific cosmology that we must start.” And so, unlikely as it may seem, Religion in Human Evolution features an account of the universe’s origins in its early chapters. “When it comes to telling big stories about the order of existence, then, even if they are scientific stories, they will have religious implications.” Bellah here is not selling crypto-creationism. He is merely suggesting that the cosmos is personal simply because we live in it and make it so. Bellah makes this same assumption about big stories concerning the development of life in all its variety. One need not believe in intelligent design to look for embryonic traces of human behavior on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. His attempt to do just that, with the help of recent research in zoology and anthropology, results in a menagerie of case studies that provide the book’s real innovation. Not only the chimps

and monkeys evoked by the word “evolution” in the title, but wolves and birds and iguanas all pass through these pages. Within such a sundry cast, Bellah searches for a commonality that may give some indication of where and when the uniquely human activity of religion was born. What he finds is as intriguing as it is unexpected: They all like to play.

All animals of a certain level of complexity, Bellah explains, engage in forms of “useful uselessness,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s term for behaviors that do not contribute to short-term survival yet do ensure long-term flourishing. In the play of animals, we can see a number of interesting elements: The action of play has limited immediate function; it is done for its own sake; it seems to alter existing social hierarchies; it is done again and again; and it is done within a “relaxed field,” during periods of calm and safety. Put another way: Play is time within time. It suggests to its participants the existence of multiple realities—one in which survival is the only measure of success, and another in which a different logic seems to apply.

From such diverse data, Bellah builds a case that play begot ritual—and that ritual, in turn, begot religion. Seen more broadly: Play both precedes and fosters imagination, and from the ability to imagine—to wonder, to plan, to strategize—civilization follows. Play does not cease at that point, but it does change form as its rules become codified: At this point, it becomes more and more like ritual and religion as we know them.

Stated so plainly, this sounds a bit too simplistic, and it may well be. Supported by both a deep prehistory of play on the one hand, and the ongoing consequences of play on the other (as any Little Leaguer will tell you, play is not always fun), the theory becomes more convincing. Yet one can never shake the sense that the research Bellah wields so effectively comes filtered from hard-science sources through a social-science sieve.

Bellah seeks an explanation of religion not because he believes all religions are about kindness, or that they all “poison everything,” as Christopher Hitchens has said. Bellah is less concerned with whether religion is right or wrong, good or bad, perfume or mustard gas, than with understanding what it is and where it comes from, and in following the path toward that understanding, wherever it may lead.

In this, he is unfortunately in the minority among those with something to say on the subject these days. The

medieval—or perhaps it is merely adolescent—preoccupation with the truth or falsehood of religious claims displayed by most popular writers on religion would be comical, if it were not such a bore. Bellah avoids such problems because, he says, he observes religion from a position outside the culture war. “I am interested to find myself on both sides of the far too polarized opposition,” he notes, “not only between science and religion, but between the methodologies of scientific explanation and humanistic understanding.”

In a perfect world, the endless curiosity on display throughout Religion in Human Evolution would set the tone for all discussions of religion in the public square. Until then, the ability to see faith from both sides may remain as surprising as a dinosaur in an art film.

Best

FICTION1. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammad Hanif

2. The Omen Machine by Terry Goodkind3. Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It by Howard Jacobson

4. The Affair by Lee Child5. Aleph by Paulo Coehlo

6. Custody by Manju Kapur 8. New York to Dallas by J.D. Robb

9. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern10. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

NON-FICTION1 .Pakistan: A Personal History by Imran Khan2. The Afghan Solution by Lucy Morgan Edwards

3. So Much Aid, So Little Development by Samia Waheed Altaf

4. Controversially Yours by Shoaib Akhtar5. Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden

and 9/11 by Syed Saleem Shahzad6. The Price of Civilization: Economics and

Ethics After the Fall by Jeffrey Sachs7. Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven

8. The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 by Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan

9. The Black Banners: Inside the Hunt for Al-Qaeda by Ali H. Soufan

10. The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan by Saadia Toor

CHILDREN’S BOOKS1. Bloodlines by Richelle Mead

2. The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight by L. J. Smith

3. Dead Island by Mark Morris4. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

5. Young Samurai: The Ring of Fire by Chris Bradford6. Aftershock (H.I.V.E ) by Mark Walden

7. Sapphire Bettersea by Jacqueline Wilson8. City of Ghosts by Bali Raj

9. Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer10. The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan

overwhelming negative for some people and they have their case. But it is also arguably one of the powerful aspects of the book and a true condemnation of war.

And then there’s the depiction of war. Milo Minderbinder’s shenanigans are most instructive about the military-business nexus than most academic tomes on the subject. The exasperation that red tape induces is palpable in the book’s happenings. You couldn’t understand bureaucratic logic and its many pitfalls better if a customs officer in Karachi made you run circles in his office. And it is not just bureaucracy and administration that are absurd and pointless; how senseless is the senselessness of the war itself. Even in all his lunacy, Yossarian is indeed

the sane one because he knows the war is out to get him. The horrific denouement is as vivid a description of the human cost of war. Today, the face of war is changing. With the advent of hi-tech gadgetry, the direct human involvement in combat is diminishing but the human cost remains the same. Whether it is a drone or a B-52 that bombs people, it is a human that pushes the button. And since it will always be so, this book will always be relevant.

I read the book first when I was thirteen, then when I was eighteen and now. And the disturbing nature of Catch-22 is no less disturbing on repeat readings. At age 13, I was mildly horrified by the book. My spring-chicken brain couldn’t grasp it entirely. At 18, I was a little more horrified.

My slightly older brain had seen the world suffer from conflict. Now that I read it for its fiftieth anniversary, there’s a world-weariness with which I approached it. The same human condition which produced the insanity that is insidious in the book has also produced the insanity that has turned the entire world into a faux war zone.

Wilfred Gibson’s poem Back, which may seem maudlin in today’s jaded world, could very well have been about Yossarian: They ask me where I’ve been,/ And what I’ve done and seen./ But what can I reply/ Who know it wasn’t I,/ But someone just like me,/ Who went across the sea/ And with my head and hands/ Killed men in foreign lands.../ Though I must bear the blame,/ Because he bore my name.

Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution waxes cosmic on the origins of faithBy Peter Manseau

Despite its generic title, Religion in Human Evolution is not like so many other “science

and religion” books, which tend to explain away belief as

a smudge on a brain scan or an accident of early hominid social

organization. It is, instead, a bold attempt to understand

religion as part of the biggest big picture—life, the universe,

and everything

Sellers of the Week

About an hour into The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s meditation on nature, grace, Brad Pitt’s crew cut, and the laying of the

foundations of the Earth, I turned to my wife, snuck a Twizzler from the bag in her lap, and said, “I knew this was going to cover a lot of ground, but I really didn’t expect the dinosaurs.”

I had much the same sensation—minus the Twizzlers—reading Robert N. Bellah’s massive account of how such a peculiar thing as religion could have come to play an enduring role in human history. Despite its generic title, Religion in Human Evolution is not like so many other “science and religion” books, which tend to explain away belief as a smudge on a brain scan or an accident of early hominid social organization. It is, instead, a bold attempt to understand religion as part of the biggest big picture—life, the universe, and everything. Like The Tree of Life, it doesn’t work flawlessly from the titles to the credits, but when it does, it leaves you looking at the world in a different way.

Bellah built his reputation—which, for those outside the realms of sociology or religious studies, is second to none in either discipline—on his ability to locate and examine religion where it is not immediately apparent. The general acceptance of the phenomenon of American civil religion (the notion that there is a genuine religious dimension to patriotism and its exhibition) comes to us thanks to Bellah’s treatment of the subject beginning in the 1960s. Not content to point out the similarities between the rituals of church and state, Bellah pulled back the curtain on the nation’s evolving spiritual tendencies to show how biblical tropes had been transformed into a distinctly American theology—a theology in service not of God, no matter what our money says, but of the apotheosized ideal of America itself. His 1975 book, The Broken Covenant, wondered if the faith of national pride was finished (civil religion at the time, he wrote, was “an empty and broken shell”). But the years since, particularly the last ten, have proved the prescience of his original observations.

Religion in Human Evolution is a continuation of Bellah’s project of identifying elements of religiosity that many of us share, even if few of us recognize them as such. This time, he hopes to find a common cause

behind all religions, civil or otherwise. To do so, he follows the lead of the icons of the field, dissecting religious environments that are far removed from current concerns. Émile Durkheim had his aborigines, Max Weber had his Calvinists, and Bellah mines data mostly from civilizations of the so-called Axial Age, the period from 800 to 200 BC, during which humanity developed, with near global simultaneity, the capacity for “questioning all human activity and conferring upon it a new meaning.”

Like Durkheim and Weber before him, Bellah is not looking for answers to Big Questions, but is instead seeking to disinter root causes. However, in his attempt to place the story of the origins of religion within an expansive history of the world, Bellah takes a longer view than any prior theorist could have imagined. Drawing on hundreds of recent sources, ranging from theoretical physics to evolutionary biology, Bellah reminds us, “Even the possibility of thinking about this story . . . is only a little over 150 years old.”

Though his focus for roughly half the book is the Axial period, Bellah shifts freely through the ages. “History goes all the way back,” he writes. To him this means, first of all, that “any distinction between history and prehistory is arbitrary”—and, moreover, that in order to get to the bottom of how something came to be, one needs to find the earliest possible point of entry to the problem. “We, as modern humans trying to understand this human practice we call religion, need to situate ourselves in the broadest context we can, and it is with scientific cosmology that we must start.” And so, unlikely as it may seem, Religion in Human Evolution features an account of the universe’s origins in its early chapters. “When it comes to telling big stories about the order of existence, then, even if they are scientific stories, they will have religious implications.” Bellah here is not selling crypto-creationism. He is merely suggesting that the cosmos is personal simply because we live in it and make it so. Bellah makes this same assumption about big stories concerning the development of life in all its variety. One need not believe in intelligent design to look for embryonic traces of human behavior on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. His attempt to do just that, with the help of recent research in zoology and anthropology, results in a menagerie of case studies that provide the book’s real innovation. Not only the chimps

and monkeys evoked by the word “evolution” in the title, but wolves and birds and iguanas all pass through these pages. Within such a sundry cast, Bellah searches for a commonality that may give some indication of where and when the uniquely human activity of religion was born. What he finds is as intriguing as it is unexpected: They all like to play.

All animals of a certain level of complexity, Bellah explains, engage in forms of “useful uselessness,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s term for behaviors that do not contribute to short-term survival yet do ensure long-term flourishing. In the play of animals, we can see a number of interesting elements: The action of play has limited immediate function; it is done for its own sake; it seems to alter existing social hierarchies; it is done again and again; and it is done within a “relaxed field,” during periods of calm and safety. Put another way: Play is time within time. It suggests to its participants the existence of multiple realities—one in which survival is the only measure of success, and another in which a different logic seems to apply.

From such diverse data, Bellah builds a case that play begot ritual—and that ritual, in turn, begot religion. Seen more broadly: Play both precedes and fosters imagination, and from the ability to imagine—to wonder, to plan, to strategize—civilization follows. Play does not cease at that point, but it does change form as its rules become codified: At this point, it becomes more and more like ritual and religion as we know them.

Stated so plainly, this sounds a bit too simplistic, and it may well be. Supported by both a deep prehistory of play on the one hand, and the ongoing consequences of play on the other (as any Little Leaguer will tell you, play is not always fun), the theory becomes more convincing. Yet one can never shake the sense that the research Bellah wields so effectively comes filtered from hard-science sources through a social-science sieve.

Bellah seeks an explanation of religion not because he believes all religions are about kindness, or that they all “poison everything,” as Christopher Hitchens has said. Bellah is less concerned with whether religion is right or wrong, good or bad, perfume or mustard gas, than with understanding what it is and where it comes from, and in following the path toward that understanding, wherever it may lead.

In this, he is unfortunately in the minority among those with something to say on the subject these days. The

medieval—or perhaps it is merely adolescent—preoccupation with the truth or falsehood of religious claims displayed by most popular writers on religion would be comical, if it were not such a bore. Bellah avoids such problems because, he says, he observes religion from a position outside the culture war. “I am interested to find myself on both sides of the far too polarized opposition,” he notes, “not only between science and religion, but between the methodologies of scientific explanation and humanistic understanding.”

In a perfect world, the endless curiosity on display throughout Religion in Human Evolution would set the tone for all discussions of religion in the public square. Until then, the ability to see faith from both sides may remain as surprising as a dinosaur in an art film.

Best

FICTION1. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammad Hanif

2. The Omen Machine by Terry Goodkind3. Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It by Howard Jacobson

4. The Affair by Lee Child5. Aleph by Paulo Coehlo

6. Custody by Manju Kapur 8. New York to Dallas by J.D. Robb

9. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern10. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

NON-FICTION1 .Pakistan: A Personal History by Imran Khan2. The Afghan Solution by Lucy Morgan Edwards

3. So Much Aid, So Little Development by Samia Waheed Altaf

4. Controversially Yours by Shoaib Akhtar5. Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden

and 9/11 by Syed Saleem Shahzad6. The Price of Civilization: Economics and

Ethics After the Fall by Jeffrey Sachs7. Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven

8. The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 by Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan

9. The Black Banners: Inside the Hunt for Al-Qaeda by Ali H. Soufan

10. The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan by Saadia Toor

CHILDREN’S BOOKS1. Bloodlines by Richelle Mead

2. The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight by L. J. Smith

3. Dead Island by Mark Morris4. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

5. Young Samurai: The Ring of Fire by Chris Bradford6. Aftershock (H.I.V.E ) by Mark Walden

7. Sapphire Bettersea by Jacqueline Wilson8. City of Ghosts by Bali Raj

9. Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer10. The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan

overwhelming negative for some people and they have their case. But it is also arguably one of the powerful aspects of the book and a true condemnation of war.

And then there’s the depiction of war. Milo Minderbinder’s shenanigans are most instructive about the military-business nexus than most academic tomes on the subject. The exasperation that red tape induces is palpable in the book’s happenings. You couldn’t understand bureaucratic logic and its many pitfalls better if a customs officer in Karachi made you run circles in his office. And it is not just bureaucracy and administration that are absurd and pointless; how senseless is the senselessness of the war itself. Even in all his lunacy, Yossarian is indeed

the sane one because he knows the war is out to get him. The horrific denouement is as vivid a description of the human cost of war. Today, the face of war is changing. With the advent of hi-tech gadgetry, the direct human involvement in combat is diminishing but the human cost remains the same. Whether it is a drone or a B-52 that bombs people, it is a human that pushes the button. And since it will always be so, this book will always be relevant.

I read the book first when I was thirteen, then when I was eighteen and now. And the disturbing nature of Catch-22 is no less disturbing on repeat readings. At age 13, I was mildly horrified by the book. My spring-chicken brain couldn’t grasp it entirely. At 18, I was a little more horrified.

My slightly older brain had seen the world suffer from conflict. Now that I read it for its fiftieth anniversary, there’s a world-weariness with which I approached it. The same human condition which produced the insanity that is insidious in the book has also produced the insanity that has turned the entire world into a faux war zone.

Wilfred Gibson’s poem Back, which may seem maudlin in today’s jaded world, could very well have been about Yossarian: They ask me where I’ve been,/ And what I’ve done and seen./ But what can I reply/ Who know it wasn’t I,/ But someone just like me,/ Who went across the sea/ And with my head and hands/ Killed men in foreign lands.../ Though I must bear the blame,/ Because he bore my name.

Through the night the gusting wind kept at it. At sometime after five the sun broke through the shackling layers of gray haze and appeared

as a pale yellow disc levitating just above the horizon. It was time to take the short walk to the crest of the ridge of Bail Pathar.

I am no mountaineer and though I’ve been in some high places, I have never actually climbed a real peak. But one thing I know: even insignificant peaks, simply by their very nature of being peaks and therefore higher than the surrounding ground, offer something more than just great views. It was here where long before the dawn of history primitive man placed his gods. Peaks were sacred. Whether it be the puny Miranjani near Nathiagali; or the 4800 metre Deo nau Thuk (Peak of the Jinn) on Deosai; or Musa ka Musallah in Kaghan; or Ilam in Swat; or Kutte ji Qabar (The Dog’s Grave) in the Khirthar Mountains; or Takht e Suleman, they, one and all, were revered places. Those were places for man to approach in worshipful and reverent state of mind, perhaps with an offering or two for whatever gods man believed in.

These gods were created not as man regarded the peak from the base. They were created only after our ancestors were driven up by that curiosity that made them human as distinct from the other primates. Upon the mountain, at the apex of human endurance, the excitement of the panorama those primitive eyes beheld was paled by the heightened consciousness of man’s own place in the great scheme of things. This realisation then as now is not of grandeur and supremacy, but of inconsequence and paltriness – man’s real station in the grand scheme of

things. This is the light that removes the last swagger from lowly humans. On some hilltops (Tilla Jogian near Jhelum, for example) this awareness is higher than on others. And so it was that high places the world over became the seats of gods.

If this is the marvel insignificant peaks such as I have named can work, surely the highest places on earth would do the same many times over. Alpine and mountaineering clubs should therefore bear the motto, ‘Discover thyself.’ And if you ask me, that is the reason women and men have climbed whatever mountain is available – not ‘because it is there.’

Immediately below us to the east right where our camp was spread out was Sahib Talab – the Sahib’s Pond, glinting in the dull light of the hazy morning. Far beyond that was a blue-gray ridge and then the plains. On clear nights the lights of Dera Ghazi Khan and Taunsa, and on clear days the silver ribbon of the Sidhu River could be seen, we were told. To the west a wide valley, scoured by four dry streams, spread at the foot of our mountain. Beyond, rose a khaki ridge and on its other side Balochistan was spread out all but unseen in the dust haze. To the north were more hills and to the south a round knoll, the highest part of the Bail Pathar ridge, blocked further view.

Risaldar Yaqoob Shah of the huge pot-belly, the trencherman of this journey, had earlier told us the story of the bull and the boulder: once upon a time a Baloch came up this mountain with his bull. Tying the animal to a boulder, he went about some business and when he returned he found the animal dead. Since that day the boulder was considered possessed and if anyone tied their animals to it the animals died. End of story.

As stories go this one was the most banal and unimaginative, even rather stupid. Neither is a boulder called pathar in Balochi, nor a bull a bal. Furthermore the first part of the name is clearly pronounced ‘Bail’ and not ‘Bal,’ consequently the story could not be true. The origin of the name is lost in the mist of time and in the tradition of all self-styled thinkers who invent heroes (sometimes events) to match place names (Kamalia and Qabula are two pertinent examples in Punjab),

some moron thought up this yarn. I hotly debated the point until Yaqoob Shah lamely said since ‘bail’ in Urdu was an ivy or creeper, it might be that there was a stone on this hill that was carved with such a form. The poor man got no respite and this notion was shot to pieces very quickly. How could it be, it was asked, that a whole mountain was named after some rock or the other and no one even knew where the rock was?

But back on the top of the ridge Rehmat Khan had arranged tea for us. We sat in the blustering wind and drank the sweet brew as he told us of the angrez woman. It was about thirty years ago that a white woman was found wandering about near a village at the eastern foot of the mountain. The man who first found her, being a true Baloch, asked her to wait in an otaq (guest room) and went off to fetch someone who could understand her language. When he returned the woman was gone. Disappeared. Therefore, it was swiftly deduced, she was a spy. Moreover, the woman had shown the man a map with the Bail Pathar school marked on it. The school with its roster of one teacher and ten pupils on a map! That was sufficient for anyone who doubted her being a spy to now be fully convinced.

The following day, the woman turned up in Rehmat Khan’s village on the west side of Bail Pathar. She must have been one hell of a walker to have gone up and down the desiccated hill without succumbing to dehydration. Word, travelling by the Baloch tradition of hal-ahwal, had already arrived and folks were about waiting for her. She was quickly bundled off to the authorities at Dera Ghazi Khan. Raheal suspected she might have been the good Dr Ruth Pfau, guardian angel for lepers in Pakistan, hunting for u n r e a c h a b l e lepers, but R e h m a t Khan put on a saturnine countenance, lips down-turned, and n o d d i n g gravely said, ‘ No question. She was a spy.’

O n e w o n d e r , s though, what some crazy white woman should be spying for in the parched wastes of west Punjab hill country. But more than that one wonders

what the building that everybody thought was a school was actually being used for to have been so prominently marked on the spy’s map. Now that was something either straight out of an unlettered man’s mind or very, very mysterious indeed and worthy of the files of our intelligence agencies.

The story of Sahib Talab, on the other hand, was cannier. Howard, a Deputy Commissioner of the early 1940s, once visited this mountain. He found it dry and barren, perhaps because of a drought, and local shepherds greatly distressed. The good man ordered the pond to be excavated that has ever since been called the Sahib’s Pond. In the worst years of the drought that now seems to be coming to an end, the pond had run dry only a couple of times. But the nearly continual rains since December have filled it up besides generally greening the region.

We returned to camp in time for breakfast. Over the meal we discovered that Rehmat Khan was not permitting departure without lunch. That would mean travelling during the hottest part of the day and, worse, another roast lamb. But no amount of pleading worked. We resigned, asked him to have the blue and orange canopy put up again and sat back under its shade.

The Inspection Book was produced and Raheal showed me a past entry. Dated the last day of June 2001, it recorded Raheal’s first visit to Bail Pathar in the capacity of Political Agent. He is a strange person, this Raheal. I know for a fact that as Political Agent he was the first one since 1947 to visit some places in his jurisdiction in the tribal outback of Dera Ghazi Khan.

06 -

07Su

nday

, 23 O

ctobe

r, 201

1th

e re

view Pic

ture

s by t

he Au

thor

By Salman Rashid

The Bull and the BoulderThe Bull and the Boulder

Risaldar Yaqoob Shah of the huge pot-belly, the trencherman of this journey, had earlier told us the story

Hin

glu

n P

ost

of t

he

Bor

der

Mil

itar

y P

olic

e

One wonder,s though, what some crazy white woman should be spying for in the parched wastes of west Punjab hill country. But more than that one wonders what the building that everybody thought was a school was actually being used for to have been so prominently marked on the spy’s map

Having travelled with him before I have seen Inspection Books inscribed by officers of the Raj in 1947 and then by Raheal. In the intervening half a century no Pakistani official had deemed it fit to visit those areas!

The point of interest in the notation from June 2001 was that having enjoyed his trip to Bail Pathar, Raheal had ended his note saying he would like to return to the mountain with me. His wish, he said, had come true. The visit back then was work for Raheal had cases to dispose of. This time around it was just something we had to do together. Meanwhile, word had got around that Raheal was visiting the mountain and soon a delegation of liberally turbaned Baloch elders arrived with their entourages. These latter were perambulatory arsenals and could have started a small war on Bail Pathar. Solemnly the elders sat cross-legged and presented their petitions to the sahib.

Having come with supplies Raheal, a trained medical doctor, had turned his earlier visit into a medical camp. Scores of women turned up to be treated for night-blindness He had distributed the necessary vitamins and we now learned that nearly all his patients were cured. As a result women unable to attend that first camp were asking for treatment and Raheal promised to return with medical supplies. Men travel to cities and get their requirement of a varied diet. But women, the lower order of humanity in a tribal setting, eating only the leavings of their men, unacquainted with fruit and vegetables in a harsh land that produces nothing but some cereal, are seriously malnourished. Raheal had only discovered the tip of the iceberg. The sloth-afflicted officials of the Department of Health unwilling to undertake such hard journey find it easier filling in registers in the comfort of their offices while the poor and the unknown of Jinnah’s Pakistan living on the edge of the Middle Ages continue to suffer in silence.

Midmorning was lunch time on Bail Pathar and I hoped I was seeing the last roast lamb for several years. Rehmat Khan said it was impolite to turn down a Baloch’s hospitality and that men so spurned are known to have forsworn their wives if the guest did not relent and accept the proffered hospitality. The word is zan talaq and it is used as a sort of a binding not only upon the one who utters it to do or not do something, but also upon the corrival to acquiesce. That was something like the boys’ rhyme of the Lahore of the 1950s that made all those ‘son of a pig’ if they didn’t take up whatever challenge was thrown. For my part, in order to forestall the hazard of more roast lamb I loudly declared, for all to hear, that I would stand divorced from my wife if Rehmat Khan and his people fed us one more time.

This took everyone by surprise. Such a thing was unheard of among the Baloch. One never said zan talaq in order to ward off hospitality. But I had said it and I was standing by it. Nevertheless as we walked down the mountain every time Rehmat Khan mentioned the possibility of more roast lamb at his brother’s home, I reminded him of my avowal. That

led to the story of the large-hearted Baloch and his stingy wife who were visited by the man and his naseeb.

We arrive in the village of Ugair where Rehmat Khan’s brother nicknamed Akhrote (Walnut, but I never got around to asking why such an impressive person was thus named) was awaiting us. Thankfully there was only tea with biscuits, but the man kept on insisting that he be permitted to take down a lamb. Someone told him I had sworn zan talaq against more hospitality and that finally put the matter to rest. It was already well into the afternoon and if we tarried any longer we would miss the visit to the shrine of Pir Gahno.

This was another story related by Rehmat Khan as we were coming down the hill. Some years ago while visiting the tomb of ancestor Gahno; he got into an argument with his cousin who minds the shrine. The burden of the argument lay on the poor quality of food that had been served up to our Rehmat Khan. The argument dragged on with the cousin defending himself as vehemently as Rehmat Khan attacked him until our man pronounced zan talaq: never again was he to avail himself of the hospitality of the side of the family that kept the ancestor’s shrine. Time flew and soon Rehmat Khan was invited to a wedding in that family. He said he could not attend because that would necessarily mean partaking of his cousin’s hospitality and he would automatically stand divorced.

This was serious business. Family pressure mounted: as an uncle (and a maternal one at that) of the bride and one of the family’s decision makers Rehmat Khan had to attend the wedding. The ceremony needed his blessing. With the matter of zan talaq niggling at the back of his mind, he attended the party and, naturally, dined with his cousin – an act that automatically affected his divorce. Therefore, to keep matters in legal order a mullah had been imported from Taunsa to officiate over the second solemnising of Rehmat Khan and his wife’s nikah. The needful was done that same evening and by the mullah’s decree the new marriage between the old couple had to be consummated within ten days. With a glint in his blood-shot eyes Rehmat Khan said he had come through colours flying high.

There was one setback, however. Rehmat Khan’s wife was no dodo. As soon as the divorce became effective, she demanded her alimony. The man was flummoxed. Five thousand rupees was a good deal of money. But his wife would have it no other way. She had been divorced and she wanted her pound of flesh. Rehmat Khan paid up before he could be re-married.

Pir Gahno’s shrine, like Granddad Musa’s, was again an unpretentious cement block cubicle with a single satin-draped burial inside. The obligatory peelu tree with its multitude of coloured cloth bags containing the first shaving of sons born by ancestor Gahno’s agency was right outside shading the cubicle. It suddenly shone on me: two Buzdar ancestors, Musa and Gahno, revered as miracle-working saints. If this wasn’t ancestor worship it was nothing

in the world. Why, I wondered, hadn’t any anthropologist ever considered working on ancestor worship among the Baloch?

Baloch lore gives them Arab origin – as if that isn’t the case for all Muslims in the subcontinent. Serious research shows however that a very long time ago, much before the advent of Islam, they came from the shores of the Caspian Sea to spread out into the desert regions of eastern Persia and what is now western Pakistan. They descend therefore from an ancient Parthian bloodline. Long centuries ago and far away under the shadow of the Elburz Mountains Baloch religiosity perhaps centered on ancestor worship. The practice appears to have persisted even after conversion to Islam. Where others were encumbered with the invention of Syeds whose tombs could be worshiped for sons and wealth, the Baloch simply continued to venerate their own ancestors.

The last item on the itinerary was Khan Mohammed Buzdar. Three years ago while travelling through here with Raheal we had overnighted at the BMP post of Hingloon. They had shown me the slightly bent bars of the jailhouse and told me how one minute Khan Mohammed was locked up inside and the next was outside beside the free men. I had wanted to meet with the man and Raheal dispatched some of his staff to get him. But Khan Mohammed was away in Taunsa and I had to come away without the interview.

This time around, Raheal had sent word to Hingloon in advance that Khan Mohammed was to be made available. With ordinary build, gentle face and grey beard he looked like no Samson. He also spoke very softly. It was in 1962 or thereabouts, there had been a gunfight, said Khan Mohammed. He had shot and killed one of the rivals’ number which landed him in the lock up. Outside, his brother Taj Mohammed waited with some men of the other party. Shortly after the last prayer of the evening, he heard a gunshot and the shout that Taj Mohammed had been shot.

‘I was beside myself with emotion,’ said Khan Mohammed. ‘My brother had been shot and perhaps killed. I called upon Pir Gahno and before I knew it, the bars were bent wide enough for me to get out.’

The BMP men present in the courtyard restrained Khan Mohammed. Quickly he was hand-cuffed and shackled and returned to his cell. Meanwhile, it was also known that Taj

Mohammed had only received a flesh wound and was out of danger. The bar-bending superman was once again human.

On our first visit one of the witnesses who had seen it all had told me he heard this almighty roar of ‘Ya, Pir Gahno!’ The next thing the man knew Khan Mohammed was standing beside him. Everyone was convinced it was Pir Gahno’s blessing that the man was able to bend half-inch thick iron bars. Khan Mohammed himself believed that as well. When I asked him if he could reenact the long ago feat, he said with great simplicity that he could not have done it then without the saint’s help and he couldn’t do it now.

All those who know of Khan Mohammed’s exploit, believe it was Pir Gahno who did it for him. He had called out the saint’s name and the saint came to his aid. I tried to tell them it was the saint, the superman that lived within Khan Mohammed and indeed within all of us as well. But that made no sense to them. It was useless to tell them how karate experts, having discovered through training the superman within, can use

his powers at will. And how a shout focuses these powers to a single point to help them achieve the seemingly impossible feat of smashing a pile of kiln-fired bricks.

Khan Mohammed’s Pir Gahno had bent thick iron bars for him – but just one time. The Pir Gahno of karate experts does the impossible for them every time they wish. It is only for humans to discover the superman that lives within. My lecture made no sense. Neither to Khan Mohammed nor to the BMP men. Tolerantly they heard me out.

We left under a lowering sky. Sheets of lightning flashed on the southern horizon and I dreaded being caught up by a swollen stream. It was all right for Rehmat Khan who promised us more roast lamb if we could stay. Promising to return in case of a flood we finally bade him farewell. Thankfully it rained only lightly that evening.

–Salman Rashid, rated as the best in the country, is a travel writer and photographer who has travelled all around Pakistan and written about his journeys.

Baloch lore gives them Arab origin – as if that isn’t the case for all Muslims in the subcontinent. Serious research shows however that a very long time ago, much before the advent of Islam, they came from the shores of the Caspian Sea to spread out into the desert regions of eastern Persia and what is now western Pakistan. They descend therefore from an ancient Parthian bloodline

Having travelled with him before I have seen Inspection Books inscribed by officers of the Raj in 1947 and then by Raheal. In the intervening half a century no Pakistani official had deemed it fit to visit those areas!

The point of interest in the notation from June 2001 was that having enjoyed his trip to Bail Pathar, Raheal had ended his note saying he would like to return to the mountain with me. His wish, he said, had come true. The visit back then was work for Raheal had cases to dispose of. This time around it was just something we had to do together. Meanwhile, word had got around that Raheal was visiting the mountain and soon a delegation of liberally turbaned Baloch elders arrived with their entourages. These latter were perambulatory arsenals and could have started a small war on Bail Pathar. Solemnly the elders sat cross-legged and presented their petitions to the sahib.

Having come with supplies Raheal, a trained medical doctor, had turned his earlier visit into a medical camp. Scores of women turned up to be treated for night-blindness He had distributed the necessary vitamins and we now learned that nearly all his patients were cured. As a result women unable to attend that first camp were asking for treatment and Raheal promised to return with medical supplies. Men travel to cities and get their requirement of a varied diet. But women, the lower order of humanity in a tribal setting, eating only the leavings of their men, unacquainted with fruit and vegetables in a harsh land that produces nothing but some cereal, are seriously malnourished. Raheal had only discovered the tip of the iceberg. The sloth-afflicted officials of the Department of Health unwilling to undertake such hard journey find it easier filling in registers in the comfort of their offices while the poor and the unknown of Jinnah’s Pakistan living on the edge of the Middle Ages continue to suffer in silence.

Midmorning was lunch time on Bail Pathar and I hoped I was seeing the last roast lamb for several years. Rehmat Khan said it was impolite to turn down a Baloch’s hospitality and that men so spurned are known to have forsworn their wives if the guest did not relent and accept the proffered hospitality. The word is zan talaq and it is used as a sort of a binding not only upon the one who utters it to do or not do something, but also upon the corrival to acquiesce. That was something like the boys’ rhyme of the Lahore of the 1950s that made all those ‘son of a pig’ if they didn’t take up whatever challenge was thrown. For my part, in order to forestall the hazard of more roast lamb I loudly declared, for all to hear, that I would stand divorced from my wife if Rehmat Khan and his people fed us one more time.

This took everyone by surprise. Such a thing was unheard of among the Baloch. One never said zan talaq in order to ward off hospitality. But I had said it and I was standing by it. Nevertheless as we walked down the mountain every time Rehmat Khan mentioned the possibility of more roast lamb at his brother’s home, I reminded him of my avowal. That

led to the story of the large-hearted Baloch and his stingy wife who were visited by the man and his naseeb.

We arrive in the village of Ugair where Rehmat Khan’s brother nicknamed Akhrote (Walnut, but I never got around to asking why such an impressive person was thus named) was awaiting us. Thankfully there was only tea with biscuits, but the man kept on insisting that he be permitted to take down a lamb. Someone told him I had sworn zan talaq against more hospitality and that finally put the matter to rest. It was already well into the afternoon and if we tarried any longer we would miss the visit to the shrine of Pir Gahno.

This was another story related by Rehmat Khan as we were coming down the hill. Some years ago while visiting the tomb of ancestor Gahno; he got into an argument with his cousin who minds the shrine. The burden of the argument lay on the poor quality of food that had been served up to our Rehmat Khan. The argument dragged on with the cousin defending himself as vehemently as Rehmat Khan attacked him until our man pronounced zan talaq: never again was he to avail himself of the hospitality of the side of the family that kept the ancestor’s shrine. Time flew and soon Rehmat Khan was invited to a wedding in that family. He said he could not attend because that would necessarily mean partaking of his cousin’s hospitality and he would automatically stand divorced.

This was serious business. Family pressure mounted: as an uncle (and a maternal one at that) of the bride and one of the family’s decision makers Rehmat Khan had to attend the wedding. The ceremony needed his blessing. With the matter of zan talaq niggling at the back of his mind, he attended the party and, naturally, dined with his cousin – an act that automatically affected his divorce. Therefore, to keep matters in legal order a mullah had been imported from Taunsa to officiate over the second solemnising of Rehmat Khan and his wife’s nikah. The needful was done that same evening and by the mullah’s decree the new marriage between the old couple had to be consummated within ten days. With a glint in his blood-shot eyes Rehmat Khan said he had come through colours flying high.

There was one setback, however. Rehmat Khan’s wife was no dodo. As soon as the divorce became effective, she demanded her alimony. The man was flummoxed. Five thousand rupees was a good deal of money. But his wife would have it no other way. She had been divorced and she wanted her pound of flesh. Rehmat Khan paid up before he could be re-married.

Pir Gahno’s shrine, like Granddad Musa’s, was again an unpretentious cement block cubicle with a single satin-draped burial inside. The obligatory peelu tree with its multitude of coloured cloth bags containing the first shaving of sons born by ancestor Gahno’s agency was right outside shading the cubicle. It suddenly shone on me: two Buzdar ancestors, Musa and Gahno, revered as miracle-working saints. If this wasn’t ancestor worship it was nothing

in the world. Why, I wondered, hadn’t any anthropologist ever considered working on ancestor worship among the Baloch?

Baloch lore gives them Arab origin – as if that isn’t the case for all Muslims in the subcontinent. Serious research shows however that a very long time ago, much before the advent of Islam, they came from the shores of the Caspian Sea to spread out into the desert regions of eastern Persia and what is now western Pakistan. They descend therefore from an ancient Parthian bloodline. Long centuries ago and far away under the shadow of the Elburz Mountains Baloch religiosity perhaps centered on ancestor worship. The practice appears to have persisted even after conversion to Islam. Where others were encumbered with the invention of Syeds whose tombs could be worshiped for sons and wealth, the Baloch simply continued to venerate their own ancestors.

The last item on the itinerary was Khan Mohammed Buzdar. Three years ago while travelling through here with Raheal we had overnighted at the BMP post of Hingloon. They had shown me the slightly bent bars of the jailhouse and told me how one minute Khan Mohammed was locked up inside and the next was outside beside the free men. I had wanted to meet with the man and Raheal dispatched some of his staff to get him. But Khan Mohammed was away in Taunsa and I had to come away without the interview.

This time around, Raheal had sent word to Hingloon in advance that Khan Mohammed was to be made available. With ordinary build, gentle face and grey beard he looked like no Samson. He also spoke very softly. It was in 1962 or thereabouts, there had been a gunfight, said Khan Mohammed. He had shot and killed one of the rivals’ number which landed him in the lock up. Outside, his brother Taj Mohammed waited with some men of the other party. Shortly after the last prayer of the evening, he heard a gunshot and the shout that Taj Mohammed had been shot.

‘I was beside myself with emotion,’ said Khan Mohammed. ‘My brother had been shot and perhaps killed. I called upon Pir Gahno and before I knew it, the bars were bent wide enough for me to get out.’

The BMP men present in the courtyard restrained Khan Mohammed. Quickly he was hand-cuffed and shackled and returned to his cell. Meanwhile, it was also known that Taj

Mohammed had only received a flesh wound and was out of danger. The bar-bending superman was once again human.

On our first visit one of the witnesses who had seen it all had told me he heard this almighty roar of ‘Ya, Pir Gahno!’ The next thing the man knew Khan Mohammed was standing beside him. Everyone was convinced it was Pir Gahno’s blessing that the man was able to bend half-inch thick iron bars. Khan Mohammed himself believed that as well. When I asked him if he could reenact the long ago feat, he said with great simplicity that he could not have done it then without the saint’s help and he couldn’t do it now.

All those who know of Khan Mohammed’s exploit, believe it was Pir Gahno who did it for him. He had called out the saint’s name and the saint came to his aid. I tried to tell them it was the saint, the superman that lived within Khan Mohammed and indeed within all of us as well. But that made no sense to them. It was useless to tell them how karate experts, having discovered through training the superman within, can use

his powers at will. And how a shout focuses these powers to a single point to help them achieve the seemingly impossible feat of smashing a pile of kiln-fired bricks.

Khan Mohammed’s Pir Gahno had bent thick iron bars for him – but just one time. The Pir Gahno of karate experts does the impossible for them every time they wish. It is only for humans to discover the superman that lives within. My lecture made no sense. Neither to Khan Mohammed nor to the BMP men. Tolerantly they heard me out.

We left under a lowering sky. Sheets of lightning flashed on the southern horizon and I dreaded being caught up by a swollen stream. It was all right for Rehmat Khan who promised us more roast lamb if we could stay. Promising to return in case of a flood we finally bade him farewell. Thankfully it rained only lightly that evening.

–Salman Rashid, rated as the best in the country, is a travel writer and photographer who has travelled all around Pakistan and written about his journeys.

Baloch lore gives them Arab origin – as if that isn’t the case for all Muslims in the subcontinent. Serious research shows however that a very long time ago, much before the advent of Islam, they came from the shores of the Caspian Sea to spread out into the desert regions of eastern Persia and what is now western Pakistan. They descend therefore from an ancient Parthian bloodline

08

The irony is undeniable: areas that had hitherto been struggling with a scarcity of water, with little access to even

drinking water, are now held hostage by floodwaters that stretch out for miles on end. The current monsoon rains have rendered over 6 million people homeless, and caused losses of billions of rupees. Hundreds of thousands of livestock are dead and many settlements completely wiped of the face of the earth. The rains which started on the 8th of Ramadan have wreaked havoc in Sindh, and the debris and destruction are only a visage of the long term devastation that has been unleashed on the area and its people.

District Umarkot is one such victim, with majority of the district’s villages fully submerged and many swept away with the swirling waters. One of these is the village in which I was born, and studied till primary after which I re-located to a nearby city. While I may have moved away, the village and its people will always be my own. The village lay 20 km north-west of Kanri and 7 km south west of Nabisar Road. Made up of 70 houses, which amounts to around 175 rooms, and housing a population of 328, there is now little to tell of its existence. The only lingering sign is a lone mosque, standing desolately in a stretch of dark still water.

One night the people reported having been subjected to a 10 hour onslaught of torrential rain. The water level started creeping up as the already standing water was steadily fed by the rain and it soon swelled into a full-fledged deluge. The village, although situated on a dune, was not spared as the flood found its way to this raised platform. With great difficulty, the villagers set out to save their lives. They waded through the waters, at times submerged up to their necks, carrying their children and struggling to keep their heads above the water. One can only imagine what was going through their heads as they watched the houses, and lives, they had built with their own sweat and blood swept away before their very eyes.

A number of women, children and aged people suffered innumerable injuries in the process. Along with physical hardship, the material damage is also immense. The majority of the villagers earned their livelihoods through farming, and the incessant rains have destroyed their crops and snatched away their sole source of income. Additionally, in a rush to save themselves, they were forced to leave behind all their valuables – their jewelry, furniture, money, clothes. A number of women were anguished because the dowries they had painstakingly

prepared for their daughters had been washed away. This sense of loss was compounded by the fact that no help was extended to them. They took refuge in nearby city Nabipur, my current sojourn, where they were provided neither tents nor food nor dry clothes to wear. My own house in the city had suffered considerable damage, but I managed to arrange for some basic shelter. But I cannot ease the pain of these individuals who were my own, and I look on, powerless, as an air of hopelessness settles upon them. One old man, Basi, lies stricken with malaria but mourns more for the death of his pet animals than his own suffering. More than diarrhea and the lack of food, he feels pain at what he considers to be a failure of his duty to protect these helpless creatures. He says, “Our lives have been saved. Our wounds will mend. New clothes will be procured. But we failed in our

duty to protect animals who always remained loyal to us.”

I wish the same emotion was shared by our rulers. The broken-hearted gaze and parched lips of the flood victims ask the question: where is the government? Why are their elected representatives tucked away safely in their distant mansions? The Pakistan military would rush anywhere at the notice of a few hours is it was a matter of personal gain or power. But it has not come to the rescue of helpless P a k i s t a n i s despite the P a r c h o o r C a n t o n m e n t being situated only a few miles away from the flooded area.

While no answers will be given to these q u e s t i o n s , these brave, h a rd w o r k i ng and proud people will set about building a new world

the minute the floods recede. They will slave away, rebuild their lives and soon after, another flood will swallow up what little possessions they were able to collect and the cycle will continue. From the creation of Pakistan, 10 floods have visited the nation and brought unspeakable devastation. But the privilege classes of Pakistan are yet to experience the devastation of floods. Perhaps this is why no aid is flowing in. Or maybe they are not aware of the extent of destruction? Or maybe its just an icy indifference has seized the hearts of these people. The city of Karachi has no relief camp. Any activity remains limited to grandiloquent statements by politicians in newspaper. Meager attempts can only be seen in smaller cities like Nawabshah.

The point of awareness needs to be given some attention. And the question that needs to be asked is, why is there a virtual media brownout of

the flooded areas of interior Sindh, such as Jhudo, Naukot, Nabgali, Talhi, Nabisarwad, Hassan Rin, Kanri, Bhotsan and Samaro? The emergency is showing no signs of abating yet the media’s eyes remain averted. The Prime Minister has announced that

aid has been dispensed to 150,000 out of 4 million affectees. But the real number of affectees is 6 million which means that 5.8 million affectees are still without tents, medicine, food or clean water. Hundreds of thousands of dead animals float in the open water, substantially increasing the risk of a plague. Immediate measures must be taken else ‘photosession aid’ will soon be dispensed to corpses, rather than people.

Sunday, 23 October, 2011the review2 The anatom

y of corruption 6 The Bull and the Boulder

Illustrated & D

esigned by Babur Saghir

PML(N)’s flood politicking

While the people of Sindh suffer, ignored to an extent by the media, there is a dire need to take those guilty of negligence to task

Sunday, 23 October, 2011 08

On 13th June 2011, the Paki-stan Meteorological De-partment communicated monsoon rainfall will be 10% below the average.

On 8th September 2011, Sindh was hit by rain. And it continued to rain for two days straight. The Sindh floods had begun. Badin bore 284 mm of rain, Nawabshah bore 353.2 mm of rain, Dadu bore 348 mm of rain. Their monthly averages of between 17 and 30 mm had been shattered. Sindh stood inundated. Over 8.9 million people were affected with over 1.8 million displaced. 22 of Sindh’s 23 districts were inundated. And no one cared. The year before there was a huge hue and cry over the floods. For two straight months, the floods were the single most important subject covered. Coverage had its problems, but the flood victims were at least centre stage. How-ever, after the floods ended, media follow up on the Flood Commission reports and prepa-ration for the next monsoon was almost non-existent.

Flood managers ‘unprepared’The Sindh High Court and Sindh govern-

ment to their credit (and to critique Punjab) released the Sindh Flood Commission Report 2010 as soon as it was compiled. The docu-ment (that could be critiqued otherwise), however, was also not acted upon.

The one province that had the time to prepare up for the floods was not prepared. Starker still was the non-preparedness of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). Specifically tasked with pre-plan-ning for floods, the NDMA chairman admit-ted before the Senate that there was no “coher-ent plan of action” or “national disaster policy” to deal with the floods. He had claimed that since the magnitude of floods had not been predicted by the Met department, they had not bothered to prepare. Despite such a major lapse, the NDMA chairman was let go with just a rap on the knuckles. He stood there

representing the same NDMA that had told the United Nations and international donors to ‘stay out’ while the NDMA managed the floods – before it finally admitted the floods were out of their control. However, the same NDMA chairman still had the audacity to complain before the Senate that the Sindh government had refused to let NDMA man-age flood relief. In response to questions of aid, the NDMA has responded by furnishing statistics. In reality that is all the NDMA has had to offer: statistics. Despite such callous-ness, it is unlikely anyone at the NDMA is likely to be taken to task.

The Met department director, whose or-ganisation had submitted the ‘less than usual’ rains prediction, claimed to a reputable news-paper that, “We had given early warning of heavy spells well in time to all stakeholders if only they had heeded.” Whatever the truth may be, either of the two, and more so both departments, must be taken to task. But it is unlikely that any shall suffer from more than a reprimand, a polite slap on the back. The bureaucratic backbone to save Pakistan from the next set of floods had failed.

The meagre responseIn the meanwhile, flood levels rose in

Sindh. More drains were breached, more villages inundated, more infrastructure sub-merged, more people displaced. Badin, which had played host to the 2010 flood victims, was one of the worst sufferers of the flooding. Over 6,000 villages were submerged and over 800,000 people in Badin alone faced the brunt of the floods. But on the television channels, in newspapers, on the streets, there was little to suggest things in Sindh were anything other than normal. There were more camps in La-hore for dengue patients than flood victims. Reports from Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Ka-rachi suggest donation camps were marginal.

It was not merely the government and bu-reaucracy that had become apathetic. The me-dia, civil society organisations, ordinary citi-zens – and even ever active religious groups had decided that Sindh’s floods victims were irrelevant. The more important issues were – dengue, the Karachi killings, the political squabbling, Imran Khan, US-Pakistan rela-tions – and amongst these the fate of 8.9 million people was almost forgotten. Donor agencies, called in late, complained that only 20 percent of funding requirements had been met at $64.5 million from the $357 million required. The UN coordination office subse-

quently announced that the provision of relief supplies to flood victims may end in Novem-ber since given stock is expected to end at the end of the month. The fate of Sindh’s flood victims is not likely to be pretty.

Floods and politicsThe one thing about the Sindh floods

has been, that while aid has not flowed into Sindh, Punjabi politicians, supremely PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif have flowed into interior Sindh…and for the first time. Contributing nothing substantive in terms of aid, Nawaz Sharif began to use the shoulder of the flood victims to fire pot shots at the federal govern-ment. The federal government – or the PPP – in return did not say much but discredit Sharif ’s existing standing in Sindh. But nei-ther of the discussions was important at all. During the period when the floods spilled,

both the President and the Prime Minister, were known to have been out of country. In the meanwhile, again, the flood victims were made victims to their politics.

Drainage crisis in the Indus basinOne of the most pertinent and simple

questions to ask is: why is the standing wa-ter not draining? Again, this is not a question without a context. The context is the billions of dollars in loans taken from the World Bank and IMF to build up the Salinity Control and Rehabilitation Project (SCARP), Main Nara Valley Drain (MNVD), LBOD, National Drainage Programme (NDP) and the Right Bank Outfall Drain (RBOD), only for it to collapse miserably to flood the entire Sindh. And the context is the very reason for these drains: the problems of water-logging and sa-linity created by the last generation of hydro-logical changes in Sindh: the barrage-ifaction and canal colonization of Sindh. The prob-lem-solution matrix conjured by the connois-seurs of modern hydrology has shown to have

completely collapsed. And now the pertinent question is of accountability. The drainage cri-sis in the Indus basin needs a sustainable solu-tion and the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and IMF must be held accountable for the death, disease and destruction in Sindh.

And what of the victims?As it stands, NDMA figures report 369

people have died, 1.4 million homes affected (500,000 completed destroyed), 60,000 plus cattle have died and some 4.5 million acres of crop destroyed. Only 3,000 relief camps cater-ing to 716, 698 people have been set up. Most families remain camped on embankments and roadsides under open skies. The financial cost of the floods is expected to be above $5.5 bil-lion. As some campaigners in Sindh have be-gun long marches to raise a voice against their plight, the majority remains silent awaiting

the waters to be drained away. Drainage how-ever is expected to take 20 to 45 days where government implements a flood water evacu-ation plan. The four districts Benazirabad, Sangarh, Mirpurkhas and Badin have been selected for the first phase.

With no hope of water draining any time soon, and aid coming to reserve levels, the flood victims of Sindh face a perilous future. A UN report reports 2 million people are suf-fering from flood-related disease in Sindh. On a single day last week, eight people died in dis-trict Badin due to flood related diseases and accidents. A total of at least 290 people have died in Badin alone due to water borne dis-eases. This is as over 1 million people are suf-fering from malnutrition in Badin alone. And district Badin is just one of Sindh’s 22 flooded districts. However painful it may be to say this, but if a radical re-orientation of thought towards Sindh does not take place, the cries of the forgotten flood victims of Sindh shall become another silent blot on Pakistan’s not-so-checkered history.

By Hashim bin Rashid

No peace for painEYE-WITNESS REPORT

It looks like the ring of Pakistani politics has got its Mohammed Ali back. A month or so ago it was a dismal picture. With next to zero “exciting” developments to sell

to the audience, our news channels were parched with a slow influx of fiery political duels on the local front. It was at this helpless juncture that Mian Nawaz Sharif came to the rescue of the nation. Lest we die of boredom, Sharif packed his suit case and set up a tent down south in the flood-hit province of Sindh and began raining (no pun intended) a series of verbal punches on his political opponents that were an entertaining watch to the bone – money-back guarantee.

And it so happened that the pre-election travels of Mian Sahib took place, complete with controversial statements and cheap political card-play, all happily covered by the country’s electronic media. Most of us must have been taken

by surprise when the PML(N) chief took the southward route outside of his stronghold – upper Punjab – into the province’s neglected southern half. Many still would have been appalled when his journey took him beyond the boundaries of the province itself into the southern province of Sindh. But the strangeness of this new development vanished for most when they saw footages of him in areas like Badin and Mirpurkhas, setting up tents and telling a handful of desperate homeless people that the government, their very own PPP’s government, is responsible for their deplorable state – they are the absconders, we are the messiahs.

The picture took shape. It was slightly reminiscent of the MQM’s loud entrance into Punjab, threatening the province’s established parties of breaking their voter piggy banks and having a bite for themselves. It seemed to be a similar message that PML(N) wanted to deliver to Sindh’s established parties – we are here for a slice of the pie. The picture grew starker still when reports of the PML(N)’s attempted contacts with the PML(F) leader, the Pir of Pagara, Mardan Shah, the former Chief Minister of Sindh, Liaquat Jatoi and Jacobabad’s Saleem Jan Mazari surfaced. It was evident that PML(N) was there with a plan – to make a deeper dent on Sindh than their rivals managed to make

on them in Punjab.The result? Statements began to

proliferate from within the MQM and the PPP – the major stakeholders in Sindh – branding Nawaz as an opportunist, a ‘duper’ of the miserable flood-hit people who was trying to fool them into rejecting the current government and its coalition partners by exploiting their misery. Altaf Hussain, the MQM ‘Quaid’, also stated that his party was to contest elections in the whole of Punjab – a blow to the face, saying ‘we can play our nuisance card in your stronghold, too, so you better back off ’. The fist fight between the two parties manifested itself in reality when the elected members of both the parties attempted to physically assault each other inside the National Assembly, either side having verbally touched upon issues held sensitive by the opposing party. The PPP may not have physically taken part in the fight, but it was – and still is – very much

a part of the war of words. Even Imran Khan and Pervez Musharaf are giving in their share of verbal blows to the bare-teethed lion of the N-League – the first clearly in a bid to save what little hold he has in upper Punjab, and the latter maybe just looking to make the most of the on-going sparring between his country’s leading political parties to stage an improbable comeback. They knew not then, but they were soon to find themselves down on the mat.

Fate – or maybe merit – saw to it that PML(N) was to win this particular round of political boxing. On October 13, the people of Sahiwal cast their vote in a by-election held for PP-220.

With a seat in the Provincial Assembly of Punjab at stake, the campaigning was done energetically, despite the barring of one candidate from contesting the election and disallowing Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi from campaigning for Muzaffar Shah Khagga, the joint candidate of the PPP and PML(Q). The voting was completed with no more than a few polling breakdowns (the usual pattern), and the results came out. Khizar Hayat Khagga, the PML(N) candidate came out victorious – and that, too, after amassing nearly twice as many votes as his opponents’ put together, at nearly 40,000 with reports ranging between 39,900 and 41,000. Muzaffar Shah Khagga, the joint PPP and PML(Q) candidate received a vote count in the 21,000 range, while a third independent candidate – reportedly “supported” by Imran Khan – could not even manage a count of 3,000.

The voting might have been contested for a seat in the provincial parliament, but the fact the PML(N) emerged victorious in a region not quite its stronghold of late – and that too with a roar – has wider implications. Couple this development with the new Gallop survey declaring the Sharif Brothers as the most popular leaders of the country, and we see that the Punjabi lion is not as toothless as some of us may have thought. The first round to the PML(N) – by a knock-out.

By Naseem Rao

By Natasha Shahid Kunwar

Umarkot, Sindh’s red-chilli district, remains inundated and unaided as the human element of the devastation unleashed by the floods has been largely ignored by the media

There are still plenty of rounds more to go in this fight. All parties are busy putting on their gloves, and we must anticipate a thoroughly ‘entertaining’, and many-sided political contest ahead

And it so happened that the pre-election travels of Mian Sahib took place, complete with controversial statements and cheap political card-play, all happily covered by the country’s electronic media

The question that needs to be asked is, why is there a virtual media brownout of the flooded areas of interior Sindh…The emergency is showing no signs of abating yet the media’s eyes remain averted

Starker still was the non-preparedness of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). Specifically tasked with pre-planning for floods, the NDMA chairman admitted before the Senate that there was no “coherent plan of action” or “national disaster policy” to deal with the floods

Oh God of birds, don’t gift feathers to eagles;if you can’t stop rain, then stop giving mud houses to the poor. (Couplet from a Sindhi poet)