Reminiscing Ramadan

July 24, 2012 Leave a comment


Last week marked the start of Muslim fasting month of Ramadan across the globe.

The ninth month of the 12-month lunar Islamic calendar, Ramadan brings along a lifestyle and culture of its own, changing people’s schedules to eating habits to how they should behave in order to fulfill essentials of the fast.

It’s a month that holds significance for many but, at the same time, it’s one that becomes a challenge for some. For the faithful, it’s a month that holds far more significance in terms of worshiping than any other month of the year. Whereas, for people like me, it comes as an unwelcome guest in a metaphoric house that has no door but windows.

Fasting comes as third in a series of five pillars that encompass the Muslim faith. The others include praying five times a day towards the city of Mecca, performing Hajj–the pilgrimage to the city once in a lifetime for those who can afford it–and giving alms to the needy. During the 29- to 30-day long month, the number depending on the visibility of the crescent moon to start or end the month, observers of the fast are required to refrain from eating, drinking and having sexual pleasures. It also obliges the faithful to be more caring, helpful and fulfilling toward the needs of other fellow believers of the faith.

Despite the fact that I’ve always viewed myself as someone born into the religion more by chance than by choice and that I’ve always had this feeling that certain beliefs were thrust upon me than I would have liked, there are certain things I like about the festive month.

Back in Pakistan, where I have lived most of my life, the month would bring along a whole culture of its own. It would revive certain norms and customs that were otherwise forsaken.

For instance, the month would engender a sense of empathy among well-to-do people for their needy neighbors and underprivileged people. Alms or Zakat, enshrined as one of the five pillars of the religion that obliges the-haves to give a certain portion of their yearly earnings and overall value of possessions in form of charity to the poor, would be distributed among people in need. The amount would not help much, but it would enable the recipients to buy basic commodities of life and the like.

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My take on ‘Wasu Aur Main’

May 17, 2012 1 Comment


There is a lot of absurdity going on in Pakistani media, particularly with the electronic version. Considered largely vibrant, free and willing to hold powerful circles accountable, it is however not indicative of an ethnically and religiously diverse, culturally and linguistically plural Pakistan. All it tells is a single story, and single stories tend to be dangerous.

Where it could become a unifying force for an already-fragmented society, it works as a means to further augment fissures of strife among different strata of Pakistan society.

Electronic media in Pakistan remained Balochistan-blind for more than a decade, ignoring issues that confronted the country’s largest province that now have turned into troubling genies hard to put back in the bottle. But, all of a sudden, when a U.S. lawmaker introduced a concurrent resolution in the U.S. Congress after holding a public Congressional hearing, Pakistani news channels had overnight met a messiah who had cured their Balochistan-blindness.

With their new-founded eyesight towards Balochistan’s issues, they have been doing more harm than good to help solve the conflict. One of such misadventures is Wasu Aur Main, a reality TV show featuring a renowned pop singer, Shehzad Roy, and Wasu, a Baloch poet and folk singer employed in the police department in Jafarabad district of Balochistan.

Roy finds Wasu after someone had shot and posted a video of the latter on YouTube, showing him eulogizing Pakistan’s forefathers and telling Pakistan’s brief history of political turmoil and military takeovers in his poetic Urdu. Subsequently, Roy goes all the way to Jafarabad and casts him in one of his music videos.

Then comes the reality TV show.

Wasu is a man of wit, a funny one. On the other, he is naïve like many of his contemporaries in Pakistani society, fed with misinformation by the same media that ignore real issues and showcase a fabricated history.

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You speak thine, I speak mine

May 2, 2012 Leave a comment


My Facebook News Feed is as varied as the list of my Facebook friends that happen to come from different parts of the world. For the most part, it works as the only source of information for me. But at times, it exasperates me with photos, messages and ideas that I would otherwise not want to be exposed to.

News Feed can represent the overall outlook and mood of a people in a particular region or country. Similarly, when it comes to Pakistan, I find it a gauging tool to measure political leaning, growing religiosity and extremism, antipathy towards religious and ethnic minorities and whatnot.

Statuses, photos and other things shared on Facebook by my friends from Pakistan are not only reflective of the problems in the country but also herald Pakistan’s further descent into the abyss of radicalization along religious lines.

Since I have been very careless about who to friend and who not, there are several such people whom I do not know personally. These are the ones who click ‘share’ on almost anything without giving it a second thought.

A  couple of days ago, this photo showed up in my News Feed. A friend of mine had commented on it after a friend of hers had posted it, so it also appeared in my News Feed. It is one of many such items that appear in my News Feed which showcase the mentality and perceptions of  two generations of Pakistanis. Their view of the world is the unfortunate product of what a dictator had introduced some three decades ago.

In the eighties, Gen. Zia ul Haq, in his effort to reshape the fabric of Pakistani society along Islamic lines–or let’s say make it look like more Middle Eastern–orphaned the society of a culture. In subsequent years, the same society would adopt fathers not worthy of its lineage of great Indian civilization that had existed and flourished much before the rise of Arabs to dominance.

Talking of this photo, it reminded me of Zia’s steps to make Pakistan a ‘pure’ Islamic country, when  strong-worded instructions would be given to hosts of TV and radio shows to use the word  ’Allah’ instead of Khuda’. The later is Persian and hitherto had been in common parlance in different communities in Pakistan, including Christians. According to him, Allah was the proper word to refer to Muslim God.

The language of this photo is as assertive and aggressive as that of Gen. Zia’s.  It forbids use of English words and emphasizes on using Arabic words instead, which doubtless have already in common parlance among poor and middle-class Pakistanis since Zia’s period.

How ridiculous! Why someone else should tell me to use one language and not the other. Had the photo asked Pakistanis to use their mother tongue instead, I would have agreed (Many languages in Pakistan are nearly on the verge of extinction, because Urdu has forcefully been thrust upon people who do not speak it in the first place). In this case, I am being urged to use long, mundane words over ones that are precise and reflective of human expression.

I don’t know why people are so obsessed with a particular language. They need to understand that by speaking a certain language, one does not become a better human being. A language is a mere tool of expression, be it Arabic, English, Urdu or any other language. So why so much obsession with a particular one!

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As inclusive as Seattle

April 28, 2012 Leave a comment


Seattle is a big city and diverse as any other major city in the world. With origins from almost every part of the globe, Seattleites make the city one of its kind, what many call a hyper-diverse city.

For a year and half that I have been living in the Greater Seattle area, I have found the people very welcoming and appreciating of what I am and where I come from.

Every Seattleite, no matter where they originally come from, feel and think alike about how to keep Seattle what it always is, a hyper-diverse city. One that has all tastes and cultures from across the globe.

To show the inclusiveness of the city and provide the connect the people here with their origins, Common Language Project, a non-profit journalistic organization housed in University of Washington’s Department of Communication, has been making efforts in recent years to connect communities here with people and their issues across the globe.

The Seattle Globalist

Today, I had the opportunity to participate in an event of the CLP in which the nonprofit launched one of latest journalistic ventures – Seattle Globalist.

Seattle Globalist is a new initiative from the CLP. It’s a blog that covers “the connections between Seattle and the rest of the globe.” The blog mentions itself as a place “where Seattle meets the world.”

What I learned

Like every other human being, I have my own stereotypes about people I come across every day. But with the passage of time, I have come to understand that what we term as our stereotypes are actually the paradigms that we are born into. We view the world around in a way that we have been repeatedly told to over years, that by our parents, teachers, the society and whatnot. We stereotype and get stereotyped every single day.

At the Seattle Globalist’s launch party, I had the opportunity to meet and network with this amazing, young woman of Iranian descent. Initially, I took Roxana Norouzi, a social worker with a local non-profit, as a Muslim, as anyone who comes from my part of the world would. But the fact is that she is not; she is a Jew of Iranian descent. I unfortunately come from a part of the world where every single individual is trying to make their neighborhood, city or country exclusive. Iran as a country has been no different.

In a write-up on the Seattle Globalist earlier this year, Norouzi wrote how being a Jew of Iranian descent presented her with a complex situation of dueling identities amid recent war-mongering rhetoric from Iranian and Israeli leaders.

If we put our stereotypes aside, we will find that all people of the world are one whole, no matter where they belong to. In societies like here in the US, this wholeness or ‘globalness’ becomes more evident. Whether one is traveling in a public transport, walking on a sidewalk in a crowded city or sitting in coffee shop, the babbles around may sound different but every single of them makes the same sense that in our own language(s), it would make to us. Our differences could be of color, appearance, beliefs, ideas, language, etc., but we all are alike despite all these difference. We are all made of the same fabric.

The Seattle Globalists and The Baloch Hal

I was fascinated by the idea of the Seattle Globalist. It tries to connect the community here with people living elsewhere in different parts of the world who have a common bond with Seattleites. The Globalist for sure will make these bonds stronger.

I also find a lot of similarity between the Globalist and The Baloch Hal. What we do at The Baloch Hal and what the folks at the Globalist do has lots in common. For instance, we try to connect the rest of the world with a region and its issues that hardly get any coverage in local Pakistani media, let alone in any international media outlet. Whereas, the Globalists try to bring stories to the communities here that otherwise would not reach them through other sources. We call ours a ‘hyperlocal news site; the Globalists term theirs a ‘hyperglobal blog’.

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Remembering Huda Bakhsh, the ‘chah khor’

April 27, 2012 Leave a comment


Huda Bakhsh, more commonly known as Tughu among my family members, has remained the apple of every household’s eyes in our neighborhood for as long as I can remember. Sadly, that’s not because who he is but rather so because of what he’s been doing for so many years: Helping clean garbage of houses, doing different chores of each house in the neighborhood and doing everyday purchasing of grocery from nearby shops.

In return, he would have very minimal demands; five rupees that would get him a packet of naswar, or snuff. “Gudan mani nas e zar a bede,” he would request after completing the assigned chores, asking that he be paid the money that would get him some snuff.

He could compromise on not being paid five rupees, which would get him a packet of snuff only. But there’s something that he could hardly compromise on: He definitely wanted to be served a kettle full of black tea, or siah chah, as it is called locally, once he’s done with his work. His chah khori, or tea-drinking habit, is talked of in every household of the neighborhood.

Tughu, as I call him out of sheer respect and reverence for his services for so many families over years, and I have had many things in common: He’s as obstinate as I am, but that’s not the reason that prompted me to write a blog post on him (If Tughu once made up his mind that he would not do something on a given day, for sure he would not do it). But I am referring to him here just because of his tea-drinking habit as his would compliment mine and could hardly outmatch mine.

A habit of mine that would earn me the name of gwanden Tughu, or Tughu the junior, tea-drinking played a significant role in my developing a habit of being an avid reader, which subsequently ended up as my passion for becoming a writer.

During long, frosty winter nights, with blanket slightly tucked over my head, my eyes would remain fixed on pages of children’s books that I would buy from the one and only bookstore in the only big market of the town. Black tea would ensure I would not succumb to sleep.

In the morning, during the first period at school, my eyes would be sore, glaringly as red as the slit throat of an innocent sheep mercilessly ‘sacrificed’ on the occasion of bigger Eid, the day when Muslims around the world kill hundreds of thousands of animal to accomplish the rite of some man that had lived in distant past.

However, for the past one year or so, I have completely quit my habit of drinking black tea. I am living in a city whose residents are celebrated for their habit of drinking coffee. So, I guess it would have been difficult to survive here had I stuck to my old habit. Now, I enjoy a cup of coffee as much I did a kettle-full black tea.

The idea of writing this blog post originated from a Facebook status update of mine in which I had mentioned that I had made some good black tea for myself after a long time. This, obviously, prompted comments from family members and close friends who are familiar with my erstwhile tea-drinking habit. As a matter of fact, it came a surprise to them that I have quit being a chah khor.

I wish I had a picture of Mr. Tughu to supplement this post. Unlike me, I am sure he will never be able to quit his tea-drinking habit despite the soaring prices of sugar in Pakistan.

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Baloch Diaspora To Celebrate Baloch Culture Day In Canada | The Baloch Hal

March 25, 2012 Leave a comment


The Baloch Hal News

ImageSEATTLE, United States: Baloch diaspora of North America will celebrate their first culture day in Surrey, British Columbia, next week on Saturday March 31.

Organized under the auspices of Baloch Community of British Columbia Society, a local organization of the Baloch community in Canada, the event aims to present Baloch culture.

“This will be the first and the biggest event of its kind in North America about Baloch culture and values,” said Dorazahi Baloch, a Seattle-based organizer of the event who has actively been campaigning to mobilize Baloch community in the Pacific Northwest. “It is a part of our greater efforts to mobilize the Baloch community in the U.S. and Canada as well as to create awareness in respective communities in both the countries about Baloch people.”

Themed as “Land of Vibrant Culture, Historically Rich and Beautiful Balochistan,” the event includes a fashion show of traditional Balochi attire followed by a talk in which speakers will shed light on Baloch people, their culture and history. “We have also invited Kurd and Canadian speakers to talk about Balochistan as well,” Dorazahi said.

Click on the image to reach the Facebook page for the event.

According to Baloch, contributions from Baloch diaspora living in greater Seattle area and British Columbia have helped them organize the event.

Each year, Balochs inside Balochistan and across the world mark March 2 as their ‘Culture Day’, organizing musical shows, displaying Balochi attire and cooking traditional Balochi dishes.

Why the event wasn’t held on March 2?

Aysha Baloch, one of the Canada-based organizers of the event, said due to busy schedules of people involved in putting the event together, they couldn’t arrange the event for March 2. “However, we will try our best to celebrate our culture next year on the same day as many Balochs across the world do.”

Event is open to public. For more details, contact balochcultureshow@gmail.com.

via Baloch Diaspora To Celebrate Baloch Culture Day In Canada | The Baloch Hal.

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