An infrequent blog

My ‘new’ blog has turned out to be about as vacant as the new government of Pakistan (which, I should add, was not the government when I rather grandly started ‘blogging’ in December 2007…those were the good old days in which my friend SA governed the forests and fisheries of the Punjab, and my relative WS broke all known records as teenage minister.) It was then, in the darkness that delivered this now not-so-new year, that I was finally driven to write. (Also, the fact that there were no New Year festivities in Karachi, where I was then, and I am now, may have played a minor role.)

I have thus been troubled by the fact that my blog has not quite become a blog; it is but one sad Entry made over 6 months ago, when I was young and carefree (Not) and the world was a braver place. I have derided myself, psychoanalyzed myself, and even flirted with self-important ideas like ‘writers block’, and what-have-you.

It was after some soul-searching that it finally struck me.

Certain things can only happen once in history (and thank God for that). Like that fateful midnight 60 years ago that carved two nations out of one, my ‘Blog’ was also borne of a cataclysmic event – the assassination of Benazir Bhutto – and thus belongs to history. To expect it to perpetuate does not, perhaps, augur well for the other great leaders of our nation… Differently put, nothing has quite touched me since. I am clearly the antidote to a certain distinguished family interviewed recently by the scholarly GT whose matriarch declared: ‘We are an eccentric family – things touch us.’ Well, things do not ‘touch’ me.

In my defense, however, between 27 December 2007 and 6 July, nothing of any significance has happened…unless of course one considers that today – 6 July – is the birthday of George W Bush…a fact I was forced to discover when somebody forwarded me an email with a photograph of a road sign greeting drivers entering the state of Connecticut: ‘Welcome to Connecticut, birthplace of George W Bush’, it read, followed by ‘We Apologize.’

So what is one supposed to celebrate – apart from W’s birthday? The fact that Mr. Z, who till recently was plotting his revenge from a jail cell, is now leader of the pack? (He plotted well.) Or do we get misty-eyed (or perhaps mystified?) at his newfound ‘closeness’ with NS, the protégé and prime beneficiary of Mr. ZAB’s killer? Or, perhaps, do we delve into the latest brainteaser and try to figure out who’s the ‘Old PPP’, who’s the ‘New’, and which one counts Aitzaz Ahsan amongst its members? Speaking of whom: I am also not ashamed to say that I don’t give two hoots about the ‘judiciary’, which to me has become nothing more than an over-hyped election issue. (I mean, who was the first to storm the Supreme Court anyway?) And what’s more important: massive food and fuel insecurities compounded by backbreaking inflation and back-to-back ‘load-shedding’, or the reinstatement of some dude called Iftikhar Chaudhry? It almost seems like a poorly-hatched film plot: keep harping about the cross-eyed guy, and hope that the 16 crore awaam will somehow lose sight of the real issues!

Indeed, it would not be a lie to say that I have stopped reading newspapers (although it could be a lie to say that I ever really read them)… and let’s not even talk of the ‘Breaking News’ alerts (yawn) that flash endlessly across 800 new channels at a breathtaking pace. But despite this newfound detachment, what did irk me tremendously was when, on a recent visit to New Delhi, a friend of ours, while twisting and turning on a barstool in a much sought-after new Japanese restaurant (we couldn’t get a table), declared: ‘The way things in Pakistan are happening, I think we’ll all soon be…together.’ There was a brief lapse before the meaning of the gratuitous remark sunk in. I realized she hadn’t even prefaced it with the customary ‘I hope you don’t mind’ (or equivalent thereof), almost as if I would instantly embrace this idea of oneness with Bollywood and Shining India. I dropped, from mid-air, the California roll that I was about to stuff my face with.