birthday '16

the madness of faith
and vanities of time,
frigid desire,
sorry self-deceit

a heat
that is cold
and a wetness
that’s dry,

and the noise
of a breaking heart,
inaudible,
among empty moans
and unfulfilled sighs,

are your story

in the arms of love,
my love.

in the stranger’s embrace,
you say?

pleasure for show,
your cries
for attention

living the moment
in borrowed
sensation

dishonest eyes
despoiled hair
sublets on skin
caramel or fair
consummate guile
circumspect glee?

that is the place

you’re meant to be!

wonky talk II

this is getting serious, baby! but don't worry. we will persevere!!

Dams: The Other Side of the Promise

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2016/10/30/comment/dams-the-other-side-of-the-promise/

wonky talk

Forgive me, my unfailing database of woe! I cheated on you.

'The Unexplored Potentialities of the Pakistani Mango'

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2016/09/25/uncategorized/the-unexplored-potentialities-of-the-pakistani-mango/

How We Are Failing Our Children

Amid the swirling horrors of an unabated spate of child abductions, child pornography rings, incessant child sexual abuse, rape and murder, and numerous other excesses against society’s most defenseless members a mere fraction of which get reported, one would imagine that the country would be preparing to go to war in the protection of its future, i.e. our children.[1] Parliament (and provincial assemblies) would be scrambling to debate the merits of current legislation, pushing through more effective laws and holding the state apparatus to account on implementation. The media, with their monopoly on national opinion-making, would bring their massive influence to bear on making the plight of the child the no. 1 burning issue in the public’s collective attention. Society at large would engage in mass soul-searching to identify and root out the causes, circumstances and societal contradictions that pave the way for our children being brutalized, physically and psychologically.

What we have instead is a spokesperson for the party-in-power appearing on prime-time TV to correct facts: only 132, and not 700 or more, children are missing without a trace from Lahore since the beginning of 2016. And that somehow makes everything better. Senior police officials conclude that most missing children are runaways from home and not really kidnapped. But surely, there are at least a few that have been abducted in broad daylight without as much as a ransom call or note. There are rumors of an organ-harvesting network in operation. If that is true, it is surely being abetted by qualified medical workers and customs and police officials. What is the breadth and intensity of the investigation if the default setting is: he ran away from home? If the glorious guardians of our national consciousness, the Parliament and other law-making bodies, cannot convene to consider, e.g. how a Criminal Procedure Code given by our colonial masters in 1898 is still valid today; why laws made for Child Protection in recent years have remained largely toothless especially in the context of federal legislation and provincial execution; why children-specific bills are needed based on scientific studies investigating whether things like rape, emotional and physical trauma and being exploited have different long-term physical and psychological impact on adults and children; and, how do you even define a child in this class-, sect- and caste-crazed society, let them at least sit together and decide upon an arbitrary national threshold of tolerability for abducted/raped children. 132 is good enough. Heaven forbid if it were ever to be 133.[2] [3] [4]

The apathy of our power elites (media included) towards anything other than the high-drama of political power-play is nothing out of the ordinary. While the elite unabashedly exhibits callous disregard, the people seem to suffer from mass denial bordering on self-delusion. A standard refrain is, especially in the context of child sexual abuse, that when the phenomenon is rampant in ‘developed’ Western nations, how can Pakistan be expected to eradicate it. This line especially hurts when coming from good-hearted, well-meaning people. My only question to such people is, isn’t the decadent West only just materially advantaged while we, as a nation, have always prided ourselves on being more spiritually and morally upright? Isn’t the basic premise for our entire national existence the religion of Islam? Nothing is more symptomatic of a diseased soul than raping, seducing, or otherwise molesting, a child. Shouldn’t our superior spiritual strengths have ensured the minimal incidence of such vile crimes in our society vis-à-vis the immoral West that is going to hell anyway despite its material advantages? Or should we admit that there is also a disease within our souls that begs to be treated with all the scientific and spiritual remedies available to us in the 21^st century.

For perspective, my reading of history leads me to believe, that pederasty, i.e. a sexual preference for young boys, is not as much a legacy of our Hindu heritage, blamed as it is for most social ills in present-day Pakistan, as it is of our cherished Arabian-Persian-Turkic tradition. While ancient Hinduism is rife with the abominable tradition of child marriages, objective accounts from Mughal, Ottoman, Abbasid and Persian courts and the life-stories of notable rulers, warriors, poets and even revered saints point to a vast history of pederasty in this region. Countries like Afghanistan are also still grappling with the ramifications of this widely and openly practiced phenomenon, locally known as ‘Bacha Baazi’.[5] [6] Interestingly, boys who have been thus exploited are culturally expected to go on and inflict the same upon others as they themselves grow into adulthood. This forms a vicious chain that is unending across generations. From a six-year old boy hanging dead after being sodomized on the second floor of a mosque to the largely-forgotten depredations of the Kasur and Swat child pornography rings to the hastily-hushed and hardly ever investigated rumors surrounding our religious seminaries to the regular nuggets on the periphery of the daily news, it is about time we wake up to this hideous reality, this inherited malaise that afflicts us. This is not to say, of course, that girl-children are any safer in Pakistan. Data suggests that no child-type is safe from sexual predators in our country; rich or poor, boy or girl, disabled or orphaned, housed or homeless.[7]

In 2007, Iranian President Ahmedinejad made an international mockery of himself by claiming that there were no homosexuals in his country.[8] By turning a blind eye to how children in Pakistan are suffering just because the fire has not come home yet, many of us stand to make similar fools of ourselves, especially in the realms of conscience. Not everything from Javed Iqbal, serial rapist and murderer of over a 100 children in Lahore in the 90s, to the current, uninhibited row of unexplained kidnappings, is an anomalous stain on the beautiful face of our country that will go away by itself. Only after mustering the courage to recognize the issue can the urgently needed conversation on how elitism, socioeconomic stratification, wage disequilibrium, systemic governance failures, notions of shame and honor, clerical irresponsibility, broken and displaced families, absence of a social security net, dysfunctional gender attitudes and educational systems, and the lack of a sense of collective social responsibility towards children, all feed into leaving our children so vulnerable to exploitation.[9] And this conversation needs to occur at all echelons of society. Comparisons with other countries or arguing over incidence figures represent a defeatist, self-serving policy that undermines an unambiguous, absolutely uncompromising attitude that any self-respecting people should have as to the protection of their children.

We, in the present-day, are custodians of our future in the form children that we are bringing up. Children are the weakest members of society, needing an external voice to articulate their needs and protect their human rights as they lack the intellectual and physical capacity themselves. No code of human decency, religious or secular, looks kindly upon a people who stand in brazen disregard of the plight of the weakest among them. More poignantly, no society that remains in denial about gross injustice within itself has any right to harbor any self-gratifying notions of grandeur, material or spiritual.

---

[1] http://sahil.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FIVE-YEAR-ANALYSIS-200-2011.pdf

[2] http://www.dawn.com/news/1243231

[3] http://ombudsmanpunjab.gov.pk/children-complaint-office/child-right-acts-laws/

[4] http://www.dawn.com/news/1199985

[5] http://www.dawn.com/news/1265215

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html?_r=0

[7] http://sahil.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FIVE-YEAR-ANALYSIS-200-2011.pdf

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/sep/25/nohomosexualityhere

[9] http://tribune.com.pk/story/943616/evil-within-child-sexual-abuse-cases-rise-by-17-says-unicef-funded-study/

Sectarian Conflict in the Middle East

There is something sweet about firsts that never fails to charm. I remember when I was turning this paper in for publication, I thought I'd be elated when it finally got carried. Strangely, now that the moment has arrived, all I feel is this quiet satisfaction. And the relief that now I can safely forget about it after lunch!!

So, without much ado, my first ever formal publication as carried in the Summer 2016 edition of the Heinz Journal of Public Policy:

Topic: Sectarian Conflict in the Middle East and the Rise of ISIS: An Analysis of Saudi & Iranian Roles & Influences
Link: http://journal.heinz.cmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Heinz-Journal-Vol13-Issue-11.pdf
Date: May 23, 2016

And may this fly as low as possible under the radars of raw religious emotion and knee-jerk reaction!

for a moment

tears unwept
wails unwailed
are the silent songs
with which
your unspeakable beauty
I make eternal

do not
for a moment
glorify your loud laments
your sniveling shows of grief

for they are
the murderer's theatrics
at the scene of the crime

the anguish of
a canny tradesman
only counting losses
after breaking the deal

do not
for a moment
ridicule my silence

it is the dignity
the mystique
that so lovingly hides you

do not
for a moment
rip off that mask

it is more real
than you