ye kya jageh hai dosto?!

Is this a human dwelling?
This place I call home?

Where my life grates on, day by day

Where all I see
are mindless animals,
and humans are scarce,
like trees in a desert.

This place,
which trust has renounced,
and love has long since forsaken;
where the vain control resources,
and the merciless play at justice;
where friendship lacks all charm,
and blood relations are just as dull;
where children are
their fathers’ enemies;
where the savior kills,
the bully leads,
the godman trades,
selling his edicts
to the highest bidder;
where the houses of God
are unsafe for His creation;
where cold-blooded murderers
call dibs on heaven,
for killing His people;

This can’t be a human dwelling,
This place I call home.

Has a plague visited this land,
this kaleidoscope of color,
this bright rainbow of diversity?

Yes, there has been a plague,
a vicious swarm of locusts,
eating away all our shining shades,
our dappled hues,
save one,
which is now the color of everything.

And so,
black is white,
so is blue,
and red too.

The animals are white,
in their ignorant bliss,
and so am I,
can’t refute this.

And so must be anyone
who dreams of life,
like I once did,
as a mesh of color.

His spirit is to be broken,
his thinking set right,
he must be brought to heel,
and bathed in that insipid,
colorless,
puritanical
white!

While I,
I keep asking myself,
is this the realization of my dreams,
this dwelling of humans,
this place I call home
where I can’t even recognize myself
anymore,
and my life grates on, day by day?

Loosely translated from the Seraiki of Zafar Jatoi's timeless verse "pata nai ay kay jhaeen wasti hay?", on the recommendations of a friend. The only video link of Jatoi sahib reciting this poem that I could find is below:

https://www.facebook.com/razarumi/videos/10155186694355511?s=504581580&sfns=xmwa

twitter verse!

Inspiration came upon me while on the throne this morning. Endless, moralistic talk will get us nowhere. True change, a true challenge to the established orders of oppression, demands action, and sacrifice!

باطل کی سیاہ رات میں حق کی تنویر بھی ہو
انالحق کا بیاں، مقابل شمشیر بھی ہو
نوائے خلق خود کاتب تقدیر بھی ہو
یزیدیت کا قلعہ، ہم سے تسخیر بھی ہو
ممکن ہے تبھی جب کوئی حق پرست، دل فگار
متاع جان لٹائے، کوئی شبیر بھی ہو

"evil" panchayat

The title is the editors', the text all mine!

The "Evil" Panchayat

https://nayadaur.tv/2019/06/the-dreadful-panchayat-system-and-its-speedy-injustice/

sasti khushaamad

Khud aap jo likhey hain aankhon ka taraana
Ye dil liye jaye kahan lachaar divaana?

Inn aankhon ki midh ho gi kya bandey bashar se?
Jin aankhon ka mol nahi saara zamaana

Inn aankhon ki masti k mastaney toh hazaaron
Par jal k mar jaaney ko bas aik parvaana?

Roodad mujh se pooch na akhyon k milan ki
Qissa alam naak hai, garchey hai suhana

Woh baat jo tere ang ang ne mujh se chhupayi
Bebaak teri aankhon ne keh daala fasaana

Akhyon se lari akhyan toh akhyan huyeen purnam
Ik roag umr bhar ka banna, akhyon ka laraana

Bemaar meri rooh hai, tere dar pe hee khari hai
Aur tu hai k kehta hai, mar jao, tab aana

Roohon ka milan na sahi, jismon ka hee ho le
Maana k dil mar chukey, jism toh hain tawaana

Ashiq ki nigah aur hai, mullah ki zubaan aur
Bas chashm e khuda aik hai, yakta o yagaana

Dil e vehshi se kaho tark karey nala o faryad
Harjayi hai aisa, na apna hua, na hee begaana

birthday '18

Act I – Canine

Who doesn’t love dogs? I know I do. And why do humans love dogs so much? Because dogs, in a weirdly anthropomorphic way, suffer from a feeble sense of the self.  Nothing is more gratifying to the human ego than having something or someone worship you unquestioningly, love you unconditionally and grovel constantly at your feet. And a dog’s entire existence revolves around catering to this most vulgar aspect of human nature. A dog’s love is seldom for its own kind. It reserves its love almost entirely for the humans in its life. Unless, it is kept by a particularly jealous sort of a human who teaches it to love just one and be mean to all others. Feed it, don’t feed it, beat it, lock it up, you will always find a dog begging for your affections first, and its own sustenance second. Sure, if you starve it too much, you might find it eating out of the trash one day. And while you may tut-tut at the damn thing for not having better manners, or punish it even, the dog only did what it is genetically wired to do: feed. Even in doing so, your place at the center of its universe is by no means compromised because a dog does not understand blame, or cause-and-effect.

But a dog, like all things living, has its limitations. For instance, you can’t hogtie one and throw it down a well, or abandon an inconvenient one by the wayside as you speed away chasing mirages, and then expect the mutt to come back to you by itself, as and when you want. It is not that that dog does not want to return to you; it would probably sign away its soul to perdition for a chance at coming back to you. The only problem, the manner of its repudiation at your hand dictates that the dog absolutely has no means of making the return journey. It is literally impossible as per the laws of the universe. And so, you become solely responsible, not just for the slow, miserable, often lifelong death you have condemned the animal to, but also for your own pangs of conscience and your yearnings for uncomplicated love especially when the transient possibilities you were pursuing have come to nothing.

And this applies to all dogs, mongrels or pedigreed, high-born or strays, royal or proletarian. When you steal yourself away from the center of a dog’s universe, all you leave behind is the pretense of life, wretched, loveless, brutish. And in that, at least, I am a kindred spirit to the unwanted dogs of the earth.

Act II – Duty

I am not looking for a mid-life crisis,
or expensive roller coaster rides
that will only end badly for me.

I want no part
of your cold-blooded cirque des émotions,
where you are in perpetual need
of a short-lived reprieve.

Nor do I fancy myself
the safety valve
to your pressure-cooker life.
I know full well who the first casualty will be
when that thing begins to scream.

I am fully absorbed,
curating the cemetery of my mind,
where I stumble about,
gravestone to gravestone,
mourning bits of me
that lie rotting underneath.

Act III – Requiem

While on the subject of decay, you know what continues to fester? This feeling that while you were a monster, a bastard, for having been angry when anger was all that was left to you, for all the hurt that your rage caused them, they were absolutely justified in turning a deaf ear to your helpless howls of pain, in totally disregarding the ferment inside of you that was wrecking your emotional constitution, because greener pastures beckoned to them with promising options and more attractive possibilities. For one, there are no other options in love; and if there are, it was never love to begin with but a self-indulgent market decision. And second, ever since the dawn of time, the jury has been out on what could be more offensive to a person: the faraway, spasmodic yelps of a wounded animal, or the whimsically cold, dismissive manner in which they wounded it, with the cheerful gravy of ‘I always was heartless this way’ on top. You can’t murder somebody and then go, ‘hey, I did you the favor of killing you silently, softly; did you have to make so much noise during your protracted demise?’ History is replete with examples of how people bring themselves to detest those they have wronged, dehumanizing themselves along the way; of how even the tortured breathing of the oppressed feels like lèse-majesté to the oppressor.

So, whatever you have confessed yourself to be over time, cold, selfish, narcissistic, always on the lookout for a better deal, a ‘chutiya’, in so many words, please know that it is you who has to live with yourself primarily, not even the option that is your current ego trip. It is you who has to look yourself in the mirror every day. And for someone with a different face for each and everything in their life, expediently changing with needs, desires and ambitions, one wonders whether you even recognize yourself when you do.

As for the wounded, with time, wounds become scars, and scars become friends that tell the most exciting stories. Anger, when gets too toxic for the soul, abates, leaving behind enlightenment and peace. But the facts, the facts remain as beacons to guide you for next when the fundamentally dishonest chutiya surfaces to make you doubt the foundations of your existence.

Act IV – Salud

*clink*

Act V – Curtains

Why do you stand there,
over my corpse,
looking outraged,
half a teardrop
in your eye?

Didn’t you know
when you stab someone
in the heart
they fucking die!?

O Democracy!

You give it a catchy title and then totally fuck up the editing? Why you do this, DT?!

Democracy for Dunces 101

https://dailytimes.com.pk/269218/democracy-for-dunces-101/

to the Other

Show your face, 

you, 

my comrade 

in the torments 

of her unspeakable beauty, 

which haunts my heart 

with a thousand fantasies, 

which blinds me 

to the world 

and its foolish tricks.

You are familiar with the path 

her lustful spirit treads, 

that shines bright in her afterglow, 

mocking my eyes 

for futilely worshiping 

the ground beneath her feet.

You bask in her closeness;

you breathe in the air

which mournfully bears 

the fragrance of her body. 

The moon sees you 

from its perch in the sky, 

as it once saw the dalliances 

of many an unfulfilled night.

You’ve touched that face, 

those cheeks and lips, 

to the memories of which 

I devote my life. 

You’ve beheld those eyes, 

that aloof, bewitching gaze; 

you know my life is not a waste.

The agonies of love 

have been equally kind to us, 

to you and I; 

a kindness that knows no limits,

or end. 

What this passion gives to me, 

or takes, 

I can hope to explain to no other 

but you, my friend.

It humbles me, 

this love, 

and makes me one with the beaten. 

It brings me new friends: 

melancholy,

and an endless ache of the heart. 

It acquaints me 

with the dishonor of abjection, 

and reveals to me

the cruel mysteries 

behind ashen faces 

and helpless sighs.

When they huddle together 

and weep, 

those whose eyes won’t shed tears, 

for fear; 

when the sustenance of the meek 

is snatched from their mouths, 

by the beasts 

bred of wealth, 

and stealth; 

when the honest toils of love 

are sold short, 

and the streets run red 

with the blood of the powerless; 

a fire consumes my soul, 

a rage 

I cannot contain; 

so patient through the travails of love, 

why my heart now loses control, 

I cannot explain.

An Inspiration from Faiz Ahmed Faiz's "Raqib Se!"

birthday '17

shaa'er ka jashn e salgirah hai, sharaab la
mansab, khitaab, rutba, unhein kya nahi mila
bas naqs hai toh itna k mamdooh ne koi
misraa kisi kitaab k shayaa'n nahi likha

- Faiz

offended, outraged, totally pissed off!

Our Fleeting Moral Outrage; Our Collective Social Amnesia

https://dailytimes.com.pk/131230/fleeting-moral-outrage-collective-social-amnesia/

And now, a draft of my thank you note to the Daily Times:

"Dear DT! If your subs are going to go fuckin' nuts on editing a submission, at least pass their masterwork by the original author before publishing it for the whole fucking world to see. You've defaced this piece beyond recognition. Everybody who's reading this is thinking this Multani boy doesn't even know jack about basic tenses, much less stringing together a decent sentence. It's moolah ffs, not mullah!! Moolah means money. How does mullah even make sense where your bachas have inserted it? Piece-of-shit editing! And screw you for ruining my most heartfelt rant yet. Love."

To send or not to send, that is the question.

The original, as I wrote it, is at the link for fair comparison: Our Fleeting Moral Outrage

Partition: The Seraiki Side of the Story

Salute to my forebears who acquitted themselves with honor, nobility and an uncompromising respect for humanity in a time when the entire world seemed to be going to hell. Dada, Nana Jan, Nano, Addi Amma, thank you for teaching me what it means to be a decent human being, above everything else.

Partition - Alternative Perspectives

http://dailytimes.com.pk/blog/07-Sep-17/partition-alternative-perspectives

dreams of you

dreams of you

in a drunken haze

in power-plays
as the novice lays
his hands on you

dreams of you

your yelps
and moans

your body heat
your heart of stone

your heavy sighs
your little lies

and the rhythm of love
that cracks your bones

dreams of you

from silken days
of easy thrills
and artless ways

before foreign shores
before drugs
and whores
before dry-eyed tears
and tight-shut doors

when you sang your song
and I played along

“you are mine,
and I am yours.”

no fair!!

You give them an article. They carry a letter. Never again!

Seraiki SOS! 

http://www.thefridaytimes.com/tft/letters-180/

wonky talk III

Tree-hugger for life!

Trees vs. Development: Roads to Perdition, or how they've titled it, Is the Road to Development leading Multan Somewhere Else?

http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/50362/is-the-road-to-development-leading-multan-somewhere-else/

Rohi

a strange spring's abloom
far away
in the desert

where my foolish love resides,
and a thousand lovers
with bewitching eyes

still, I remain
a traveler
without destination

Original:

Rohi di ajab bahaar dissey
jith maen nimaanri da yaar vassey
uth ashiq lakh te hazaar vassey
hik maen musafir bewatan

- Khwaja Ghulam Farid 

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