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Postcards from Pakistan Slain Bhutto turns saint, money-spinner By Manish Chand
In her death, Bhutto has become a 'pir' (holy saint) for many people and her memorial - near Liaquat Ali Bagh where she addressed a huge election rally minutes before she was killed by unidentified militants - a place of pilgrimage. "People come here like to the mazaar of a saint. They light lamps, offer their prayers and ask for their wishes to be fulfilled. They come here at all hours," says Khalid Mahmood Butt, a diehard loyalist of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP). "Most people come here in the morning. But many come in the evenings also," said Butt, sitting next to a stall that sells relics, portraits and odd photographs of Bhutto in myriad moods. Butt spends at least a few hours everyday manning the portraits stall and says he does so purely out of love and devotion for the slain leader. "I do it out of 'pyar-mohabbat' (love). It gives me mental peace," says Butt, pointing a finger at Hotel Akbar a few metres away, when "Bibi", as she was fondly called by the PPP faithful, was killed in cold blood. Naveed Mir, the owner of the stall, too insists that he set up the shop near Liaquat Ali Bagh, named after Pakistan's first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan, out of love for the deceased Bhutto. But he doesn't seem to mind the uninterrupted flow of money that has come his away after her martyrdom. Mir Ashraf Badda, another enterprising man, also downplays the money factor. "I now sell Bibi's portraits worth Rs.5,000 every day. Soon after she was killed, I earned double to triple that amount. I don't count the money. It gives me 'sukoon' (peace of mind)," said Badda. Those in the know point out that the souvenir sellers are not the only ones capitalising on Bhutto's resurrection as a martyr and saint. "I have all my sympathy for Zardari Sahab. But he is the big gainer. Today he is the most powerful man in Pakistan because of his wife," says Javed Khan, a 40-something businessman getting down from his car in front of the stall. Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of Bhutto, is now co-chairman of the PPP and the power behind the present civilian dispensation in Pakistan that emerged victorious riding on a Bhutto sympathy wave in the Feb 18 elections. Javed picks up a few pictures of Bhutto, showing her in different settings and capturing the myriad facets of the two-time prime minister who became the first woman head of government of a Muslim country two decades ago. "She really loved her daddy," he smiles fondly, pointing at a picture of the younger Bhutto with her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan who was ordered hanged by Zia-ul Haq in 1979. "How sad the whole of her family had to die violently," he remarked, while alluding to the deaths of Bhutto's two brothers, Shahawaz and Murtaza under mysterious circumstances. Say goodbye to visa regime Lahore: Sitting in Coocoo's Den, a must-go restaurant in Lahore in the heart of the city's red light district, maverick painter and owner Iqbal Hussein simply can't understand the visa games politicians and officials of India and Pakistan play. 'Why should Indians need visas to come to Pakistan and why should Pakistanis need visas to go to your country?' says a genuinely bewildered Hussein, recalling his last visit to India three years ago with relish. 'I was touched by the hospitality and affection of the people in India. I was really taken care of by my hosts,' Hussein told IANS. His sentiment is not confined just among the liberals but is becoming part of mainstream political thinking in Pakistan, with former prime minister Nawaz Sharif calling for the abolition of the strict bilateral visa regime. In the Punjab province, where nearly every second family seems to have relatives and friends in India, the proposed relaxation of the visa regime gets a spontaneous welcome. 'In many ways, Nawaz Sharif and the (Pakistan) Muslim League he heads, represents public opinion in the Punjab. He has backed the abolition of the visa regime and this is what people on both sides of the border want,' say Mujibur Rahman Shami, editor of Daily Pakistan. 'There is an overwhelming cross-party consensus for a quicker and reformed visa system. Every Indian and Pakistani should be allowed to travel freely to each other's country,' Shami said, while slamming the present system of city-wise visas as 'utter nonsense.' 'The media is backing the proposal. Nobody has opposed the idea except for one Urdu daily,' he added. India and Pakistan are perhaps the only two countries that issue city-specific visas to one another's nationals. Travelling to any place, however close by, outside of the one or two cities for which the visa is valid is illegal. Khuram Hussain, a business executive who visited India recently, said Indians and Pakistanis were frustrated over the present system of having to apply for visa for each city they want to visit. 'I had gone to New Delhi. I badly wanted to go to Gurgaon and Noida, just outside Delhi, but I couldn't because I did not have visa to do so,' he said. An Indian coming to Pakistan faces the same irritant. If he has a visa for Islamabad, he can't go to neighbouring towns like Rawalpindi or Taxila unless the visa permits him. India is pushing for a visa scheme for more than one state and business visa to be issued within 24 hours and is exasperated over the Pakistani insistence on police reporting for visitors. The introduction of pilgrim and student visas and visa on arrival are also being discussed between the two sides. The easing of the visa regime was one of the key issues that was discussed between the two nuclear-armed neighbours when they resumed peace process and concluded the fourth round of composite dialogue May 20-21. India is studying closely the second draft of a visa agreement submitted by Pakistan that indicates that, despite some differences, the two sides may just clinch a relatively liberal visa pact next week. A rethink on the restrictive visa regime is high on the priority list of the six-week-old Pakistan Peoples Party-led civilian government in Pakistan that is determined to improve relations with India. IPL fever infects Pakistanis
At Café Zoo, a trendy hangout for the young, Zareen Chaudhry, a 20-something art student and painter, sips coffee, tucks into delicious kebabs and is seemingly absorbed in talking to her boyfriend. But her eyes are glued to Shoaib Akhtar playing for the Kolkata Knight Rider team. "I love cricket and I love films. It's a perfect combination for an evening out these days," Zareen tells this writer as she recalls the magical debut of Shoaib in IPL last week when he demolished the Delhi Daredevils top order in the three-over opening spell, scripting a spectacular win for his team. The win triggered jubilation across the streets of Lahore, especially since Shoaib's participation in IPL was under a cloud because of his running battles with the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). But it's not just when five Pakistani cricketers are playing in IPL matches that Pakistanis are watching IPL matches. They are equally enamoured of Indian cricketing legends like Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly. 'India has revolutionized cricket through IPL. It's being keenly watched in Pakistan,' said Oxford-educated Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi Qureshi in Islamabad, confirming stories of the IPL fever in Pakistan. Qureshi is a big fan of Kolkata Knight Riders - his favourite team for which Pakistani pacer Shoaib Akhtar plays. "Cricket cuts across boundaries. The IPL has brought the world's top cricketers together," says a lawyer and cricket fanatic who identified himself as Iqbal. What makes the IPL genre of cricket tick in Pakistan? "Cricket is a passion we share with Indians. The IPL matches are wildly popular here because it's first-rate cricket and first-rate entertainment," says Khurram Khan, a 30-something executive at Pepsico. Khan has just returned from a business trip to India and is full of talk about cricket diplomacy and connecting people through sports, business and cultural exchanges. Inayat Khan, manager of Ziafat restaurant, specializing in Oriental cuisine, said: "Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta are big names here. Glamour helps and surely sells. Shohaib Akhtar in the Kolkata match was a smashing hit." The IPL cricket is not just an entertaining distraction when many Pakistanis are reeling under rising prices and a general sense of insecurity. For some, IPL is serious business as well. Shahnawaz Hussain, a businessman, says rich Lahoris are gambling big time on IPL matches. "Betting is big time and there is a lot of money to be made." Cricket has done what political leaderships of the two countries are still struggling to achieve - making borders irrelevant through free travel, trade and people-to-people contacts. "Everybody loves cricket, watches cricket, plays cricket," chimes in Waseem Ibrahim, a manager at the posh Hotel Avari. "Cricket is a great connector."
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Rawalpindi: They light lamps, chant prayers and sprinkle flowers. Some even slash their wrists and scatter blood at a makeshift memorial of charismatic Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated here nearly five months ago.
Lahore/Islamabad: The Indian Premier League (IPL) has caught the imagination of Pakistanis. Go to any café on the trendy MM Alam Road in central Lahore, you will find young upwardly mobile Lahoris engaged in cricket natter - around the fortunes of 'bad boy' Shoaib Akhtar, the glamour of Bollywood stars like Shah Rukh Khan who are sponsoring some of the teams, and the "connecting" power of cricket between the two neighbours.
I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I am trembling with cold