Sunday in London, when Pakistanis win the T20 championship

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Late last night, after watching an exhilarating T20 world cup final and a crazy facebook status update war, my friend Andrew in London - he is a Canadian by the way - started sending me live updates via text messages about how Pakistani fans have taken over St Johns Wood Road by the Lord’s, the amount of money Pakistani expatriates have with people draping hummers in Pakistani flags and white BMWs with a green Pakistan Zindabad slogan pasted on it. I told him it is all those curry houses owned by Pakistanis across Britain that are responsible for the riches of the desi Diaspora.

This is the email I later got from him, it would give you an idea how London goes nuts on Sundays, especially when Pakistanis win a major cricket tournament.

Dear All,

A crazy day here in London. I went to the demo at the Iranian Embassy for an hour or so in the late afternoon. Spoke to an Iranian guy for about 20 minutes about what has been going on. Lots of noise and emotion!!

Walked across Hyde Park and headed up towards Lords. Traffic was backed up so I guessed that the final of the 20-20 Cricket World Cup between Pakistan and Srti Lanka had ended. Lots of crazy happy Pakistan fans were running around making noise. A few were drunk as well. Then a group of Sri Lankan Tamils came by in an anti-Sri Lanka protest. "Sri Lanka, terrorist!" You get the idea.

I walked around Lords after a bit and came upon the Western gate where the team buses were to come out. A crowd of a few hundred Pak fans had gathered. They had the largest flag of Pakistan I had ever seen. It must have been 30 feet long and 15 to 20 feet wide. Lots of Anglo-Pakistanis too so the chants were football like: "Are you watching India?!" "Green Army!" "Afridi (the team's star player)!"

Someone had a sign that read: "I got my ticket from an Indian."

After being in Sri Lanka when they won the World Cup in 1996 and following things since then, it is clear that Mike Marquese was right to call his book about the World Cup "War Minus the Shooting".

Great fun!!!

Cheers

Andrew

PS: President Zardari has announced cash award for the team Pakistan and for the first time, I am ok with him spending our tax money like his personal treasure chest. Go Green Army, you made us proud. To quote a blogging buddy, you guys have gone from cricket chumps to T20 Champs.

PPS: Now that Younus Khan has announced his retirement from the shortest form of cricket, would we see Afridi as the new T20 captain?

PPPS: Younus Khan finally revealed his true age. According to cricinfo, he is still 31, but in a post match interview, he said he is 34 and too old to play T20.

PPPPS: Has anyone noticed, this is Intekhab Alam’s second world cup as a coach (the first was in 1992), is he our lucky mascot?



The last photo was added because I just wanted Afridi to be part of this post


Disclaimer: The post does not mean to hurt any Indian reader, I just reproduced Andrew's email.

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From Daddy's little girl

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Father’s day may be a creation of Hallmark cards to sell their merchandise in times of lull, but it is a beautiful reminder that we need to appreciate our fathers and tell them that we love them, something we often tend to forget. For a country that celebrates births, weddings and birthdays, we do not celebrate relations and our loved ones as much as we should.

When we do acknowledge the people in our lives, we tend to celebrate some relations more than others. Heaven lies at the feet of mothers, but fathers, who usually bankroll our lives and provide immense support throughout, are left out when we express love, gratitude and appreciation. This father’s day, I wanted to take time out to acknowledge fathers and tell them how wonderful they have been through the years. This is something all fathers would love to hear from their children, no matter what their age or relationship might be.

My relationship with my father has been like any other child’s. It started off with me adoring everything he did to indifference to rebellion without cause in my teenage years. Later, I developed the calm appreciation for my father that many people get as their parents get older. Abba, on the other hand, has always loved me, warts and all, and took pride in every little thing I did.

I look a lot like my father, at least that’s what I have been told by friends, family and perfect strangers. I now smile and accept it, but as a little girl I would sulk to no end whenever I was told that I resemble my dad. My argument was simple: I am a girl who braids her hair, my dad is a man with a receding hairline. We cannot possibly look alike. Instead of being hurt, my father was proud of the fact that his daughter could argue so well.

As a little girl, I had a huge, wall-sized map of the world in my room and my dad and I would spend hours in front of that map discussing countries, food, geography and wars. One thing we always discussed while standing in front of that map was traveling. We planned a million and one trips for later and my top three destinations of choice were the coffee plantations of Colombia, Cairo and Venice. Those trips together never materialised because his health deteriorated after my mother’s sudden and untimely demise. But he took great joy when I traveled to these places (I am yet to discover Colombian coffee plantations) and made memories for both of us.

Before I discovered the Internet, my father was my Google, encyclopedia and Wikipedia – all rolled into one. Whether I would want to know about the Stockholm syndrome, the Crimean wars or Issac Newton, my father was my go-to person and he never disappointed. Abba introduced me to Mumtaz Mufti, Ghalib, Jospeh Conrad and Anton Chekov and inculcated the love for the written word in me. I may have inherited more than just facial features from my dad because my wanderlust, my love for books, my pragmatism and my never-say-die attitude all come from him.

Although Abba has never been very demonstrative about love and affection, and I always thought that he cared about his children in a very casual manner, I know now that we have always been the centre of his life. I only realized how much he loved me when I left to go to college abroad. He never once told me how much he would miss me, but cried for hours after I left and even developed an eye infection as a result. When I got to know about it, I called Abba and said that I would come back if he wanted me to. He told me to stay put and finish my degree and joked that while Prophet Yaqoob lost his eyesight while crying for his lost son Yousuf, he only had conjunctivitis.

It was only after this I remembered all those incidents of quiet fatherly pride he took in everything I did, whether it was my high school results, my sports achievements or my work. I do remember him beaming with pleasure when I first got published. He called everyone when I was not around to make sure that the world knew about the accomplishments of his daughter.

I lost my mother when I was a teenager and never really had a chance to tell her how much I loved her and what she meant to me. My father is not well these days. He is hospitalised and fighting ill health and weakness. This father’s day, I want him to know that he is much loved and appreciated. Whatever I am today is because of my dad, because of his affection, compassion and guidance. He always encouraged me in whatever course of action I took, and never stopped me from doing anything because I am girl. Perhaps his greatest gift is that he never placed barriers to my flight of imagination. I love you Abba, and I want to thank you for enriching my life and being such a wonderful father.





Originally published in Dawn

Not just 'Boom Boom Afridi'

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It was not just Boom Boom Afridi, it was a BANG !!!

For me, the moment of the match was when Afridi blew a kiss to Jacques Kallis after smashing his three consecutive deliveries to the boundary. When you are this confident, chances are, you are feeling good and you will do well and he did v. v. well.

Looks like Boom Boom is not only capable of a bang, he can blow a kiss or two :), after all, it is all about spreading the love and good cheer.

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Gaddafi on a mission to meet 700 Italian women

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Separately, Silvio Berlusconi and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi are about as coo coo crazy as it gets, but when you put them together, its gets beyond wacky and enters into realm of subliminally nutty.



Colonel Muammer Gaddafi, who is responsible for keeping a company or two of jet black hair dyes in business, is now touring Italy, the land of Pizzas, Pasta and Silvio Berlusconi. Apart from being the dictator par excellence – he has been ruling Libya for a good forty years now – his claim to fame is that he employ young women as his bodyguard (he has male guards too but leaves them home when he travels abroad to look cool) and erects a tent to sleep in wherever he go.

During his recent trip to Italy, the crackpot dictator personally requested to meet 700 women from the world of ‘politics, industry and culture’. Now how he came about that particular number is something I will never know, but Zoe Williams at Guardian speculates about the selection procedure of those who get to meet the Libyan leader. She believes that “Berlusconi must have gotten down his Bumper Catalog of Hot Stuff, got rid of any that were over 25, discarded those with a loud voice or body hair, and whittled down the rest by ballot until he got to 1,000.” I don’t know how the final 700 were selected.

Among those who get to shake it with the tent pitching nomadic leader, Italy’s Minister for Equal Opportunities Mara Carfagna is at the forefront. Minister Carfagna claim to fame is that she is a former topless model and has been the subject of public flirting by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Before we debate the peculiarity and creep quotient of the request and Berlusconi government’s proclivity to entertain weird demands of the foreign dignitaries, let me remind you that it is not the first time such a request was made and entertained. Apparently, a similar request was made during his trip to Paris a couple of years back where he met with 1000 Parisian women, who were told he wanted to “save European women.” He was not very clear on what he wanted to save them from, though.


If anyone thinks I have seen some crazy ass political satire and soft porn last night and mixing the two here, let me remind you that truth is stranger than fiction almost all the time.

Gaddafi in all his hair dyed glory

Failed to "Touch"

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Aks at fiverupees recently wrote a post praising the efforts of Greenstar marketing for making a song and video about Touch Condoms.





Personally, I was disappointed with the campaign. It was a great opportunity squandered. I was monitoring a project about awareness raising for sexual and reproductive health and as part of the project, the ad/song was shown to a group of people who have neither ever heard the word condom nor were they familiar with the concept of family planning. I witnessed one such viewing in a rural settlement on the outskirts of Karachi. When the viewers were shown the song, not a single person got the message – that people need to plan their families and should space having children and stay protected against STDs and STIs. When asked, most of the respondents either thought it was a wedding song; it had something to do with rich people getting married and living happily ever after or it was about selling housing schemes to rich people. Not a single one of them connected with the message of the advertisement/song.

The only thing new about the ad was that it actually used the word condom for the first time in a TVC (television commercial) which is commendable but it failed to tell people what condom is and why it should be used? Its relevance, not only to family planning but also for other health and safety reason should have been spelled – loud and clear, especially in HIV high risk country like Pakistan (their own wesbite says that Touch is being targeted to high risk groups for disease prevention). Sadly, Greenstar marketing screwed the campaign gallactically, like all good things are screwed in Pakistan.

What I fail to understand that they spent HUGE amounts of money in an ad campaign that did not even reach out to its target audience - the uneducated Pakistani masses who produce something like 9 children per woman. What was the point? Why there was no pre testing done before the campaign was launched. Greenstar is a social marketing firm and they must have gotten the contract either from government of Pakistan or some foreign funding agency to run this campaign. If the government of Pakistan paid for it, then it was our (the tax payers) money badly spent and if it was foreign aid then the future tax payers will be paying for the advert. In any case, the loser is the common Pakistani, who did not benefit from a campaign that was supposed to target and educate its massive percentage of population in child bearing age and ended up paying for the cost of a marketing campaign that only benefited the ad agency and people connected to its marketing.

The campaign of Touch Condoms failed to 'touch' its target audience, what irony!


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The ghetto of women's writing

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Back in 2001 during my rookie reporting days, I wrote a piece on the renewed Intifada which was quite well received. One of the senior assistant editors who was at least 75 years old at that point in time (yes, it was the time when Dawn still had its geriatric brigade roaming the Islamabad corridor) called me and asked me why did I choose to write on intifada. Being the super naïve, extra exuberant idiot that I was, I went on and on about how international politics fascinates me and how I want to write political commentary regularly.

After I was done with my tirade, he smiled a benevolent smile and told me in no uncertain terms that I should stop worrying my pretty little head about stuff as gruesome as Intefada and should stick to things bright and shiny – like fashion and pop music. Before I could say that unlike the old gent who had a degree in Persian literature, being a student of International Relations in general and of people’s movement and confidence building measures in particular, I was actually qualified to write on Intifada and Middle East crisis. I was too young and inexperienced to know that assistant editor probably was afraid of a newbie taking over his area of expertise.



Hajrah Mumtaz’s excellent piece ‘The ghetto of ‘women are writing’ in Dawn today reminded me that I too have been pushed to the ghetto of light & fluffy writing at one point in time. Thank heavens that I was too stubborn to listen to the old gent and wrote about everything under the sun.


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The truth about space travel and curry

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Gone are the days when parents used to tell their children, “Eat an apple a day, and keep the doctor away.” A new research, obviously carried out by a desi, says that you can ward off dementia and Alzheimer’s if you eat curry two or three times a week. How is that for a diet plan, eh?

Professor Murali Doraiswamy, of Duke University in North Carolina, said there was evidence that people who eat curry meals regularly have a lower risk of dementia. The key ingredient is curcumin, a component of the spice turmeric. Curcumin appears to prevent the spread of amyloid protein plaques - thought to cause dementia - in the brain.

If you are a desi living in the West, now is the time to invest in that curry house. Chances are that you will strike gold.



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While we are at weird scientific announcements, Astrobiologist Dr Lewis Dartness revealed that living without gravity would cause space travelers' bones and muscles not to develop properly, leaving them stunted and weak.

Not only that, body fluid will float up to the brain to give human heads a permanently swollen look and the outer space residing human race of the future will also be “pretty chubby” As there would be no dust around, human will morph into hairless beings.

In short, if the Star Trek franchise led you to believe that Captain Kirk (specially the version played by Chris Pine) is a handsome fellow with a normal sized head full of hair, scientific evidence says otherwise. Long-distance space travel will leave us humans short, fat and bald. I wonder if anyone will aspire to be astronauts anymore?

Chris Pines looks far far away in the space as Captain Kirk



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The baby daddy of the mostest

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A few days back, I was watching TV where residents of a low income locality in Lahore were protesting against high electricity bills and were ripping them off in protest. Most people protested against paying for a utility (electricity) which is not available to them half the time, but there is one old lady who refuse to pay the bills because she has too many children. Her exact words were, “I have six daughters and 4 sons, I can barely feed them, the state should pay my electricity bill so that I can at least feed my children.”

Let me make it very clear that I have no respect for any electricity providing unit; be it WAPDA, KESC or IESC, but I thought her request was really strange. I mean why should the state pay your utility bills because you have been careless and produced far too many off springs? While I was lamenting about this to my colleague, she pointed out this story where a 29 year old man in United States has fathered 21 children with 11 different women. When asked why he had so many children, he responded with the wise & scholarly reply: “it just happened.”

Yes, It just happened - 21 times.

I am just a little confused though, if this was his level of intellect, how did he score with 11 women, had unprotected sex with them and managed to produce 21 children in 11 years time?



The very wise Mr. Desmond Hatchett (baby daddy of 21 children to date) makes minimum wage and his lawyer believes that the state of Tennessee has had to step in because Hatchett can possibly not support all his children. At least the amma ji from Lahore was only asking for free electricity but this fellow has gone on a massive procreation spree (He boasted of fathering four children by different women in the same year.) in a country like US with better health care facilities and more outreach and awareness programs and still is shameless enough to ask the state to step in to take care of the children he carelessly brought in the world!!!
I seriously can’t believe that there are women stupid enough to have unprotected sex with a man who has numerous partners at the same time.