Links for the long weekend

Foreign Policy ran a couple of lists of sons and daughters of world leaders with exceptionally bad behaviour. The list included Isa, son of Shiekh Zayed, the notorious torturer of humans & animals and daughters of Islam Karimov and Saddam Hussien, but the name that caught my eye was that of Moammar Gaddafi’s son. His son’s name is Hannibal and if the profile on FP is to be believed, he is cut from the same cloth as Hannibal Lecter – the cannibalistic serial killer.

A lot of people must have tried to rattle the Catholic Church but very few actually proved to be successful at it. Hardly anyone would have been as cavalierly successful about it as the Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi. Apparently Catholic Church is ‘mortified’ by the private life of Silvio Berlusconi. What is absolutely amazing is that Italy seems to be totally out of the grips of the Catholic Church because Berlusconi still enjoys a 49% approval rating and a majority in both the houses of parliament.

Here, Maureen Dowd discusses what she calls the conjugal psychodrama (I absolutely adore this term) of the Clintons.

Khaled Diab writes about the Muslim Gay character in Eastenders who ended up marrying a woman for sake of propriety.

A word of caution for those who yawn. You can end up in jail for yawning ‘boisterously’ inside a court.

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Cheesy chutzpah

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One of my favourite objects to photograph are the promotional banners of Pakistani films. This picture that I am pasting here is an artistic gem. This is the poster of a film called ‘Piyasa Badan’ which literally translates to ‘thirsty body’. However, it actually means longing for physical love (readers are welcome to contribute with more appropriate translations).





The closer shot shows the hero taking a girl’s clothes off and in typical Pakistani hypocritical manner; the bare back is censored with a super imposed image of the hero and his paramour in a loving, but clothed embrace. The billboard can display a film called Piyasa Badan, which I am sure has dialogues straight from the gutter but a bare back needs to be covered up because it has the potential of wreaking havoc with the faith of pious men who throng the Electronic market in Karachi (That’s where the cinema is situated).



The clip below is something I recently found on youtube and boy, what a find it is. Sung by Naheed Akhtar, this is perhaps the naughtiest song that ever came out of Pakistan’s now defunct film industry. The Urdu version - very PG 13 - was part of Pakistani film Kora Kaghaz.



Before anyone says that it is a trashy song and does not represent the Islamic Emirate/Fiefdom of Pakistan, I would like to state that it perhaps represents the desires of a lot of Khawateen digest reading teen aged girls across Pakistan who starts dreaming about their knight in shinning armour even before they attain puberty. Lines like “I don’t know dancing and singing, but I can’t say no to my darling, make me a partner in loving, I want to be a wife" symbolizes the aspirations of all those girls and perhaps represents the dreams of more Pakistanis than the erstwhile PPP slogan of Roti, Kapra aur Makan.

The naughtiness quotient goes a little up in second half and retells the longing for loving. Lines such as “I want love, give love my sweetie, interest me, I am love thirsty, what you want, I will do, it will be my duty,” not only promise sex in abundance, they also ensure complete submission to the almighty man.

I fail to understand why Lahore High Court banned Naseebo Lal for singing suggestive songs when Naheed Akhtar has already created history with “Some say I am sweetie.”


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