Showing posts with label sarcasm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sarcasm. Show all posts

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Twitter, Imran Khan and Aafia

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Twitter is fun. If you are lucky, you can annoy other people and have fun at their expense. It all gets funnier if the people you make fun of are Z list celebrities who are also on twitter and are probably following you.

A friend and I had doubts about a Jemima Khan profile on twitter as we were not sure if it was a genuine account or not. So in a conversation last night, I wondered if it could be a fake Jemima Khan account. It was an innocuous conversation and we forgot about it, she apparently she saw that, got pissed and in order to prove that she is the real McCoy she scanned her passport with all the details and put it up on twitter! I mean I know she is a blonde and not particularly a bright one (she married Imran Khan after all), but who puts up their passport details on a public twitter account which is open for all?

As if that was not enough drama, some desi men with fantasies of skinny blonde British women falling for them jumped in acting like knights in shining armor advising Jemima to remove her passport details. She then put up another photo of her passport – minus the details – on twitter (she has later removed them both but a pal from across the border saved that passport photo & emailed it to me). I mean what were those gentlemen thinking, she has had a Desi man, she is not gonna fall for another one. One desi dude in one lifetime was enough, dontcha think?

Anyways, that got me started along with two other tweeters, Naheed and Mirza on all things Jemima and her erstwhile husband. Mirza shared that in another century, Liz Hurley and Imran Khan had dated. It just reminded me that in the same century, Liz Hurley and Hugh grant also dated and then Imran Khan got married to Jemima and then Jemima dated Hugh Grant and now perhaps Imran Khan is dating the whole Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan which makes it kinda really kinky circle. Mirza then suggested that maybe it’s time Imran Khan and Hugh Grant should get up close and personal. In any case, Jemima has beaten Mr. Khan when it comes to getting intimate with famous people of the same sex – remember the lip lock between Kate Moss and Jemima (it generates 183,000 links if you google it - in case anyone wanted to know that).

By that time, Jemima Khan got really angry and gave me two names; twalker (that’s twitter stalker) and tweak (twitter freak). Now I am all game for name calling but they have to be smart and inventive. If only Ms Goldsmith had actually spent some time in college in her younger days instead of playing house with an aging Lothario, she would have known that tweak is actually a proper English word found in all major English language dictionaries. Her exact tweet was something like this: “What a relief to discover you can block the tweaks (twitter freaks). I'm banishing dissidents like a despot.” Even the statement was kind of a let down. After writing 'expert' articles on democracy in Pakistan in esteemed publications like Vogue and Harper's, I never expected such naked despotic glee from Ms Goldsmith.

We decided to let go of Ms Goldsmith and stick to her former and far juicier half. Naheed asked us if Imran Khan has remarried and then started listing the names of all the women Imran Khan has ever been with but I suggested that we need to leave that alone. After all, if one starts listing all Imran Khan's exes, 140 characters wouldn't be able to do him any justice. That man has been very very busy for most of his adult life and he is in now in his late 50s.

As far as Imran’s second round at nuptials is concerned, I have a feeling he will do a complete turnaround. In the past, much to chagrin of all the aunties (who were not really aunties back then) he had almost exclusively dated foreigners. Now, in his new Maseeha-e-Islam avatar, he will only take the plunge when 'Qaum ki Beti' Aafia Siddiqui returns. Imagine a wedding invite that says ‘Imran Khan weds Aafia Siddiqui’, would it not be a Jamat-e-Islami and Talibaan wet dream? If Ms Siddiqui agrees to marry Imran Khan, then nothing can stop him from becoming the most powerful man in Pakistan.

Naheed disagreed with me. She believes that Aafia Siddiqui will sell Imran Khan at the juma bazaar for a bucketful of ammonium nitrate, which got me thinking. Ms. Siddiqui is a paak baaz Muslim woman, she will probably not agree to a union with a former play boy who has been with MTV VJs (tauba tauba haram). In any case, if the choice of her last husband, Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of the 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and ten years her junior, is any indication of her taste, she is into young Jihadist boy toys, not old Romeos like Imran Khan.


PS: I still have Jemima's passport shot with me but I chose not to publish it, for obvious reasons.

Tuesday, 20 October 2009

Reading 'The News' is more painful than a visit to the dentist...

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Reading newspapers in today’s Pakistan is an ordeal. All you get to read is news about bombings, acts of terrorism and gang rapes which is traumatic at best. But what gets you even more nauseous is reporting done in bad taste and almost non existing editing. The News International was never a great newspaper to begin with, but of late, their standards have reached a new low.

Apart from printing bat shit crazy assed & and downright offensive opinion pieces by Dr A. Q. Khan, they have previously published news about Singer Humaira Arshad’s visit to Punjab’s CM House and how a political party will hold a meeting on September 33 – yes you read it right – September 33. The funny thing is that this news item was published back in September but no one bothered to correct it.

Today’s 'The News' was no exception. A report published about the launch of Namal Knowledge City by PTI Chief Imran Khan described his house as a citadel (I think it was the new word that particular reporter recently learned). Among other things, reporter was at pains to point out that Imran Khan did not use the word former while talking about his ex wife and how people gossiped about it.
“Imran Khan revealed that his wife had declined to send his children to the function for security reasons. The guests whispered when he did not use the word ‘former’ while referring to his wife.”
While the whole world, his wife and his assorted animals know that the total amount of aid that would come to Pakistan through the now infamous Kerry Lugar Bill is $7.5 billion, The news editors got a bit carried away and decided to replace the decimal between 7 & 5 with a zero making the amount a whopping $705 billion. I just hope that American tax payers are willing to shell out that kind of money.

The bat shit crazy assed QUOTE OF THE DAY came from former CM of NWFP Mohammed Akram Durrani who says that with assistance in form of Kerry Lugar Bill – or KLB as it is affectionately termed by the local media – the United States is trying to start a civil war in Pakistan by the year 2010. What the fuck does he mean by 2010? What are we doing right now? I thought we are already in a war like situation where 30,000 troops are carrying a massive operation in the North West Border region

Following it closely is the other super crazy quote came from former information minister Muhammed Ali Durrani who believes that “the tabling of the controversial National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) in parliament was a vicious attempt to divert the attention of the nation from the ‘anti-Pakistan’ Kerry-Lugar Bill (KLB) and this attempt would be foiled by the vigilant media and political parties.” I just hope to God that he was not referring to his own party – PML Q – as one of those vigilant parties.





PS: I actually read the newspaper while waiting at the dentist’s. So miffed I was with The News that after I came back, I tracked all the news that I remembered and linked it to this post. Reading it was definitely more painful than scaling, really.






PPS: If possible, the epaper header has even more atrocious English.


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Wednesday, 9 September 2009

...and the halalness saga continues ...

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Honestly, I never thought that my blog posts would be taken seriously by anyone, let alone makers of a halal search engine.

A few weeks back, PTI reviewed one of my previous posts about a halal browser and commented that although the post was in good humour, it was taken very seriously by the more pious readers. That report was carried by Pune Mirror, Yahoo India and The American Conservative to name a few.

A Dutch company came up with a halal search engine (If there exists a Halal browser, please enlighten me about it) with help of which Muslims will be able to surf the internet without the fear of accidentally encountering sinful material. The site is called www.iamhalal.com and comes with the tagline; I search halal, I am halal (wonder what does that make a bonafide google worshiper like me).

Now, I am not a narcissist nutcase who believes that the whole world is copying her but these guys totally stole my idea of three levels of halalness – or rather haramness.

If you type a word that is deemed inappropriate by the search engine, you will be warned in 3 levels of haram.

A query for the term “Suicide bombings” is considered level 1 haram and came with this warning.

Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 1 out of 3. This means that the results fetched by ImHalal.com could be haram!

The word “Sex” was deemed level 2 Haram. The warning for it goes something like this:

Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 2 out of 3. This means that the results fetched by ImHalal.com could be haram!

Searching a word like “Fornication” would put the search engine on red alert (literally) and the warning would come in red letters.

Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 3 out of 3! I would like to advise you to change your search terms and try again

Honestly, this search engine is in a bad taste. Words like love, kissing and Nazi are level 1 haram and words like gay, lesbian and sexy are level 3 haram but words like fascism, nigger, molester, murder and torture are totally halal.

What kind of weird world we live in where adult Muslims would actively seek an internet nanny to filter stuff for them!


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