A Girl Called Meera

News on the drawing room circuit this week revolves around the private life of a local media personality: the statuesque, achingly beautiful actress Meera, who, like Cher, goes by just the one name. Meera is a Lollywood film star, in so much as one can be a Lollywood film star. The Lahore-based Pakistan film industry hasn’t enjoyed anything resembling brisk trade since the ’80s and hasn’t seen quality cinema since the ’70s. Currently, a percentage of their talent is culled from sex workers. In an odd reversal, if you’re going to find successful actors and thoughtful directors, it’s most likely to be on television. Meera’s tried her luck that side of the border (where film sets are paved with milk and honey) but so far it’s come to naught. Well, almost naught. She was picked up by Mahesh Bhatt (for a movie, I hasten to add) in 2005. Her controversial kiss with co-star Ashmit Patel in Soni Razdan’s steamy Nazar made it to the international press due to the now customary death threats from lunatic extremists. While it remains unconfirmed, there are suspicions that some of the threats may have come from film-goers irked at having spent good money on a clumsy remake of The Eyes of Laura Mars.

It doesn’t really matter that the film was a turkey; Meera is not known for her acting and draws a sizeable income from advertising campaigns and personal appearances. She is known by the in-crowd primarily for her novel use of the English language. ‘Meera-isms’ regularly circulate at parties, a running joke being the time when she was asked what her favourite feature was and replied, ‘my ass’, obviously meaning her eyes, Meera announcing she has a headache in her stomach, and so forth. That she largely works in Pakistan and is fluent in both Punjabi and Urdu makes no difference. And if it isn’t bad enough being tittered at by pretentious socialites (many of whom think ‘rocking’ is an adjective), for not having had the opportunity to attend a Grammar School, there’s the most recent scandal that shows up an even uglier quality in society at large.

The rumour, which in itself isn’t terribly interesting, involves a Dubai-based businessman claiming to be Meera’s husband, complete with photographs of what appears to be their nikkah, attempting to take possession of the house she lives in, which he alleges belongs to him. According to Meera, he has threatened her with physical harm. She has responded by swearing up and down that she has never been married and will tell anyone who’ll listen that an opportunistic plot has been cooked up to use her fame to seize her assets.

I don’t particularly care if it’s true or not; like I said, not very interesting. I am however taken aback by the utterly disgraceful treatment meted out to her by the media. She’s presented as comic relief, shown as an exhibit at a zoo, worse yet, a contestant on a reality show. She’s patronised by smirking, smug little news anchors, who appear to forget that they’re not in fact opinion-makers, closer to human teleprompters. She constantly confronts hostile questions, has been filmed secretly having an off-the-record conversation and the footage of her crying at a press conference has been set to a jaunty little tune on YouTube. A particularly nasty blog included the comment, ‘I feel so bad for that man. All these bazaari women marry men for their money.’ Ah yes, as opposed to all those eminently respectable girls from ‘good families’, well, obviously money has never crossed their noble minds, which is why we see so many of them eloping with the milkman for love.

All the liberals (and we have many who wouldn’t be considered broad-minded if there weren’t the Taliban as a point of comparison), fully cognizant of the fact that women are particularly at risk in Pakistan, are too busy sniggering up their sleeves to care. There’s a self-satisfied air in the re-telling of Meera’s misfortune, a sense of justice that an upstart of dodgy origins, who flaunts her new money and her outrageously large Versace glasses, should be brought down a peg. The unsubstantiated suggestion lingers that some of her newly acquired wealth may have come from the world’s oldest profession. Here’s the deal: you create a society where women are neither permitted nor equipped to make a substantial living, a society where, out of sheer politeness, you’re supposed to be born and die on the same social echelon. Then you hate people for finding ways around this.

Published in openthemagazine.com 12th September 2009

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/a-girl-called-meera

My Name is Khan, Too

Shah Rukh Khan, as the world and its aunt are no doubt aware, was recently held for questioning at Newark airport on the basis of his surname, identifying him as Muslim. This led to Priyanka Chopra, renowned intellectual and political polemicist, who moonlights as a crappy actress, declaiming on Twitter: “It’s such behaviour that fuels hatred and racism. SRK’s a world figure for God’s sake. Get real.” Er, no Priyanka, you get real. Every day, Muslims are picked out of queues at airports, regardless of their social standing, their profession or their intent. This is done on the basis of racial profiling, a process several other Muslims, deeply uncomfortably albeit, tolerate as a justifiable prejudice (this, in spite of the fact that airport staff almost always gets it comically wrong). Chopra’s objection wasn’t to racial profiling, her big problem was that American customs officials weren’t aware ofKuch Kuch Hota Hai.

Unlike the majority of Muslims for whom travelling has become an intimidating prospect, Khan at least had the advantage of knowing that others felt his outrage with him, for him. Victims of discrimination have found a yardstick, “if it can happen to SRK, then…” If I were he, taking one for the team in a post 9/11 world, I’d go the Queen Mother route. When the Luftwaffe hit Buckingham Palace during the Blitz, she famously said, referring to the heavy bombing of London’s poor neighbourhoods: “Good, at least now I can look the East End in the eye.”

Here in Pakistan, we’re by and large pretty stoic about security searches, producing identification and the high chance of airport security personnel getting their jollies by copping a quick feel (not to mention the out-and-out apartheid inflicted on Pakistani passport holders at Indian airports). The big difference, of course, is that it happens to everyone. Pakistan’s is a fascinating conflict, where we are both the Germans and the Allies. Terrorism on the sort of scale we experience here is, if nothing else, the most egalitarian form of violence there is. No more mindlessly dispatching generations of cannon-fodder to the trenches. This war is home delivery, brought to your doorstep; and your marketplaces, your mosques and your five-star hotels.

You’d think that with all this chaos, there’d be some real intellectual growth, some insight from within the eye of the storm. While there has been some impressive new writing from and about Pakistan recently (and inevitably some frightfully bad writing too, given that one in every five people at an average dinner party is allegedly writing a novel), there isn’t as thoughtful a response to the crisis as one would hope. Being Pakistani, living in Pakistan, having a Pakistani parent or knowing somebody Pakistani who lives across the road from your second cousin’s best friend has become, sadly, a unique selling point unto itself, providing the launch pad for some dreadful forays into print and broadcasting that the world was surely richer without. You see, along with discrimination, a form of ghastly, patronising global Affirmative Action is afoot. We have become creatures of fascination, and some of us are milking it for all its worth.

Being ludicrously pale (I’ve been mistaken for everything from Israeli to French to dead, depending on how much sun I’ve had), I’m accustomed abroad to the inevitable “but you don’t look Pakistani”, delivered in the tone generally reserved for the sentence “I didn’t know you have dandruff”. But attitudes are changing. Now I can dine out on my nationality, and not only in the West, where people are expected to not know very much, but also in my own neighbourhood. I’ve found myself received as a novelty figure in India (“Really? You can live on your own in Pakistan? But isn’t that a problem?”), where really you’d think they’d know better. But back to what I was saying, get this, along with every other self-promoter in the business, I’m producing a book. Naturellement. I have an agent, a pleasant offer from a respectable UK publishing house, and various people keen to write about it. What I don’t have as yet is a completed manuscript. The way things are going, I can quite possibly dash one off over a free weekend and sell it as is. Publishers are under the impression that they can get more bang for their buck here. Few people are going to resist the lure of cashing in on their moment in the sun. It’s hugely unfair, but nice work if you can get it. Oh, and it helps if your name is Khan.

Published in openthemagazine.com 29th August 2009 http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/my-name-is-khan-too

How the Other Half Lives

Let me make this perfectly clear; I’ve never celebrated Pakistan’s Independence Day. This is largely because everyone I know who had anything to do with ousting the British has since bought a Georgian terraced maisonette in South Kensington and sent their favourite son to Eton. It has nothing to do with Pakistan being, shall we say, not on its best form this last year. Not that it’s half as bad as you’d think. I appreciate that one rather gives the impression of a country made up entirely of violent religious extremists, a few Booker nominees and a flotilla of BBC reporters in flak jackets. It’s all far more humdrum, far more mundane than that. In fact, tedium is one of the biggest problems that the newspapers never get to (too boring, I suspect). In terms of cultural stimuli, there was something of a rush to divest oneself of all those traits that might be perceived as Indian (geographically improbable though it may seem to the casual observer, various leaders have been under the impression that Pakistan is culturally affiliated to Saudi Arabia). This has, over the years, led to a series of rather arbitrary pick ’n’ mix judgement calls, which means that now we’ve largely lost, say, the art of Kathak as part of the average school curriculum yet routinely suffer the horror that isBoogie Woogie Mania on cable television.

Fun, unless you’re terribly well off and can have it privately, is largely frowned upon, more so legislated against. I’m not entirely sure how or why this happened, but I will go with the theory that eighties dictator Zia ul-Haq liked to go to bed early and didn’t want to feel like he was missing out on a good time. Still, try as you might, people will find a way to entertain themselves. I’ll wager that painted, topless women aside, large political rallies are Pakistan’s version of Mardi Gras. They feature vibrant throngs of young lads and quite often music and dancing. True, there might be the occasional burst of teargas or a baton charge to put a damper on things, but largely it’s a party with a purpose, like a charity ball (which, by the way, is what the elite do for fun, I’d sooner opt for the teargas).

For those who are not especially politically inclined, there is the enormous, rambunctious Carnaval that is Independence Day. Cars, streets and houses sprout dark green flags. Fairy lights that belie the national power crisis hang in ropes off monuments and shopping plazas. Young men (always men, mind you), high-spirited gaggles, swathes and hordes of them, pile into cars and onto motorbikes and careen down main thoroughfares. It’s a much-needed release. The soundtrack is bursts of acceleration, cheering, hooting, honking and the modern anthems ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ and Junoon’s ‘Jazba’. Bikers try their hand at wheelies, death-defying balancing acts, complicated synchronised manoeuvres and, given the opportunity, that delightful activity euphemistically known in the subcontinent as ‘eve-teasing’. It is a giant oil spill of testosterone. Since this is about celebrating independence, it’s perfectly fitting that women are largely absent from these festivities.

Others conspicuous by their absence are us—the chattering classes, liberals of either sex, those people who attend charity balls in skirts and boob tubes, who import Thai orchids for dinner parties and/or wear block-printed khaddar and endlessly forward each other Arundhati Roy articles (now accepted as the South Asian shorthand for being ‘right on’). Customarily we’re found on Facebook posts and in newspaper editorials, pontificating on the vast distance between the current reality and Mr Jinnah’s vision. For me, Independence Day usually means hawkers trying to sell me flags and pins, and the rush to get home early to avoid traffic jams. It means feeding the dog half a sedative to get him through the firecrackers. We aren’t found on the streets because the streets don’t belong to us. Having long enjoyed the advantages of social inequality, it serves us right that we should find ourselves outsiders, hidden in our homes, ready to fight for the common man in theory but in fact unwilling to touch him with a bargepole. Pakistan now has no choice but to change and for the better. I’ve never before felt the need to celebrate the place, not until the rest of the world erroneously decided that it was checking out. It isn’t. In the words of poet Lucille Clifton: “Come celebrate/with me that everyday/something has tried to kill me/and has failed.”

Published in openthemagazine.com 14th August 2009

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/how-the-other-half-lives

Review - The Seagull

The Seagull

Produced by NAPA
Director: Zia Mohyeddin
Cast: Rahat Kazmi, Talat Hussain, Arshad Mahmud, Nyla Jaffri, Nimra Bucha, Ayman Tariq, Bakhtawar Mazhar, Saqib Khan
Venue: Karachi Arts Council
September 26th - October 5th

A suitable introduction to The Seagull, for the uninitiated, would be Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”, a brilliant and affectionate pastiche of the Russian literary oeuvre from which I quote the following, “Alexei loves Tatiana like a sister. I’m in love with Alexei. He loves Alicia. Alicia’s having an affair with Lev. Lev loves Tatiana. Tatiana loves Simkin. Simkin loves me. I love Simkin, but in a different way than Alexei. Tatiana’s sister loves Trigorian like a brother. Trigorian’s brother is having an affair with my sister, who he likes physically, but not spiritually.”

It’s a spoof, but only just. NAPA’s Seagull, directed by Zia Mohyeddin and starring an onslaught of theatre heavyweights (including the triple whammy of Arshad Mahmud, Talat Hussain and Rahat Kazmi), largely succeeds in presenting the wreckage of disappointment, unrequited love, dashed hope and missed opportunity that is life. And, like life, it’s surprisingly entertaining in spite of the inevitable misery.

Saqib Khan as young playwright Konstantine is a portrait of juvenile pretension and sentimentality, all but castrated by the enormous presence of his self-involved stage diva mother Irina (Bakhtawar Mazhar).While Mazhar is savage and witty at times she's not always at ease with Irina’s vast personality. The role is magnificent, the performance however, stops short of this and is just enjoyably serviceable. There's only so much attention to go around, and her son gets very little. The only cure to Angry Young Man-itis, Chekhov wisely notes, is a bullet to the head, which Konstantine manages to botch later in the play. One reason for his suicide attempt is his failed courtship of his lovely young neighbour Nina (Ayman Tariq), who has a grating exuberance about her that Tariq is sadly unable to translate into charm. Konstantine is desired by Masha (Nyla Jaffri), who gets off to a slow start (to be fair, she gets the clunkiest dialogue of the first act) but settles in about halfway through and is poignantly, matter-of-factly unhappy thereafter. Polina, Masha’s mother, is played by the compelling Nimra Bucha, who desires Dr Dorn (Hussain and more on him later). She bristles exquisitely with resentment, even her most innocuous, ‘off-duty’ moments twitch with hostility following his rejection.

Consummated passion fares no better. Nina is captivated by the charms of popular novelist Trigorin (Rahat Kazmi), Irina’s lover, but the ensuing affair leaves her devastated. If Tariq had given a finer performance the audience may have been inspired to sympathise rather than gloat; besides, so foul is her slime-green velour gown in the last act that I, for one, was unable to concentrate on her lines at all. Kazmi’s worldy, oddly vulnerable, and cautiously careless Trigorin is, on the other hand, genius. You can tell this man’s ears and toes are in character. When he sets up their Moscow rendezvous his reticence and desire are perfectly balanced, his tone and bearing alone telling you everything you need to know about how this affair will progress. Veteran Mahmud, as Irina’s brother Sorin, outside this grid of criss-crossed desire, is warmly engaging.

While The Seagull is darkly humorous throughout, the unscripted comic relief comes in the form of Dr Dorn as played by Thespus Maximus Hussain. Although he pitches the play’s closing line perfectly, the actor is otherwise astoundingly, painfully stylised, not lapsing into caricature so much as occasionally lapsing out of it. Still, this is a minor glitch in a solidly directed production that does a good job with a terribly important play about the terrible unimportance of life. Full points to the set designers Anjum Ayaz and Tanveer Abbas, for their elegant Russian interior, complete with portrait of Pushkin. The less said about the wardrobe department the better.

Review - Piranha 3D: Still Waters

Alexandre Aja, the French director who rose to prominence with the visceral slasher film Haute Tension in 2003, came as a breath of fresh air to a genre which appears to have been struggling of late with expensive, flaccid remakes and shock value quite often taking the place of the very basic premise of the horror film, to elicit fear or at least a lingering unease. With Haute Tension he succeeded and with his next big release, 2006’s The Hills Have Eyes, he pulled off another coup by doing what so few manage, delivering a fresh, effective and exceedingly disturbing remake of a cult classic.

This year, Aja gives us Piranha 3D, which, needless to say, the Pakistan-based viewer shall not be able to enjoy in its full glory. Having clocked the number of eyeballs and other unmentionable body parts shooting towards the camera on a DVD print, this is no bad thing on balance. Piranha 3-D is an entertaining and often amusing creature feature beautifully shot with a clean palette of blues, greens and yellows. It stars some fairly likeable and better yet, dislikable, stock characters — several of whom have large chunks of flesh rent from their bodies by a shoal of the titular carnivorous fish. The premise is pure delight: a small town hosts spring break, a peculiar American custom/rite of passage whereby idiotic college-goers descend upon towns en mass to under-dress, over-drink and use as few of their brain cells as humanly possible. Since spring break is synonymous with the odious video series Girls Gone Wild, which celebrates sexual exploitation in the name of sexual freedom, a large selection of potential victims, whom one would only be too happy to see eaten, is at hand for the piranhas to have a field day. There are cockle-warming touches such as Christopher Lloyd borrowing from his Back to the Future persona as a scientist who informs us with incredulity that this particular species of piranha hasn’t been seen since ‘’the Pleistocene epoch, two million years ago’’. I do love a horror with a touch of the prehistoric.

The central character should have been the lovely Elizabeth Shue playing the town sheriff; it is she and her cute kids whom we are rooting for. Sadly, the real central character in this film is the Spielberg masterpiece Jaws. While the film nods and winks at it throughout, opening with a cameo from Richard Dreyfuss reprising his original role, by and large the effect is largely to remind one of just how brilliant Jaws was. Clearly it was intended as a playful parody and homage to Jaws rather than competition, but the tone is inconsistent. Aja seems to have stepped out of his genre for this film — let’s face it, the French aren’t really known for their sense of humour. He’s more convincing when he gets nasty, and he really does, with a thoroughly disturbing massacre on the water of Saving Private Ryan proportions.

As such the film, for all its entertainment value, is somewhat scattered. There are, for me, two ways to go with a creature feature: there’s Jaws, which channeled Melville and made a psychological drama of it. Alternatively, there was the glorious Lake Placid, a whole other kettle of fish, scripted as a comedy, with an exceptionally low body count. With Piranha one feels as if it was scripted as fluffy entertainment and handed over to a serious director, ending up with Jaws-lite.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 31^st, 2010. http://tribune.com.pk/story/68017/piranha-3d-still-waters/

Review - Hisss

Old school Indian cinema enthusiasts (the sort of people who would sooner die than call it “Bollywood”) are well-versed in the legend of the ichchadhari naagin, the shape-shifting cobra who can assume human form.

A fairly common theme once upon a time — with alpha-females Rekha, Reena Roy and Sridevi all taking a stab at playing one — it has, in the last two decades, gone the way of the reincarnation drama, abandoned as an anachronistic throwback to a whole other India. Apparently the current Indian film-going public is able to suspend disbelief only far enough to be convinced by Karan Johar films, though my gut tells me that a vengeful snake-woman on a mission is as convincing a premise as Shah Rukh Khan setting out to inform the American president that he isn’t a terrorist.

Hisss doesn’t remotely resemble the naag films that preceded it; it resembles nothing on this earth. It is, did I forget to mention, a film by Jennifer Lynch, better known as the most baffling creation of her father, American auteur David. Jennifer Lynch seems a peculiar choice for reasons too numerous to mention, not least because her directing credentials include the film Boxing Helena, which earned her great renown as one of the world’s worst filmmakers. With Hisss she works to solidify that reputation.

Opening in the dense Indian jungle, a deranged American with an inoperable brain tumour is convinced, perhaps from having watched Indian cinema in the 80s, that the only cure for his condition is the mythical nagmani, the “jewel” possessed by the female ichchadhari naagin. Since finding an ichchadhari cobra in an Indian jungle is akin to the proverbial needle in a haystack, he hatches a plan to capture her mate (cobras, unlike socialites, mate for life) thus luring her to him. And so, following a series of incredulous coincidences strung together with choppy, incoherent editing, Mallika Sherawat slithers her way into the city where she is provided with the opportunity to show off her acting talents in a series of very small cholis and some see-through saris. Sherawat’s naagin is a function of anthropomorphism, she is not a snake — she is a feminist. The bulk of the film comprises sequences of her mauling and devouring would-be rapists and domestic abusers at a woman’s shelter. One can’t help but think that Lynch would sooner have cast Germaine Greer. It’s not as if it would make this film any more peculiar.

And while on the subject of peculiar, it’s almost heartbreaking to watch Lynch Jr trying to channel Lynch Sr. David Lynch, while often infuriating, is invariably intriguing and atmospheric. Jennifer Lynch’s attempts at being intriguing are laboured, unconvincing and ever-so-slightly pathetic. With a subplot about a police officer charged with getting to the bottom of Sherawat’s murder spree, the plot creeps along achingly slowly. It is interspersed with lengthy and pointless visuals of Lynch’s India — elephants, snake-charmers and barely-clad natives. Also — and this is far more offensive — artsy, boring sequences of the scantliy-clad Sherawat, a cardboard cut-out of an actress, possessing none of the fire and ice of her sinuous cinematic predecessors.

Lynch claims that she abandoned this film without editing it since she wished to make a love story and not the horror that the producers insisted on. As regards the climax (pun intended), which features the long-awaited (and feverishly graphic) mating of woman and snake, Lynch doesn’t seem to understand that the love story was the most horrifying aspect of all.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 28^th, 2010. http://tribune.com.pk/story/81228/hisss-snakes-and-ladders/

Review - Cougar Town

Television behemoths “Seinfeld”, “Friends”, “Frasier” and “Will & Grace” made the 90s the official decade of the situation comedy. The half hour sitcom format has, this last decade, changed, evolved, one may say, at the very least adapted, to a great extent under the tutelage of Ricky Gervais and British mockumentary “The Office”. The new breed of successful sitcom tends towards following the mockumentary format, and has included “30 Rock” and more recently “Modern Family”. While critically acclaimed, their viewership is nowhere near the sitcoms that preceded them, with “30 Rock” settling in at about 5 million viewers, as opposed to the 50 million who tuned into for “Friends”. The traditional format, which tended towards using lovable protagonists, a more formal visual set-up, and aiming for flat out laughs, rather than the more modern notion of edgy, ambivalent awkwardness, is dead in the water. With “Cougar Town”, we are invited to its wake.

Picked up, shockingly, for a second season which premiered recently, “Cougar Town” attempts to cash in on what popular culture has deemed the latest dating ‘’trend’’. While the 90s were epitomised by Bridget Jones — the thirty-something single girl, in possession of an urban family, a semi-career and a French skillet that she would never master — the new millennium brings with it the coupling of the successful, affluent 40-something divorcee and the younger man. It comes with the ugly, derisive, predatory term ‘cougar’, which goes to tell you, more than anything else, that some ninety years after women won the right to vote and some forty years after the advent of the contraceptive pill, the idea of a woman trying to control her destiny is still viewed with a sneering contempt.

That said, sneering contempt is all that is deserved by “Cougar Town” and its portrayal of modern sexual mores. Springing from a school of thought that considers any display of intelligence pretension, “CT” is a repellently crass look at a financially successful but intellectually bereft divorcee Jules (Courtney Cox) who scandalises her equally provincial friends by re-entering the dating scene and trying her hand at younger men. As an attempt to ham-handedly draw attention to double standards, her neighbour Grayson (Josh Hopkins) is a forty-something who dates one young girl after another, with no qualms and no societal disapproval either. That he is portrayed as an infinitely more attractive character than the protagonist does not help the argument. The show follows Jules’ dating misadventures, along with her attempts at raising her teenage son alone, in order to give her character some appearance of depth, with motherhood ever the shortcut to proving that one is a ‘good person, really’. Perhaps the only amusing moment so far has been Jennifer Aniston’s cameo as an obnoxious, two-faced therapist, reminding one that Aniston is so much better at playing petulant and vile rather than the bland girl-next-door she’s been condemned to on the big screen. As for Cox, if dating in ones 40s is really a matter of obsessing over the appearance of one’s elbows and eternally waiting for the phone to ring, then I, for one, am least surprised by her continuing singledom. Age has come to “Cougar Town” without bringing with it smarts, self-awareness or even a dash of sophistication. Jules is a character consistently told by well-meaning friends to learn to love herself, yet not one convincing reason is provided as to why.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 24^th, 2010. http://tribune.com.pk/story/65269/death-of-a-sitcom/