Film review - Queen, Dir: Vikas Bahl/Starring Kangana Ranaut

The Queen Is Dead 

Such is the justifiable desperation to watch a film that deviates from the clapped-out male-dominated Bollywood standard, that the quirky, unconventional Queen has found itself basking in much acclaim and, more significantly, steady results at the box office. The sheer relief at a film about a woman’s life – a damsel finding her own way out of distress – is palpable as critics rush to outdo each other’s praise and pledge undying love to director Vikas Bahl and actor Kangana Ranaut. Since nothing succeeds like success, one can only hope that the natural course of things will see more films with meatier roles for female protagonists, eventually leading cinema to the thunderbolt of realization that women are also people. As such, the delight with which Queen has been received by critics and audiences is a joy to behold. It would have been all the more gratifying had the film actually been better. 

The story – and I use the term as loosely as the director does – kicks off beautifully. Rani (Ranaut), an obedient girl from a conservative middle class family complete with a degree in Home Economics, is dumped by her ghastly fiancé at the eleventh hour. After spending a few nights awake soaking up the horror and mortification of it all, captured so well one can feel every pinprick of Ranaut’s despair and panic, she decides to go on her honeymoon after all, even if it is without the groom. So far so good. Utterly charming girl well shot of nasty boy with journey of discovery underfoot, in Paris at that. What could possibly go wrong? The opening act is so flawless that it took me a good hour to accept that the plot had subsequently disappeared down a rabbit-hole never to be seen again and what was one left with were a few entertaining moments, going nowhere, and not nearly fast enough.     

On reaching Paris, Rani and outrageously beautiful half-Indian chambermaid Vijaylakshmi bond over a bewildering exchange during which Vijaylakshmi complains that she doesn’t understand why men are offended by the suggestion that they have small penises. Scared, depressed, disoriented and now on the receiving end of rhetorical questions about genitalia, Rani decides Europe was a terrible idea and tries to book the next flight back to the familiarity of home. But as she waits for a seat, she plucks up the courage inch by inch to navigate the streets, fending off a mugger, and in a glorious highlight, getting sozzled and unleashing Punjabi dance moves atop a Parisian bar.

The scene in which she visits her parents’ friends, who lament the tragedy that’s befallen her, is pitch perfect and acutely observed and does what comedy does best, which is to reveal the ugly truth. Along with being the subject of much pity, Rani may well have similarly lamented her fate for having lost out on marrying a controlling, petty little shit had it not been for the opportunity to find a great big world of possibilities out there. It sounds obvious said out loud but believe me, it really, really isn’t.   

Some of the less charming moments included Rani shouting “Mummy, Mummy” with fear on seeing a black man in a dormitory and Rani telling a chef at an Italian restaurant her meal would be much improved with all the accoutrements generally associated with haleem. I cringed through the obligatory vibrator joke at the sex shop. I realise this is meant to be wholesome simplicity (which I have some trouble with in and of itself) but there’s a fine line between that and irritating doltishness and it is crossed here on numerous occasions.  

While it’s a refreshing change to see an Indian film without romance at its core, the absence of any sexual crackle whatsoever was also deeply felt and I was disappointed that Rani returned to Delhi having embraced a hair straightener rather than sexual liberation beyond a laboured and entirely unmagical first kiss. I also can’t help but feel that for all its unconventionality, and for all of Rani’s newfound daring, we’re still being presented with a goodie two shoes on a pedestal. A rough edge here or there wouldn’t have hurt. All of us off-screen women have somehow managed to live with them.

About a third of the way in, Rani accidentally sends her horrid ex-fiance a selfie in a skimpy vest and one knows too well that he’s going to reappear and also precisely how she’ll handle it. One waits for another story arc to appear to get one to that point but the arid Sahara that is the screenplay yields nothing. The complete lack of pace isn’t a minor problem. It makes for a very, very long two and a half hours; which, for example, afforded me the time to send nasty messages to everyone who’d recommended it to me and play Solitaire till the phone’s battery gave out. Three people are credited with conceiving the story - so where the hell is it? Admittedly, the film’s lethargy is punctuated with some lovely moments. The process reminded me rather of trying to stream a film on a slow internet connection – euphoria when it works followed by lengthy periods of frustration and restlessness when it sticks.

The Burka Avenger Backlash

The Ridiculous ‘Burka Avenger’ Backlash

Faiza S. Khan on why we should be praising the Pakistani cartoon superheroine for taking on the Taliban, not criticizing her clothing choices as a mark of oppression.

An exciting new show from Pakistan has caught the world’s attention, which was great for the five minutes before it was hijacked by a debate notable for its levels of misplaced angst. Burka Avenger, an animated show for children airing on Geo TV, opens in an idyllic green valley of happy, frolicking villagers reminiscent of the Swat region where Malala Yousafzai was shot. Soon their world changes with the arrival of a Taliban-like villain with a flowing beard and a corrupt politician based on Pakistani feudal lords. The local girls’ school is shut down, and all hope seems lost, until a shadowy figure emerges, a heroine draped in black, felling baddies under the cover of night. Turns out, she’s the village teacher, Jiya—a mild-mannered educationalist by day and a superheroine by night, using pens, books, and a considerable expertise in martial arts to bring peace back to her people. All this, and it boasts a really catchy theme song, “Don’t Mess With the Lady in Black.” With its focus on education and its strong female lead, the show seemed sure to win accolades for such a positive message directed at Pakistan’s youth.

But the lady in black is being messed with—and not, as one would assume, by the local Taliban. Instead, Burka Avenger has taken a beating at the hands of the Western, and more recently the Indian, media, along with a handful of privileged Pakistanis. For while she teaches in a shalwar kameez with her head bare, the disguise she wears at night to pulverize those people threatening girls’ education is indeed a burka. So what the show’s really doing, it’s argued, is glorifying an instrument of oppression. Because the burka is evil, and so is anything that makes contact with it, it must follow, as day follows night ... Only it doesn’t follow, really.

Last week an Indian news show asked whether Burka Avenger was “cool or conformist,” a question you’d think would have already been answered by a scene where the heroine knocks out a Talibanesque figure. We’ve heard the show’s creator explain, repeatedly, that the main character actually doesn’t wear a burka in the day—he simply thought that, since a burka covers your face, it would make a good disguise and give the show a local flavor. Among the panelists on the show, we heard a Pakistani blogger talking about her concerns over women being forced into burkas and the problematic question of choice in a country where there’s nothing resembling a level playing field between the sexes. As well meaning as the debate was, it also missed the point. It goes without saying that forcing women to wear anything is entirely unacceptable. The woman in question, however, is adopting the veil of her own free will, for the express purpose of obscuring her identity. When we ignore the character’s intentions behind willingly adopting a burka (as a disguise), it brings us back to good old-fashioned patriarchy, whereby a woman’s decisions are dwarfed by whatever message her clothing is putting out.

A working woman is seen deciding to put on a burka to hide her face to go beat up bad people without getting caught, and we’re stuck on “Why a burka?”

A working woman is seen deciding to put on a burka to hide her face to go beat up bad people without getting caught, and we’re stuck on “Why a burka?” God help feminism, for that day has arrived when feminists are more concerned with what’s on a woman’s head than with what’s in it. It is, after all, possible that Burka Avenger may provide some inspiration, some hope to young girls made to cover themselves up against their will that women’s lives in similarly constrained situations have potentially more to offer. The debate about what the burka signifies has always been surprisingly low on concern for and resistant to knowledge about the women who actually wear them.

Leaving aside for one moment the fact that no one, as far as I know, applies a similar level of scrutiny to Pakistani children watching Wile E. Coyote to extrapolate that they’re being inspired to plant explosives, much of the writing on Burka Avenger reeks of cloying paternalism—“the poor are dense”—and the enormous fear that Pakistani children, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, are so simple that they won’t be able to understand a painstakingly simple scenario presented to them on TV. That girls who have previously shown no inclination toward walking around dressed like a campsite will set fire to their wardrobes and demand burkas from their parents for their sweet 16.

I personally find the use of the burka incredibly smart as a superhero creation myth. The show, far from glorifying the veil, shows it for what it is—an instrument intended to make women invisible. What a masterstroke to turn this on its head and have a woman use that invisibility to her benefit for a change. Far from normalizing it, it makes the burka into a costume, an outfit. Frankly, if it inspires little girls to wear what they wish during the day and slip out at night in a garbage bag, a burka, their pajamas, or their underwear worn over spandex to beat the living daylights out of the Taliban at night, I’ll take it.

Appeared in The Daily Beast, 7th August 2013

The Pink Sari Revolution, as reviewed for TNR

The Inspirational Story of a Female Indian Vigilante

Appeared in The New Republic, 29th July 2013 

If India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, “were a country,” journalist Amana Fontanella-Khan states in the opening chapter of Pink Sari Revolution: A Tale of Women and Power In India, “it would be the fifth most populous one in the world. But it would also be the poorest; food scarcity there is more severe than in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Lawless and corrupt, it is the “home of some of the country’s most notorious bandits,” with a crooked police force that locals want protection from rather than the protection of. Elected representatives bring no relief: Between 2002 and 2007, half the ruling party's electoral candidates “had criminal charges pending against them or had been convicted.”

Women are among the worst-off in this impoverished state. “We sing songs when boys are born,” says Sampat Pal, the heroine of Pink Sari Revolution, “but for girls no one sings.” While women in India’s urban centers join the workforce, marry and otherwise enjoy relationships on their own terms, there are still vast swathes of India where conservative tradition reigns. There, some blame “Western” ideas—namely, the emancipation of women—for high rates of sexual assault. In the city of Aligarh, in June, a woman was beaten to death for allowing her daughter to wear jeans. While child marriage is illegal, more than one-third of the world’s child brides live in India, and scarcely a day goes by without a grisly tale of murder resulting from a disappointing dowry or inadequate modesty. While throngs of ordinary citizens poured onto Delhi’s streets in January to protest the brutal gang-rape of a student on a bus, small town India is still another world.

The Pink Sari Revolution is a 20,000-strong troop of women activists headed by Sampat Pal that aims to change this sorry state of affairs. While they’re often depicted brandishing canes and billed as kick ass vigilantes, Pink Sari Revolutiongives a softer impression—that their mission is focused more on raising awareness of women’s rights and providing women with legal counsel than on beating up bad husbands. Pal’s singular story is Khan’s focus, however, and in emphasizing the life of one woman, she sacrifices the possibility for a deeper understanding of the operations of the Pink Gang and the change they might foment.

“WE SING SONGS WHEN BOYS ARE BORN, BUT FOR GIRLS NO ONE SINGS.”

Sampat Pal may not seem the most likely candidate to spearhead an enormous women’s movement. Without formal schooling and married at the age of twelve, she had few of the resources one might expect of a national leader. (But given the countless number of highly educated, privileged Indian women only too willing to enter a predetermined role as a subordinate, what does likelihood have to do with anything, really?) What Pal has is a razor-sharp mind, a burning sense of social justice, and courage. Her favorite uncle, the only person in her family with a college degree, treated her “like a man” she says. “If someone hits you, hit them back” he told her, and that’s precisely what she started doing—on behalf of those who wouldn’t or couldn’t.

In her early twenties, having already had five children with her fairly uninspiring husband, Pal decided that she wants more control over her life. She put together enough money to buy a sewing machine by stealing grain from her own store and selling it back to the grocer for a lower sum. (She told her husband she found the money lying on the road.) Emboldened, she then decided she wanted to join a local, cash-strapped NGO and work for the awareness of women’s rights. Her husband kicked up a fuss, and so she fibbed; when an admirer unwittingly revealed her double-life, her resolve only increased: “I decided either I will become weaker than him or stronger than him." She went on to persuade local women to pool money in order to help women who find themselves in trouble. Borrowing money from a friend, she bought some cheap polyester saris as a uniform for these women. (They’re pink because every other color is already associated with a political party or a religion in India.)

While Pal often placed herself directly in danger’s path, the closest she comes in this book to an actual assassination attempt is unrelated to her campaign for women’s rights. A crew of outraged men show up at her door, sent to kill her after she is spotted sharing a drinking vessel with a member of a lower caste. She packs her things, gathers her children, and takes the first bus out of town. She starts over, recruiting more women, taking on more cases, and ultimately attracting the attention of the President of India’s ruling political party. The book ends with Pal determined to run for office.

While this recounting of Pal’s life makes for a brisk read, it ultimately feels like a missed opportunity. The Pink Sari Revolution presents events but doesn’t aim for theories or larger ideas. Once you’ve read it, there’s not much to chew on; it boils down to a few years in the life of one woman, inspiring though she is. This is additionally disappointing since the book is billed (in its subtitle) as “A Tale of Women and Power In India.” There are legions of women standing up for their rights in India, through women’s rights organizations or merely by deciding to work. But The Pink Sari Revolution neither alludes to these movements nor provides a portrait of the way this singular organization is changing things. Though limited in its scope, it is, however, a fine tribute to a remarkable woman, a close look at an India that still exists beneath the economic boom of recent years, and a rousing reminder that formidable will can make a difference.

Review - Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Director: Woody Allen

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson

Our introduction to Scarlett Johansson's character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona tells us that she's a film student who's just completed a twelve minute film about why love is hard to define. Most of Woody Allen's works are that film, not least this latest offering. On summer hols in Barcelona, we meet Vicky (Rebecca Hall) an earnest bluestocking responsibly engaged to a dependable (if lacklustre) partner, and Cristina (Johansson) a perky blonde libertine keen to discover herself through self-induced romantic torment. That they are stock characters of cinematic cliché isn't lost on a director of Allen's sophistication. Their personas are deliberately reduced to types, emphasised further by the hilarious commentary provided by the narrator's voiceover (which tells us, for example, that right-on Vicky is studying to complete 'a Masters in Catalan Identity'). Throw in another stock character, Latin lover Juan Antonio (Xavier Bardem), an intense artist (but of course!) and a seducer so candid and reasonable that it seems uncouth not to go to bed with the man. It is a conclusion reached sooner or later by both girls.

Vicky is seduced somewhat reluctantly (but in record time) while Cristina gives herself with extravagant abandon hoping to induce some tumult within. While Vicky subsequently resigns herself to humdrum married life, Juan Antonio proceeds to embark on a live-in relationship not just with Cristina but also his ex-wife – wild-haired, mad-eyed artist Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz). They settle into a threesome very much in the manner of Sartre, du Beauvoir and Bianca Bienenfeld. All of them find love but none of them keep it. Come to think of it, Woody Allen films aren't about how hard love is to define, they're about how hard it is to stomach.

There's something fitting about this film being shot in Spain. The golden architecture in the languid Barcelonan light suits this languidly paced venture. Allen's pace hasn't changed over the years; it's delicate and thoughtful, what modern cinema-goers impatiently refer to as 'slow'. It was unremarkable in his 70s heyday, when films were known to breathe and think, today it seems positively European. This is not a movie hurtling towards a conclusion; it meanders quietly in one direction and then the next, with characters spending at least as much time thinking as acting. Allen's got milder with age and there are moments when the film meanders a tad too long, verging on aimless loitering. It could be said that too many couples spoil the broth (along with the aforementioned, there's also a Patricia Clarkson subplot I shan't even bother trying to touch upon). While it's never dull, the film doesn't seem to commit to one idea, and aims to cover too much ground. This is, I suppose, the problem with trying to make cinema out of a philosophic debate, is romantic love sustainable? Still, the script is word-perfect, and Rebecca Hall makes an utterly charming new avatar of Diane Keaton, anxious, pensive, and with an eerily Allen-esque sense of delivery. The Latin lovers, Cruz and Bardem are fun to watch but comic-book incendiary, and clearly borrowed whole from Almodovar. Johansson is perfectly adequate, and given nothing complicated to do. Though she brings a certain freshness to the role of sexually precocious ingénue, the more I watch her movies, the more I suspect this eminent director may be thinking with his pants in casting her three times in a row.

Within the warren of the storyline, Allen explores his customary concerns, including the bohemian neuroses of a particular social milieu and the impossibility of love. It's all familiar terrain; Allen has built a career on the affectionate (and self-deprecating) lampooning of pseudo-intellectuals and artistic self-discovery. Love, he concludes, is ever unattainable. It's only sexy if it's complicated or unrequited. Once you're in a relationship, the grass is always greener in someone else's bedroom, and if you shun romance altogether, well, then you're miserable anyway. The happiest couple in this movie are the destructively passionate Bardem and Cruz, who simply cannot be together – I don't mean they make scenes in restaurants, I mean people get stabbed when these two argue. As Cruz explains about her relationship in what is essentially the moral of the story, "It'll always be romantic because it cannot be complete." This is the sorrow at the heart of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it is this uncomfortable revelation about the nature of romantic love that lingers. It has been a running theme of Woody Allen's for some thirty years now (one wonders how it escaped the attention of Mia Farrow) and was articulated most memorably by Diane Keaton in Love & Death: "To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer."

Review - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti in TNR

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/mohammed-hanif-our-lady-alice-bhatti

Jonathan Swift in Karachi

by Faiza S Khan

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

by Mohammed Hanif

Knopf, 256 pp., $25.95

A FEW CHAPTERS into Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, the titular protagonist relaxes on a stretcher between shifts at the chaotic Karachi hospital where she is employed as a nurse. On the wall behind her, a torn poster reads, Bhai, your blood will bring a revolution. Someone has scribbled under it with a marker: And that revolution will bring more blood. Someone else has added Insha’Allah, in an attempt to introduce divine intervention to the proceedings. Some more down-to-earth soul has tried to give this revolution a direction, and drawn an arrow underneath and scribbled, Bhai, the Blood Bank is in Block C.

One could reasonably suspect that this “more down-to-earth soul” is the author Mohammed Hanif, making a Hitchcockian cameo appearance, for it seems to be just this gift for applying logic to absurdity that has allowed him to compose a comical love story out of a frothing, roiling sea of rage in an extravagantly dysfunctional society. And this is not one of those uplifting, life-affirming stories of love, salvation, and the innate dignity of the human condition amidst suffering and degradation, either. No, here the ceremony of innocence is officially drowned. Drowned? People are wading through the water trying not to get electrocuted.

Hanif’s new novel, which follows on his wonderful debut, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, centers on Alice Bhatti, a janitor’s daughter and a Christian in a country increasingly consumed with fanatical bigotry. (Last year Pakistan witnessed the assassinations of the Governor of the Punjab, and the Minister for Minority Affairs, for daring to speak up on behalf of Pakistan’s beleaguered Christian community.) Alice is a Pakistani “untouchable,” if not formally by caste as in India, then by default. With hypocrisy being religious zealotry’s most natural ally, she is not quite untouchable enough; the pious Muslim men who refuse on principal to share a drinking vessel with her have no such qualms about trying to cop a feel on the bus.

Hers is not a piteous tale of victimhood, though. By the time we meet the twenty-seven-year-old Alice, she has already done time at a juvenile correctional facility for assault, and later, when sexual favors are demanded of her at gunpoint, she takes a razor blade to her attacker’s favorite appendage. Not that she deliberately puts herself in these situations, mind you. Street-smart and self-possessed, she makes every effort to keep her head down, having spent “not a single day” working in Accidents & Emergencies, “when she didn’t see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive.” Even without following the news, “it seemed the city was full of serial killers.” She knows better than to have expectations of legal recourse, observing that “nobody was surprised; there were no police detectives sitting around matching clues, no parliamentary subcommittees discussing ways of saving this endangered species.”

Hanif’s magnificently acerbic critique of the sorry state of women’s rights in Pakistan is possessed by a Swiftian spirit. Alice “looks at these battered bodies on the floor of the A&E and tries to figure out the rules of this sport.” She “thinks she’s identified the type of woman who attracts the wrong kind of attention, who stumbles from one man who wants to slap her to another man who wants to chop off her nose…” As a result, she “tries to maintain a nondescript exterior,” avoiding eye-contact and conversation, along with precautions such as walking around rather than leaping over puddles as “any act that involves stretching her legs may send the wrong signal.” In addition she “never eats in public. Putting something in your mouth is surely an invitation for someone to shove something horrible down your throat. If you show your hunger, you are obviously asking for something.”

But she does accept a proposal of marriage—throwing caution to the wind, as marriage has been known to be a leading cause of grievous bodily harm and death among Pakistani women. While the Muslim groom, Teddy Butt, seems to make for an unlikely beau—he falls on the somewhat unreconstructed, not to mention mildly deranged, side—he is an oddly endearing man, in fact the novel’s most endearing character. While we see plenty of Alice, she is a surefooted heroine who can sometimes be so sensible as to verge on the remote. We get Teddy warts and all. He is a body builder (“Junior Mr. Faisalabad”) and a police informant. The job options that he has rejected include bodyguard to rich kids and fitness trainer, which seem to him “a bit effeminate.” With “almost no flair for physical violence,” he himself is not a killer, merely one who provides “valet parking for the angels of death”; his experience of escorting one such victim to his grave makes for one of the novel’s high points.

Teddy is made flesh and blood by his vulnerability, by his almost constant air of mild bewilderment. Alice, at the bottom of the food chain, is able to take a coldly analytical view of society. Teddy has so far not felt any great need to do so. He has formed his code of conduct, his understanding of human nature, in particular of sexual relationships, from what is considered the norm for a Muslim man in his position. His worldview is an amalgam of snippets he can retain from newspapers and dodgy advice administered by his police squad colleagues. And so he is deeply bewildered. His experiences with “romantic love” are so barbaric as to induce pity for him along with the women in question. “Twice he has come close to conceding love. Once he gave a fifty-rupee tip to a prostitute” and another time he “only pretended to take his turn” with a prisoner offered to him after being gang-raped by the police.

During his courtship of Alice, hopped up on love—an inexplicable new emotion—Teddy fires a bullet into the air, which causes a car accident, mobilizes a lynch mob, and manages to set off a three day riot leaving scores dead. Its telling is as amusing as it is tragic for being an entirely plausible scenario in a city where countless numbers are routinely lost to utterly random violence, a city where everyone seems pent up enough to eternally be a hair’s breadth away from erupting.

As for Pakistan’s upper classes, they make only rare appearances in this novel, and always as vile sexual predators, insulating themselves from Alice Bhatti’s life with small battalions of private guards, hidden away on the other side of doors that close with “a discreet, expensive VIP click.” Our Lady of Alice Bhatti inhabits a world where “I found a baby in the main drain at the Ideal Housing Society” is an acceptable opening gambit over a meal. It is a world where a fading, cancer-ridden woman’s son is asked by the hospital to check if his mother’s dead yet, as the bed is needed. All the animals that wander into the story are maimed, bloodied, and mad with hunger, with half-torn ears and protruding ribs. This is no place for those who rely on the goodness of human nature, or indeed, the humanness of human nature. Hanif’s disgust is evident throughout, “Beggars were trying new tricks every day, pretending to be white-collar workers fallen on bad times … to soften hearts that had hardened in the face of the bottomless greed of half-naked children and droopy, blind old women.”

Innovatively structured, in loose, almost episodic chapters, every section of the book has its own self-contained narrative. While Hanif’s humorous colloquial tone and his deftness at juxtaposing brutality and farce are his biggest gifts, the jokes are occasionally piled on too thick. There are moments when the temptation to apply a mallet to a nail already hit on the head would have been better resisted. But these are quibbles. In the hands of a lesser writer, a novel dealing with these themes would run the risk of turning didactic and self-righteous. But Hanif’s skewering wit and his acute journalistic sense of observation consistently shine through. This is a brisk, biting narrative, entirely shorn of sentimentality and exoticism, and fuelled by an anger born of deep compassion.

Faiza S. Khan is a Karachi-based columnist and literary critic, and editor-in-chief of The Life’s Too Short Literary Review: The Magazine of New Writing From Pakistan.

Between Clay and Dust review

Musharraf Ali Farooqi's novel Between Clay and Dust reviewed in The Caravan Magazine, May, 2012 http://www.caravanmagazine.in/Story/1391/With-Souls-and-Elbows.html

On the first issue of Hello! Pakistan

The Hottest Place in Hello! 

FOR ALL the coverage it has received in Pakistan and in the international press, anyone might think Hello! Pakistan — neither Pakistan’s first glossy social magazine, nor Pakistan’s first international franchise — means something. That is the only possible explanation for the miasma of self-righteousness that rose to greet it from some quarters. As the situation in the country deteriorates, a spot of frivolity — like the publication ofHello! or the country’s numerous fashion weeks — is received within Pakistan in one of two ways, both of which induce murderous rage in your humble correspondent. It is either hailed as a triumph of progressiveness despite being limited to a fraction of a fraction of the elite who are already as progressive as they’re going to get or then greeted with outrage as an insult to the poor and the suffering.

Somehow, I suspect the beggar child feebly scratching at the car window is least concerned with whether one is sprawled in the backseat reading a lifestyle magazine or Das Kapital. Naturally, it is right to be appalled by the gaping chasm between rich and poor but do then remember it each time you dole out a half of your cleaning lady’s pay for a meal at a nice restaurant or switch on your air conditioner or plan a vacation or go to the hospital or buy bottled water; and not just at the publication of a magazine that merely showcases an aspect of society that exists and will continue to exist whether or not it’s chronicled by Hello!.

That said, turns out much of the pre-emptive scoffing directed at the advent of Hello! has been entirely justified. I’ve spent much of the past few years on the edge of my seat poised to take violent umbrage to the international media’s coverage of the Pakistani elites’, shall we say cultural activities, eternally (and disingenuously) juxtaposed with the Pakistan of the Taliban. In this instance, the foreign press has, against all odds, taken a relatively sophisticated approach, crediting the magazine with being one of the many Pakistans that co-exist. I suspect, what with Hello!’s pages intended as the stomping ground of millionaires, of pop and film stars, polo players and minor royals who shan’t ever ascend anything but a ski slope — even the most sensationalist journalist would feel a tad sheepish trying to seek out meaning in it. But never you mind, that mantle has been taken on by the magazine itself.

The publishers note reads: “It is unfortunate that, of late, Pakistan’s image has been dulled by the shadow of bad press.” Silly me, then, for naïvely thinking Pakistan was to blame for Pakistan’s image. The editor’s note continues in much the same vein, in fact, what Pakistan looks like from abroad forms the running theme of this premier issue. Now, call me shallow, but I buy Hello! for the gracious drawing rooms, and the antique chandeliers, for photos of the well-heeled on holiday, for details of their gratifyingly vulgar weddings. Instead, I get a cover story on Sean Penn speaking on humanitarian efforts in Badin, our sole Oscar winner (who speaks very well but has already been interviewed at great length) on what her documentary means to the country, designers Sana Safinaz commenting on the country’s perceived radical image, Vikram Seth and Shobhaa Dé on how much Indians and Pakistanis really love each other, and an interview of Spanish designer Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, who I believe earns a medal for Most Diplomatic Soundbyte of recent years, “I think it’s a wonderful country. And yes, it has problems, but then even in Spain we have problems”.

That's all well and good but one can’t help but wonder what this is doing in a publication sold to Pakistanis in Pakistan who presumably form their opinion of the country by living in it. I’d wanted to resist the temptation of quoting Lionel Richie but when it comes to its target market one must ask, “Hello!, is it me you’re looking for?” I fear this is the editorial team’s attempt at making good on their threat of being a “socially responsible” publication as they’d stated in an earlier press release. God only knows why, when one requires them to be a great deal more sassy, ballsy and unapologetically decadent if they’re to put together the entertaining piece of fluff that is required of them.

For Tehelka Magazine, April 2012

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main52.asp?filename=Op050512HOTTEST.asp