Tips to happiness

Islamabad diary
Or rather tips to living reasonably well in today’s Pakistan…a Pakistan beyond tinkering or fixing in bits. Most of us are coming slowly to the realisation that this country needs a complete overhaul. But who will perform this feat of engineering? So as we dream of change and revolution, we can at least make our present slightly more comfortable.
Some form of weapon training, learning how to strip a pistol or a rifle and learning how to shoot, is an absolute must in today’s Pakistan. Your children and dependents too, including I would say womenfolk, should know how to handle a weapon. And your family should learn the basics of field-craft, like taking cover and lying on the ground in the proper position. You must also know how to clean your firearm. Incidentally, a weapon need not mean a Kalashnikov. It could be as simple as a .22 pistol, provided you know how to use it.
Across Pakistan’s rural spaces it is a time-honoured custom for people to stock up on their yearly supply of wheat at harvest time. For city folk, and whose background is not agricultural, it may be useful to follow the same example, because the atta (flour) to be had from the bazaar is atrocious, as you can see when you go to a restaurant. The moment your roti/chapatti is cold it becomes like leather…hard to chew and without the taste of genuine atta.
So this harvest time take time out to get your own stock of wheat and have it ground at a chakki – an atta-grinding machine. Despite the mess we are making of our urban skyline – unchecked urbanisation with no thought given to the loss of precious agricultural land – chakkis are still to be found in towns and cities.
We could do worse than become Sikhs as far as tobacco is concerned. Smoking is evil and every household head, man or woman, should discourage it. Whoever said smoking is cool? It is the un-coolest thing of all.
And what article of faith makes us such gluttonous meat-eaters? The farming of chickens, the way it is done, if anyone were to look at it would make a vegetarian of him for the rest of his life. Sorry for this sickening detail, but it is a fairly widespread practice for chicken feed to be made from the fat, especially the tales, of stray dogs. And there are restaurants which have nothing but chicken on their menu.
As for mutton, the favourite Pakistani staple, you don’t know what you are getting from the butcher’s. It is not unusual for sick and near-dead animals to be fed to slaughter-houses. The practice of injecting water into mutton or beef to make it weigh heavier on the scales is common. Yet meat is sacred to our diet.
Boiling or filtering water is a must. There was a time when even in Islamabad we used to drink tap water. Then sewerage pipes started getting mixed up with water pipes and that was the end of that idyll. Now so-called mineral water is all the rage, which is really water drawn from deep underground – thereby contributing to the depletion of our underground aquifers – and bottled in plastic bottles (which do their bit to add to the pollution of our landscape) and passed on to you and me. And because we have such wonderful regulatory bodies there’s no way to tell which ‘mineral water’ is safe and which is not, the market full of spurious labels. Beyond boiling, however, we could follow the Chinese example of drinking hot water. I drink hot water, which I always carry in a thermos, even in June and find it saves me from throat infections.
And, by the way, no one in his/her right mind should keep aerated drinks at home, an abomination if ever there was one. In the ideal republic there will be a complete ban on two forms of advertising: for aerated drinks (I dare not take their name) and cell phones and cell companies. If anything is calculated to induce insanity it is this mindless advertising.
One of the great inequalities in today’s Pakistan is the dearth of spiritual sustenance in small towns and villages. The bootleg trade, if we count our mercies, has become a highly-developed trade in the larger metropolitan centres – Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, spiritual solace just a telephone call away. But what if you live in the great urban and rural hinterland, where the bulk of Pakistan is located?
True, good Samaritans from among religious minorities carry on a lively trade, all the more so because ever since the enforced piety of prohibition the thirst of the Pakistani nation as a whole for the forbidden stuff, far from diminishing, has sharply risen – a sterling example, if any were needed, for the law of unintended consequences. But in much of Pakistan the forbidden stuff is a bit like the meat from the butchers – you don’t know whence it comes or what may be mixed in it.
So taking the principle of autarky or self-sufficiency forward – weapon training, your own wheat supply, hot water – it may not be such a bad idea to learn the art of home manufacture. I say this in all seriousness. We are so good at the art of adulteration. Even the ginger (adrak) most of us buy is washed – hard though it may be to believe this – in acid, to give it a better form and colour. Even the call to prayer – the azaan – is many a time not what was the original azaan on the lips of Bilal, who first sounded the call to prayer. The art of home manufacture should be a small step towards purity in at least something.I am going about this in a roundabout way, picking my words carefully for fear of offending the guardians of morality who miss the larger picture of injustice and wrong in our society but who are great at getting worked up over trifles. In India magazines like Outlook and India Today off and on carry cover stories on the changing sexual mores of Indian society (which make for gripping reading, as any aficionado will readily understand…but that’s another story). Try anything of the sort here and you will be inviting the vengeance of the furies.
Not that we are ignorant of the things those cover stories talk about. Nothing lurid or excitable is alien to our understanding. But we do those things, and much more, behind the seven veils. We can drink ourselves to death but we dare not talk openly of drink…unless we happen to be poets. We can then refer to mai-parasti and the maikhana symbolically or allegorically. But any clear discussion of the benefits or disadvantages of prohibition would still be considered a dubious exercise.
And try not to visit Islamabad, which with its excess of roads and now with the metro-bus is a city best avoided. You can say that the construction of the metro-bus is a temporary dislocation. Perhaps. But when this monstrosity is completed Islamabad will be uglier, and a greater monument to concrete, than it already is.
Gen Musharraf’s sin was not the subverting of the constitution. (If messing with the country, which every ruler in living memory has indulged in, is no great sin, why should a short-term fiddling with the constitution make us such legal purists?) His great sin, which I am certain he will have a hard time explaining before the final Judgment Seat, was the thrust his economic policies – and that of his economic tsar, Shaukat Aziz – gave to the motor-car.
The clogging of the nation’s roads and highways, the traffic jams now to be seen in every city, even the smallest, are the lasting effects of those policies. Avenues everywhere, trees uprooted, a near-virgin landscape turned into an urban nightmare…this is our idea of progress.
Can anything be done about the plastic shopper? I don’t think so. We are an atomic power helpless before two forces more potent than our nuclear arsenal: the plastic shopper and the mosque loudspeaker. Both are in no one’s control.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com