Glimpses of Beirut in Karachi’s violence

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

While Beirut has uneasily risen out of its war-torn past as a glitzy metropolis, Karachi seems to be hurtling toward a bloodier crisis. Once romanticized as “the city of lights,” Karachi is now marred by death, darkness and chaos. It is a city on the brink of an almost civil war.

Shot four times after being brutally tortured, gunned down by unidentified men riding a motorcycle, kidnapped for ransom, blown by grenade thrown into crowded restaurant — these are the stories playing out across the city’s wards each day.

Between 2003 and 2011, an estimated 5,549 people died in Karachi from target killings, terrorism and sectarianism, according to a recent report by the Center for Research & Security Studies, a Pakistani think-tank founded by civil society activists. The number is nearly half of the 11,990 civilians killed in Pakistan due to terrorism in the 2003-2011 time period, the report said.

“Karachi’s situation has really deteriorated in the past year,” said Noman Baig, a Ph.D. student of anthropology at the University of Texas Austin, who is currently doing his fieldwork in Karachi.  The situation began to worsen substantially after the 2008 elections when several political parties and crime syndicates began challenging the decades-long hegemony of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement— an ethno-nationalist party, which represents the nine million Urdu-speaking Mohajirs, who migrated from India in the 1947 partition.  Since then, hundreds of political workers have been killed.

These targeted killings thrive with almost perfect impunity. Extortion and kidnappings, used by the political parties as instruments to obtain and maintain power, flourish.  No business in Karachi can operate without paying to the extortionists.  

“Right now nobody knows who is killing who,” he said. “The city’s situation can be gauged from the fact that Karachi is now being compared with war-ravaged Beirut in the 1980s.”

Beirut and Karachi, while vastly different, have many parallels: both are seaport cities; both play a pivotal role in each country’s economy and politics; and both have an inflammable ethnic mix.  It is the ethnic factor which gains particular salience in the anatomy of stability in the two cities.  During the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was primarily divided between the Muslim west part and the Christian east.  In Karachi, the Mohajirs and the Pashtuns lie at the heart of conflict.

For a quarter of a century, the M.Q.M., the Mohajir political party, has controlled both state and non-state governing apparatus of Karachi in a thoroughly one-sided affair. This has bred animosity and resentment from a growing number of other ethnic populations.  The M.Q.M. has violently clashed with other political and ethnic groups in Karachi — Sindhis, Punjabis, Balochis, the Pakistan People’s Party and Jamaat-e-Islami. Since 1994, an estimated 9,696 people have been killed in Karachi and majority of them are victims of ethno-political conflicts, the C.R.S.S. report said.

The main challenge to the M.Q.M.’s dominance in Karachi has come from the Pashtuns. Despite the fact that nearly half of Karachi is Pashtun, few Pashtuns hold political power in the city.  The M.Q.M. holds 17 of 20 national assembly seats in Karachi while Awami National Party, the party of the Pashtuns, holds no seats.  Of the 44 seats in Karachi’s provincial assembly, the A.N.P. holds two.  The M.Q.M. has 34.

“The M.Q.M. maintains its dominance of Mohajir politics through a combination of coercion and consent,” said Hafeez Jamali, an anthropologist based in Pakistan and the U.S who specializes in ethnic nationalism. It emerged in 1985 as a platform to channel popular Mohajir resentment due to what they perceived as unfair treatment of Mohajirs in the education and civil services.

The M.Q.M.’s ideology was accompanied by a brand of rogue politics reliant on targeted killings, extortions and kidnappings. “Over the years, the party lost its shine due to its excessive reliance on violent means and its fascist tendencies, as well as the dubious alliances it made with the Pakistani establishment, to remain in power at all costs,” Jamali said.

The absence of any other legitimate power force— one that is seen as a legitimate negotiator by all the factions of the society— in Karachi’s politics is a serious problem for the city: there is no way to negotiate the violence on the streets. Pashtuns and other ethnic communities, who do not have enough political strength to keep the M.Q.M. at bay, have started to exert power through violent means.

Karachi continues to attract migrants from other parts of Pakistan. In the wake of the Taliban insurgency and the ongoing War on Terror in Pakistan’s frontier region, more Pashtuns have fled the tribal areas to seek refuge in the Pashtun dominated areas of Karachi’s slums. The M.Q.M. sees this growing influx of Pashtuns and other migrants as a demographic change that will ultimately challenge the authority of the M.Q.M. in the city politics.

“Karachi is now witnessing a new political consciousness in non-Mohajir ethnic groups, especially in Pashtuns,” Baig said. On the other hand, the M.Q.M. is neither willing to cede any political power nor willing to accept other ethnic groups as equals.  In its latest fact-finding report, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan called the tussle between the M.Q.M. and the A.N.P. “Karachi’s main fault-line.”

The commission argues Pakistan’s current government has completely failed to maintain law and order in Karachi. It said it believes “the arrest, trial and conviction of a few ringleaders” could alter the course of the city’s future.

But Baig is skeptical about such a solution. “Law and order can bring some sense of peace to the city, but it’s not the answer to Karachi's problems.”

In the wake of deteriorating law and order situation in Karachi, another humanitarian organization has filed a petition for military intervention in Karachi. But most agree that military operation in Karachi is not a good idea, and the option of using military action can further exacerbate the situation, as it did in 1992. In 1992, Pakistan’s Army, in consultation with the civilian government, launched a military-led operation to clean up Karachi. The operation was marked by extrajudicial killings and ultimately resulted in further radicalization of the political groups in Karachi.

The P.P.P., the party in power, needs the support of M.Q.M. for its minority government and seems completely disinterested in resolving this crisis.  After the general elections of 2008—in which the M.Q.M. emerged as the fourth largest party in the parliament— the M.Q.M.’s support was crucial for Pakistan P.P.P.’s minority government.

“Perhaps an international peace mediator, which can bring all the stakeholders on the table, can resolve this situation,” Baig said.  “A peaceful solution can only be achieved if the M.Q.M. accepts these ground realities and starts seeing other ethnic groups as communities that also have political aspirations.

Karachi’s problems are both deeper and dangerous than has been recognized. Mohajirs, who consider themselves intellectual elites of the country, regularly denigrate the Pashtuns and other ethnicities as “sub-humans” and “imbeciles” who are suitable only for menial jobs. This mythologized dehumanization of “the others” is disturbing. As we have learnt from past tragedies of ethnic conflict, when one group denies the humanity of the other groups and monopolizes the political apparatus in a conflict situation, the stakes become high for inaction. For Pakistan, this could mean Karachi turning into another Beirut.

EDGEWATER: THE GHOSTS OF TOM JOAD

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi
July 9, 2011

Chicago-- Christopher Joseph Lombard, 53, looks composed wearing a Cubs jersey over his emaciated body, sitting on a bench on the corner of North Clark Street and West Berwyn Avenue. Unemployed for almost two years, he seems unmoved by the news that unemployment rose to a grim 9.2 percent on Friday in its third consecutive monthly increase.

Lombard, who has been living in Edgewater for the past year and a half, worked as a cab driver in Detroit and used to make decent money. The company folded in early 2009 and he became jobless.

“I had to cut back on a lot of things that I liked to do,” Lombard said. “Paying the rent, just getting the odd jobs here and just squeaking by enough to get the rent paid.”

While he was unemployed, he had to frequent soup kitchens on a regular basis. He spent a lot of time riding his bicycle because he could not afford to drive his car, which stayed parked for almost two years.

Finding work was hard. He used to walk the streets every day looking for any kind of labor jobs. Sometimes he was lucky, sometimes not. “You have to be willing to go out, maybe, and scrounge like that too,” Lombard said. Six months ago, he finally found a steady truck-driving job through a connection with Chinese Mutual Aid Association, a community-based social services agency in Uptown.

“I don’t so much see unemployment as being a problem, I know there is a lot of work out here, it might not be what a person wants to do,” Lombard said. “That’s why I think unemployment rate is too high because a lot of people are being too selective.”

Life is different for the 56-year-old African-American Terry Kyles, who was visiting Edgewater from the West Town: he has been unemployed for the last three years after losing his job at Suncast Corp., a household storage manufacturing company. He survives on food stamps now.

Christine Dumdum, a 39-year-old manager at Richman Tax Solutions Inc. in Edgewater, said that the number of unemployed clients in her office has increased by 10 to 20 percent since last year. “Mostly, my clients that are experiencing unemployment are laborers,” Dumdum said.

She has seen many cases of people who have been unemployed for over a year.

P.S:

PROFILE: DR. A. VANIA APKARIAN: Of Pain & Passion

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

December 6, 2010

He comes across as a full-blooded philosopher, with a bearded face and long grizzled hair, when one meets him. Despite his age, he displays a youthful, almost surprising, passion for science. His lab, called “Pain and Passions Lab”, seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms of pain with cutting-edge heavy duty apparatuses that he playfully calls “his million dollar toys.”

Dr. A. Vania Apkarian, a professor of physiology and anaesthesiology at Northwestern University, has researched pain for two decades. His lab employs a variety of non-invasive brain imaging techniques to understand pain perception in humans and animals.

Born in Syria, of Armenian descent, Dr. Apkarian spent his youth in Lebanon and came to the U.S to study electrical engineering . He stumbled into neuroscience through serendipity. He took a course where he learnt about the properties of the brain and their correlation with the electrical activity in the brain. This discovery triggered his passion for neuroscience, leading to a Masters in Biomedical Engineering, and, eventually, a Ph.D in Neuroscience. While history played draughts of violence in his nations of descent, Dr. Apkarian occupied himself in studying mechanisms of neurobiological and psychological origin in chronic pain patients.

Through his research, he has answered some key problems underlying chronic pain. His research shows that processing in cerebral cortex is fundamental to chronic pain perception instead of peripheral and spinal mechanisms. The cerebral cortex, occupying the bulk of our brain mass, plays a key role in sensory perception, cognition, speech, language, and motor skills. “The cortex interacts with everyday pain, it is both ‘influenced by’ and ‘influences’ the perception of pain,” says Dr. Apkarian.

Pain remains one of the key puzzles confronting the scientific world today. Until very recently, pain was seen as the symptom of a disease. Recent scientific advancement, however, brought a new perspective of pain in which chronic pain becomes the disease itself. Through Dr. Apkarian’s research, chronic pain may now be viewed as a memory of a painful experience trapped in the brain. This view deconstructs the way we understand pain and also our approach toward pain management.

According to the American Academy of medicine, “reduced productivity due to pain costs employers somewhere between $60 and $100 billion annually yet NIH barely spends 1% of its funding on research focused primarily on pain.” Pain research aims to reduce healthcare cost, increase productivity, improve quality of life, and, along the way, develop a clearer and more profound theoretical understanding of the brain.

As an engineer-turned-neuroscientist, Dr. Apkarian’s edge over other scientists in studying pain has been his technical expertise in methods and research tools. He has done pioneering work in the field in pain psychophysics, which studies the relation between the pain stimulus and the pain sensation. He rarely settles for the status quo. “In many ways, technology is an enabler, technology has been moving forward at an amazing pace and we have been able to do things that we never thought we would do," Dr. Apkarian says.

As a stickler for data-driven science, he believes that interpretation remains subservient to the process of measurements. “I am a scientist, if I have to understand anything it has to be mechanistic,” he says. “Science is measurements and numbers.”

Pain is a subjective experience. The element of subjectivity in pain renders many difficulties in quantifying pain. Dr. Apkarian approaches the brain as a complex matrix of circuits. “Brain is essentially a machine,” he says. “It computes, it calculates, it reacts, and it interacts in a staggeringly complex way.”

One of the fundamental ontological questions concerning consciousness involves the emergence of subjective consciousness in brain. “The grand problem in pain research is the link between subjectivity and brain,” he says. “How can a machine generate this subjective perception?”

As science answers deep questions about pain and the brain, it poses deeper questions, and this for Dr. Apkarian, keeps his passion alive and burning.

Doublethink: November 28, 2010

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

It opens in a dark, eerie, industrial, an almost blue-gray monochrome setting. “Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives,” we hear the harangue of an unseen ominous speaker.

In a tunnel, monitored by a line of CRTs, an army of zombies marches imposingly to the cadence of its boots in perfect unison.

“We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths,” the diatribe continues.

We see a “blond” track and field athlete, carrying a sledgehammer— wearing a white tank top and reddish orange matching running-shoes and shorts—  running into a dark auditorium filled with grim, hypnotised skinheads watching a telecast on the screen.

Behind the “blond”, a group of policemen— with full face masks, helmets and batons— comes charging toward the “blond”. 

The “blond” runs toward the screen airing the image of spectacled white man spewing his propaganda:

"Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion...”

The “blond” swings the sledgehammer in an arc, passing it below knee and above head several times, and releases it, with all muscle, into the screen.

“We shall prevail!”, the white man utters his closing “paradox” as the screen explodes and a burst of light engulfs the audience.

A voiceover reads a text that rolls on the screen:

“On November 28th, 2010,

WikiLeaks released 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables,

And you see why diplomacy

Is not like 'diplomacy' anymore.”

P.S

Watch the original here:

Avatar (2009) by James Cameron

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

“Braille for my eyes,” I said to myself,  after watching James Cameron’s epic.

“Avatar”, set on the moon Pandora which orbits Alpha Centauri A,  as a visual fable revisits planet earth— a place that we have forgotten in an eyes-wide-shut existence— with a fresh eye. Pandora, as depicted in “Avatar”,  is a deluge of color and form with its luminous flora— comprising a color scale of violets, purples, and greens—and its multifarious fauna. The mystical floating mountains of Pandora, inspired perhaps by Huangshan mountains in China, appear breathtakingly real.  

Set in the year 2154, “Avatar” narrates the story of Jake Sully, a paraplegic former marine, dispatched to the moon Pandora  to replace his twin brother, a scientist trained as an “avatar” operator.  Scientists use “avatars”— Na’vi-human hybrid bodies— to study Pandora and its inhabitants, the Na’vi. Behind this soft mission, a corporation called RDA aims to plunder Pandora’s environment for a valuable mineral unobtanium. Colonel Miles Quaritch, the leader of the RDA's private security force, promises Jake new legs in exchange for logistical information about extracting unobtanium.

Jake falls in love with a Na’vi native, Neytiri, and begins to understand and appreciate the ecologically connected and conscious life of the Na’vi people. Jake soon finds himself trapped between the choice of supporting his people or the peace-loving Na’vi people. Quaritch, eventually, decides to use violent and destructive means against the people of Na’vi, forcing Jake to take a stand with the people of the Na’vi. Jakes leads the Navi to victory in an epic battle and humans are forced to leave Pandora.

“Avatar” announces the birth of environmentalism as new religion, which sees everything connected in a total-field image of the biosphere. It makes a case for a philosophy that should not privilege one species over the other within the ecosystem.

“Avatar” is also an implicit critique of American imperialism. There are many parallels in Avatar about the U.S invasion of Iraq and the RDA’s invasion of Pandora. For example, the film makes an explicit reference to the shock and awe method, a military tactic that was used during 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unobtanium on Pandora can be seen as a reference to oil, which was one of the driving motivations behind the U.S invasion of war.

That being said, one can still accuse Cameron of pushing the white-colonial imperialist stereotypes, which depict white people as rational and scientific, while colonized non-white victims are depicted as primitive and spiritual. What is more, in the fight against colonization, the salvation for non-whites must also come from the “White Messiah”,  Jake Sully in the case of “Avatar”. 

Life as a Dream: Nostalghia (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

The film opens with a single long take of a family and their dog descending a misty hill and halting in a lugubrious freeze frame. In the next scene—also a single long take—  we see a car  moving in the bleak Tuscan landscape. It disappears from the frame only to reappear again. Time passes slowly in "Nostalghia". 

Set in Italy, "Nostalghia" narrates the story of a Russian poet, Andrei Gorchakov, traveling through Italy— accompanied by an Italian translator Eugenia, with whom he seems to have an ambivalent relationship— researching the life of an 18th century Russian composer. In the desolate gloomy parts of Italy, Gorchakov seems plagued by a nostalgia for Russia, and his yearning for his wife and children. 

Traveling with Eugenia, Gorchakov arrives at St. Catherine's pool in a Tuscan hillside village where he meets a local madman Domenico, obsessed with the impossible idea of carrying a lighted candle across the pool to save the world. 

In the midst of metaphysical symbols, hallucinations, memories, and eventful episodes, we slowly see Gorchakov identifying more and more with Domenico.

In the climactic end of the film, Domenico leaves for Rome where he climbs an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius and burns himself to death. He does so against the backdrop of Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" after sermonizing to callous onlookers on the decadence of mankind and the need for universal brotherhood.  

Meanwhile, Gorchakov successfully crosses St Catherine’s pool and dies after crossing it. 

The final scene zooms back from a still shot of Gorchakov and his dog sitting by the pool. We see his Russian country house behind him first and then we see the monumental ruins of an Italian cathedral nestling the Russian landscape completing the elysian synthesis of the rural and the empyreal. 

Through recurring images of dilapidated abandoned buildings and dreary landscapes—juxtaposed with a rich palette of sound, ranging from the music of dripping water to Beethoven’s ninth symphony— Andrei Tarkovsky, the director of the movie, creates a dream out of impenetrable material of reality. Each shot could be treated as a painting. Each subject in the frame could be seen as a portrait.

As a cultural metaphor, Russia, in "Nostalghia", stands for the eternal feminine, the great womb of Being, and the Christian spiritual world, while Italy represents the decadence and the transience of the modern world. 

As a political discourse, "Nostalghia" echoes a call for a supranational Europe, and perhaps a supranational world.

While cinema has expanded dramatically and has evidenced rich and diverse themes, "Nostalghia" remains a work of high art and profound themes in the canon of world cinema. 

Dream as life: Inception (2010) by Christopher Nolan

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”— Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph & Other Stories 

Imagine a dream. Imagine a wasteland. Now imagine a colossal city blooming into existence within a span of seconds out of the wasteland. Call this city Paris. Now imagine a procession of classical Parisian architecture folding over itself in a gravity defying mirror inversion. Now imagine another dream within this dream with another dream within it. Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is an eye-bending Borgesian dream.

The plot is simple yet elegant. Saito, a Japanese business man, hires Dominic Cobb on a corporate espionage mission to break up the company of Robert Fischer,  the rich and powerful son of a dying energy magnate. 

Cobb’s expertise in the deceitful world of extraction— the art of extracting  secrets from  the dream space— has not only made him a sought after figure in the  field of espionage, but also a renegade on the run.

Saito offers Cobb a chance of emancipation from his renegade world in exchange for accomplishing an impossible “inception”— the art of implanting an idea inside dream to induce a desired act in reality— on Fischer. For this seemingly impossible “inception”, Cobb hires Ariadne, an architecture student, as a dream architect;  Yusuf, a sedative specialist as a dream chemist; and a Eames, as a appearance forger.

The “inception” seems overly simple but there are complications in its execution—the subconscious projections of the subjects in the dream space turn the absurdly tractable dream word into an uncontrollable nightmare, causing the subjects to spawn multiple dreams linked together like a recursive equation.  At the center of this nightmare resides Cobb’s haunting nostalgia for his deceased wife, Mallorie “Mal” Cobb.

While “Inception” lacks brooding on complex philosophical and metaphysical themes, it effectively captures the paradigm shift in how we are thinking about reality in the shifting landscape of technology. We can now envision a reality made up of dreams entirely. While dreams may influence our reality, and may affect our existence— by planting an idea or by performing inception— it is the dream world we are more interested in. Who cares about the real world if the dream world is more interesting, colourful and rewarding than the real world!

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“Inception” as metafiction gives a visual vocabulary to the age old art of novel writing through its conception of dream architects. One can see how the creators work, how fiction comes into being, one can almost experience the jouissance of creation. Novels create realities which may or may not have roots in the real world. The writers, like dream-architects, share the dream space with their readers. 

The film has its flaws as well— the dream world in “Inception” remains too logical, too tractable, too bland, and perhaps that accounts for its lack of profundity.  Compared with Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Nostalghia”, “Inception” lacks poetic value. I guess comparing “Nostalghia” with “Inception” would be like comparing Leonardo’s  Last Supper with Dali’s. 

“Inception” is not a work of genius, it is a work that exposes genius and that is why I love it.