‘And so there lay my political dilemma: a clash of cultures. Being a good Pakistani son, while remaining an accepted and integrated citizen in the angraiz culture, is like engineering peace between Hitler’s Germany and Churchill’s Europe. I chose to be Neville Chamberlain and run away from the matter.’

Excerpted from Melting the polar ice, The Friday Times, December 26, 2005

‘The journey back home was filled with Jenn’s unhelpful venting. She endlessly criticised “Pakistani men” as she cited example after example of men on the street propositioning her or masturbating when she was alone on public transportation. However, she apologised for me, explaining that since I had been raised in Britain I was educated, and that her African friends were surprised that I was a Pakistani man because I was “gentle” and “respectful”. Rather than rebut her condescending statements, I half-welcomed being disassociated from the label “Pakistani man.”‘

Excerpted from What is a Pakistani man?, The Friday Times, August 11, 2006

‘Cricket – the tangible medium of cultural cleavages – had [ . . . ] given a voice to the Pakistanis of Britain: that self effacing, inclusive voice on Goodness Gracious Me evolved into an unabashed, exclusive voice of ‘Paki pride.’ Our fellow citizens were disturbed. A schism of “us” and “them” had developed, but for a British Pakistani who’d never felt English and had been disowned as a Pakistani, I was glad that there was finally an “us”.’

Excerpted from Playing to the homesick crowd, The Friday Times, March 24, 2006

Salman Rushdie:

‘I was very struck by a curious fact I discovered which showed me something about the reason why my writing, or perhaps one reason why my writing had fallen towards this metaphorical, imaginative kind of writing, which is that if you look etymologically at the meaning of the word ‘metaphor’ and the word ‘translation’ it turns out they mean the same thing.

Translation, from the Latin, means ‘to carry across.’ Metaphor, from the Greek, means ‘to carry across.’ So again this comes back to my preoccupation with the idea of migration. People are also carried across, you see; they’re carried physically from one place to another and I formed the idea that the act of migration was to turn people somehow into things, into people who had been translated, who had, so to speak, entered the condition of metaphor, and that their instinctive way of looking at the world was in that more metaphorical, imagistic manner.

If you consider where your sense of self has always been located—in the idea of roots, the idea of coming from a place, the idea of inhabiting a kind of language which you have in common and the kind of social convention within which you live—what happens to the migrants is that they lose all three. They lose the place. They lose the language and they lose the social conventions and they find themselves in a new place with a new language—and so they have to reinvent the sense of the self. This is, after all, the century of the migrant as well as the century of the Bomb; there have never been so many people who ended up elsewhere than where they began, whether by choice or by necessity. And so perhaps that’s the source from which this kind of reconstruction can begin. People who are no longer caught in the old definition of the self, but capable of making new ones.‘

Excerpted from Imaginary Homelands

Zadie Smith:

‘In Dreams from My Father, the new president displays an enviable facility for dialogue, and puts it to good use [ . . . ] I have to pinch myself to remember who wrote the following well-observed scene, seemingly plucked from a comic novel:

“Man, I’m not going to any more of these bullshit Punahou parties.”

“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time….”

“I mean it this time…. These girls are A-1, USDA-certified racists. All of ‘em. White girls. Asian girls—shoot, these Asians worse than the whites. Think we got a disease or something.”

“Maybe they’re looking at that big butt of yours. Man, I thought you were in training.”

“Get your hands out of my fries. You ain’t my bitch, nigger…buy your own damn fries. Now what was I talking about?”

“Just ’cause a girl don’t go out with you doesn’t make her a racist.”

This is the voice of Obama at seventeen, as remembered by Obama. He’s still recognizably Obama; he already seeks to unpack and complicate apparently obvious things (“Just ’cause a girl don’t go out with you doesn’t make her a racist”); he’s already gently cynical about the impassioned dogma of other people (“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time”). And he has a sense of humor (“Maybe they’re looking at that big butt of yours”). Only the voice is different: he has made almost as large a leap as Eliza Doolittle. The conclusions Obama draws from his own Pygmalion experience, however, are subtler than Shaw’s. The tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural.

For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden—it is also a gift. And the gift is of an interesting kind, not well served by that dull publishing-house title Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance with its suggestion of a simple linear inheritance, of paternal dreams and aspirations passed down to a son, and fulfilled. Dreams from My Father would have been a fine title for John McCain’s book Faith of My Fathers, which concerns exactly this kind of linear masculine inheritance [ . . .] Obama [ . . . ] corrects its misperception early on, in the first chapter, while discussing the failure of his parents’ relationship, characterized by their only son as the end of a dream. “Even as that spell was broken,” he writes, “and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”

To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream. [ . . . ]

But I haven’t described Dream City. I’ll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.”

Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say we. He was noticeably wary of “I.” By speaking so, he wasn’t simply avoiding a singularity he didn’t feel, he was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives.

It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. What kind of a crazy place is that? But they underestimated how many people come from Dream City, how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek a synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn’t so strange to them.

Or did they never actually see it? We now know that Obama spoke of Main Street in Iowa and of sweet potato pie in Northwest Philly, and it could be argued that he succeeded because he so rarely misspoke, carefully tailoring his intonations to suit the sensibility of his listeners. [ . . . ] The balance was perfect, cunningly counterpoised and never accidental. [ . . . ]

Which brings us to the single-voiced Obamanation crowd. They rage on in the blogs and on the radio, waiting obsessively for the mask to slip. They have a great fear of what they see as Obama’s doubling ways. “He says one thing but he means another”—this is the essence of the fear campaign. He says he’s a capitalist, but he’ll spread your wealth. He says he’s a Christian, but really he’s going to empower the Muslims. And so on and so forth. These are fears that have their roots in an anxiety about voice. Who is he? people kept asking. I mean, who is this guy, really? He says sweet potato pie in Philly and Main Street in Iowa! When he talks to us, he sure sounds like us—but behind our backs he says we’re clinging to our religion, to our guns. And when Jesse Jackson heard that Obama had lectured a black church congregation about the epidemic of absent black fathers, he experienced this, too, as a tonal betrayal; Obama was “talking down to black people.” In both cases, there was the sense of a double-dealer, of someone who tailors his speech to fit the audience, who is not of the people (because he is able to look at them objectively) but always above them.

[ . . . ] Right up to the wire, Obama made many black men and women of Jackson’s generation suspicious. How can the man who passes between culturally black and white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest man? How will the man from Dream City keep it real? Why won’t he speak with a clear and unified voice? These were genuine questions for people born in real cities at a time when those cities were implacably divided, when the black movement had to yell with a clear and unified voice, or risk not being heard at all. And then he won. Watching Jesse Jackson in tears in Grant Park, pressed up against the varicolored American public, it seemed like he, at least, had received the answer he needed: only a many-voiced man could have spoken to that many people.

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward. In his memoir, Obama takes care to ridicule a certain black girl called Joyce—a composite figure from his college days who happens also to be part Italian and part French and part Native American and is inordinately fond of mentioning these facts, and who likes to say:

I’m not black…I’m multiracial…. Why should I have to choose between them?… It’s not white people who are making me choose…. No—it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me I can’t be who I am….

He has her voice down pat and so condemns her out of her own mouth. For she’s the third bogeyman of black life, the tragic mulatto, who secretly wishes she “passed,” always keen to let you know about her white heritage. It’s the fear of being mistaken for Joyce that has always ensured that I ignore the box marked “biracial” and tick the box marked “black” on any questionnaire I fill out, and call myself unequivocally a black writer and roll my eyes at anyone who insists that Obama is not the first black president but the first biracial one. But I also know in my heart that it’s an equivocation; I know that Obama has a double consciousness, is black and, at the same time, white, as I am, unless we are suggesting that one side of a person’s genetics and cultural heritage cancels out or trumps the other.

But to mention the double is to suggest shame at the singular. Joyce insists on her varied heritage because she fears and is ashamed of the singular black. [ . . . ]

It’s telling that Joyce is one of the few voices in Dreams from My Father that is truly left out in the cold, outside of the expansive sympathy of Obama’s narrative. She is an entirely didactic being, a demon Obama has to raise up, if only for a page, so everyone can watch him slay her. [ . . . ] It’s the Joyces of this world who “talk down to black folks.” And so to avoid being Joyce, or being seen to be Joyce, you unify, you speak with one voice.

And the concept of a unified black voice is a potent one. [ . . . ] There was a popular school of thought that maintained the voice was at the very heart of the thing; fail to keep it real there and you’d never see your Blackness again.

How absurd that all seems now. And not because we live in a postracial world—we don’t—but because the reality of race has diversified. Black reality has diversified. [ . . . ] It’s black conservatives and black liberals, black sportsmen and black lawyers [ . . . ] We’re all black, and we all love to be black, and we all sing from our own hymn sheet. We’re all surely black people, but we may be finally approaching a point of human history where you can’t talk up or down to us anymore, but only to us. He’s talking down to white people —how curious it sounds the other way round! In order to say such a thing one would have to think collectively of white people, as a people of one mind who speak with one voice—a thought experiment in which we have no practice. But it’s worth trying. It’s only when you play the record backward that you hear the secret message.’

Excerpted from Speaking in Tongues, The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009

Yacine Kateb:

‘In our Arabic tradition, there are some poets who have refuted even the message of the Prophet. People believe them to be proud, but it is not true. It is a matter rather of a total confidence in the word as word and the refusal to become domesticated. There is the true poet. He is someone who does not claim to make of his word something that domesticates men and that teaches them to live, but on the contrary someone who brings them a freedom, a freedom often uncomfortable moreover. I believe that the true message of the poet lies in this. It is not the fact of saying to the people that you must do this or you must do that; it is precisely to break all the frames that have been placed around them so that they might bound back.’ (“Role de l’écrivain” 179-80)

Quoted in John D. Erickson’s ‘Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma: A Dialogue of Difference’

Popularity: 1% [?]

Happy Christmas! Happy Hanukkah!

A collection of cosmopolitan if not always TCKid music.

Grace Kelly – Mika

La Vie Boheme (from Rent)

Frozen Orange Juice- Peter Sarstedt

Carmensita – Devendra Banhart (featuring the delicious Natalie Portman!)

Good Time – Brazilian Girls

Une americaine a Paris – Rupa and the April Fishes

Popularity: 1% [?]

I reckon it’s either Pakistani or Pilipino.

A large percentage of middle class and elite families in Pakistan have at least one person in their nuclear family living abroad. A lot of working class families also have people working abroad. I think VS Naipaul noted how Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was popular for improving the emigration process and increasing Pakistan’s most important export – its people.

Among my mum’s siblings and my nuclear family alone, we’ve lived in Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, the USA (6 states), Canada, England (10 towns) and France. And not one of us is a diplomat. There hasn’t been a complete family reunion since 1981!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Shades of ethnic humour

n American, an Englishman and an Israeli are captured by cannibals. They are each permitted one last wish before being thrown into an enormous boiling pot. The American takes off his wedding ring and gives it to the cannibal chief. “Please have this sent back to my wife.”
The Englishman asks permission to sing God save the Queen.
The Israeli says to the chief, “I want you to give me a very hard kick in the ass.”
The chief complies and sends the Israeli sprawling, but when he gets up, he whips out a gun and shoots the chief dead, then starts firing at the other cannibals until they flee.

It took this joke, a Pizza dance and acting as a rabbi for a mock Jewish wedding at the ‘Global Village’ with the TILS-Lahore team before a number of fellow delegates at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) Model UN were willing to work with me – as a delegate of Israel.

The order was a tall one – there was a strong block of OIC members against Israel, lead by the delegate of Syria. Most of the delegates were Pakistani and so already had strong prejudices against Israel. The delegate for the Palestinian National Authority refused to even talk with me. By the end of the first day of debating, people came up to me and told me that I argued like a Jew. I wanted to take it as a compliment, but wasn’t sure if it was unreservedly meant as one. One asked if I was Christian.

By the end of the five-day conference, 85% of the delegates voted in favour of a resolution I had worked on to counter terrorism, which included the clause, ‘will not recognise the legitimacy of any organisation which threatens a UN Member’s right to exist in peace and security.’
Humour coupled with outward humility and inner confidence, I learnt, are essential to good diplomacy.

Erroneously, I had come to the opinion that ethnic humour could only be put to bad use. The following joke was told to me when I was in Year 5. Although I couldn’t stop laughing when I first heard it, it hurt a little and hurt every time I heard or told the joke myself. It, with other Paki jokes, is perhaps a reason why I said good-bye to the indignity of living in England.

An Englishman, a Welshman and a Pakistani are on a plane. It’s going along nicely till the pilot announces an engine failure, advising them to get rid of any excess baggage. The Pakistani throws out three buckets full of curry.

BBC’s Goodness Gracious Me had helped my classmate Vijay and I become popular at our school in Lincolnshire. The British Asian comedy series had given our gora classmates a few insights into the traditions and ways of thinking of desis. It also, they thought, had given them license to believe that they understood us and our culture and that everything in the series might relate to us. As the series dragged on, I saw Vijay becoming increasingly commodified. Some of the desi jokes should simply not have been shared with the wider community because they were readily abused. A friend recently pointed out that Goodness Gracious Me was well-to do desis making fun of lower class desis.

African American comedian Dave Chappelle’s letter to white fans summarises why he doesn’t want those outside the ethnic community to listen to his jokes:

‘I just don’t trust you [. . . ] You’re kind of like a creepy stepfather [ . . .] You may have seen me on Oprah talking about the time I felt that a white guy on my staff was laughing at me rather than with me during a sketch I was doing in blackface.’

When I arrived in the United States, I found I had an inexplicable contempt for the French. Jeremy Paxman solved the mystery for me in his book, The English – A Portrait of a People.

The humour I was exposed to on an almost daily basis in England had subliminally ingrained that hatred:

‘This is how [the English] thought of their continental neighbours. Obscene drawings were French postcards or French prints. [ . . . Prostitutes] could be wearing wide-legged underwear – French knickers. If a man used their services, he would take French lessons. If he caught syphilis as a result, he contracted ‘The French disease’ ‘French gout’, ‘French pox’ [ . . .] or was said to have been paid a ‘French compliment’ [ . . .] If particularly badly ‘Frenchified’ he might lose his nose through the disease [. . .] The way for a man to protect himself from these scourges was to wear a ‘French letter’ or ‘French safe’ or just a French (unless you were French, in which case, you used a capote anglaise.)’

The problem with the above jokes isn’t, however, that they are ethnic jokes per se. The problematic jokes are the ones which are told by a person about an ethnic community she does not belong to and are intended to offend or are designed without taking into consideration the sensitivities of the targeted ethnic community. Some jokes told by the ethnic community about itself feed into racism because they are accessible to stupid people.

I found a book last week in a friend’s office. Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin. It might complement my research on Israel, I thought. Besides, it’ll be a light read. I found that used sensitively, humourists who write ethnic jokes about their community and then share it with others can use it as a tool for us to better understand each other’s problems. With that, I leave you with some Woody Allen:

Here’s a story you’re not going to believe. I shot a moose once. I was hunting in up-state New York and I shot a moose.

And I strap him on to the fender of my car, and I’m driving home along the West Side Highway. But what I didn’t realise was that the bullet did not penetrate the moose. It just creased the scalp, knocking him unconscious. And I’m driving through the Holland Tunnel and the moose wakes up. So I’m driving with a live moose on my fender and the moose is signalling for a turn. And there’s a law in New York state against driving with a conscious moose on your fender, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. And I’m very panicky.

And then it hits me – some friends of mine are having a costume party. l go. l take the moose. l ditch him at the party. It won’t be my responsibility. So I drive up to the party and I knock on the door and the moose is next to me. My host comes to the door. I say, “Hello. You know the Solomons.” We enter. The moose mingles. Did very well. Scored. Two guys were trying to sell him insurance for an hour and a half.

The following morning the Berkowitzes wake up in the woods, in a moose suit. Mr Berkowitz is shot, stuffed and mounted at the New York Athletic Club. And the joke is on them, ’cause it’s restricted.’

Popularity: 2% [?]

By Imaduddin Ahmed

Too often are analysts ready to put Islam on trial for the crimes of its so-called practitioners. Aqsa Pervaz’s murder in Toronto has inspired headlines such as Murder in the Name of Islam and The Deadly face of Muslim Extremism. Aqsa was beaten badly by her father, angered, allegedly, by her refusal to don the hijab.

When I worked in Pakistan, I learnt that domestic violence had little to do with Islam and a great deal to do with patriarchy and lack of education. For example, I taught at a Christian squatter settlement in Lahore where my pupils would delight in handing me a thick metal bar to beat classmates who gave wrong answers. (Naturally I didn’t use it.)

I also worked for a leading women’s rights organisation run by a devout Muslim. It employs Muslims of varying degrees of orthodoxy, as well as Christians, communists and people who don’t feel the need to affiliate themselves with any religion or political ideology. Like a number of other groups that work to discredit honour killings and domestic violence – sanctioned in national cultures as the right of senior men in the family- this organisation used wisdom inspired by Islamic teachings to win hearts and minds to the cause of non-violence.

Yet leading opinion-makers seem bent on proving that Islam perpetuates domestic violence. The problem is that they don’t discuss the Quran, the book that sets Islam’s limits. (It also provides allowances, guidance and hope.) Instead, they sensationalise the actions of self-identifying believers to cast aspersions on a religious system. An open minded debate about the semantics of verse 4:34 of the Quran would be entirely tolerable.

How often do you see Christianity put on trial for the crime of a Christian malpractitioner? Does anyone (ridiculously) link the Christian faith’s permission to drink alcohol with the high rate of rape at American colleges? When was the last time you heard of Judaism as a religion being blamed for the violence of a Jew? “It’s the Zeitgeist to put Islam on trial. It used to happen to Jews, but now that’s called anti-Semitism, and it’s a pretty bad thing to be accused of these days,” says a female Muslim doctoral student of psychology based in Virginia.

A prominent journalist at a Canadian broadcasting entity recently asked Ayesha Basit, a community worker in Toronto, for an interview to discuss growing up in Canada as an immigrant. Says Ayesha of the interview, “The journalist managed to cause more violence to me with her prejudiced assumptions on my religion within a few minutes than my religion had enacted on me over a lifetime.”

The questions asked of Ayesha all related to stories of ‘brutality’ she might have from her childhood, from “growing up Muslim”. “The journalist aimed to extract ‘Islam’s dirty secrets’ from me to contextualise Aqsa Parvez’s murder,”says Ayesha. “She saw me and Aqsa as one in the same: young Pakistani women growing up in Canada, one murdered, the other survived.”

To sum up the course of the interview, the journalist asked Ayesha leading questions about her family, community and Islam. Ayesha said that she loved her culture, that her religion is kind, and that she did not grow up being beaten up like Aqsa. She said that she lived a privileged life and that she can wear whatever she wants without fear of being murdered for not wearing a hijab. Her words went unheeded by the journalist who, to add insult to injury, insisted (despite Ayesha’s protests) that Ayesha’s voice would be dubbed and her name changed because her community would kill her.

The journalist would have done well to have believed Ayesha.Ayesha has an MA in Political Science from York University and is widely-travelled. Her mother, contrary to popular assumptions about Muslim women, is a bold matriarch who has survived two marriages and yet remains well integrated in her religious community in Toronto. One of Ayesha’s aunts was a prominent minister in President Musharraf’s government.

Not to be outdone, ‘liberal’ politicians have been getting in on the act of making assumptions about Muslims. Former Democratic senator Bob Kerrey recently pointed out that Barack Obama’s father was Muslim, and that this fact should enable Obama to speak to a billion people around the world. Later, Kerrey apologised for being “insulting” and added, “I meant no disrespect at all.” What Kerrey considered insulting in his apology wasn’t made clear. Was he apologising because he assumed that a man with a Muslim father would automatically be able to communicate with Muslims? Or was he apologising for saying that Obama’s father was Muslim?

Says the psychology doctoral student: “Ayesha’s experience reflects badly on the education of people who are primed to believe that the type of freedom enjoyed by Muslim women is not freedom at all, whereas they are perfectly happy with it. Just because you choose to not live a particular lifestyle doesn’t mean that you abandon your freedom.”

The writer does not subscribe to an organised religion

- – - –

An opportune time to plug my friends’ Boston-Lahore based Muslim punk band: The Kominas.

Check out Ayesha and other songs on http://www.myspace.com/thekominas
Ayesha

Way back in June of 2005,
I was a martyr on his last day,
or so I felt riding the red line,
a taqwacore on the MBTA

I scanned the train looking for trouble,
on my way from a home full of grief.
That’s when I found my rocket to heaven,
a pair of green eyes jade would envy.

K O M I N A S
Kinne Sunnay Munay Hain!
K O M I N A S
Go! Go! Go! Go!

I’m not getting ahead of myself
but this girl could-a been the girl of my dreams
she wore hijab covered in patches
I spotted ‘Sham’ and the ‘Dead Kennedys’
She told me that her name was Ayesha,
I eyed her lips as she spoke in Farsi,
all the while I dreamt of us knocking Marten’s
Under the bright white new moon of Eid.

Whoa Ayesha,
Surf’s Up,
Whoa Ayesha’
Surf’s up baby won’t you please hang ten
Whoa Ayesha,
don’t get buried like a pearl in the sand.

We rode the train all the way to Braintree,
life seems short when there’s love to be made,
she skanked through turnstyles like a Layla for me,
We didn’t know Bulls were out on parade.
I felt a brick hitting me in the head,
I was out before I fell to my knees
some short haired girls from Smith College,
Chose to liberate my Ayesha from me.

Whoa Ayesha,
Surf’s Up,
Whoa Ayesha’
Surf’s up baby won’t you please hang ten
Whoa Ayesha,
don’t get buried like a pearl in the sand.

I woke up, Ayesha’s face first in mud,
I reached out with my unbroken hand,
I touched her neck; I felt for a pulse,
I guess she travelled alone to Heaven.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’m rather pleased with this compilation. What do you think?

1) Motorcycle Diaries – De Usuahia a la Quiaca – G. Santaolalla

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh2GgCFR2dw[/youtube]

2) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Sun & Rain by Tenfold Loadster

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wkE-VmjkUI&feature=related[/youtube]

3) Amelie: Untitled #4 by Sigur Ros

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9VXEIvztkc[/youtube]

4) Amelie main theme tune

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aip3836VtZ0&feature=related[/youtube]

5) Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack: The Winner is by Devotchka

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5ZTOH3_2ac[/youtube]

6) Such Great Heights by Postal Service

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOkfI7wCrI[/youtube]

7) Dashboard by Modest Mouse

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erc40wCxRZo[/youtube]

More Life in a Tramp’s Vest by Stereophonics

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXL_Xb0zT5g[/youtube]

9) Sun Hits the Sky by Supergrass

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6i8KmIKv5I&feature=related[/youtube]

10) Strangers by the Kinks (on Darjeeling and Rushmore)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCVllFl_GFI&feature=related[/youtube]

11) Where do you go to my lovely? by Peter Sarstedt (features on Darjeeling Limited)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If9NWsF03xg&feature=related[/youtube]

Popularity: 1% [?]

So-called liberal politician Bob Kerrey apologises for ‘insulting’ Obama because Kerrey brought up his Islamic ‘connections’. The only insult here is the one against Islam caused by Kerrey’s apology.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections08/barackobama/story/0,,2230941,00.html

Obama wins apology over Muslim remark

Ed Pilkington
Friday December 21, 2007
The Guardian

A backlash against attempts to smear the presidential hopeful Barack Obama by suggesting he has Islamic connections claimed another scalp yesterday when a former senator was forced to apologise for referring to Obama’s Muslim heritage.Bob Kerrey wrote to Obama to apologise for any insult he had unintentionally caused by bringing up the Muslim link in the process of endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. He told the Washington Post that “I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim.”

In his apology, Kerrey said he meant no disrespect but accepted his comments were insulting. The speed of his retraction underlines how formidable the Obama campaign has been at protecting the senator for Illinois from political attacks.

Popularity: 3% [?]

so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel’:

I’ve lately been thinking how awesome it would be to have an army of 12 kids, adopted from different countries and brought up in the same household until university age, at which point I sent them to their own native countries for their higher education. But they’ll all be connected with one another because of their childhood and they’d take an interest in the affairs of each others’ countries. And then when my kids have kids, my grandchildren will rule the world! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Popularity: 1% [?]

IngridGiles’ funny post on her first proposal (http://www.tckid.com/group/my-first-proposal/) from a person from a patriarchal and repressed society reminded me of my first mirror culture shock experiences as a (then) practicing Muslim adjusting to the extremely sexually open societies on the west and east coasts of the USA.
Incident 1:
Ramadhan is coming to a close and I’ve had my most rewarding month of fast. I’m feeling mellow, enjoying the sunshine and walking to a campus library when a red flashy sports car pulls up.
the window winds down. I obligingly approach.
“Hey, do you know where i can find some porno movies?” asks a dashing middle-aged South American man.
“No, I’m afraid not,” I confess truthfully, but add helpfully, “maybe you can find some at Blockbusters,” and proceed to give directions to the Blockbuster on Durant Avenue.
“Do you know where i can find porno magazines?”
“Sorry, I don’t.”
“You’re a good looking kid,” says the man.
“Thanks,” I reply, thinking that perhaps he’s an eccentric talent spotter.
“Is that cop coming for me?” he asks, as he peers behind at a woman cop approaching.
“No, I don’t think so,” I reply, wondering why he’d think that.
“Are you a student?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I reply, “are you faculty?”
“No.”
Trying to keep the flow and avoid an awkward pause, I naively continue: “Are you here on holiday?”
“Yeah, actually, I’m looking for a good looking kid like you to give me a blow-job.”
“Right then. Good luck, have a good holiday,” I tell him and walk away.

Incident 2:
I’m lying outside another one of the campus libraries, reading something for class under the Californian sun. As I turn the page, I notice a young African American woman appears out of nowhere, her face near mine, bending over, her ample bosoms showing their full worth, asking me for a spare dollar for the BART because she’s lost her wallet.
I oblige, and she asks, very casually, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No, I don’t,” I reply sheepishly.
“Do you have sex a lot?”
“I’m a Muslim. I don’t want to have sex until I’m married or have found the one I love.”
“People actually do that?!” she asks in an angry kind of statement, summarily picks up her ample bosoms and walks off in a huff. To the BART, presumably.

Incidents 3 and 4:
I’m at Washington DC’s Dupont Circle, reading on a bench by a tree. By this time, I’ve adopted some Californian culture and I have hair that curls at its ends reaching down my back a couple of inches below my shoulders. A guy in his 30s introduces himself as a Pakistani, “Mohammed Ahmed”, and asks me where I’m from and where my parents are. We talk for a while and then he asks to swap numbers. I mention that I have a girlfriend, and he finds out that she’s back in Berkeley. He then proceeds to waste the better part of half an hour trying to convince me of the benefits of experimentation and the relationship allowances that distance gives.

Convinced that my hair was the source of attention that I could do without, I patronised the local barber (a Christian Lebanese man, as it turned out). He too had the same pearls of wisdom to share about experimentation and oooh wasn’t I enjoying this special massage, you know he doesn’t just do it for anyone who walks in. He told me how he was the sex slave of some super rich woman in her 50s who didn’t know what to do with her wealth and that he was wanting to move on. Weary of what kind of ’special’ compensation he was looking for, I tipped him as much as I would normally pay for a haircut and never set foot in his part of town again.

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The tables have turned, the shoes have been swapped, and the doctor has now swallowed the very medicine she mercilessly poured down her first born’s throat.

Since adolescence, every time I’ve spent my birthday in England, I’ve tried to pack the day with activities, trying to ensure that there was no time for the inevitable. Yet the inevitable always managed to live up to its reputation, courtesy my mother dearest: my dreaded “surprise” birthday party.

The problem is not that I’m shy or introverted, or that I mind being the centre of everyone’s attention – my younger siblings would testify to that. The problem is that Ami insists upon delving through my Year 9 and 10 diaries for my friends and their phone numbers. She’s never managed to move on to the Year 11, 12 or 13 diaries, even though I have tried placing them strategically as a hint that this is where she must look. Okay, so I admit it – it was awkward (read: politically unfeasible) for me to organise my own birthday party. That being the case, year after year, Ami would manage to invite the wrong friends: friends that I’d outgrown. And so, year after year, I would suffer conversations that I no longer found palpable.

To add salt, the next day I would have to explain to fifty-odd people why so and so hadn’t been invited: “because I hadn’t organised the party myself,” I would resignedly say.

Why was it “politically unfeasible” for me to organise my own party? Well, imagine that you’re the only Muslim adolescent in a class of 114 atheists, one Mormon, one Hindu, two Catholics and one Buddhist. Half of them are your friends, so that’s a guest list of 60 people – all of whom can only be diplomatically appeased if you’re having a full-scale disco party. But then, you offend your Pakistani parents’ sensitivities because disco parties in England usually involve booze, dirty dancing and rampaging hormones. If you aim for a civilised party on the other hand, and want to cater to your parents’ sensitivities, then the only way you can accommodate 60 people is by hiring out a mansion.

And so there lay my political dilemma: a clash of cultures. Being a good Pakistani son, while remaining an accepted and integrated citizen in the angraiz culture, is like engineering peace between Hitler’s Germany and Churchill’s Europe. I chose to be Neville Chamberlain and run away from the matter. I started taking day trips into London’s androon sheher with my best friends, in the hope that my mother would give the surprise birthdays a rest.

Not everyone agrees with the clash theory and the need to run away from unwanted realities. A few Eids ago, I was translating for Irish and Welsh-born American medics in Balakot and Mansehra in earthquake hit northern Pakistan. They wanted to take some time out and find some common ground with the religious welfare group Al Khidmat; build bridges to share experiences and coordinate relief work. The medics were thoroughly impressed by Al Khidmaat’s medical camp and as the sun began to set, we were hosted by some of Mansehra’s Jamaat-e-Islami party leadership for tea. Dr Steve Price played devil’s advocate and asked our host, former naib nazim and son of a prominent Jamaat-e-Islami leader, what he thought about his brother living in America. “There is no clash of civilisations as Huntington claims,” commented advocate Shujaat. “Everyone should visit America; everyone should visit everywhere. The world is becoming smaller and we are living in a global village . . . we should be working for humanity. That is why you are coming from far-flung remote areas like the USA and the UK to help.” Though I have to disagree with him on the first point, he is certainly correct about the world becoming a progressively smaller place. That being the case, there’s really no place that I can run away to in my attempt to leave behind unresolved issues.

This is because the issues I had thought I’d left behind in the Wild West are actually only a short airplane ride away. It’s really quite uncivilised how Lahore’s population quadruples in the winter. All the ex-pats descend from the far-flung, remote areas . . . and suddenly, Nano’s hitherto empty house – which had been my sanctuary for the past year – was invaded by ten other people. Amongst the returning natives is Ami. That year, she turned the big five-O and unaware, the poor dear provided me with an opportunity for the perfect revenge. Arrange “surprise” birthday parties, for me, would she! I’d show her, and show her good.

I rubbed my hands in glee and hatched up the scheme in my Machiavellian little mind. Then I started dialling numbers . . . ah, the power of having your parents’ phone directories. I’ve survived a year in the Land of the Pure now (in spite of 20lbs of weight loss), in no small measure due to the fact that my parents’ networks of family and friends were only a phone call away. And so it came to pass that revenge involved a surprise tea party for Ami’s forty-odd cousins and friends – and, as the grand finale, getting into the act the 200 people at the posh dinner for King Edward Medical College class of 1980’s reunion that she later attended. Birthday songs accompanied a fluffy Santa who served a suitably Delicious Chocolate Symphony cake (as the purveyors so charmingly termed it). Revenge was indeed very sweet.

The clash, however, is just around the corner. Once again, Ami and I are in the same country for my birthday and though there are no Year 9 diaries for her to consult, I nevertheless find myself dreading the inevitable. This time, it’s not a clash of civilisations that’s turning my head towards the androon sheher, but a clash of families. The unresolved issue – that my life is enriched by many people who don’t feel comfortable in the same spaces – appears to be chasing me around the globe!

A year before I graduated, I attended the convocation for UC Berkeley’s class of 2003. Professor Martha Olney, one of the university’s most popular teachers, told the graduating class that their education had equipped them for this moment – a taster of the real world. “As you position yourself strategically between your dad and his boyfriend, and your mom and her partner in the post-graduation photograph,” she said with a twinkle, “you’ll be using the culmination of what you’ve learned in those Psych 101, Sociology 102 and Peace and Conflicts 110 classes. They’ve been waiting over 20 years for this moment and the picture will hang proudly on their lounge walls for another 40 years.”

I didn’t see the wisdom of her words. 2004 came and I asked my divorced parents not to attend my graduation. In the university’s student body elections, I’d run, won and delivered on the mandate of introducing dialogues to facilitate understanding of politically polar views. And yet, here I was, unable to bridge the polarities within my own home. Equipped with an education or not, I was not doing a good job of facing up to life’s realities.

I should really organise my own birthday. After all, how bad can it be?

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