Stories of our times
Dear All,
There have been a lot of interesting stories in the British press: what with The Sun deriding Gordon Brown for misspelling the name of the dead soldier to whose mother he had written a condolence letter to the revelation of the identity of the call girl blogger known up until then only as 'Belle du Jour', through to some rather disturbing Iraq stories, it's been an exciting November.

A row of sorts seems to have broken out within the Pakistani media over whether foreign journalists can or should have access to all areas and people in the country, particularly when covering terrorism in areas declared out of bounds by the authorities. One Pakistani media house that runs newspapers and a TV channel, this month took an unusually strong exception to a reporter of the Wall Street Journal doing exactly that and branded him a spy working for CIA and Mossad. Other than this, no other media house, however, supported this line of argument and some have even come out strongly in defence of the right to freedom of movement and expression of the media and the unfettered right to access to information for their journalists -- both of which form the bedrock of journalism and are guaranteed under the Pakistani constitution.

The objection to a foreign reporter meeting high government functionaries and attempting to seek access to the tribal areas in the coverage of the military action against the Taliban and al Qaeda has been equated with a violation of local laws and threatening of national security. The unsubstantiated allegations critically compromised not just reporter Mathew Rosenberg's security but also of other foreign journalists who are coming to report on Pakistan simply because one of the world's most critical war is being conducted here and raises questions about whether foreign journalists, despite better resourced, can face the same dangers that Pakistani journalists do when reporting the war in FATA or NWFP.

Violence against journalism

Worse, branding journalists who are out in the field to collect and report information from a variety of sources as spies (without any evidence to boot), and therefore implying they are performing acts of sabotage and intrigue means putting their lives in danger in dangerous areas. As it is, Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North West Frontier Province are the most dangerous places to practice journalism in Pakistan. Of the 250-odd journalists from FATA, about two-thirds have in the last two years had to migrate to NWFP after facing all manner of threats, including murder, injury and other forms of intimidation. According to Intermedia, a Pakistani media development organisation that, among other things, monitors violations and abuses against the media on a daily basis, since January 2008 a total of 24 journalists have been killed in the country (2 in FATA, 7 in NWFP), 48 have been arrested or abducted (27 in FATA and 5 in NWFP), 131 assaulted or injured (3 in FATA, 15 in NWFP) and 150 have been intimidated by formal threats (13 in FATA, 15 in NWFP). Of the 361 cases of violence documented against the media in Pakistan in this period, 20 happened in FATA and 64 in NWFP.

Perpetrators of all this violence include outlawed militant groups, government functionaries, particularly security forces, and even religious and political forces. Coming in the backdrop of journalists struggling with low wages and lack of safety training and resources, the frequent threats and violence -- with no prospects of protection offered by employers -- the journalists are getting a raw deal for performing a job that should be (but is not, adequately) acknowledged and prized. Considering the range of threats arrayed against them, journalists are cautious not to grossly offend either the outlawed militants or the security agencies. With grossly inadequate institutional and professional support, these brave journalists in FATA and NWFP despite their best attempts to feed local communities hungry for independent and reliable information, are forced to compromise and reluctantly exercise self-censorship in these tense environments. Because of low wages, most work for more than one media organisation.

Risked reporting

It is in this backdrop that top executives and editors of 21 leading international media organisations collectively voiced concern over accusations against the reporter for Wall Street Journal, of working for foreign intelligence services and even the US military contractor Blackwater. In a joint letter written to the Pakistan government, they said the development had caused alarm among international media organisations working in the country and urged the government to take all possible steps to ensure the safety of all media personnel in future. "These are difficult times for all journalists in Pakistan. Our employees already face an array of threats, including violence and kidnapping, as they strive to provide timely and accurate coverage. Now those risks have been needlessly increased." They recognised that courageous Pakistani journalists routinely face greater danger than their international counterparts.

Security is just one aspect of this row. Coming from a section within the Pakistani media community, the line of reasoning that media has been generally co-opted by intelligence agencies and journalists should not go to areas declared no-go zones for media has shocked the rest of the media community in Pakistan. This is because it seems to accept in totality the contention that the authorities have the unquestionable right to restrict the media from large swathes of the country, access to a theatre of conflict that affects every citizen of the country on a daily basis and -- by that corollary -- that the citizens can be denied independent sourcing and analysis of information, including hundreds of thousands of conflict IDPs desperate about information about their home areas.

Combating militancy or journalism?

The media in Pakistan should be asking for more -- rather than agreeing to less -- access to areas, officials and information. The conduct and outcome of the war in FATA and NWFP affects every citizen of Pakistan and each one of them has a right to know how it is going. The risks to journalists in the restive regions notwithstanding, the current lack of access to Waziristan in particular and FATA and some pockets of NWFP in general for both Pakistani and foreign media is unsatisfactory. The security agencies have drastically restricted the media's access not only to combat areas but also to certain refugee camps. For all practical purposes, South Waziristan has been out of bounds for both media and humanitarian agencies for several weeks now. If the war is being won there, as is officially claimed, why not allow media to report it freely?

A large clutch of Pakistani TV channels have, demonstrating professionalism and openness, voluntarily agreed to a code of responsible reporting with respect to coverage of terrorism and other security issues. The government should reciprocate by respecting the people's right to know and allow accredited media to independently visit Waziristan and other conflict areas. Not allowing free coverage of a situation that affects everyone in the country violates the emphasis of transparency. Merely allowing 'embedded journalism' and controlled access to an area just to confirm 'military victories' is not enough. Facilitation to media should not just translate into helicopter visits for journalists from Islamabad and Peshawar who are not allowed to move about freely in the areas taken to.

Truth, not sanitised

information

Independent reporting, both by Pakistani and foreign journalists, including information about the situation of civilians caught in the fighting, became drastically scarcer since the popularly supported offensive against the Taliban launched in mid-October. The media and the public have had to depend on sanitised information supplied by the military's public relations office. The restriction on access to media does not just include South Waziristan but is also liberally applied to refugee camps in Dera Ismail Khan and Tank districts of NWFP adjacent to FATA, preventing free access to over a quarter million Waziristan refugees alone.

Just think: how much coverage of IDP camps in these two districts have you seen on TV? It's been so negligible that most viewers across the country can be forgiven to think there's any war in Waziristan. While even local journalists are not allowed too much leeway, foreign journalists are completely banned from these districts. While media -- both local and foreign -- was also partially restricted from covering the summer military offensive against Taliban in the Swat valley of NWFP, it has been severely restricted in FATA and southern districts of NWFP this time round.

Feeding the hunger for information

The appetite of ordinary Pakistanis -- who had been kept in information darkness for over five decades -- for live news coverage, commentary, and call-in talk shows, with diverse and critical viewpoints on hundreds of TV channels and radio stations, has grown in the last few years. This is why any clampdown on independent media now, direct or indirect, is unacceptable. Restricting media freedoms during periods of unrest is a disservice to the Pakistanis who want to know what's going on.

While the government backtracked from formally announcing severe regulations to control how the conflict is covered, in practice the restrictions are strictly being enforced, even as journalists struggling to practice their trade find themselves caught between the military and the militants. This unannounced but enforced regime of censorship and self-censorship will only obstruct plural voices and media development in Pakistan. A democratic, civilian-led government should uphold people's right to know.

In the kaleidoscope of art, there are artists who see with the eye of a city; the eye of a region; the eye of a nation; the eye of a race; and the eye of mankind. And there are those artists who see the world with the eye of the poet, the saint and the child.

What distinguishes this last category? If we stopped judging objects by their practical usefulness, we might discover the mystery of things and not be restricted by the logical, practical world in which we strive to survive physically. Our body has to make space for our spirit. If we lose our memory and could not recognise objects or know what they are for, we would acquire a state of innocence. If we lost the need for the usefulness of things, we would acquire the state of grace. This state is inside us and not outside and it is there that we enter through R M Naeem's paintings.

Extensive drawing has been the catalyst and vehicle for many of the ideas leading to the suite of paintings in the show entitled, 'Faith Soul Search' at Koel Gallery in Karachi. The act of drawing, like the subject of theatre, has enriched Naeem's notion of painting in significant ways. As an established artist, drawing -- fine coloured lines, robust plumes of pigment and dramatic bleeds -- has entered and re-entered his painting process, as diagrammatic element, as accent and mark, as linear articulation and numerical notation, as a way to activate and subvert the painted image. The act of drawing, unlike pure painting, is forgiving when it comes to fits and starts, aborted attempts and outright failures. As a seedbed for ideas, drawing enables Naeem to sustain the generative pulse without having to worry that the stakes are too high.

R M Naeem employs recurring enigmatic motifs (reverberant suns, graphically rendered, portentous cast shadows) as both literal/descriptive and allusive/symbolist devices to set up a question-raising pictorial dualism. While working the cryptic territory, Naeem ardently apotheosizes the natural world in a sort of quasi-religious, animistic manner. The childlike symbolist sun hanging over (an Arcadian landscape in a copse of leafless trees) and the gelid orb beaming down on (a glacial lake set like a rough-cut gem in a subalpine valley) suggest reserves of preternatural potential. But Naeem keeps his paintings' emotional temperature down, and the viewer at arm's length. He approaches the deft balancing act between loaded symbolist content and cool execution by shuffling and reshuffling tonally close, high-key values and puckishly nuanced tints.

R M Naeem paints intimately scaled scenes in an offhand manner, yet arrives at accomplished results. His efforts exhibit a marked disregard of dexterous surface incident in favour of practiced nonchalance. He pretends to employ paint as nothing more than a means to an end. However, his tissue-thin, gouache-like acrylics assuredly emit hushed spectral light and dazzle demurely.

Nevertheless, Naeem's is no mere fairy-tale world, though much in it takes on the guise of fable and bugbear. The picture he holds before men's eyes could easily be accused of exaggeration and falsity to fact, but it is part and parcel of his single theme, the fortune and misfortune of human existence, a theme cloaked in cryptic language piling riddle upon riddle but whose basic meaning, once decoded, proves clear as glass and anything but ambiguous. For all that he speaks in riddles and fables, he is, at heart and always, a realist.

But what, we may ask, is the reason for these puzzles set down with such utter realism. It is certainly not that Naeem is heralding an apocalyptic end of the world, however much it may look like that, nor does he portray a desolate wilderness of stinking swamp and barren scrubland as the inevitable final destination of the traditions of his age.

Nor does Naeem's painting provide simply an illustration of the punishment awaiting those who transgress God's commands and the principles of righteous living. Rather, the evil that men do in their daily lives is shown more nakedly than ever before. But then this realism in turn is shifted to a less direct plane, and in its place Naeem has populated his world of images with faces wearing masks or blindfolding each other. However, such beings may have been depicted before, he has gone far beyond the tradition to a total metamorphosis of the representations of evil and betrayal. The devilish brood contaminates everything human and real in his pictures. Certainly his entire attitude remains orthodox, but there comes into it a pungent vein of scepticism. The theme of transgression and punishment, still linked only tenuously with the afterlife, is brought down to earth. Which is why, in Naeem's paintings, everything having to do with earth itself seems as if it has undergone some dreadful cataclysm. The figures are immersed in water, and though all roundabout the land lies peaceful and untouched, the horror is scarcely less.

R M Naeem's paintings are not about the seen but are in the service of the unseen. He attempts things with which painting, one would have thought, could not cope, such as sound, or the lack of it, which is, implied silence. Through various means, he achieves a strange, charged atmosphere, which has little to do with surrealism, but is nevertheless close to that strange, unreal atmosphere of dreams. He manages to invest objects and things, banal in themselves, with intense private meanings, which we feel, though we cannot understand logically what is going on. He creates a poetic dimension in which his world is suspended in a kind of 'charmed' but also tragic atmosphere. All this is felt and exists behind the pictures. Naeem addresses us one at a time, intimately, privately, and establishes a rapport with us, which is intense and rewarding. If we bring humility and a receptive mind as our contribution, his work will open a door to us, which is the door to the world of the imagination.

Naeem's realism has led him to invent a whole new world of meaningful signs because of their inherent tendency to deform reality. But let there be no mistake, these are not symbols in the accepted sense but explosions of meaning, phantasmagorias designed to lay bare the essence of reality. The result is a vocabulary of images that seldom draws its symbols out of any existing stock, but instead, experiments with possibilities, with symbols that have as yet no determinable significance but are rich in suggestion.

Naeem stands at the frontier, pointing back to the old though in transfigured guise, ahead to something as yet unknown. From the first he possesses two gifts: clear-eyed insight into all blind folly, a coldly critical view of all excess and exaggeration. However much or little religious as may be his paintings that comment on these failings, he never ceases to show how all God's beneficent influence on the world man himself constantly thwarts. The question may be raised whether it is self-will or insubordination that drove rebellious mankind to such extremes. And though there is no sign as yet of a Reformation, in such pictures there is a first hint, a seed of doubt, perhaps even a warning to the artist's contemporaries, an unmistakable, though enigmatic, glimpse of things to come.

Brian Silver and Shubha Sankaran were visiting Pakistan recently, primarily because they were invited to perform at the All Pakistan Music Conference in Lahore. Unfortunately the conference could not be held due to the prevailing law and order situation. That did not deter them from giving a number of performances at various not-so-public avenues and to engage in a series of discussion on matters relating to music with local music lovers, aficionados and connoisseurs.

The couple is no stranger to Pakistan. Brian Silver has been part of various programmes and has visited Pakistan in the last few decades. His association with the subcontinent has grown and developed primarily through his interest in music. After graduating from Harvard in 1964, he stayed in India under a Fulbright Grant to learn sitar from Ustad Ghulamhusain Khan of the Indore Gharana. He earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago and has taught Urdu language and literature, South Asian Music and South Asian Culture at several universities including Minnesota, Chicago and Harvard as a junior colleague to Annemarie Schimmel. After serving for twenty odd years as Chief of the Voice of America's Urdu Service in Washington, he is now VOA's Ethnomusicologist and World Music Curator. In 1982 he founded International Music Associates of which he is the Executive Director.

Shubha Sankaran may be the only woman playing the surbahar on the global concert circuit. She studied music from Ustad Imrat Khan and vocal music in the khayal with Pandit Shrikant Bakre and dhrupad with the Gundecha Brothers. She has been recognised for her surbahar performances by the D.C Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. She appeared in the Pakistani American play Kite of the World in an ensemble described by the Washington Post as a trio of terrific musicians. She has been featured on the National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and currently has two CD released on the Surbahar Records.

Both have performed throughout the United States including the Lincoln Centre in New York and in concerts and on radio and television broadcasts in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Great Britain, Rumania, Morocco, Egypt, Central and South America and the Peoples Republic of China. Shubha has also performed in Australia, Singapore and with the Gundecha Brothers on tours in the United States. In her recent performances in Pakistan it was evident that she has practiced a lot and thought deeply about the musical quality of the instrument.

Brian D Silver who plays the sitar has been experimenting with the instrument as having closer music links with the various string instruments that were and are played in Iran. Many of the Iranian instruments have a close resemblance to the instruments played in the subcontinent and he has been in search of finding links that did and do exist but have been covered by years and years of dusty neglect. For him, a rediscovery of those links or the reassertion of the links that have existed between the two cultures needs to be enunciated more clearly and then made the foundation of future musical structures.

He wants to reaffirm these links as an indicator of the commonality that had existed between the musics of Iran and India and which had flowered in the making of the musical tradition that is called North Indian or Hindustani Music. Brian Silver prefers to call it Ahang e Khusravi and wants to capitalise on the work done by musicologists like Khurshid Anwar. His task is difficult because it is one thing to identify the links in theory and altogether a different ballgame when it comes to demonstrating it musically through voice or an instrument. And then to be able to do so not as a classroom exercise but as a living piece of music is doubly difficult.

Dear All,

There have been a lot of interesting stories in the British press: what with The Sun deriding Gordon Brown for misspelling the name of the dead soldier to whose mother he had written a condolence letter to the revelation of the identity of the call girl blogger known up until then only as 'Belle du Jour', through to some rather disturbing Iraq stories, it's been an exciting November.

The Sun -- a Rupert Murdoch/Sky group newspaper -- recently made a big hoo ha about announcing the fact that they will no longer "support Labour" but will be backing the Tories instead. So no surprise that they take every opportunity to bash the British PM who is on a popularity low at the moment anyway. Fortunately their recent instance of Gordon-bashing backfired. After they ran the story about the angry, bereaved mother who was 'insulted' by the spelling mistakes in the PM's handwritten condolence letter, and the story was magnified all over TV (especially Sky TV, no surprises there), the public rather came down on the side of the PM, who handwrites (in his very awful handwriting) individual condolence letters to the families of every British soldier killed in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Then there was the revelation (in The Sunday Times) of the blogger who called herself 'Belle du Jour' who had chronicled her life as a call girl in blogs and books and whose identity was known to nobody. She turned out to be a young attractive research scientist who had gone into this line of work when she was doing her PhD and was desperately short of money. Sort of like the character played by Sigourney Weaver in Half Moon Street. Really. Truth really is stranger than fiction... Over here debate had been raging for some time about the authenticity of the blog (was it mere erotic fantasy?) and the suspicion that its author was a man...

*******

But perhaps the most disturbing news story was in The Guardian: it detailed the sharp rise in birth defects in one of Iraq's worst war-ravaged areas, Fallujah. Doctors in this area have seen more than a fifteen fold rise in the number of children being born with defects and abnormalities. One doctor was quoted as saying that before 2003 he had barely seen children here with abnormalities whereas now it is fairly common. Fallujah was the site of fierce fighting from March 2003 when US troops entered the city, till almost two years later. About 6000 civilians were killed in the fighting. White phosphorus was used in Fallujah in 2004 and there is a possible link between these birth defects and the use of this. Birth defects seen in Fallujah "range from minor ailments (such as skin discolouration) to life threatening conditions such as hydrocephalus and spina bifida."

The director of the Fallujah Handicapped Organisation says the children with brain injuries are all under eight years old and before the war there were very few such cases in the area. The cases chronicled in the article are truly heart-rending. There is the story of Fatima (the girl "with two heads") who lived only till the age of three, and her grieving family, there is the story of Zainab Abdul Latif and her three young children, all of them under the age of six, all with learning difficulties and none of them are able to walk. The tragedy of Iraq will continue, one supposes, to unfold for many years, with shattered families, brutalised communities, damaged children and grieving parents.

Strange animal the human being is. Keeps doing the same brutal things again and again -- not listening to reason, not listening to calls for restraint, not listening at all. Just killing and destroying -- and later, analysing the extent of the damage done in the process. What the fighting in the Gulf wars has done to Iraqis is still an untold story.

Many years ago the outspoken British MP George Galloway set up Mariam's Fund to help treat a young Iraqi Leukaemia patient whose illness was said to be linked to the radiation from US  bombing in the 'first gulf war'. He warned then of the damage such war weapons can cause but he was largely laughed off and subsequently ridiculed and politically undermined. But the latest data from Fallujah bring his words of warning back to us. It is a truly chilling story -- perhaps because these cases are probably only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the human cost of this conflict. 

Best Wishes,

Umber Khairi