The reforms in the Frontier Crimes Regulation 1901 have been generally welcomed by the tribal people. Most opined that the amendments were a step forward, though others felt these were inadequate. A debate was generated on the merits and demerits of the new FATA Regulation 2008 and the extension of the Political Parties Act to the tribal areas. This was obviously a good thing at a time when all seven tribal agencies and the six Frontier Regions are suffering unprecedented violence due to Taliban-inspired militancy and military action by Pakistan’s armed forces.

Some tribespeople, who apparently constitute a minority, wanted the FCR scrapped altogether. In their view, it was a black law with draconian sections that the British colonialists had devised to check the freedom-loving and rebellious Pashtun tribes inhabiting the tribal borderlands and keep them subservient. They wanted the 108-year-old FCR to be dumped as it violated certain human rights and was out of place in this age and time.

Then there were the tribal elders, or the hereditary Maliks, who didn’t want any changes in the FCR and were bitterly opposed to legalising political parties in FATA. They believed the FCR was in conformity with the tribal customs and traditions and scrapping or amending it would create a dangerous legal vacuum and trigger instability in FATA. In their opinion, the inability or unwillingness of the state to strictly apply the FCR had weakened the political administration in tribal areas and allowed the militants and other new forces to become strong. They viewed the entry of political parties into FATA as a recipe for disaster as this would divide their closely-knit tribal society. As supporters of the status quo, the Maliks were accused of resisting change as it could threaten their status and deprive them of their numerous privileges.

The bureaucrats too resisted major amendments in the FCR. In fact, their stance didn’t differ much from that of the tribal elders. They believed the administrative and political changes being introduced in FATA were destabilising an essentially tribal society. They had also opposed the 1997 federal government decision taken by the then President Farooq Leghari to grant the right of vote to every tribesman and tribeswoman. If the bureaucrats had their way, the tribal people even now would have limited franchise with only the Maliks being able to vote and contest assembly elections. For the civil servants, the time to grant universal adult franchise to the tribal population hadn’t arrived yet.

The political parties had generally clear-cut positions on the issue of FCR and the status of FATA. The nationalist ANP had the most radical stand as it opposed most provisions of the FCR and wanted merger of FATA into the NWFP and its representation under adult franchise in the provincial assembly. It saw the merger as means to uniting the Pashtuns into a single administrative unit and giving the Pashto-speakers a bigger share in the provincial assembly. Though the ANP doesn’t have a single member of parliament among the 12 MNAs and 8 senators from FATA, it harbours hopes of increasing its share of the vote and winning assembly seats in the tribal areas in future.

The PPP has long been in favour of democratic reforms in FATA, along with amendments in the FCR to humanise this law and measures to accelerate development activities in the dismally under-developed tribal areas. In fact, it was the government of the late PPP founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that pursued kind of a forward policy in FATA in the 1970s in a bid to bring it at par with rest of the country. The populist Bhutto was probably the first Pakistani politician who held public meetings in the tribal areas and directly spoke to the people instead of communicating with them through their Maliks at officially-arranged and controlled jirgas.

The religious parties, particularly the Jamaat-i-Islami, generally also welcomed the changes in the FCR. The JI has always been critical of the ban on political parties in FATA and its former head Qazi Hussain Ahmad made highly-publicised attempts in the company of sizeable number of party workers to enter the tribal areas in defiance of the law. It also wanted curtailment in the powers of the political agents, who have often taken tough action against JI activists defying the ban on political activities in tribal areas such as Bajaur and Khyber. It is generally felt that extension of the Political Parties Act to FATA by President Asif Ali Zardari as an Independence Day gift on August 14, 2009 would largely benefit the secular and nationalist parties. But, the fact remains that all reform and independent-minded political forces, defying the status quo, would benefit. There has been a strong belief that the Islamic parties, in particular the JUI, had an advantage over the secular and nationalist forces due to its ability to use the mosque and the madrassa despite the ban on political parties in FATA. All political parties would henceforth get a level playing field even though it is a fact that every party worth its name was already active and visible in the tribal areas in spite of the ban on political activities.

It is, however, now up to the secular and political parties, particularly the major ones like the ANP, PPP and PML, to take advantage of the extension of Political Parties Act to FATA and organise their chapters in the tribal regions. They would have to take risks as doing politics in most of the restive and militancy-hit tribal agencies is going to be dangerous. In fact, questions are being raised whether the good-intentioned political, judicial and administrative reforms envisaged for FATA could be implemented in such a dire situation, where almost every tribal agency and some of the Frontier Regions have become "no-go" areas for government officials, politicians and aid workers, and where the armed forces since 2003-2004 have been trying to put down a stubborn Taliban-led insurgency. The political administration, rendered dysfunctional by the actions of the militants and the military, isn’t in a position to ensure proper implementation of the intended reforms package.

The six-party Islamic alliance, MMA, had won 7of the 12 National Assembly seats in FATA in the 2002 elections and also obtained half of the eight seats in the Senate reserved for the tribal areas. Almost all these seats, except one, were won by Maulana Fazlur Rahman’s JUI-F, which is still the dominant political force in FATA, particularly in South Waziristan and North Waziristan. However, the outcome of the 2008 general elections in FATA like elsewhere in the NWFP and Balochistan was different as a divided MMA, deserted by the JI after its boycott of the poll, managed to win only one of the 11 National Assembly seats for which election took place. It may win the remaining seat from South Waziristan if the security situation allowed the polling to take place. Still it constitutes a big drop in the popularity of the JUI-F in FATA and presents an opening for the secular and national parties.

The tribal voters too are keen for a change in their lot and that can happen only if measures are taken to provide them justice, political rights and socio-economic development. There is no doubt that the FATA Regulation 2008 despite its inadequacies offers rights that were hitherto denied to the common tribesman and tribeswoman. Unlike the past when the unamended FCR was the law, an accused person under the FATA Regulation 2008 would have to be produced before an assistant political agent within 24 hours of the arrest, his case referred to the council of elders, or jirga, in 10 days time, and the jirga required to submit its findings to the government authority within 90 days. The provision of bail has now been included by inserting a new section in the regulation, an appellate court would be set up and the collective responsibility clause has been diluted by restricting initial punitive measures to the offending sub-section of the tribe of the accused instead of the whole tribe being penalised as in the past and disallowing action against children less than 16 years of age and old persons aged more than 65. The political agent’s administrative, judicial and financial powers would be reduced. This is alright and could be described as a promising first step. A lot more would have to be done in terms of reforms in the tribal areas to ensure that its population isn’t discriminated against in terms of its political, economic and human rights.

A whisper can command greater attention than a shout — that is the impression left by Fahd Burki’s sophisticated exhibition at Grey Noise in Lahore. Whereas his larger works are intense and assertive, these complex, yet elegant amalgams of acrylics and occasionally collage draw the viewer into an intimate exchange. Many feature recognisable anatomies, yet the imagery is not narrative and is considerably abstracted from its realistic sources.

With their science fiction titles and antiseptic palette, Burki’s drawings are as devoid of illusionistic space as it is possible for painted surfaces to be. Yet they do not become sculptures despite their object hood, because their visual impact is primarily graphic. They could be insignia of futuristic corporations or universal symbols for products or processes that have yet to be invented. They are inscrutable — equally menacing and jolly. Their size and their smooth, featureless surfaces align them with commercial signage. Too visually aggressive to be dismissed as decorative, the drawings allude to logos, badges, trademarks and the puffy, pudgy lettering and swooping, dynamic accents familiar from the annoyingly perky commercial graphics of the 1970s, themselves a bastardisation of the 1930s streamline aesthetic. In most, the motifs relate snugly to the painting’s edge.

In this impressive show, Fahd Burki has exhibited alluringly subtle and ambiguous new drawings that extend a strain of dry wit. The drawings are acrylics, some untitled and in muted black tones. On the evidence of the works here, Burki is shifting further and further from his earlier graphic boldness and deep spaces toward understated abstractions that give the gaze nowhere to rest. He demonstrates that humour in drawing is not confined to figuration. Modest in their stake in contemporary art discourse, they demonstrate an artist setting limits and finding within them a satisfying degree of freedom.

In a world driven by cynicism, it’s refreshing to see ‘happy’ art. True, the news on the tube is grim, and there’s much to gnash our teeth over, but don’t we need something to live for? Joy is a challenging emotion to carry off with artistic rigour — being tortured is so much easier — but Matisse proved it could be done. Burki is playful without being silly — rather like Gaudi and his present-day counterpart, Frank Gehry, whose buildings are as grounded and solid as they are light-hearted and capricious.

Burki has crafted an outré oeuvre of constructed chaos, narrative contradiction and eccentrically embellished personae that both galvanised the visual and musical community from which it probably sprang and permanently shifted the tenor of the vanguard from the experimental to the iconoclastic. In this exhibition, he proves that fine art can be as problematic, conflicted and absurdly casual as even the most lowbrow strains of commercial advertisement.

Split between two rooms, the show begins with an array of quirky drawings, most in acrylics on paper, some framed and some push-pinned to the wall. There is abstraction as well as crude, almost schematic figuration (faces, bodies, animals and geometric forms). Burki’s marks are quite gestural, but with a linguistic sense of sign. Speaking indirectly to the time and milieu in which they are made (the artist is a student at the Royal Academy of Art, London), these drawings — at once raw, primordial and conceptual — still show the stylistic whimsy of the kid who regularly published his ‘spot’ sketches in The New Yorker, but with an almost dissolute pathos, as if the very effort of representation must inevitably blear and bleed out like late-night ravings on a cocktail napkin. The cumulative effect, though potent, is awash with the irresolute.

In each vertical composition, a single large composite form fills the frame. These forms are set against white grounds that function as foils and also as positive shapes in their own right. The coloured forms twist and turn and are full of erotic tension, as parts seem to restrain other parts, which swell almost to the bursting point. Playfully asymmetrical, they feel deliciously arbitrary, as if ready to flip over or reverse their contractions and expansions in the blink of an eye.

The curvilinear shapes are reminiscent of early organic abstractions such as Arp’s carved planar wood reliefs, in which each constituent part or the entire composition is painted a single colour. Yet Fahd Burki seems also to be inspired by the shapes of fruits, the rhythms of the body and mellifluous forms in design (Philippe Starck comes to mind). The sinuous outlines manage to give the impression of volume, although the shapes themselves are quite flat, painted in matte colours. His bold, reductive, synthetically coloured compositions turn the torsions of nature into artifice, as catchy as logos.

Burki is an intrepid draughtsman, comfortable with acrylics and graphite in drawings. The acrylic surfaces are so boldly coloured that the paint appears to be pure pigment, laid down in decisive opaque layers.

The artist has extracted the clean-lined, beautifully resolved forms of his drawings from shapes and outlines found in architecture and nature. He turns such reductive processes on their heads; augmenting and reconfiguring found shapes to create chattering that reflect the hectic visual stimulation of urban life. Burki’s works seem predicated on stop-and-go glimpses of billboards, store signage and bus shelter posters. Fragments from mass media are simply part of the mix, as he resynthesises images to add to his hyper-connected, busy network of visual activity.

On the other hand, in a work like ‘Combustion I’, it is as if we are perched in mid-air high above a great expanse, with nothing to interrupt our free visual access to the distance. Eschewing post-modern critique, Burki offers a positive spin on the image glut of consumer society. His abstractions devour with playful glee a vast array of signs and images in their reconstitutions of the world. Reshaping mass media to suit his needs, Burki with his avant-garde aesthetic, promotes an idealism that is regenerative and slyly empowering.

(The exhibited will remain open until Sept 20, 2009)

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Frog boy.

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Fair trade.

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Untitled.

Certain musicians, though not great artistes themselves, have left an indelible mark on the development of music through innovations in instruments. One such musician was Les Paul, who made revolutionary changes to the solid body guitar, the most important instrument of contemporary music that made the sound of rock and roll possible. He was also innovative enough to introduce many technological firsts that have been improved to become standardised techniques without which sound recording may now seem inconceivable.

It is a little difficult to imagine what the guitar looked and sounded like before the rise of popular music in the early part of the 20th century. Also, it is difficult to imagine which was the most important and commonly used instrument in popular music. As the American forms like country and jazz music became a worldwide phenomenon due to the Hollywood films, the star of the guitar began to shine. And it soon displaced all other instruments and assumed some kind of an iconic shape primarily because of the polyglot musical expression the films successfully promoted internationally.

In the earlier part of the 20th century, in the mishmash culture of the Americans, it was probably jazz that was the most iconoclastic representative music as compared to the Western classical tradition encapsulated in Europe. European classical tradition had the piano and the violins as the major instruments followed by oboe, flute, viola, cello, horn, harp, bassoon and some others that were incorporated due to the expanding horizons in the East. The Russian, Hungarian and Polish instruments were introduced to Western orchestras through the brilliance of composers like Chopin and Liszt and Tchaikovsky.

But with the Americans and the dominance of the jazz instruments like the saxophone, trumpet and the drums, it became more widely heard and seen. Similarly, due to the influence of the Spanish-speaking people, the guitar was introduced to the Americans through the Latino influence.

The modern English word, guitar has been taken from Spanish guitarra (loaned from the medieval Andalusian). Arabic qitara, has been derived from the Latin cithara, which in turn came from the earlier Greek word kithara, a descendant of old Persian sihtar. By 1200 AD, the four string guitar had evolved into two types: the guitarra morisca (Moorish guitar) which had a rounded back, wide fingerboard and several sound holes, and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) which resembled the modern guitar with one sound hole and a narrower neck. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the qualifiers ‘morisca’ and ‘latina’ were dropped and these four course instruments were simply called guitars.

Paul’s innovative guitar, ‘The Log’, built in 1939, was one of the first solid body electric guitars. Though Paul approached the Gibson Guitar Corporation with his idea of a solid body electric guitar, they showed no interest until Fender produced theirs. Gibson designed a guitar incorporating Paul’s suggestions in the early 1950s and presented it to him to try. He was impressed enough to sign a contract for what became the ‘Les Paul model’, originally only in a ‘gold top’ version and agreed never to be seen playing in public, or be photographed, with anything other than a Gibson guitar.

The arrangement persisted until 1961, when declining sales prompted Gibson to change the design without Paul’s knowledge, creating a much thinner, lighter, and more aggressive looking instrument with two cutaway ‘horns’ instead of one.

The original Gibson Les Paul guitar design regained popularity when Eric Clapton began playing the instrument a few years later, although he also played an SG and an ES-335. Paul resumed his relationship with Gibson and endorsed the original Les Paul guitar from that point onwards. His personal Gibson Les Pauls were much modified by him — Paul always used his own self-wound pickups and customised methods of switching between pickups on his guitars. To this day, both novice and professional guitarists use various models of Gibson Les Paul guitars all over the world. A less expensive version of the Les Paul guitar is also manufactured for Gibson’s lower priced Epiphone brand.

His innovative talents extended into his playing style, including licks, trills, chording sequences, fretting techniques and timing, which set him apart from his contemporaries and inspired many of the guitarists of the present day. He recorded with his wife Mary Ford in the 1950s and they sold millions of records.

In 1948 Capitol Records released a recording that had begun as an experiment in Paul’s garage, entitled, ‘Lover When You Are Near Me’ which featured Paul playing eight different parts on electric guitar, some of them recorded at half speed, hence ‘double-fast’ when played back at normal speed for the master. This was the first time that multi-tracking had been used in a recording. These recordings were made not with magnetic tape, but with acetate disks. Paul would record a track onto a disk, then record himself playing another part with the first. He built the multi-track recording with overlaid tracks, rather than parallel ones as he did later. By the time he had a result he was satisfied with, he had discarded some 500 recording disks.

Paul even built his own disc-cutter assembly, based on automobile parts. He favoured the flywheel from a Cadillac for its weight and flatness. Even in these early days, he used the acetate-disk set-up to record parts at different speeds and with delay, resulting in his signature sound with echoes and birdsongs like guitar riffs. When he later began using magnetic tape, the major change was that he could take his recording rig on tour with him, even making episodes for his 15-minute radio show in his hotel room. He later worked with Ross Snyder in the design of the first eight-track recording deck. We owe overdubbing, sound on sound, delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effect and multi-track recording to him.

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Les Paul: June 9, 1915 – August 13, 2009.