Hello. My name is Sajjad. I’m just over 40, and I’ve been working in the NGO sector for the last 10 years. Every evening, I go back home, and I try not to think about the suit I was wearing, the two useless reports I approved, or the fancy hotel lunch meeting I had with a naïve white man (who picked up the tab). Every evening, however, despite my best efforts, I go to sleep thinking about the color of tomorrow’s tie, the three reports I still need to read through, and the planned lunch meeting with another white man. This time, I’d have to pay the bill.
It wasn’t always like this, you know. Things were different 24 years ago. Things were unstructured, unregimented, unconstrained. Things were free.
At the age of 16, I passed the matriculation exam from Government Higher Secondary School (for boys) in my hometown, Muridke. By the grace of God, my father thought I was smart enough to be sent to Lahore for further education. As I packed for the hour-long bus ride, abba ji stepped into my room and told me his plans for my future: Plan A was admission to Engineering University (formally known as UET), and then a job in the gulf through Uncle Farooq’s younger brother (who knew some people there). If Uncle Farooq’s younger brother bailed, then it was probably best I sit for the CSS exam. Failing that, I will apply for a grade 16, entry-level post in the Communication and Works department, Government of Punjab. Plan B was admission to Hailey College of Commerce for a B.Com, because, apparently, there are new banks recruiting young graduates and sending them to the gulf. Takes Uncle Farooq’s younger brother out of the equation all-together. Plan C would kick in if I failed to make the merit list after the intermediate examination results. If so, I would move back to Muridke and start work with abba ji at the shop.
Deference to paternal authority, it turned out, is inversely proportional to distance. After 5 months in college, a friend of mine convinced me to switch from pre-engineering to arts and humanities. I ditched Physics, Math, and Chemistry, and ended up taking Sociology, Political Science, and Economics. I decided I wanted to take up Plan D, which was becoming a college lecturer. Unfortunately for me, abba ji wasn’t willing to finance a Plan D, and I had no option but to turn to my eldest brother for college related expenses. Luckily, he was less fussy about my choice of subjects.
I was arrested for the first time in my life at the age of 17. One of our instructors took a bunch of us to a pro-democracy public gathering on Mall Road. We were baton charged, tear-gassed, and then finally pushed into a large police van, which took us to the police station.
It was a frightening, yet oddly exhilarating experience, and I wanted more of it.
An Inter, BA, MA later, I found myself working as a journalist for the Lahore bureau of a major newspaper. Plan D, sadly enough, fell through when the Public Services Commission interviewer, after three questions on political theory, asked me to recite Dua-e-Qunoot. The idea that the attainment of a political science lectureship hinged on my ability to repeat a certain amount of words in a foreign language seemed ludicrous. I voiced my thoughts, they didn’t like them, and I ended up working as a journalist. As it turned out, it really wasn’t such a bad thing. Four of us had taken up a small apartment in the old city and spent most of our time dabbling in plenty of radical ideas, and even more radical substances. Good times.
This is how I lived life for 12 years. The cities changed, the apartments changed, the substances changed, but life was spontaneous, and existence remained unfettered.
That Sajjad is dead now. Bogged down by a changing society, and eventually killed by the barrenness of growing old. The worst part is, there’s no new Sajjad either. No 17 year olds getting arrested, nobody making spontaneous life-style choices, nobody bothering themselves by the added weight of utopian ideals. People want straight, predictable lines, and lives they can see 10 years into the future. They want stability, fancy toys, and gated communities. The only ‘ism’ that they cherish is careerism, (Islamism too, but only as long as it doesn’t interfere with the former).
There’s a 24-year-old LUMS graduate working in my NGO. He’s doing well for himself, and he knows it. He sees a promotion at the end of this year, and a fat pay-raise too. After a while, he’ll move to some hi-fi UN type international organization, get married, rent a bigger place, and buy a bigger car. His ambition, he told me, is to become a Washington-based public policy specialist. And he tells me all of this with an earnest, sincere expression on his face. Yep, that Sajjad is definitely dead.
Originally published in Pakistan Today on 20/02/2012
9 comments:
Yaar .. good stuff.
Kaafi had tak dil ko lagi hai yeh post.
I don't know whether to laugh or sigh.
Aside from the tragic aspect, great writing and good stuff Umair.
I do this because you are a brilliant writer, and this is a brilliant post, but some devil's advocacy here.
The comparison you made was ostensibly between Sajjad, and Sajjad's hypothetical son. After all, look around you at any rally or social convention, or a lefty hashtag on twitter, and count the number of young 'uns who are there because this is the faith their lefty parents brought them up with. For them, like the 24 year old, radicalism etc is the norm. And any 24 year old yearns to break out of norms, or rationalise his existence within them by indulging in what we would call hypocrisy.
But what about Sajjad's 21st century counterpart? When a young boy leaves Muridke today, where does he go?
Pretty sure you had chosen Muridke on purpose, but we know of at least one young man who left Muridke for Mumbai.
And if we were to break out of our own biases, what he did was very radical, very much an anguished howl of ultimately psychopathic levels against his own realities, and against the forces he had come to believe were responsible for the degradation of his society. His actions were decidedly subversive and radical, and within the ideology they were carried out in, logical too.
But forget Kasab. If you remember Four Lions, the guys who get arrested are the religious looking ones who didn't actually do anything. The contemporary, Muslim version of Sajjad, who were peaceful and yet highly politicised, or ideologised (sic).
Two questions then - is political Islam (and broadening the net here) the radical right the new radical left? Is the Tea Party the new Third International? I am of course being glib here, but it is no surprise that across the globe, the left's social values have left it unable to speak for and about the poor, while the right's one-eyed views at least appeal to them, even when we feel it is to their own detriment.
But then there is another question. Abbas Nasir had said to me that he appreciated that the generations that came after him were post-ideological. Most of us rich kids were just material, but what about the same Sajjads in Muridke? Is it the paucity of our imagination that we can't seem to find where they are now? Is it that the new Sajjad will not come from this generation - which is concerned with stability due to its volatile social upbringing - but that he will come from our children?
I don't think I can honestly defend any of the things that I've said for very long, but one thing that needles me is a forlorn look at the revolutionary past and to decry the present.
Political radicalism is a consequence, IMHO, of social and artistic radicalism. Had Sajjad not had the ability in him, or rather the belief, to change courses, he wouldn't have ended up as a political radical. Radicalism means the breaking down of social norms, artistic conventions, and these MUST precede the political changes we see. And these social, artistic revolts take time, must be given time, and must arrive so that we can begin to think of political challenges. Unfortunately, in Pakistan the youth is constantly exhorted to shed it's apoliticism first and foremost, meaning that there are young people discussing the deplorable labour conditions in our homes while cracking open creme brulee's at Cafe Flo, or even more absurdly, others calling for tsunamis without willing to concede, or even acknowledge the levees of corruption that give them their safe vantage points. Even politics becomes apolitical when it is divorced from the factors that influence our lived reality.
I could go on for days, but I'll end here.
What Sajjad is really ruing is wasting his life believing it could be unfettered. He would chop off his old man's dingaling to be in the 24 year old LUMS grad's shoes.
@KK: I think i get what you're saying, but i wrote this with a completely different thing in mind. My point was to highlight how careerism is taken as an unequivocal virtue, hence stifling artistic expression of any kind (even existing spontaneously, without ideology is artistic expression of some kind). Sajjad, btw, is not a make-belief character. He's a real life person that i know, and interact with on a daily basis (different name though). And the 24 year old kid is what i could very well be, if i was less exposed i guess.
I dont want to hark back to some exaggerated leftist past that this country's middle class might or might not have had. I'm political and ideological as a person, so its natural for me to rate one form of ideological adherence as being morally superior to another. even then, all i wanted to say was that the possibility of someone stepping out of the rat race, to do anything they wanted, regardless of the material promise it had or not, was perhaps greater a few decades ago. We can keep Islam and the left out of it, and see this simply as a consequence of how capitalism and the middle class has developed in this country. The fact of the matter is that economic mobility doesnt exist without a culture. In our case the culture of economic mobility is much more material, more focused on sustaining and preserving itself (conservative), and places far greater stress on hard technical knowledge (engineering, medicine etc) and its usefulness.
Every weekend, when im in islamabad, i end up going to QAU and i meet a bunch of people who, regardless of their class compulsions, are doing things that they enjoy doing. One of them's been working at the physics lab as an RA for the last 5 years simply because this is what interests him. It's an interesting way to live, especially because it seems counter intuitive. Here's a lower middle class boy not trying his best to make money in life. how fucking weird is that.
khair anyway, this post/column comes at a time when im having a fairly hard time trying to keep myself motivated at work. The fact that im having a hard time just convincing myself of the need to quit and do something different is, at one level, quite telling.
Was so easy to relate to Sajjad...
Btw, is the question on Dua-e-Qunoot sort of a standard here? I've heard someone else tell me about it too...
absolutely brilliant.
Inspiring. Thank you for this.
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