Comments on: Crazy Diamonds – III

By: Ghani

Ghani — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:20:41 +0000

Awesome piece NFP, like always. You’re one of the voices that keep us Pakistanis feel that there are sane people who remain here.

By: Tahir Ali Khan

Tahir Ali Khan — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:55:29 +0000

Yes, Rashid wasn’t willing to die. When army entered his hiding place, he is reported to have told an anchor in his last statement “The army has come upon us. You can hear the shots. Though I might have done some bad things, I don’t think I had done something which warranted my killing…”saying this he took out his gun and came out of his hiding place into the open and was killed

By: Sameer

Sameer — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:44:33 +0000

@ Atif: … Apparently…

By: Mani

Mani — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 16:11:41 +0000

So was Jinnah… and So am I. Stop spreading Hate!

By: Kaiser Waziri

Kaiser Waziri — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 16:40:29 +0000

I almost cried when I read about Saghir Siddique!
So tragic stories of real people!

By: Atif

Atif — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 12:47:58 +0000

@Indian, Dilawer

ANP, MQM and PPP are all liberal parties.

By: Seeker

Seeker — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 08:55:35 +0000

Defeat of Osama Bin Laden was defeat of radical Islam and lesson for all Islamist.

By: Kamran Ahmad - India

Kamran Ahmad - India — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 03:24:35 +0000

The writer’s obsessed with ‘islamization’ concept and he is looking everything through those lens. I am sure that anything that has been even remotely done by keeping religion in mind is anti-liberal to him.
- good to see he recognizes this and calls himself a cultural ‘critic’

By: Dilawer

Dilawer — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 02:07:03 +0000

I agree with you 100%. If you impose a penalty or make a bet against using the religious term such as Inshallah, Mashallah or invkoing the name of Allah then most of us would go silent forever. The Pakistani speech is nothing but the religious words. Listen to any TV program or watch even the most educated they can not say two lines without the religious reference.

By: Viqar Qadir

Viqar Qadir — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:52:22 +0000

This is interesting.
A few weeks ago I was reading (or rather watching) one of your pieces about how Pakistan used to be and the first thought that struck my mind was to send you a mail thanking you for not having died in your own turbulent years…sorry to mention this so frankly and crudely here but you have been close…and I could not bear the thought of not having had this “contribution” from you.

When I wrote you that email, I had just recently finished reading a whole lot of stuff from V.S.Naipaul. I was feeling he understood what it felt to be uprooted. When you leave your country and go to another place you are not only uprooted and misunderstood, you are actually not relevant enough to be understood. And Naipaul knew this…and this feeling of something shared was like a soul caress. What was still taking a shape but not fully clear at the time was that this uprooting was not because I had left Pakistan, I was uprooted while I was living there. And I know many others were…being irrelevant is hard on your self respect. I decided I would leave Pakistan the day I learned my father had gone out to vote for Parvez Musharraf in that funny referendum.

I am saying all this because, having read Naipaul, having understood at least part of the person that he was, I was seized by this almost urgent need to thank the guy…for doing the incredibly tedious research that he did…for having the ambition to want to share it…for making all that effort, that I know he must have made. He did not need my acknowledgement, the need to acknowledge was entirely mine.

It is now the same that I am beginning to feel towards your effort. Having felt immensely frustrated at what a waste it was of your talent and your ability to empathize. And now seeing that you made the effort to grant that token of respect to me, your reader, makes me grateful.

And believe me I am grateful for the part you are playing. At times like this I think about what I am missing, sitting out here, only occasionally catching glimpses of all of the wonderful things that are happening back home. Only the other day I discovered Najam Sethi on youtube. I got news of these articles from a tweet of Sabahat’s(I still have to figure out if I am made for twitter).

Nostalgia is easy to analyze…it is like a pink cloud over everything. You can clearly see something pleasantly colored and vaguely shaped and painfully attractive. That’s about it. Nostalgia is easy to sell. And cataloguing too. I am not saying that cataloging is not a service. It is one of the most important ones. In a ludicrously redefined society like ours, cataloging is probably the only way to at least account for, and to begin to get a feeling for, what was there before all the historical plastic surgery that we went through. What I see coming from you is only at its start.

I am saying this because I want to be among the first to review the first draft of the book you will write. I am a critic at least by training…it will be worth it.