Literature was the most talked about topic in Pakistan’s English media during the last three weeks. Karachi and Lahore saw scores of renowned literary figures from around the world converging on the two cities. One helplessly envied Karachi and Lahore, and wondered in what time length Peshawar would figure on the world literary scene. In a hundred years, will it be? Or this indeed would look to be an optimistic guess if one were to take into account the large-scale destruction of schools, with absolutely no compunction, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Incidentally, while none of the two events in Karachi and Lahore generated any juicy headlines, the funniest headline of the present times, or indeed of all times, emerged these very days out of some cavernous quarter of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A headline in a leading newspaper screamed: Taliban term government’s peace talk offer as ‘old wine in new bottles.’ Now that was really mind boggling. Did the militants really employ this biblical proverb to reject the peace talks, or was that the imagination of the editors gone wild?

Wine appears to have all but disappeared from Peshawar in the wake of the containers’ scandal. But newspapers’ headlines would suggest that the intoxicant is still wistfully alive in the popular perception. One example of that being the piety professing righteous militants preferring to stick to the niceties of the English language even while talking tough and acting recalcitrant instead of announcing their verdict through the bayonet.

It is also quite inexplicable why old wine must be so faulted to be equated with an unacceptable or unsavoury solution when wine is in fact said to be most enjoyable only after it gets old. One may ask if the militants would have accepted anything akin to new wine in old bottles though that surely would have sounded more perilous since old bottles may burst as a result of fermentation of new wine.

Editors and columnists fancy borrowing titles and phrases from popular and timeless works especially the English classics. A recent addition to such untamed fascination was the title of a write-up about knitting. It was titled ‘Needle of the hour’ in the fashion of popular adage ‘need of the hour.’ Knitting is an essential domestic chore in the classics especially those of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. In Dickens’ historical novel ‘A tale of two cities’ about the French Revolution, a leading character Madame Therese Defarge is shown to give an altogether different meaning to the women’s favourite pastime as she slyly encodes through knitting the names of the enemies of the revolution in her wine shop eventually to be led to their executions. Madame Defarge brings to mind the man from Swat who used to announce the death warrants of the undesirable people on the FM radio only to be found dead the next day in the infamous Green Chowk.

It is incredible how our past and present circumstances qualify us to fit into most of the momentous literary scenes. It also looks to be a coincidence then that most of what we are borrowing from literature has got a lot to do with our being miserable. A title that one has seen being used with an unexplained frequency in Pakistan rendering it sound clichéd now, if not totally Faulting old wine obsolete, is ‘The winter of our discontent.’ Shakespeare first used it in his drama Richard III, with Richard saying in a punning reference to his brother Edward IV, Now is the Winter of our discontent Made glorious Summer by this Sun of York And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house In the deep bosom of the Ocean buried John Steinbeck subsequently popularised it further when he used it as the title of his novel. The winter of my content, Arab winter of despair etc are some of the titles seen during these last few weeks demonstrating the poverty of imagination and lack of creativity among writers and scholars or perhaps complacency. Winters look to have taken a heavy toll; freezing minds and souls. The severity of the English winters is or used to be notorious, but in our case shouldn’t it then be all four seasons of our discontent.

A close following of the mainstream English newspapers, magazines and periodicals in Pakistan over the years would show with what great convenience columnists have found the choicest titles for their columns and features. Shakespeare, novelists of the Victorian age and among others Gabriel Garcia Marquez have proved most handy to fit into and adorn any description. Hardly any of Garcia’s more than a dozen novels have been left unexplored as far as titles are concerned, and some have been repeatedly used by the same newspaper and magazine. ‘Love in the time of hate,’ one title recently read in the wake of the Valentine Day debate.

It was the umpteenth time Garcia’s timeless love story ‘Love in the time of Cholera’ that he conceived with his parents in mind came back into focus in this manner. ‘The General in his labyrinth,’ The Autumn of the Patriarch,’ ‘Chronicle of a death foretold’ and ‘No one writes to the Colonel’ are some of the titles that sound too familiar to have been missed by any reader in varying arrangements heading descriptions of various types in the recent past.

‘A man for all seasons’ is the kind of title that appears to have been used more frequently by the writers than the definite article ‘the’ in the English language. One recently found it topping a write-up on the late Ardeshir Cowasjee in a Karachi-based magazine. ‘A man for all seasons’ is a play by Robert Bolt about the less fortunate 16th century English Chancellor Thomas More who was executed by Henry VIII after the former refused to endorse the King’s wish to divorce his aging wife Katherine who could not bear him a son. Thomas More who in his stead was no less cruel to those allegedly not conforming to the religious tenets has been resurrected, and condemned to death again by Hillary Mantel in her award winning novel ‘Wolf Hall.’ One is at a loss to understand if the title fits Cowasjee’s profile as one knew him as a columnist of good standing.

Watergate scandal appears to have been long forgotten by the Americans, and buried since the death of its main perceived architect Richard Nixon. It, however, refuses to take leave of our morbid imagination. No scandal in Pakistan is considered worthy of being called one unless it is suffixed with a gate. Mehrangate, Memogate, Bahriagate so on and so forth appear to have gained credence only after having been labeled as such and not otherwise. Shakespeare’s Brutus and Gulliver’s Yahoos were all very good to be planted here and there and everywhere, but we have since got our own Brutuses and Yahoos. Why don’t we accommodate them in our imagination and stop shying away from putting them to service; our old wine haters.

Someone once recalled a scene from a 1949 classic ‘The Third Man’ in a write-up in TIME, ‘In Italy for 30 years under the Borgia they’d warfare and terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy, and what did they produce? ‘The Cuckoo Clock.’