Piece of What?

I left home for a gathering of peaceniks and ended up at the social event of the year. The card in my hand said ‘Arundhati Roy: keynote speaker: seminar on peace and freedom in south Asia’, but the aunties in line ahead of me said ‘she’d be pretty if she didn’t have such short hair’, which isn’t exactly the most auspicious precursor to the end of acrimony.

The first inkling I had of the nature of the turnout was the traffic jam at the Avari roundabout. The number of cars blocking the road…you’d think someone really important was getting married. As Kiran and I trickled like two particularly insignificant drops into the stream of people leading into the Avari itself, I began to notice the outfits. Black velvet pants with lace and raw silk kurta’s…three-piece suits…Pinkies and Tinkies and Bunties galore…and that most accurate indicator of one’s place in the social hierarchy, the sunglasses currently tipped as the item to have. By the time we got to the metal detector, I was grinning like a fishy president of the shark anti-defamation league that has just spotted a leg labeled ‘Peter Benchley’ dangling in the water. Didn’t matter if the speeches were boring and the sandwiches stale, this was going to be a fun four hours.

Despite the ‘people who reach the venue after 2:30 might not be allowed to enter’ line in the morning paper, it took a little while for things to get under way. This was because the people just kept pouring in. Like a ripple of silk as a salesman unfolded a glossy thaan, like a torrent of the finest bubbly coursing down a swan like throat, a mass of well-heeled humanity poured down the stairs and into the aisles. Men, women, children, a sub-human or two…I had no idea such a large percentage of Karachi’s moneyed brigade and their noxious offspring were interested in literature, journalism or even peace…by the time they closed the doors Jugnu Moshin was inviting the younger people to come and sit on the floor of the stage itself so that everyone could be seated. Her appeals to the young to find less comfortable homes for their designer clad posteriors didn’t fall on deaf ears either. And as I watched young people whom I knew behaved in selfish, parasitic ways as a matter of course rise meekly and head for the hills (or in this case the stage) I wondered whether real power lay in who was doing the asking rather than what was being asked.

Bits of Hameed Haroon’s speech reinforced my confusion. Short of rotating my neck 360 degrees like the witch some claim I am, I couldn’t for the life of me make out where exactly the ‘great liberal tide’ he was talking about was ‘rising’. How many of the people there were marching under that banner simply because they didn’t like the other one rather than any deep rooted belief in its inherent value? When he referred to the crowd as a ‘gathering of underlings’, my snort earned me a good poke in the ribs from Kiran. More like gathering of underarms.

I settled down during N. Rams speech. The gist of his fifteen minutes was an examination of the causes of conflict. He referred to the way the Hindu right had hijacked nuclear policy, and also pointed out how Kargil had contributed to the ascendancy of that Hindu Right. Many applauded at the statements “it is highly irresponsible to threaten a country with war” (in the context of actions taken by his government that he didn’t support), “a position of supplication doesn’t do a democracy any good” (in the context of running to big brother superpower when things don’t go a governments way) and “I deplore the attitude that says I will not allow my team to play cricket with you”. A lot of his speech had to do with cricket…good solid common ground for both sides.

Shekhar Gupta presented his take on the current conspiracy theory explaining tension between India and Pakistan. The real beneficiary of the hostility, he pointed out, was not the Jihadi or the BJP zealot or the ordinary man or even the government but Emirates airlines because anyone wishing to travel between the two countries had to take a long, convoluted route through the middle east. It would take less time to walk across the border, he pointed out. His summation of the current conflict can also be considered spot on, “Blood feuds are the preserve of those societies which, one, are male dominated, and two, have very little to do.” He also said “you cannot have people responsible for ruining the equation now hijacking the idea of solving it.” While he said it in reference to the many retired bureaucrats and soldiers who take up peace activism as a hobby after devoting years to maintaining the status quo, I again couldn’t help but wonder how relevant it was to this gathering. Looking around, the workers, artists, writers, poets, thinkers etc in the audience were vastly outnumbered by the socialites, the wastrels, the lecherous alcoholics, the apathetic young, and the would-be politicos. A lot of the women who were nodding fervently through mention of the horrors of gang rape and liberty and equality for all also flocked in droves to an elite club which still doesn’t admit female members.

Arundhati Roy herself was well worth the wait. Not because she’s the Goddess of small things (as someone in the audience referred to her) or a peace activist (she mentioned herself that she doesn’t like the term because it isn’t as if peace activism is an occupation), but simply because she came across as a good human being with her head screwed on the right way. After nearly two hours of analysis of the current situation, with many loaded statements about Kashmir and ‘you’ and ‘us’ references, it was refreshing to hear her confess she never quite knew what those meant, she never quite knew who in India she was speaking for. What she managed to do was change the paradigm of the discussion from the political to the personal, draw it from the realms of government to the notion of personal responsibility and power. By the time I got home, I was all charged up and made a fiery speech about how I would fight creative atrophy tooth and nail…how I would fight becoming a black hole that sucked energy and never gave back. The four walls, cricket watching husband and jungle cats that were my audience didn’t seem quite as moved though…perhaps if I cut my hair…

Apart from putting the Daily Times on the map (which the seminar succeeded admirably in doing) the point was simply to keep both sides talking, and to demonstrate that we have loads in common. Like Ms. Roy pointed out, our religious bigots are practically interchangeable, except of course for the whole clothes bit (I think ours wear more). And I echo her desire to tap them on the shoulder in the midst of their dance of violence and frustration and say ‘boys…you don’t know what you’re missing.’

The other high point of the event were the egg sandwiches.