The Modern Bogeyman

Not serious!

Not funny!

Not scary! Not gory! Not bloody! Not gutsy!

Not hot! Not chilling!

Not awakening – nor sleepy – nor solid – not softy!

Not dotty! Not lofty!

Not much – as such!

This write-up starts out hemming and hawing, keeps sputtering and fails to pick up speed – and it does not go very far – and at the end one can not help but wonder – hey, I have been taken for a ride!

Some of these stories are “scary” – if one wishes to stretch that term. A bit late for Halloween, but perhaps just the appropriate material and just in time for Children’s Day! The jibe on the poets of the world is a particular low-blow!

Let me tell you a really scary story. One day I was on the Chowk site and found something funny! Then I woke up, of course.

shandana,

..... this was a wonderful piece of writing `from the heart` - as a parent, i was deeply moved ........... thanks for jolting our conscience .....

v .good shandana- - really enjoyed reading it. it was poignant and thought-provoking. WHEN will the system change?

In the immortal words of Faiz;

Hum dekhenge...

a kaleidoscope of changing emotions with subtle but powerful satire -- the sinuously unfolding article -- part lament part protest unfurls like an ascending and descending scale of a gaiki in Kheyal -- Mrs Minhas you have an inimitable style of prose that is almost poetic.

btw when you wrote -- ``No no not the one about the inexperienced technocrat wreaking havoc on a disenfranchised populace, that other one about the woman and the flat tire.`` -- hope u didn`t mean Shaukat Aziz and Benazir Bhutto......?

You should have interceded on behalf of the boy.

I can never understand why people who have no means to support themselves or their families have kids. It is an act of extreme cruelty to give birth to a human being and put them in hell, when you are begging or dirt poor. The kid goes through hunger, misery and deprivation, all because the goddman parents cannot control themselves.

Heck, I live in the US and am relatively well to do yet I find kids to be so demanding. Imagine being a beggar in India or Pakistan and having kids. Yikes!!

Re: # 7


Why to fear God at all? We fear God only because we do not personalise it and believe in him, but instead believe in the gods of the prophets. Even prophets` god says he loves us human beings so much so that he lives in our hearts. Only the Wahabi god is conniving and vengeful. We should be afraid of that god because he is anti human. In fact the great Buddha who did not indulge in any god-mongering had seen only humans in pain and suffering and was concerned with relieving that pain.

Just tired and rambling like the writer!

[Instead of fearing nothing but God, we fear everything but God. ]

Why do you have to be fearful at all? Fear is used by human beings to control other human beings. Should we think so little of ``god`` that he/she/it should be as conniving and vengeful as us humans?

Good attempt.
Reminds me of a column `connections` in scientific american by James Burke.
He would talk about 10 completely different topics and connect them all, leading smoothly from one item to the next.

The article reminded me of the very young and absolutely beautiful afghan children I saw in Karachi trying to sell flowers to cars at various busy tourist and business hubs.

Four, may be five year old girls in rags selling roses.......broke my heart..

Also brings to mind, the young children Pakistani parents send to various Jamiah`s and Madrassah`s to become Memorizers of the Quran so that they can get into Heaven..The maltreatment metted out to these children by the ignorant Mullahs and the lack of a balanced education, coupled with serious physical, mental and sexual abuse bothers none it seems...

These idiotic Mullahs are the first to gather rallies against female marathons, but have they ever rallied for the orphans of Pakistan....Have they ever vehemently acknowledged and spoken up against Child sexual abuse.....

Yet, they are the first to wave the Quran in your face......and the funny things is that they dont even understand the language of the book they are deriving all their authority from.......

Our Children are our future......not the children of our family, but all children.....

until such is realized by the populace......that it takes whole communities to raise good children.....we have lost the battle for our children.... and our future is very bleak!

In DAWN KARACHI TODAY....

NAROWAL, Nov 14: A five-year old girl was hanged to death after ‘rape’ at Talwandi Kahloan village in the Saddar police station precinct on Monday night.

Reports said Zeenat, a student of nursery, went out of her home but did not return until late at night.

Her parents and other members of the family moved from place to place to find her out but to no avail.

On Tuesday morning, they found the girl hanging with a tree outside the village. Her clothes were bloodstained.

The police suspected that the girl might have been killed after rape. The residents of the area have expressed anguish over the incident and demanded that the police should arrest the culprit(s) without delay.

300,432 children out of school in Larkana



By M. B. Kalhoro


LARKANA, Nov 14: The government has failed to address the grim situation of education as 130 schools are lying closed in the district for a long time.

The number of children of school-going age in the district is 495,684 and 300,432 of them are out of schools.

There are 89 school buildings which have been declared dangerous, but children are studying there.

Sources in the education department told Dawn on Tuesday that the Sindh Education Management Information System had prepared ‘Sindh Education Profile’ of each district which based on information in the 2005-06 census.

The chief programme manager of the reform support unit, Mr Iqbal Durrani, in a letter to the Larkana EDO (education) on October 14, said the district education profile was based on census, therefore, first-hand information be provided to the unity.

But the reform support unit had not received comments which had delayed finalisation of the district education profile.

The sources said that not a single district had sent the comments.

The number of school going children from pre-primary to higher secondary level is estimated at 195,252, the sources said.

It looks quite tricky on the part of bureaucrats that enrolment has increased while the number of teachers has decreased from 5,965 (in year 2002) to 5,842 (in year 2005).

No new school has been constructed since then.

A cursory eye over qualification of teachers tells that only 2,522 teachers had their graduation and 2,362 did their masters.

It means there is an army of 958 non-graduate teachers alone in Larkana district imparting education in government-run education institutions.

The quarters concerned has neglected rural areas in education, which could be gauged from the fact that the number of ‘shelter-less’ school in rural areas was 250 out of 255 in the Larkana district.

It means only five schools are located in urban areas.

The survey said since 2000 to 2006, not a single new school was added to already existing schools.

Instead, one school was closed, reducing number from 1,336 to 1,335. Hundreds of schools are devoid of basic facilities, electricity, toilets, drinking water and boundary walls.

In the district, 1,069 schools, with the highest number of primary (1,016), are running without electricity, 508 are without toilets, 335 has no facility of drinking water and 639 has no boundary walls.

Reminds me of the big scare we had in Rawalpindi when I was 12 (which was approximately the same time as when the Napoleon was vacationing in St. Helena). anyway - there was this dwarf who was supposed to be grabbing children and putting them in a sack and taking them home and boiling them for dinner. I dont mind admitting that for some time (until the dwarf disappeared as mysteriously as he appeared) when stepping out of the house, I (like other kids in the neigborhood) was on the lookout for any ``bona`` carrying a sack. :-)

#9 by teshah

[Just tired and rambling like the writer!]

Nope. You make perfect sense.

:-)

Re: # 15

Burpy,

U read minds? I liked the sentence flow......

Powerful stuff, Shandana. Though I must confess, I didn`t quite get the connection between the strange obsessions/urban legends part with the second half.

You seem to be exorcising your own demons through these columns. Guilt of being a bad parent, perhaps? Frustration at leaving a career semi-cooked? The uneasy realisation that time is running out, one heartbeat at a time? Don`t worry lady, you got company, it`s called the 30`s. And it`s happening to an awful lot of us :)

For me, it`s not so much what I see anymore: the mind accepts what it can, forgets what it can`t and keeps us sane. But when things that happened to other people start happening to me/people I know- a seemingly healthy colleague my age keeling over in the loo never to return after a party, kids tumbling out of loving parents` arms to their death, messy divorces of those voted most likely to stay together for life- then it just starts to get a little scary.

Keep writing.

Hi SM
what I think now a days it become Fashion to criticize the people and authorities either in Angarazi or in Urdu. How many of us spends time in criticize talking, reading, writing.Did any of us take a positive action only for 30 minutes in a whole week?

I still remember the day April 19 2006 when I read the news about Nur Jahaa a 14-year-old poor girl kidnapped andd shot her four times in an attempted honor killing in our beloved city of Karachi. Nur Jehan was shot in the stomach, leg, knee and arm in Karachi and left for dead by her cousins, who accused her of having sex with a man.
She was lying in a government hospital, at that time I was in Karachi. I have to visit her may be I could done some thing Alas shame on me because It was not my Busy ness Right ! I did not went their to help the poor little helpless girl.
Nur Jehan said she crawled out of the ditch to a road and screamed for help. “They will try to kill me again,”. She also feared for the lives of her parents and siblings, who were also kidnapped by her attackers.
Nur Jehan was declared a “kari” her cousins who accused her of having sexual relations with a man in Mirgoldop, a village in the southwestern province of Baluchistan where her father was a farmer.
Her cousins had also killed the man with whom she was accused of having sex. Fearing for his daughter`s life, Nur Jehan’s father moved the family to Karachi after she was declared a “kari”.
After couple of days I read the news that Nur jahaa was died, and her killer are living freely with out any fear; cos of us. Why the politician and the Molvess even the citizen of Sindh, don`t take any action ,these guys make big speech about the country but fail to give a justice to her murderer. She would be the daughter or sister one of us. The word Beeguyrat is very small to label them and us including me. Shame on us Chuolo Bhir Pani Main Mer Jana Chaiya ! We need to kill the Javed Iqbal inside us First.
Ahad

With all this, Karachi still has a lot of catching up to do with cities like Rio and Manila. One day, Inshalla, the arrogance of middle classes will be dealt a severe blow by the Subcommandante Marcos and the Zapatista National Liberation Army.

Things don’t look as bad from impoverished’s perspective. Those who take pride in economic, military and other progress at the cost of poor give up any right to find faults with the society. The Shahdaras are always built on poor people’s asses. You can only have one or the other. If it upsets you to see young kids being abused, start abusing your own, and it wont seem as bad.

#13 dear sir, no wonder ur wit & wisdom r timeless

Nice article, it only shows that you are going to a college because your English creative writing skills are improving with each post.

Sorry to hear about the description of the baby on the street.

If that woman was in USA, she would have lost the custody of the child and social services would have taken him.


Good job!

What do you want to say?
What is new in it?
I cannot say it is boring. But not as good as I supposed.
The climax of the article was good but it has no good ending at all.
You should have clarified it more.

Adults who slap children, ostensibly to put them on the right path, should also be slapped when they screw up in their daily lives.

I just read your posting `The Modern Bogeyman` which turned out to be quite an interesting read ... and it got my mood pretty enchanting too : ) After reading this posting, I went to read your profile, which turned out to be even `More` interesting and fascinating .. I can certainly envisage you to be everything you depicted in `what you do for work` a good writer, teacher, actor, drama queen :) etc etc ... I just did not want to post this for everyone ... BUT just wanted to get my wandering thoughts across you, which may not at all be new to you ... :)

Good, thought-provoking read as usual, Shandana. Thanks.

---

re. kulhee: ``Those who take pride in economic, military and other progress at the cost of poor give up any right to find faults with the society. ``

Truer words haven`t been spoken here in a long time!

---

re. those (ranjit?) lambasting parents for their irresponsibility in bringing kids into this world they cannot support:

May I suggest that we consider that many of the poorest in our societies, robbed of all dignity and a sense of purpose in life, operate in a quite different way from the way us folks with at least the illusion of choice (and with it, responsbility) do. When meaning to life comes from working out where your next meal is coming from, literally, it doesn`t matter whether you have a child in tow or not. In fact, the kids usually help in the profession of `choice` for these folks. Or so is the `logic` they operate on, anyway, I`m betting.

And I haven`t even touched on the subject of lack of sex-education.

---

#22: hey malik! long time, man.. good to see you back!

I guess the point of this whole long article was ``our fascinations are becoming increasingly morbid. Instead of fearing nothing but God, we fear everything but God.`` Which I don`t why should make such a long article unless there are some compelling passionate personal reflections or some twisty turning style that keeps readers` interest somehow.

Shandana,

Not the usual humorous light stuff from you. What gives?

And yes, if you had seen little babies with their eyes gouged out begging with their mothers outside the red fort in Delhi, you would have discovered then what you have discovered now a long while ago.

Be well.

For the rest of us, where is the middle road?
In a land of extremes where extremely bad things are happening, how does a thinking feeling person approach these incidents in a `normal`, `moderate` , `oh well thats life` manner. Do you save one child and let the other child die? At what point is the hero/heroine`s involvement Optimal? In her essay Shandanan treats society like a badly injured patient in an emergency room. She is the doctor and at what point does she get to go home from the hospital. At what point is her `job` over? It is not the logic of numbers, that `yes i have helped 7 patients, time to go home now...` it is an emotional logic that extremely cruel events invite extremely emotional responses. Hopefuly something nice will happen to us when we decide to stop abusing the word ``Moderate`` and ``Balance`` and confront the reality which is niether balanced nor moderate.

Our beggars are not what they seem.
Many many years ago when I first visited Karachi, my nephew instructed me in no uncertain terms to just keep on walking with him quietly to the car. The swarm of beggars was overwhelming, in particular one middle aged lady. She was carrying a ten twelve year old healthy girl on the waist such as the girl`s legs were touching the ground.
I could not control myself as the lady pushed her heavy-gold-bracelet laden hand through the car window—“Behen, merey paas Pakistani Rupiye nahin hain, muaaf karo” I said politely.
“Rupiye kis ko chahiye…tumharaa Phaarun eskjen dey do” she said in the most humiliating way to this ignorant traveller.
Rashid