Telic Chowk: A Personal Odyssey

.......what chowk?

.........personally, i believe the chowk is horribly misnamed – it should be called a round about, a square, hyde park corner, starbucks, or the pit stop for confused expaks and equally confused exindies searching for an identity ..........why? because most of the people who inhabit this place are idle expaks, exhindoos and ex-expaks (like ylh) who have a silly warped world view that has nothing to do with reality.............what the heck do most of us know about the price of dal or a real chowk ?.......... diddly..........i was surprised to find out that chandni chowk does not exist any more (now it is just another characterless intersection), there is no fawara in fawara chowk, and most people give you a blank look when you mention hathi chowk ...........these chowks only live in the memories of old fools and expaks who don’t know that they have built a “fly-over” at faizabad and the faizabad chowk is gone ................of course there is the monstrous missile chowk that these neo-chowkies know nothing about ...........

..................most, if not all, interlocutors, instigators, pontificators, actors, clowns, sages and fools you find on chowk are fakes and frauds ............take urstruly for example ........from the passion he exhibits for the unwashed brown masses, the poor and the downtrodden, you would think he is squatting on a sidewalk in raja bazaar eating a ten rupee plate of fiery dal chawal and coughing up phlegm on the baa-baa black sheep’s shiny black oxfords .............but no siree!..............he is sitting somewhere in the midwest munching on a kosher ham sandwich, listening to wailing tilawat on a boom-box, sipping mocha and designing bad parts for chrysler ...........on the other side, you have jay sitting in kalgoorlie australia playing with his koala and all worried about paki jihadies marching on chennai ..........even the mumbling mullah naqshbandi (may the blessings of a thousand pirs be upon him) is practicing alchemy behind a gay bar in the west end of london.........they are all like my friend tehsin abbasi who soaks in his indoor pool after a hard day at tanglewood and tells me, “ you know what is wrong with Pakistan?”...........no I don’t!........... just pass me that cheap chilean wine and keep that nasty moldy cheese away from me!................

.............i even have a suspicion that ahmed madani is part of this deluded diaspora - he is probably running a flop-house in the bronx and making it with native white women instead of running a hotel in karachi and trying to find his sons “milky white” kashmiri brides..........

.................maybe ylh qualifies as a worthy chowkie as he drives down to mozang chowk in his new Honda civic , listening to nazia hassan, waving the green and white and shouting “long live jinnah” .......... maybe...............but the real chowkies are those who get an earful about amreeka as they get their ears cleaned with hot oil in the biggest chowk in the world - khanta ghar in faisalabad, or those who discuss the sexless life of veggiepie as they swat at flies whlie eating ras malai in laxmi chowk .............

..........maybe I feel this way because I just got back from pakistan and didn’t meet one person who had the time or the inclination to loiter on the chowk........ ``what chowk``, they asked ........... in a few weeks reality will wear off and i should be back confabulating and pontificating about silly stuff that no one cares about .........what the heck, i might even read some of temporal’s excruciating poetry ...............

Happy Independence Day to all my Indian neighbors... May India be the promise it holds.. and may India and Pakistan live as neighbors and as friends...

-Manto, a Pakistani Well wisher

#27 To Bat,

u read the foundation trilogy!!!!!!!!!!

Congrats Urstruly... I just saw that Chowk has reincarnated its old non-ideological self.

If only it were this easy with the other great August 14th dream...

Anyway... thanks Chowkstaff...

:)

-Manto

Oooops Errata..

I meant to say `I am glad you are NOT wedded ideologically to the current position.`

It came out all wrong.

Thankyou Chowkstaff for that reply. Looking forward to a focus which works for all of us. I am glad you are ideologically wedded to the current position, no matter how much that position might be to my liking.

-Manto

Chowk

Janamdin ki shubhkamnayen, Salgirah mubarak and Happy Birthday. May we all continue to grow. My story is the same as others - one day I came here, and without realizing pitched my tent somewhere. After a hard days work, or sometimes during the work sometimes out of sheer intellectual loneliness, I wander from camp to camp. I see laughter, arguments, tu-tu, main-main, enlightenment, flirting, matchmaking, finger-pointing, sorrow, regret, moments of aha, moments of disgust, vows of not returning and yet returning (isn`t this what love is?). Chowk is like life. We have people who get busy with life, but come back for sharing a special moment, we have family arguments. We each have our least favorite relative (or is it more like the in-law family?). I think that`s the core of the charm - of our shared identities (now don`t get miffed Urstruly and Manto - we do share a few things - and nothing short of aliens invading and wiping out one country or the other will take this away).

Welcome back - Farzana and Jawahara !! You were missed.

What I want to know, is why we don`t have more Indians on this site...why why why? Where are they? Where are the massaledar issues about India? Whether it`s a cricket match or representation on Chowk - how can we let the Indians fall behind :-)

Brat

PS: Chowk-staff``s reply makes me think of Chowk as Gaia - from Asimov``s book - Foundation and Earth.

...silly old man looking for attention..buzz off...

Dear Urstruly and Mantolives,

If it saddened you, it saddened us to make those changes. But there were strong reasons why we undertook to reduce ambiguity. You are part right that some of it certainly helps in marketing Chowk. And most of it was in response to feedback that ``all are welcome to read write and think`` is too vague for first time visitors.

It will be interesting to you to know the origin of all are welcome to read write and think. In the words of one of the founders of Chowk ... In the days of yore, when we were free and brave, I do admit spending nights at the only printing press in Karachi, which was willing to print flyers to condemn what Zia was doing to ruin our lives. Deep in the bowels of Nazimabad, was this man I recall as ‘Habu’ who smoked Capstan cigarettes and always had one refrain, in English - “everyone should be free to read, write, think and speak. Any society that imposes censorship and jails people if they speak freely is doomed. Simple stuff. But then simple things are what it is all about.

You are not just an eight-lettered word on Chowk. You, he, she, we all make Chowk.

In future we hope to come up with a focus that everybody is comfortable with.

Sincerely,

Chowk Staff

dost

in a certain sense you are right…to come to Chowk you need internet access…but to call it elitist would perhaps be going overboard…

…as for your desire for Chowk to be more women-friendly…it is really up to us…if we treat each other (and them) with respect they would come and stay, not leave so quickly…look at their numbers on I-logs…they make regular entries there but few of them interact on other boards…our apparent mcp-ism may have something to do with it i suspect?

google for html commands…

…i can share the two am familiar with…for italics enclose the word/s or paragraph you want to italicize in brackets like this <> <> please note there should be no space between the word or phrase and <>s…and you will get italic the first <> should enclose a small `i` and the second or closing <> to enclose forward slash with i like this `/i`

same for bold…enclose bold in <> the first bracket with b and the last <> /b
...t

kyun, t, boxing gloves kyun? kiss se dhullai kar wa rahay hain meri?

temporal..

Sorry couldn`t resist myself.. once I actually found that poem.

:(

-Manto

Chowk staff,

Urstruly has a point. I remember initially that the hope was to let Chowk whatever identity it pleases as time goes on without actually holding it to one particular idea or ideology....
Like the other great dream realized on 14th August, this realized dream is now an ideological website.

Listen to Urstruly... and I hope Urstruly will also apply the same principle across the board.

-Manto

PS Pakistani Private Channel `Geo` was also born on 14th August... so far it has not become ideological giving space to every ideology and point of view... let us see how long Geo resists going down the same road as Pakistan and Chowk.

And for others, Chowk is a home on the web. We might wander away for a while but we always come back. And when we do, it`s great to see all the old people still here, along with the new ones. Temporal, you are one of my favorites on here. Thank your for being, well...temporal.

ferzi
…oh…ok…if you insist…welcome back and a cyber hug…did you really go away?…feels like you are here;)

Naqshbandi, ana, stuka, taimur
thanks a million folks

nazar
well said

sameer
was ko d’roost karlaiN…aapkay dost phir namoodaar hoga’aye haiN under another nick…now he fancies himself as a islamophile…

Subroto
that chowk patch was a good one…get a patent…

aamir
thanks for your kind words…now go don your boxing gloves...

manto
badmash!
knew that when i mentioned it it was just a matter of time...sooner or later someone had to spoil that perfectly held record since `98;)...

thanks all and yes chowk mubarak

Wow! Nice one temporal bhai!

Happy Birthday Chowk! I love you! ooops... :-)