Featured Chowk Columnist Rehan Ansari lives in and writes from Lahore and New York. Like any typical Pakistani student, Rehan Ansari took the KGS-Vassar route to a degree in English and gave in to the promise of obscene wealth to return to Pakistan and engage in free-lance journalism, new media projects, and research in post-partition South Asian culture and society. Rehan Ansari is a FISAA Fellow (Fellowship in South Asian Alternatives) working with Delhi-based CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) on a project on memory and partition violence.

[The Author’s Rebuttal:] CV mangta hai mera editor? I think he has spent too much time in silicon valley and too little time on Hall Road (that Lahore reference I am sure is completely lost on the incorrigible Karachi wallah that he is). I disown all of the above my friend has said about me. It is a character assassination I forgive him for. He is a school chum, and forgiveness, like irony, ambivalence, ambiguity, irreverence, diffusion, and dilution, are qualities I wish to promote in my Pakistani self. So, dear editor, forget about introducing me, let’s introduce my mood, and you’ll find out why I call this space what I call it.

College main jo smattering of Muslim history parhi (after having read enough European and American history since Karachi Grammar School to warrant a change of skin colour I would think) to parha kay an gint maulvi hazrat nay, in the last 500 years of Muslim regimes everywhere, kaha hay kay hamaray mazhab main hakim agar musalman ho to uski ataat ki jati hai, baet li jati hai... And it is all too obvious who is the hakim in this town and country, and I believe the only reason the maulvis have not taken baet on him is because he is not despotic enough. That explains Nawaz Sharif in the title of the column but why Love.

Ataat kya, in my josh and walwala, I am willing to give Unconditional Love to my hakim (this may have to do with having failed at love in my twenties and feeling a great upswelling to say love, I love you to just about....well) so, since I haven’t said ’I love you,’ in a long time, I may as well to our hakim.

I live in Lahore and I want to talk about living here. I’ll talk of sexuality, violence, Krishannagar and Mall Road, about women and men, the ex trees of Main Blvd and Nisbet Rd, fear and loathing, about this haunted, haunting ex-city, about writing, and no money in publishing, to things I think about while living in Lahore: Iranian cinema and Indian documentary making. And with no libraries worth their legend, and too many archives who have two feet, I am not going to get my facts right about any Lahori topic (from food, cloning, contraception, food, ordinances and Islam, and food). But I am not interested in fact, and neither should you be. Feeling is where it’s at: what does it feel for me to live in Lahore, Pakistan at the end of the millenium.

Rehan’s writings will be featured on Chowk and indexed here at I Love Nawaz Sharif.

Articles by Rehan Ansari