Adil Najam
In searching for graphics to go with Deeda-i-Beena’s post on Sui Gas Water Heaters, I stumbled upon this rather interesting animated filmat YouTube called Sui Gas ka Connection.
Sui Gas Ka Connection
04:12
Although I think it should have been much shorter than it it (around 4-5 mins rather than 15 mins) and becomes a little bit of a drag at times, it is interesting commentary on
Sui Gas,
NADRA, the
rishwat culture in Pakistan and more.
It is a depiction of the now internalized view that in order to get anything you have to give rishwat. That corruption is not a social distortion, but a social fact. That it is somehow ‘the cost of doing business.’
Or, as our friend Darwaish has been discussing elsewhere, it is not just that we have developed a warped sense of morality; but that we have lost at least a part of morality. So much so, that someone doing the right thing is supposed to be ‘good’, because those doing bad are merely ‘normal’!
Adil Najam, Owais Mughal, Bilal Zuberi
All Things Pakistan (ATP) turns six-months old today.
The very first post on the old (wordpress.com) address was posted on June 11; we celebrated our 100th post on July 16; on August 18 we expanded our core team; and we moved to this new domain and address on September 1.
We keep celebrating these milestones (hopefully) not because we are self-obsessed, but because in many ways we are ourselves surprised by the wonderful roller-coaster ride this has been … and remains. This is the 356th post on the blog, over 30 authors have contributed posts, and nearly 6000 comments have been posted (despite our fairly heavy moderation which culls out a significant number of inappropriate ones); over these six months, our sites (this and the old one) have received some 366,000+ hits; we now routinely get around 1000-1200 individual visits and around 2500-3000 page views per day.
We are thankful to our readers for all of this. But as we have said before, we are even more thankful that a now vibrant community has begun to develop around ATP and its core concept of Pakistaniat.
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Guest Post by Raza Rumi
Thirty five years ago, Mustafa Zaidi, a poet of notable standing and a dismissed CSP officer, was found dead in Karachi’s Hotel Sumar.
The mystery of his death remains unresolved to date but there is an informal consensus that he committed suicide. He was only 40-years old and had produced several outstanding, original collections of poetry. He had also tasted and fallen victim to intimacy with the state. He was married to a woman of German descent and had two children; yet his final companion was not a member of his family but Shehnaz, the last love of his life.
That October day in 1970, Shehnaz was found unconscious along with Mustafa Zaidi’s dead body. His last five poems were a series titled ‘Shehnaz’ and it is through these powerful poems that we know of the woman who was immortalised by Zaidi.
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