Reflections / 08.08.2020

By Anjum Altaf I read a strange proposal the other day -- that Tipu Sultan’s famous tiger, safely ensconced in the British museum, ought to be returned to Pakistan because Pakistan is the Muslim successor state to Colonial India and also because the tiger is a symbol of resistance. This is just so problematic at so many levels. First of all, Bangladesh is just as much a Muslim successor state of Colonial India as Pakistan and the fact that it has (wisely) not lodged such a preposterous claim should not be held against it. Given the fact that there are two successor Muslim states, how would a Solomon allocate the trembling tiger? Would the head be assigned to Pakistan as the senior successor state and the tail to Bangladesh for having arrived late on the scene?   And why should a Muslim successor state be privileged in any way...

Analysis / 04.08.2020

By Anjum Altaf The Coronavirus pandemic is bad enough but, as dozens of countries have demonstrated, it can be controlled -- there were just 3 new cases in Sri Lanka on June 12. Even in places where the number of infected persons was very large before the alert was sounded, Italy for example, new cases per day have dropped from 6,557 on March 21 to 163 on June 12. In Pakistan, they continue to rise -- from 144 on March 21 to 6,397, the highest to date, on June 12. What makes the pandemic so recalcitrant in Pakistan, where the initial cases were minimal for lack of tourists, are the epidemics within the epidemics.  The first of these is the blight of ignorance. A country where the majority cannot verify information for itself is hugely handicapped. All it should take is a visit to one of the...

Analysis / 01.08.2020

By Anjum Altaf While the pandemic has months to run, enough time has passed since its inception to render an interim judgement on its management in Pakistan and India. Despite giving the governments as much benefit of doubt as I possibly can, I am afraid I have to assign both a failing grade. The governments would no doubt contest this award so let me justify my verdict. As always, the proof of the pudding is in the eating so let us look at the actual situation at this time. Both countries are reporting the highest number of deaths per day to date -- Pakistan over a 100 and India close to 400. Despite everything they have thrown at it, the graph of new cases continues to rise and their number exceeds the number of new recoveries so the load on hospitals continues to grow. Unlike most other...

Analysis / 21.07.2020

By Anjum Altaf Introduction Mr. Javed Jabbar has posted a public video titled “Two Nation Reality” to refute certain statements about Pakistan by Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy. I feel the issues raised in this exchange are worthy of a detailed analysis. In this introduction I wish to explain my motivation for undertaking this analysis and laying out how I have organized it. The video was forwarded to me with a ‘must-watch’ label by someone whose opinion I respect. He was impressed by how Javed Jabbar had successfully refuted Pervez Hoodbhoy with infinite gentility. That statement intrigued me sufficiently to make an exception to my standard policy of deleting, without watching, all videos sent to me via social media. The issues debated in the exchange go to the heart of the controversies that are generally avoided in Pakistan much to our disadvantage. Mr. Jabbar’s initiative is therefore to be greatly appreciated and...

Reflections / 20.07.2020

By Anjum Altaf When I was young, growing old was an amusing idea -- Prufrock’s “I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” -- entailing a quaint adjustment. Parting one’s hair behind or daring to eat a peach didn’t seem all that onerous and walking along the beach in white-flanneled trousers seemed actually quite suave to one who had encountered neither. Prufrock was worried that the mermaids wouldn’t sing to him but given that they had not ever sung to me, I didn’t envisage that as a particularly major loss. Those were days in the life of the country when one could still have a cosmopolitan education. My father was a MA in English in the 1940s from Lahore’s Government College and his library continued to occupy the bookcases and shelves in all the houses we moved in and out...

Development / 15.07.2020

By Anjum Altaf How amazing that governments all over the world that could not find any money for public health or education have now, all of a sudden, discovered they can conjure up over ten percent of GDP to revive the economy after the COVID pandemic. What this means is that we don’t have to worry where the money will come from. Governments have signalled they have it and presumably they have figured out how they will pay for it -- by monetizing the debt or growing out of it or inflating it away. What this does mean is that we can move on to thinking about the economy that is to be revived with all this money. Are we aiming to restore the wretched economy that was damaged by the pandemic? Was that economy really all that great? Weren't we fighting against its inequities all these...

Language/Meaning / 14.07.2020

Anjum Altaf, Transgressions: Poems Inspired by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Delhi: Aakar Books, 2019; Karachi: Liberty Books, 2020. Transgressions, by Anjum Altaf, is a book of poetry that is a comment on the nature of translation more than anything else. This commentary is made all the more poignant since the book is not a work of translation in the first place, but is rather reflections on the poetry of the late, great master of Urdu poetry, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Described on its cover as a book of ‘Poems inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz,’ Anjum takes on the task of picking different poems by Faiz, and writing poetry inspired by those poems. He insists, and correctly so, that these are not translations. Instead, it is a very humble offering. The act of making another poet your muse is not just rare, but also a nod and an acknowledgement towards the...

Analysis / 15.06.2020

By Anjum Altaf The relatively low number of Covid-19 deaths reported in South Asia continue to puzzle analysts. While the low numbers might be true for reasons yet to be fully confirmed, there are now serious charges of undercounting.  Reports of undercounting have been circulating in India for a while but now an investigative piece in the London Telegraph has leveled charges of deliberate malfeasance. It claims to have seen written orders to a West Bengal hospital that in case of Covid-positive determinations, the cause is not be recorded on death certificates. A doctor at a government hospital in Cooch Behar is reported as saying: "We were ordered to strictly refrain from using the word 'Corona' in the death certificates until it gets a nod from the state government's opaque committee.” In Pakistan, doctors told the newspaper that “deaths were being undercounted because of stigma around the...

Education / 07.06.2020

By Anjum Altaf Many are having a hard time comprehending the coronavirus in Pakistan. They have not seen it before; it has no distinctive symptoms; there have been very few deaths in most communities; it hasn’t yet penetrated rural areas where half the population lives. This lived experience makes it hard to relate to what they are being told by the rest of the world -- that they are threatened by a lethal pandemic that calls for extreme constraints on how they live. Mixed messages from political and social leaders have fed the doubts. From the Prime Minister down, many in government have underplayed the threat likening it to the flu and comparing the number of deaths to those from road accidents. The Chief Justice has turned denier-in-chief, ordering the immediate opening of markets for Eid shopping. Partisan infighting has convinced many that this is just politics...