by Omar Ali

If all goes well, Pakistanis will go to the polls on May 11^th to elect a new national assembly and all 4 provincial assemblies. The Pakistan People’s Party was the largest party in the outgoing parliament and under the guidance of President Asif Ali Zardari, successfully held together a disparate coalition regime in the face of multiple challenges to complete its 5 year term of office. Unfortunately, that huge achievement is almost their only major achievement in office. While things were not as absolutely abysmal as portrayed by Pakistan’s anti-PPP middle class (rural areas, for example, are better off economically than they have ever been), they are pretty awful. Chronic electricity shortages (inherited from Musharraf’s Potemkin regime, but still not fixed), galloping inflation, widespread corruption and endless terrorism have tried the patience of even the most devoted PPP supporters and make it difficult for the PPP to run on their record. There are a few bright spots (including a relatively well run welfare scheme called the Benazir income support program) and with Zardari deploying his coalition building magic, it is not a good idea to completely rule them out. Still, they are clearly not the favorites in the coming elections. The middle class excitement (especially in Punjab and KP) is all about Imran Khan, while more serious pundits seem to be betting on Nawaz Sharif and his PMLN. Being out of the country, I have little direct knowledge of what retail politics looks like on the ground; but there is such a thing as a long-distance view and I am going to take that view and try and make some predictions. We will know in 3 weeks how out of touch I really am.

If you do want to look up what is happening on the ground in detail there are several excellent sources available, for example: Saba Imtiaz’s election watch, the Dawn newspaper’s election page (including an interesting motor cycle diary from Tahir Mehdi as he motors across Pakistan), an election page from journalist and public intellectual Raza Rumi and last but not the least, the wonderful young team at fiverupees.com, who don’t have a lot of coverage yet, but do have writers who prefer carefully checked facts and data to mere opinion.

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By Maniza Naqvi

I spot a café, called, “99% God's Plan.” It is on the side of the road which goes straight from Lilongwe, the Capital, passed the sprawling Monsanto complex, passed the tobacco auction facility, passed the gigantic silos of the national granary—passed churches and more churches and missions and mosques, passed the vendors selling trees burned down into charcoal and ending two hours later at the gates of the Livingstonia Sunbird Resort, in the district of Salima on the shores of Lake Malawi. I joke that at least there is some recognition, that there is one percent chance that it isn't.

And that's exactly what seems to be the scheme of things in Malawi—Where 99% of the people are made to rely on God's plan and prayer while the 1% of people made up of foreigners seem to own everything: land, missions and businesses. How did this happen? There are more churches here then there are schools, or health posts or hospitals or shops or maize and other grain storages or water bore holes in villages. Jomo Kenyatta, the first Prime Minister and President of independent Kenya said: When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”

Awkward is the word Malawians, I've met, use to say very politely: very bad, or awful.

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by James McGirk

My wife and I moved to the capital of Cherokee Nation, a small city in Northeast Oklahoma called Tahlequah, a few months ago. Tahlequah, as the would-have-been capital of a proposed all-Indian state, Sequoyah, is arguably the center of indigenous culture in the United States, or at least it has a plausible claim to be. Last Saturday, the local college, Northeastern State University, hosted a powwow as part of their annual symposium on the American Indian. A powwow is a tribal gathering. Having never seen one before we decided to watch. We saw Native American traditional rites mixed with, for lack of better way to describe them, that unique American civic culture of card tables and paper cups. If anyone reading this knows what’s going on in any of the following pictures, I’d be delighted to hear it.

A picture of the Cherokee National Color Guard: they marched behind the American flag, followed by the orange colors of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and the black POW/MIA flag (which commemorates American prisoners-of-war and missing in action). Two of the flag bearers wore swords. The Guard wore red and black, with tribal insignia and American military patches sewn on them. At times the company was lead by an elderly man carrying what a cursory Googling reveals is the tribe’s “eagle head staff.”

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”Civilization” is the soothing notion that, in it, natural
callousness has been successfully quarantined.
…………………………………………. —Roshi Bob
.

Civilization
.
A cat on the pillow of a couch, on the point of a spear, looks out

through windows facing south with the fierce frustration

of an indoor cat who preys through glass
.

The squalor of first spring just after the snow has passed

falls under her gaze which pierces its drabness for anything that moves

beyond the breezy animation of pine limbs and spruce—

the quick jerk or dart of something sentient on the loose

which, unlike a couch cat, lives with the threat of spacious freedom,

in the wind, on the prowl without the leash of civil cover,

who scuttles among the hungry with a life as short as its cunning

who’s liberty is only cramped by the cunning liberty of others

.
Jim Culleny
4/8/13

Arrow and Cockle Shell. Copyright Alison Harris

By Elatia Harris

Their 50th birthdays in sight, the acclaimed travel writer David Downie, and his wife, the photographer Alison Harris, decided that trekking from Paris, where they live, to Spain, would be just the thing. The Way of St. James, for a millennium one of the world's most celebrated pilgrimage routes, was right at their back door. Neither Alison nor David is religious, so the classical pilgrimage experience was not what they were seeking. What were they seeking? Renewal, changed perspectives. Perhaps to test themselves, over 72 days and 1100 km of — at times — very rough terrain. And thereby hangs a tale. Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of St. James, will launch this week. Permission to post, here, the superb photos from the book was granted by Alison Harris.

ELATIA HARRIS: There has been a lot in the news lately on pilgrimage, however one understands the phenomenon — a recent New York Times article, for instance. People who do it talk about needing to lose their routine and find themselves. Most set out alone, meeting others en route. You and Alison started together.

DAVID DOWNIE: Our choice to walk together happened organically. I had planned to do this on my own. Alison came along to keep me out of trouble. If you ask her, she’s likely to say it was her idea about 25 years ago, when she suggested we do something similar.

EH: Readers cannot but wonder how they would hold up, in these circumstances. I pictured a leisurely outdoorsy spell, kind of a French countryside movie. Cows, chateaux…oh, perhaps mildly strenuous stints. I was so wrong. This was a test of all your combined resources. It would be for any couple. 72 days of togetherness and real physical hardship. And you had already spent years collaborating on your books.

Cow. Copyright Alison Harris

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by Leanne Ogasawara

“If God allowed you to go back in time to spend the day with one famous historical person, who would you choose?”

He pondered this question in a rose garden. And as he happily ran through his various candidates– “Plato or Socrates in downtown Athens; or how about Nietzsche or the young Rimbaud?” — his mind lingered lazily over Cleopatra, “Ah, but one day would never be enough…”.

I had, in the meantime, already made up my own mind. For almost in an instant I had decided who I would choose. To meet Proust would have been delicious and the sight of John the Baptist incredible, and yet, in the end, I knew I could not really top the allure of Voltaire. In terms of a day spent, I just have to believe that Voltaire really had what it takes. I mean, he kept Madame du Châtelet happy for decades in her grand chateau, right?

We know at Cirey, the two lovers would spend their days absorbed in the respective studies. Working at opposite ends of the vast chateau, it is said they passed notes constantly during their days spent working apart; liveried butlers would deliver handwritten love-letters on silver platters whenever one of the lovers had something to say to the other. In the evenings, though, Madame and Voltaire would always come together to dine. Oh, can you imagine the sparkling conversations? Those dinners alone make him worthy of a wistful sigh.

I love Voltaire. And, like a favorite landscape, Candide is a book that I seem to return to again and again. Maybe like a lot of people after Japan's deadly earthquake in 2011, I found myself thinking about the book's opening chapters, when the luck-less Candide– along with the syphilitic Pangloss and the sailor from the boat– were shipwrecked; washing up on Lisbon's shores just moments before the city was struck by the infamous mega-quake of 1755.

As if the earthquake wasn't enough, the mega-quake was followed by fires and then a great tsunami that caused the complete destruction of one of the world's greatest cities of the time. Indeed, the human suffering was so terrible that the disaster sparked philosophical and religious debates on the nature of Evil that continued across Europe for a long time afterward; Voltaire's Candide being perhaps among the most famous.

In one of the vivid scenes of the novel, as Candide is lying there trapped under the rubble, he begs for wine and light. The sailor has gone off to pillage– but what of Candide's companion Pangloss? Well, our man Pangloss is too busy philosophisizing to be of any real help. Though thousands have perished, he tells his friend lying under the rubble, still everything is just as it should have been, for: “How could Leibnitz have been wrong?”

How indeed?

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by Sarah Firisen

So who has the right be wed?
Who deserves a marital bed?
Should just Jack and Jill
Marry at will?
We’ll wait for the ruling with dread

But what really here is at stake?
Will the value of wedded bliss break?
Is it really the case
That gay weddings debase
The vows that the rest of us take?

Are we hetros doing so well?
Is straight marriage doing just swell?
Why does their right to join
Kick my vows in the groin?
Why’s this the right's end of days hell?

Can’t we just all relax and agree
That gays and lesbians have as much right to be
Miserably wed
Stuck together till dead
Bickering, depressed and sex free

Maybe unlike us they’ll find a way
Actually together to stay
Maybe theirs is the course
That won’t lead to divorce
Despite what the right-wingers say

By Liam Heneghan

What kind of happiness does technology procure then? And why do people remain both enthralled and unsatisfied by it? (Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life)

To be a friend to many people in the complete kind of friendship is not possible (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII)

There is a nice moment in Desmond Morris’ documentary The Human Zoo where, as he ponders the means by which the human animal deals with dense urban living, he hoists his address book and declares: “This is his [the urban dweller’s] personal tribe!” No doubt if he were writing the documentary today he would make the same point by recourse to his Facebook page.

Facebook provides us a convenient mnemonic device for keeping track of family and acquaintances. More than this, of course, it offers the means to friendship itself. We can carry out a range of cordial tasks on Facebook: we can post, comment, like, poke (does this even exist anymore?), chat, re-share, or indeed, if we incline to do so, quietly monitor the lives of our friends.

Assuming that the nature of friendship has not budged much since Aristotle wrote about it in the Nicomachean Ethics, this means that in order for Facebook to serve be a one-stop companionship-shop it must allow for friendships based upon use, pleasure, and finally should facilitate the mutual exchange of well-wishing between the virtuous. There is more to say about this, but at first pass this can translate into commercial acquaintanceships, mutual affinities between those who share an interest, and finally the reciprocation of mutual respect between people of fine character – besties, in other words.

One of the implications of Facebook use, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, is that is slows the decay-rate of friendship. Facebook allows us to collate intimates from the fragmented geographies of our contemporary lives and to sustain contact with friends from our past with whom we might otherwise only have sporadic contact. In doing so, Facebook may be, in fact, just one of a progression of technologies that allow us to keep track of our personal human networks (our “tribe”) when these extend beyond the so-called “Dunbar’s number”, that is, those 150 people predicted to be within the “natural” limit of our information-retention ability. Dunbar’s observations were based upon a supposed general relationship between the size of a primate brain’s neocortex and the size of the average social group. Dunbar’s Number seemingly finds support in analysis of social aggregations of hunter-gatherer tribes, military units, and even Christmas card networks. Lending further support is Facebook’s own assessment that the average number of friends per account is between 120 and 130.

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by Jalees Rehman

Nietzschean, Heideggerian, fascist, anarchist, libertarian, brilliant genius, blabbering nutjob – these and many other labels have probably been used to describe Peter Sloterdijk, who is one of Germany's most widely known contemporary philosophers. He has achieved a rock-star status in the echelons of contemporary German thinkers, perhaps because none is more apt than Sloterdijk at fulfilling the true purpose of a public intellectual: inculcating his audience with an insatiable desire to think. His fans adore him; his critics are maddened by him. Few, if any, experience indifference when they encounter the provocateur Sloterdijk.

Sloterdijk achieved fame in Germany after publishing his masterpiece “Kritik der zynischen Vernunft” (English translation: “Critique of Cynical Reason“) in 1983, but his hosting of the regular late-night talk show “Das Philosophische Quartett” on the major German TV network ZDF for ten years turned him into a cultural icon and a household name. I realize that it might seem strange to non-Germans that philosophers instead of comedians can host TV talk shows, however Sloterdijk would probably be the first to agree that there isn't much of a difference between a true comedian and a true philosopher. Not only do we Germans have TV philosophers, we even enjoy the TV gossip and cockfights that they indulge in. When the ZDF network decided to get rid of Sloterdijk and replace him with the younger, more handsome and less thoughtful philosopher Richard David Precht, they start engaging in reciprocal mockery and name-calling.

Unfortunately, Sloterdijk is not quite so well-known in the English-speaking world and this may in part be due to the fact that much of his oeuvre has only recently been translated into the English language. It is no easy feat to translate his writings, in part because his playful mastery of German words is one of his signatures. Sloterdijk is a wonderful story-teller who weaves in beautiful images and puns into his narration, many of which are unique to the German language. His story-telling also makes it difficult to understand some of his texts in the original German. One may be enthralled by his stories, but after reading a whole chapter or book, it is quite difficult to condense it into a handy “message” or “point”. Sloterdijk is a professional digressor, going off on tangents that are entertaining and exciting, but at times quite frustrating. He shares his brilliant insights on a broad range of topics ranging from metaphysics to politics with his readers, but he also offers practical advice on how we can change our lives as well as bizarre and pompous statements.

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—on the occasion of an unexpected email from an old
friend who'd abruptly withdrawn from conversation
some years earlier without explanation

Rapprochement

Just wondering if worlds seen from a distance
really are smaller than they are
.
Could it be that when we sleep
the world we leave goes on without us
.
Maybe you remember the old days
when greenhorns multiplied their joys
and were thoughtless as a new moon
.
Is it possible that, from upstairs,
everything is seen through a rose window
crisp as Venus or is nothing to be seen between us
.
Perhaps, in your wintering,
you needed to spend some years
on an island being tuned
when suddenly you cleared your gears
and thought I might be snow shoveling
this morning on the cusp of spring
.
I wanted to ask if maybes still exist
or if tomorrow is so sure a thing
.
So, are you still counting coup
on the enemies of the morning dew
.
I hadn’t heard, so thought I’d start a new tale
of thoughts that may never have been played,
thoughts naked as the first babe born today
.
Have you noticed something odd
—that nothing ever changes but the color
of the feather in the hat band of god
.
Could I
ask
.
Would you
answer
.
What the
fuck
.
And why the unworn soles of the shoes
on the tongue of the dancer —bad luck?
.
When did you say you last caught
glimpses of the ghosts you fought
.
I never asked, but I suspect
you’re still stuffed with words,
a cornucopia of clever corkscrews
in our alphabet
.
Possibly it’s a mistake,
but even god's not perfectly awake
.
For what it’s worth breakfast’s the best meal of the day
The sun’s a fresh egg, the clouds white albumin
—ahead? a day with plenty of time and space to stew in
.
Guess I could just jot something down
recalling our bridges of contention
with their steel beams and tenuous
cables of suspension
.
If it’s not too much to ask (you asked
—the paper being so unreliable these days
and TV a joke)
how’s the weather?

Fine , and yours?
as fine, I hope

by Jim Culleny
4/1/13

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Torkham, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, felt like an utter release— as if we were random things, a fistful of summer insects set free in space. This, of course, was before the Soviet war. I was in elementary school.

Dwarfed by the standoffish ice blue mountains on the road to Torkham, we loved the bridge one must drive under twice, once before and once after a loop. Where Peshawar of the ‘70s was a nest of “jhoola parks” with stone slides, school routine, snack bars, badminton for girls, street cricket for boys, Torkham was a rush of freedom.

Sunlight hit the rocks here in a way that kept shadows minimal, the boundlessness was the essence of the place and a contradiction to the bitterly disputed Durand line, the artificial boundary that stared you in the eye with a chilling animosity, and worse to be reprimanded by the guards that it was forbidden even to straddle the rope that marked the border and to declare proudly as we did: “look, look, this is how to be in two countries at once!” Afghanistan was silent and unfriendly in the distance as we stood sobered and chastised for mocking the sanctity of the divide that the miserable rope represented. This corridor between countries, this no-man's land demanded veneration as if it had an invisible flag and a soundless anthem of its own. It filled us with awe and a little disgust until the frowning guard gave us a watermelon to make up for spoiling the moment. [Photo shows the author at Torkham in 1977.]

My brothers must have enjoyed the treeless, rugged mountains, the wide embrace of the sun, the cool wind whipping, shalwars swelling like sails. I preferred to gaze at this generosity of grayness, angularity and sun from the café window. There was only one café, with nothing on the menu except for Coca Cola and tea sandwiches but the place was magical and never felt lacking in anything. Peshawar being desperately short of tourist attractions, my father used to bring his overseas guests to Torkham. We came here so often that my younger brother served as a perfect tourist guide, somehow communicating to the Japanese, British, or American guests all the tourist worthy aspects of a place more historical than any of us realized then.

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by Misha Lepetic

“Fish is as natural in Fulton Market as they are in their own briny element.”
~Harper's Magazine, 1867

Followers of the New York City food scene have recently been galvanized by yet another all-too-predictable brawl between, on the one hand, real estate developers and the city and, on the other, scrappy entrepreneurs bent on preserving another endangered aspect of New York's urban heritage. In this case, the contested site is the Fulton Fish Market, whose fishmongering operations had already decamped to the Bronx back in 2005. Since then, two sizable waterfront buildings have remained astonishingly, unconscionably empty. In the meantime, the New Amsterdam Market, founded by Robert LaValva, has grown its following with increasingly successful seasonal, weekly markets, conducted in the shadow of the old fish market for the last seven years.

Not only has New Amsterdam Market been steadily expanding since its 2005 inception, but LaValva's vision is decidedly more ambitious: to re-occupy the former market buildings and create an urban market as worthy of New York as Reading Terminal Market is of Philadelphia, as La Bocqueria is of Barcelona, or as Les Halles once was of Paris. This unstoppable force has, unsurprisingly, run into the immovable object of what we may call the “city-developer complex.”

But in order to understand what it would take to recreate the Fulton Market, it is instructive to look back to its genesis. Markets tend not spring wholly formed from the minds of expert city planners, visionary mayors, or magnanimous philanthropists; nor do they manifest themselves in some sui generis manner from self-organizing associations of merchants. They are messy affairs, constantly contended and never fully secure. What, then, drives the creation – and maintenance – of a successful urban market?

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by Syed Tasnim Raza

This is a response to the article “A Cardiac Conundrum” by Alice Park in the March-April 2013 issue of Harvard Magazine. The article mostly discusses a new book: Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care by David S. Jones, which I have not read, so the following comments are only in response to the article itself, which may or may not represent the book exactly. I am a heart surgeon and I will limit my comments to the parts of the article referring to coronary artery bypass graft operations, not to angioplasties.

The author indicts coronary artery bypass operations, which are performed widely by claiming that they “provided little or no improvement in survival rates over standard medical and lifestyle treatment except in the very sickest patients.”

Let me start by giving a little historical perspective, slightly different then the author's recalling. Until 1896, surgeons were too afraid to even attempt suture of the heart. In that year Ludwig Rehn of Frankfurt repaired a stab wound to the heart of a young man, who survived, thus beginning the era of heart surgery. From then until the 1950's most attempts at heart operations were largely unsuccessful. It is only after the development of the Heart-Lung machine (John Gibbon 1952) and it's further improvement at the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic, between 1955 and 1960, that the modern era of heart surgery began. Coronary Artery Disease (CAD), which is blockage of coronary arteries by atherosclerotic plaques and can result in a heart attack was recognized mostly by indirect methods or post-mortem, until 1958, when selective coronary angiography was developed at the Cleveland Clinic. Before then it was the symptoms of CAD namely angina which was clinically recognized and attempts at surgical treatment for angina had been made since 1930's including denervation of the heart, surgically causing inflammation of the membrane surrounding the heart (pericardium), hoping that it would result in formation of new blood vessels (Beck's operation) and in 1960's implantation of Internal mammary artery into the muscle of the left ventricle with the hopes that new blood vessels would form (Vineburg operation). All these operations were unsuccessful and are of historical interest only. It was only after selective coronary angiography was possible in 1958, that Favalaro developed the operation that is now referred to as coronary artery bypass graft (CABG, pronounced cabbage) surgery. The first successful operation was performed in late 1967. The results of this operation were such a vast improvement over any other treatment then available that it was taken up by surgeons everywhere and by early 1990's over half a million such operations were being performed annually throughout the United States.

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ON RECEIVING FATHER
AT JFK AFTER HIS LONG
FLIGHT FROM KASHMIR

As I open my arms wide, he extends his hand.

by Rafiq Kathwari

More work by Rafiq here.

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

In much of modern casual cooking the separation between animal and vegetable is excessively rigid: meat dishes are big slabs of flesh, and vegetable dishes lack any trace of meat. But there are many reasons to trouble this distinction, especially if you want to eat more vegetables and less meat (for ethical, health, environmental or aesthetic reasons) but don't need to stay away from meat entirely. Adding animal fats to vegetables allows for rich flavor without using a lot of meat or going through the trouble of constructing elaborate secondary sauces. And the combination scratches a particular spring itch: days are cold and warm, the sky is alternately wet and sun-drenched, and vegetables start to proliferate, hinting at the exuberance to come, but the evenings are brisk enough to demand robust fortification (no simple tomato salads, sublime as they can be).

Good and convenient fats to use with vegetables are poultry fat (chicken or duck), rendered bacon fat, butter and cream. You can also use beef or lamb fat, which are harder to find without a butcher, and veal fat if you're feeling decadent. And small fatty fish (like anchovies) are wonderful with vegetables, but that's a subject for another post.

Unsurprisingly, bacon fat emerges when you cook bacon. To make the process smoother, you can add a splash of water to the pan when you put the bacon in, which allows for gentle heating while the water heats up and boils off. Eat or reserve the bacon and strain and store the fat for later use. Poultry fat is often sold relatively cheaply but you can also accumulate fatty bits of chicken or duck (like the skin and the fat inside the cavity) in the freezer, and render it when you have enough. This is quite straightforward: trim away any attached bits of meat and cut the fat into small pieces; put it on low heat with some water and let it render out, stirring occasionally to make sure the non-fatty bits don't burn. Once the fat is liquid and the water has cooked off, strain it and store in the fridge. You can also render beef or pork fat in a similar way.

As a start, you can use these fats instead of oil when making salad dressings. If you're making a vinaigrette (mix vinegar or lemon juice with salt, mustard, etc. and whisk in fat with a fork), try using melted duck or chicken fat, or some rendered bacon fat, or even brown butter instead of part or all of the oil. This is delicious tossed with a simple salad of greens, and makes an excellent weekday lunch. Of course you could add refinements to your salad; possibly the best is a poached egg (or, equivalent but simpler, an egg boiled in its shell for about four minutes till the white is mostly set and the yolk is runny).

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by Tom Jacobs

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego. —Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry that I could not travel both… —Robert Frost

No, I'm kidding. At least about the second one. One has to choose epigraphs carefully. Even if Bobby Frost was onto something there, it's too hackneyed and clichéd and infinitely deployed at every commencement speech to ever be retrieved from the abyss of misuse. It's not his fault. It's a good poem though, and although he could never have foreseen it, the sentiment strikes waaaay too many of the notes that are appropriable by those who might misuse it, who might tend to want to give advice. Even me. Even if he's spot on. So no Bobby Frost. At least not right away. Maybe later.

Our heads are space-traveler's helmets. ­How strange it is to think that, although we all lug about with us long and complicated social histories, histories that are totally invisible but very heavy—to think that all of this is contained in a rather thin and delicate envelope that reveal nothing about who we really are.

These are a few things and life lessons that I think I might have learned.

I think of Luke Skywalker. I think of old Luke Skywalker. The fella from Tatooine. The father we never found.

I recall going to see the 20^th anniversary re-release of Star Wars and loving it and then walking out of the theater feeling oddly sad. Actually not sad; full on melancholy, rather; the kind of anxiety and profound unhappiness that rattles at your very sense of who you are and might become or could have been. At the time I couldn't quite identify the source of my sadness and melancholy. Eventually I did. Here's what I came to understand and what continues to reverberate:

When I first saw Star Wars, I was five, but I was old enough to recognize a hero when I was one. Luke Skywalker was, what, maybe 21? The age of a hero. Not to old, not too young. He would always be 21, eternally and forever on film. By the time I saw the re-release in 1997, I had aged and had surpassed the heroic age of 21, even if Luke had not. I found myself to be older than Luke, who would remain 21 forever. And however many times I had envisioned it happening in one shape or another—the notion of some mentor tapping me on the shoulder to point out that I was, in fact, and whether I realized it or not, a rather remarkable Jedi-like individual, one who had a role to play in the larger intergalactic battle between good and evil, between right and wrong—it never quite happened, at least not in the shape or form that I had anticipated. No Obi Wan ever tapped me on the shoulder. The hero's journey that I imagined for myself never quite emerged. Which is not to say that it hasn't happened.

I had always imagined the dramatic moment, the decisive cut, the transformative moment when everything changes (the moment when Obi Wan takes me to the cantina and I realize that I'm on the threshold and that if I go out, and if I return, I will not return in the same form or shape… Everything will change).

Life is far too subtle for that sort of thing. Too discrete and full of nuance and ambiguity. I think we all are, potential Jedi Knights, even if we continue to wait for Obi Wan Kenobi to come. Maybe he has already come and tapped and asked, even if we never understood or recognized it at the time. I think he probably has.

In the spirit of someone who is constantly looking for his own Obi Wan Kenobi, here are some thoughts from someone who knows nothing and is adviceless. Or maybe that's not exactly right. I have learned a few things. No doubt these are obvious and well-known to you. No matter. Let me re-iterate and re-galvanize.

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by Omar Ali

I recently wrote a piece titled “Pakistan, myths and consequences”, in which I argued that Pakistan’s founding myths (whether present at birth or fashioned retroactively) make it unusually difficult to resist those who want to impose various dangerous ideas upon the state in the name of Islam. The argument was not that Pakistan exists in some parallel dimension where economic and political factors that operate in the rest of the world play no role. But rather that the usual problems of twenty-first century post-colonial countries (problems that may prove overwhelming even where Islamism plays no role) are made significantly worse by the imposition upon them of a flawed and dangerous “Paknationalist-Islamic” framework. Without that framework Pakistan would still be a third world country facing immense challenges. But with this framework we are committed to an ideological cul-de-sac that devalues existing cultural strengths and sharpens existing religious problems (including the Shia-Sunni divide and the use of blasphemy laws to persecute minorities). Not only do these creation myths have negative consequences (as partly enumerated in the above-linked article) but they also have very little positive content. There is really no such thing as a specifically Islamic or “Pakistani” blueprint for running a modern state. None. Nada. Nothing. There is no there there. Yet school textbooks, official propaganda and everyday political speech in Pakistan endlessly refer to some imaginary “Islamic model” of administration and statecraft. Since no such model exists, we are condemned to hypocritically mouthing meaningless and destructive Paknationalist and Islamist slogans while simultaneously (and almost surreptitiously) trying to operate modern Western constitutional, legal and economic models.

This argument is anathema to Pakistani nationalists, Islamists and neo-Islamists (e.g. Imran Khan, who believes a truly Islamic state would look something like Sweden without the half-naked women) but it is also uncomfortable for upper class Leftists educated in Western universities. Their objections matter to me because they are my friends and family, so I will try to answer some of them here. These friends have pointed out to me that:

1. India is not much better.

2. The US systematically supported Islamists in Pakistan and pushed for the suppression of leftist and progressive intellectuals for decades.

3. Colonialism.

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