Podcast • August 11, 2011

Saad Haroon: Pakistan as a bad Bollywood comedy

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Saad Haroon (22 minutes, 11 mb mp3) KARACHI — Dying is easy, as the old comedian could have said about Karachi today. It’s making jokes about it that’s ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Saad Haroon (22 minutes, 11 mb mp3)

KARACHI — Dying is easy, as the old comedian could have said about Karachi today. It’s making jokes about it that’s hard. This is Saad Haroon‘s calling as a Pakistani version of Jon Stewart, on television and in the comedy clubs that survive, almost thrive, despite everything. We’re getting an introduction to professional humor here on a day when one of the big newspaper headlines says: “Deadly drone attacks kill 61.” And we’re getting a lesson in a strange legacy of Pervez Musharraf, the Army strongman here through the George W. Bush years in America.

A radical expansion of FM radio and commercial television channels in the last decade has filled the air with often raucous political chat, analysis and satire. There’s even a Pakistani version of “Dame Edna” — a cross-dressing TV host, “Begum Nawazish Ali,” who built a career impersonating Benazir Bhutto, then on teasing politicians and the religious right. And still there are limits, as Mohammed Hanif was explaining. Call it the Musharraf Double Standard: Pakistanis should feel entitled to say almost anything, and to change almost nothing in a veiled military dictatorship that fronts for an openly feudal social hierarchy. And beware the line where words approach incitement to action.

What’s acceptable, then, as public humor as Saad Haroon reads the rule? Terrorists, believe it or not. Young women in burkas. President Zardari’s lust for “money, money, money.” And before him, General / President Musharraf’s lust for “power, power, power.” In the stage bits he shared with us, I liked Saad Haroon’s voice-over for a Bollywood love story, “Pipeline of Passion,” between Musharraf of Pakistan and President Sonia Gandhi of India — the man in uniform and the bereaved widow, on the phone late at night: “Mushy, you take Kashmir…” “No, Sonia, you take Kashmir…” I also love his version of a Pakistani guy talking with a mouthful of paan leaves.

Podcast • January 13, 2011

Mohammed Hanif’s Af-Pak: A Case of Exploding Absurdities

Somebody said: if you’re an intelligent Islamic militant and you had a choice: to take over either Afghanistan or Pakistan, what would you do? You would take over Pakistan, obviously. Click to listen to Chris’ ...

Somebody said: if you’re an intelligent Islamic militant and you had a choice: to take over either Afghanistan or Pakistan, what would you do? You would take over Pakistan, obviously.

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mohammed Hanif (52 minutes, 25 mb mp3)

Mohammed Hanif, the Pakistani novelist, is observing from Karachi that “even the believers” don’t believe in the war in Afghanistan anymore. No statement of purpose passes the “you’ve got to be kidding” test — not the US professions about stabilizing the region, not the Pakistani Army’s mission to defend its country. Pakistan’s tribal areas that were peaceful before the war have been devastated. The future is disappearing. Certain dark absurdities underlying Pakistan’s situation, underlying Mohammed Hanif’s “insanely brilliant” novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, are chasing their own tails.

On January 4 this year Salmaan Taseer, the rich, connected governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, was assassinated in broad daylight in a public market in Islamabad. The shooting eerily prefigured by four days our made-in-America madness in Tucson, but it was more horrifying by many measures. Taseer took 26 rounds of sub-machinegun fire from one of his own guards before the rest of his security detail intervened. Prominent mullahs in Pakistan have celebrated the murder and promised vengeance on Taseer’s funeral goers. At issue, so to speak, was Taseer’s enthusiasm for repealing an Anti-Blasphemy law — an old statute that in today’s fervor has enabled religious prosecutions and deadly personal fatwas on farcical grounds. (You can be charged with blasphemy in Pakistan for discarding a salesman’s business card — if the salesman, like so many of his countrymen, bears the name Mohammed.)

We are drawing again on a novelist’s gift for figure and ground, the big contexts of war and faith, news and nationhood, for tragic jokes.

MH: I think the basic kind of crisis that we are going through is that somehow a large majority of people are convinced that their faith is under attack. Now, how can their faith be under attack if 98 percent of people who live in this country are faithful? What has happened is that this environment, these perpetual wars that we’ve been involved with, have somehow convinced our people…

We’ve never even begun to deal with the reasons for which this country was created, which was that there should be some kind of economic and social justice for the Muslim minority in these parts. That’s what this was supposed to be about. But yesterday I was at this big religious gathering where all the kind of hot-shots of Pakistan’s religious parties were there. And they were saying that Pakistan was actually created to protect the honor of Prophet Mohammed. Now I’ve lived here all my life. I haven’t grown up in some kind of sheltered community. But I haven’t heard that kind of discourse ever in my life…

CL: How does the Af-Pak war, ongoing, affect the day-to-day outlook of Pakistanis?

MH: Well, I think it has radicalized a section of Pakistani society. It has made a lot of people cynical and anti-American… I think this is probably the first time in the history of the world that a so-called friendly country, the United States, is using robots to kill the citizens of its partner in war. Now whatever logic you might apply, that doesn’t come out nice. It’s never, ever going to sound good to anyone.

There’s an Urdu saying that when your neighbor’s house is on fire, the chances are that fire will get to you as well, [especially] if you as a nation, as a country, have been stoking that fire for 30 years. If you’ve had this attitude towards your neighbor, if you’ve never considered Afghans as human beings, if you only speak of them in military terms, as targets or allies or collateral damage… then Pakistan is going the same route. You can’t create a monster, you can’t create a jihadi group, as the military has in the past, that will exclusively go and kill Indian soldiers in Kashmir, and not do anything else. You can’t create a faction of Taliban whose sole duty it is to go into Afghanistan and fight the Americans. They will do it for a while. They’ve done it for a while. But after that, they will come back and they’ll find other targets. The jihadi groups that initially were supposed to fight in Afghanistan, and then fight in Kashmir and then go and liberate Sweden or whatever country, they’ve finally turned their guns on Pakistanis, sometimes on the Pakistani establishment…

CL: What is it about Pakistan — a dangerous place, a dangerous state of mind — that seems to invite broad satire? I’m thinking of your own Exploding Mangoes and also Salman Rushdie’s Shame and even the Tom Hanks movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War.” People seem to forget the unfunny truths here.

MH: I grew up in a small city in Punjab, and the traditional form of entertainment there was standing on a street corner, making jokes about current affairs, about political leaders, about the village elder, about the mullah in the mosque – anybody who carried, or thought that he carried, any authority. And it was quite accepted in our culture. So for me, the first insight into how the world is run, how a city is run, how a family works together, I got from the comedy clubs. But I don’t have it in me to be a standup comic. I’m a sit-down comic. I’ll sit down and struggle with myself and maybe compose a joke, or come up with a character that can reflect some of those absurdities…

Pakistan has lots of TV news stations, and suddenly I’ve seen that every single channel has got a political satire show, and those are the shows that are doing really well. Things are so bad that nobody actually wants any more analysis. Nobody wants any more pundits telling them the future because they know it is all downhill. So we might as well sit here and laugh at ourselves.

Mohammed Hanif in Karachi, in conversation with Chris Lydon in Providence, January 11, 2010

February 1, 2006

Groundhog Day, Again

It’s Groundhog Day…again. It could have been just another funny comedy, a Bill Murray vehicle, a good but forgettable flick. But clearly it’s much more. It’s more than a cult film, even: it’s a classic. ...

It’s Groundhog Day…again.

It could have been just another funny comedy, a Bill Murray vehicle, a good but forgettable flick. But clearly it’s much more. It’s more than a cult film, even: it’s a classic. Why?

In a story meeting a few days ago Mary said that “Groundhog Day” is for a certain generaton — mine, I guess (I’m 30) — what “High Noon” “The Searchers” was for a former one. I’m not exactly sure what this means, but I have a feeling she’s right. And also that it’s more than generational.

Screenwriters crib from it. Film theorists teach it. Orthodox Jews love it. As do Jesuit priests. And Buddhists really love it. Stanley Cavell, the Harvard philosopher who normally writes about Wittgenstein and Emerson (along with film comedies of the 30s and 40s, and a lot more) named it as the contemporary work of art that will be cherished 100 years from now.

But unlike, say, Caddyshack — another Bill Murray movie also directed by Harold Ramis — people don’t memorize lines or standout scenes. Fans may have their favorites of each, but the movie seems to be beloved more in its totality. Which seems good and right in a Buddhist sort of way.

But if Mary is right (and when isn’t she?), and “Groundhog Day” is some new touchstone for a generation or a time, what does that mean? What does Groundhog Day mean to you? Why does it hold up? (Or maybe the first question is: does it hold up, for you?) Why does it get better, this film with so much repetition and such subtle variation? What kind of religious gloss would you give it? Any at all?

Far from Pennsylvania

Most other countries don’t have groundhogs; none have Groundhog Day. How, then, to present the movie “Groundhog Day”? We dredged up a few examples.

What they called “Groundhog Day” in…
Sweden: Måndag hela veckan, “Monday All Week Long.” Translation courtesy Helena Bergenheim, Swedish Consulate, New York.

France: Un Jour Sans Fin, “A Day Without End”

Italy: E Gia Ieri, “It’s Yesterday Already” This was an Italian-language remake, with a writing credit to original writer Danny Rubin.

Germany: Und Täglich Grüßt Das Murmeltier, “And Every Day the Marmot Says Hello”