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February 7 - February 11, 2018
I’ve written somewhere that there were three significant events in my life. The first was my birth, of which I have little information. The second was my wedding, the third my becoming a writer of short stories.
Languages are not created, they make themselves and no human effort can destroy one already made.
We’ve been hearing this for some time now — Save India from this, save it from that. The fact is that India needs to be saved from the people who say it should be saved.
When these leaders shed tears and wail, “Mazhab khatre mein hai” (Religion is in danger), it is all rubbish. Faith isn’t the sort of thing that can come into danger in the first place. If anything is in danger, it’s these leaders who want to be saved by claiming religion is in peril.
Those were strange days. There was chaos, mayhem, panic everywhere and from the womb of this anarchy were born two nations. Independent India and independent Pakistan.
Allah sends down natural disasters to control population explosion. He encourages us to go to war, He creates Pakistan and Akhand Bharat. In doing this, He teaches humans new and innovative methods of birth control.
Allah Ka Bada Fazal Hai in Oopar, Neechay aur Darmiyan, 1954)
To be searched. Orwellian short story.
The intercourse between State and citizens (it will be appropriate to call it forcible intercourse) also produces offspring as a marriage does. But frightening ones, like the “Safety Act and Ordinance”. Offspring that resemble their father, the State, more than the citizenry.
Experts on religious purity have concluded that humans invented firecrackers to scare away demons. But when humans themselves began to turn demonic, the firecrackers were turned into bullets and bombs.
A boy: Dad, what’s an atom bomb? Father: The world’s largest firecracker. Boy: Get me one, then. I’m going to set it off on Shab-e-Barat.
A boy: In Anarkali (Lahore’s red light area), a girl was passing through. Seeing her, a man said to his friend: ‘What a firecracker!’ (Kya patakha hai!) Second boy: ‘Did it go off?’ First boy: ‘Yes, she took off her sandal and, patakh se, smashed it on his head.’
But for the last twenty-five years, made of 9,125 days, what have we got to show? Can we put on display our directors? What about our writers, who exist by ripping off the writings of others? Can we show our movies — all of them copies of American films — to others?
Like a piece of rubber which can only be stretched so far and no further, the film’s story snaps. It loses the integrity that it had in the shorter version.
