don’t know if this was posted here or not. but a sad read especially since it comes from someone who could be considered an outsider.
====================================
The eternal stranger
Monday, August 02, 2010
Chris Cork
There was a quite specific moment when I realised that I had very little knowledge or understanding of what I had got myself into. It was in a cinema at the top of Kashmir bazaar in Rawalpindi in the early ’90s. It was packed, literally not a seat to be had in the place. About forty minutes into the film people suddenly started flicking on lighters to look at their watches. I had no idea what was going on or what was about to happen. The film was a typical gore-spattered epic and I was beginning to wonder if there was anything else on offer in the Pakistani cinema scene when I discovered in the blink of an eye that there was.
The eye blinked and I was looking at hard-core pornography. Welcome to the very private world of the male Pakistani cinema-goer. Here, in a public cinema full of apparently ordinary men, I was watching what by any standards were truly appalling images – and the audience loved it.
They whooped and cheered the ‘actors’ on, jeered if the ‘action’ slowed at all and when, twenty minutes later, the film broke for half-time – they mostly left. Sitting in a near-empty cinema drinking a soft drink I did not know what to make of what I had just seen, but was helped by a man who came to sit next to me and introduced himself as a doctor. He explained that there were cinemas across the country that showed films called ‘inserts’ where pornography was spliced into the reel. The police were paid to look the other way, seat prices were increased for ‘special’ showings and everybody was happy.
Those were my days of innocence in Pakistan. I was doubtful about what the ‘doctor’ had told me (he gets inverted commas because I have no idea if he was a real doctor or not) but later discovered that he had been telling the truth. There was worse to come.
Some cinemas offered other services than grainy old clips of western pornography. They had children on the menu. I was staying in Karachi on M A Jinnah Road and idly looking out of the window one Sunday morning and wondering just why there was a line of young girls, perhaps seven or eight to early teens, standing by the outside wall of the compound where I was lodging. Oddly, they all seemed very ‘dressed up’ and then the penny dropped. A man came up to the line, spoke briefly and then took one of the girls across the road into the cinema on the opposite corner. They were prostitutes and the cinema allowed its premises to be used as a brothel. The men using and abusing these children were not foreign sex-tourists, they were – as were the men in the cinema where I had lost my innocence ten years before – ordinary.
By the time I was witness to the public sexual exploitation of children I had lost all illusions about the place I had chosen as home. I knew of the cybercafés where men and women went for their daily dose of porno. I knew of the little private ‘cinemas’ that were set up close to bus-stands and were not in the business of showing educational films about wildlife. Of the children, boys and girls, who prowled the stands at Pirwadahai offering themselves for rent and of the ‘blind-eye’ culture that allowed all this to go on because somewhere along the line a vital piece of the moral structure of the nation had got broken.
Thus I was not surprised when in the last couple of weeks there has been a rumbling story in the press about how high up the list we were on the Google scorecard for searches related to sex. Not for nothing is it said that there are ‘lies, damned lies – and statistics.’
Figures can be manipulated to prove pretty much anything you like these days, and it may well be that the number of times that we here in the Land of the Pure hunt for sexual imagery on the internet has been ‘massaged’ for the sake of a good headline. Despite this there is a nagging sense that Google may not be far off the mark with its number crunching.
**Which brings us to the harrowing events of last week, and not just the deaths of the 152 people in the Airblue disaster but the disaster that was the coverage given to it by a section of the electronic media. There were things that should just never have been seen, heard or said. A reporter at the crash site broadcasting live… ‘There are so many body parts, oh no! I nearly stepped on a dead man’s piece of flesh.’ Sensitive reporting, huh? Well try this one from the (female) studio anchor: “Are the rescue teams paying more attention to the injured people and ignoring the dead?” Then there were the requests that reporters describe the state of bodies being brought into hospitals and the gross irresponsibility of federal ministers talking of ‘survivors’ and the crazed speculations on the causes of the disaster.
All in all it was a moral and ethical bloodbath. What it spoke of to me, the eternal stranger in a strange land, was that I was in a place where boundaries no longer existed. Where common decency and respect for the dead had been sacrificed on the altar of ratings and profit.
Where it was considered acceptable to shove a microphone in the face of a mother who has just learned that her daughter, an air-hostess on the doomed flight, was dead and asked… “Can you tell us what sort of daughter she was?”
The moral fracture I was witness to in my early years here has grown into a monstrous abscess. And I really do not know if it is curable.**
The writer is a British social worker settled in Pakistan. Email: manticore73@ gmail.com