I went to an event tonight with some friends from work. It was an english comedy show that was put up in this posh place in town. The attendance was just about 300 people, in a small auditorium.
It was all in english, maybe about 20 urdu words thrown in in about 2 hours, a highly westernised affair, and the performers and 85% of the audience was completely burger. The audience was mostly young ppl, a lot of high school kids too, very few uncles and aunties, and there were some foreigners there too. More than half the girls in the audience were dressed in trendy western outfits, some were wearing very fitted n revealing stuff. The comedy itself was very westernised in nature, nothing desi about it. The performers, guys and girls, Pakistani, were interacting with each other on stage ummm very very very liberally like ummm hugging and stuff..touching each other just dint seem to be an issue…
One thing positive that I did note was that they did keep limits in the words they were using in the comedy. they didn’t use any bad words. also when they were joking about Bush they condemned the fact that he was so bomb happy.
i was aware of the existence of this section of society in Pakistan. I mean, I’ve been to Karachi Grammar School [which is prolly the most burger school in Pakistan, another burger school I went to for a week was Froebels in Islamabad…] for two years for A levels [grade 12, 13] and that was the first time I came to see that such ppl also exist in Pakistan, that was a real bad culture shock to me. i was really depressed and i hated going to school, i hardly ever used to go to school for those two yrs. the farewell “ball” [yearly tradition] we had as a goodbye to our graduating class at KGS was crazy, the stuff that girls were wearing was literally ummm like miniskirts and ummm na honay ke barabar tops etc. And ofcourse it was a mixed gathering. And 95% of kids in that school are burger. they just had the attitude that pakistani culture sucks, and this country is not worth living in bla bla…really snobby…some of these were kids who were raised in pakistan but couldnt speak any language but english…thats how burger they were…
Im not condemning burgers or anything, some of them were nice too, but an eye opening observation it sure was…
I hadn’t seen that part of Pakistani society since I’d left KGS, I’d almost forgotten abt it coz KGS was a black period of my life which I had tried to blot out of my memory…and then since then never interacted with such a Pakistani crowd all thru college…
today for the first time after coming back to Pakistan from Amreeka I saw that crowd again…
i dono it just left me feeling kinda sad…that our culture, our language, our dress, our food…is so rich…but we still try to ape the west…it sad…
coz i’ve seen it all before
nope there wasnt anything like that
shukran
