Email from Zahir Ebrahim, Islamabad, Pakistan*
*September 11, 2012*
Dear friends and well-wishers.
AsSalaam Alekum. Greetings from Pakistan. On this eleventh anniversary of 9/11, I find myself pensively brooding over my own journey in life since that dastardly day in infamy. With my children now grown up and pursuing their professional lives in the United States, I have moved to Pakistan to
once again re-attempt to re-start my life in Islamabad after a hiatus of more than three decades. My adult life mostly being spent in the Boston area studying engineering, and in Silicon Valley, California, building or contributing to America’s great military-industrial and academic complex as
an engineer, tax-payer, and finally as parent.
From that lofty perch of “Mr. Clean hands”, I imagine it is easy to opine the following commentary as an expat. returning home to pitiful surroundings, and for which one has contributed nothing towards its
amelioration. Permit me give it a try.
Life here in Islamabad is very humorous, to say the least. For, a sense of humor is surely what it takes to survive its daily travails: the daily 6 to 8 hours of load-shedding of electricity during the hot summer which has only now abated somewhat; no water in the taps unless one is willing to pay
1500 rupees (about US $15) for a private water tanker service which appears to be financially benefitting the same governmental agency staff responsible for officially supplying tap water and for which they also bill you quarterly whether or not any water trickles out of the faucet (the scam
in fact appears to me to be a thinly veiled way to privatize all water supply by way of extortion and other pretexts of inefficiency, while drinking water has already been effectively privatized, my monthly bill being an additional 2000 rupees on the average, paid to Nestle); frequent armed police check-points on city streets as if Pakistan has moved to Palestine; long lines of taxis and small cars in front of gas stations which form every Wednesday evening because CNG (Compressed Natural Gas
which is now priced almost at parity with petrol) is not available Thursday through Saturday; continuous demoralizing news and commentary floods the 500 news channels which make the plebeian want to long for the *Messiah *and the *Mehdi;* just to mention a few items off the top of my head which must induce a great deal of humor in daily existence in order to bear it. That humor naturally leads one to seeking refuge in religion, and consequently what passes as spiritualism, meaning, a resignation to fate while *waiting for Allah*, is rapidly rising to its zenith here. The mosques are full, and there are several belonging to different sects, in almost every street. In my street alone, I have counted four, and another two or three in the next street over. I don’t need an alarm clock here because I get five wake-up calls a day in quadraphonic surround sound.
And Yet, there are also petrol-guzzling Mercedes and BMWs roaming the streets of Islamabad without a care; fancy car dealerships, shops, boutiques, and restaurants which would make the upscale hangout of *Santana Row* in San Jose California in need of a face-lift; and the elite are
living as if they have a special tunnel that daily takes them straight from their posh homes in the outskirts into *Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard,*by-passing all the misery behind the
*Iron Wall* and totally oblivious of it.
Most of my long-time friends are drawing handsome compensation packages as vaunted academics, or corporate widgets and CEOs selling cell-phones to *field niggers* or providing software services to *the white man*, or as poster-child of various governmental bodies suitably anointed with lofty
titles. Higher education being the sassiest gravy-train in the civilian sector as it evidently requires the least amount of talent and scruples to really make a killing under the strong leadership of Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission. I had previously written about it in the scandalous *Plagiarism
Case*
had accidentally uncovered. It was evidently as dead on arrival at the *supreme court of
Pakistan*
mills abound in this country as if trying to compete with America’s two thousand colleges and universities in sheer numbers – numbers evidently being the hallmark of both learnedness as well as piety here.
Sheer numbers, whether it be the number of servants employed in a house (often exceeding the number of family occupants in the elite homes of Islamabad by a factor of two or three), or the number of papers published (often exceeding the highest acclaimed Nobel laureate’s in the respective
field by a factor of at least ten), or the numbers of *hajj* performed (don’t even ask), or the number of gun-totting security guards manning the front gate – all count for status here. Unfortunately, I too have one thin scare-crow sitting at my gate – but one is not a number that matters in the
race to nowhere here. Some with their dual citizenship, and the *white man’s * Passport of any color, and others eagerly trying to acquire theirs, a comfortable life-style is the carefree lot of a handful who seem to own most everything here. I am not even speaking of *Military Inc.*, who evidently own most of the wealth and real-estate of Pakistan. I am only speaking of civvies I know of.
I seem to have sadly escaped all the lofty charactership which the Pakistani society evidently cultivates among the genius of our peoples, having contributed directly into the *white man’s* military-industrial complex for the highest level of corruption which begets all others – intellectual corruption. Instead of working for the benefit of my own peoples in a labor of love as only a handful of my friends have endeavored, I have helped – like the millions of other Silicon Valley engineers –
buildup the *white man’s ability to destroy* us. So I can hardly throw stones at others
who are merely trying to do well for themselves – with the only means they know how.
The *house niggers* over here however, are a different species altogether. They are sadly funny in way. They have taken over Pakistan across the full spectrum of social intercourse – from the military to the economy to the media to the elected to the bureaucrat to the mullah to the judge to the
professor to the so called NGOs largely populated with ex-military and secular humanists with foreign degrees – in all their Hegelian Dialectic variations. I dare to think that the sex prostitutes working the streets and nearly ubiquitous, are probably the most honest and hardworking of all professionals here. I don’t know any yet, but I suspect I may rather prefer their company.
The amount of bullshit which passes for great wisdom and profound knowledge over here is simply astounding. Everyone is a saint and a scholar. “Experts” abound. I am frequently informed how honest they each are, *“not a haram morsel has been fed to my children”* is the common refrain as the
pious bow in prayer five times daily in their million dollar homes.
The trend of self-deception arguably tops the United States. The bullshit there at least stands on the giant foundations of a super-power who needs a compliant public. Here we don’t even need foundations to build tall totem poles to get a compliant public. Hey, we are ahead of the US in something!”