NEXT ROUND, PLEASE!

رشتوں کے اکھاڑے میں

جذبوں کی ورزش سے تھک گیا ہوں

اور تھک کر جہاں بیٹھ جاتا ہوں

ایک نیا دائیرہ وہیں سے کھینچ لیتے ہیں لوگ 

اگلے مقابلے کے لیے 

Rishton Kay akhadey mein

Jazbon ki warzish se thak gaya hoon

Aur thak kar jahan baith jata hoon

Ek naya dayira wahin se kheench lete hain log

Agle muqable Kay liye 

ARS POETICA

When I am old with sickness

in every vein,

sleeping on the fringes

of life and death.

When the visions

before the curtain of my eyes

And the dreams backstage

are nothing but

an insurmountable fog.

When my toilet etiquettes are slurry

and my existence a muck

in the diaper -

Shit, piss and the stench of life.

When Alzheimer's is cleaved

to my brain like leech

to the skin.

When I have forgotten my self,

This person -

Who was nothing but a noisy utensil

inside the grand kitchen of

relatives and family.

Who was always an aberration

within the system,

whose complexity was always

simplified, essentialized 

with a label, a judgement,

who always remained misunderstood

among his colleagues and friends.

Who was nothing

but an imbecile

performing in the academic circus,

a jester never able to complete

the assigned syllabus,

leaving students and scholars

dismayed, to the end.

One, who was never

literary enough to be

in the literary circle of contemporaries,

or worthy enough to be discussed

in magazines or journals;

A blind man who could never see

what everyone saw,

an unpublished amateur.

When he is far away

from all this civilized rattle,

please come to him (wearing

that maroon or mustard dress)

and recite the verses

that are never to be found

anywhere in the world,

that were written 

For you and only you.

Recite those to his

deaf hearing and cloudy vision,

to the demented head in your lap

and tell him -

"Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus"

THE FEAST

("A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism" - Georges Bataille)

Between carnality and love,

body is bruised.

Cigarette burns, torture wounds, scars

become light pecks, hickeys.

Passionate touches: that's what

The official document says.

It always begins with a kiss -

Our warm lips

on your soft bosom.

Soon we were nibbling,

chewing into you,

we, with all our beaks;

Some had pens, some guns,

some jabbed at you with official orders,

while some were doing their duty.

The feast lasting a century

on History's table.

Leaders, masses, army and police,

Poets, intellectuals and revolutionaries,

all drunk on your blood.

The vultures are passed as flamingos.

The blood as essential crop milk.

Your gorged-on body

is a carcass now.

Who could have thought

it can all start with a kiss, a body,

A law and a land.

A PRIMER OF LOVE

C for Clothes

Magar accha tou ye hota ki hum ek saath rehte

Bhari rehti tere kapdon se almaari humari

(Jawad Sheikh)

Clothes form an essential structure in the metaphysics of love because your beloved wears them. Just by that fact only they become signifiers of something transcendent  wavering between mystical and fetish. The cloth, the garment becomes a text, a language tailored by one adorned by someone else - a Barthesian language. Its texture is the texture of memory and desire - suddenly you remember, she wore that dress on that day when that thing happened. Somewhere in a closet hangs Rene Magritte's  Homage to Mack Sennett.

"I love your every dress

Because they do

What I wish to do"

F for Fingernail

Your fingernail grazes my lip and nicks my being. Last night the waxing crescent moon resembled your clipped fingernail. Was it destined to be apart from you because it was a part of you or it wasn't, like me.

"In love

I want to collect

All your clipped nails

As a souvenir of my excess longing" (Mubashir Karim)

Q for Question

Standing before God (who has all the answers), it is a matter of asking the right questions. Mythology and epics are riddled with questions, so is Love. I love you was a question when you said it. I inherited it as an answer and that has made all the difference. Here I am, everyday, standing before God searching for the right questions to ask. 

"To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)?

Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought. . .?" (Barthes)

T for Time (and Place)

I love you is always incomplete. I loved you in Kashmir: the past indicator and the place. Love can never escape the spatiotemporality. To be in one place at the same time is essential for you and me to fall in love. Had we been somewhere else, say Paris, we would have loved differently. There's a particular Kashmiri way of loving that only lovers in its space and time know.

"Tumhari aankhoun mein

Nami aatey hi

Srinagar mein

Baarish hojati hai

Mausam koi bhi ho

Meri Nazm bheeg jati hai"

ENDURANCE

(for Raymond Carver)

It's always good to

Visit your neighbour and

When you're there 

Observe your own house

From that neighbourly strangeness:

See people living,

Laughing and bickering,

Doing stuff inside rooms,

To keep this house from falling apart.

So that you

Hear the occasional music

Slipping through the bricks,

The smoke waving

Through the chimney.

What is true for houses,

Is true for people too!

Montage (or The History of Love as Philosophy)

Plato -

You shone like the sun

Over the cave of my being.

The moment I saw you,

I knew all the epics

About us

Revolting against Zeus.

Aristotle -

Contrary to everything;

You were, are and will be

All my causes.

Ibn Sina -

In the contingency of this world,

You and me ARE.

Our love,

The necessary logical proof:

God exists.

Al Ghazali -

You

Are all my knowledge.

I memorized you

Syllable by syllable.

Descartes -

Society,

The evil demon

Deceving us.

Kant -

I see Me

As you.

Both should be counted

Both are true.

Romanticism -

To touch your soul,

I smell grass

At 2 AM.

Marxism -

Lovers of the world,

Untie!

You have nothing.

Nietzsche -

We are and will

Recur eternally

Through every lover

And every lover

Through us.

Existentialism -

Lovers;

One should imagine them

Happy.

Wittgenstein -

You are all my poems

Written, unwritten.

Postmodernism -

A mood,

An incredulity

Towards love poems.

Post-postmodernism -

You and me

Raising a family of bastards.

A BILLBOARD IN ATHENS

As mesmerized

By the black screens today,

People go on

Engrossed in the things people do,

While a voice calls unto them -

Calls for the Truth.

It is a pity,

the wisest man in Athens

Has to beg for it,

Search rigorously for the interlocutors.

The enemy of the Truth

Is not falsehood

But the glamour of it.

The appearances:

To seem speaking the truth,

To appear to be revolutionary -

The same formula,

The same equation everywhere;

The truth should be quotable,

The quotation has to be beautiful.

The face should make a good wallpaper,

The martyr has to be adorable.

While this lustrous flaunt goes by,

Truth appears

Beneath the largest democracy

As Kashmir,

As the face of Socrates,

Ugly and warted.

CIRCUMVENT

You run your fingers

Through my hair,

Like fatal thought 

Combing a suicidal mind.

One day I kissed you frantically

Raising a tooth-memorial

Over a blushing, soggy landscape.

The inevitability of music

When the bow touches the string:

A frisson running through the body,

Your touch,

Rain and blizzard hitting together

The glass of my being.

My poem, hanging hopefully

By the eave of your bosom

Over the peg of your heart.

Have I not lost everything?

I am balding and

Missing major molars.

The body slipping into mountains

Spreading silently,

Firm as a tree -

Ever increasing girth.

I have lost everything.

Everything you ever touched.

Except this poetry!

Maybe, I lost you

The day you were found.

And these have all been the attempts

To regain you, recover you

Line by line

Word by word.

CHLADNI FIGURES

Everything is in motion.

The heavens, the mountains,

The atoms.

Everything.

Beating to its own rhythm.

The emptiness, the sadness,

The pain,

Inside you

Beating faster than your heart,

Echoing excruciatingly.

Outside, 

The world appears calm, so serene -

You smile, greet people,

Listen to them,

Display the chladni figures

Of your face,

Pass the beating as sound,

As music,

As art.

SLAPSTICK LIFE

School, University, Airport, Bank and Prison - 

A same beam runs through the ceiling . . .

One day you stand in a long queue

To deposit the university fee

In a bank

An airplane takes off  beyond your control

One day you work through life

The penal labour 

To pay the bank

Before you are admitted to the hospital

(This all happens easily

As easily as a School or a University

Is converted into a Hospital or a Prison 

During a pandemic).

You are the patient, the student,

The passenger, the defaulter, the criminal -

Helpless!

A dot entagngled within

The colossal rib cage of iron and emptiness.

Just look inside those eyes -

Those Buster Keaton eyes

Hiding the pain

Under the sheen of vaudeville stunts.

KISS

I taste your lips 

On my tongue

Like dentist's tools

Long after the tooth has been

Extracted -

The throbbing

The wound

The blood

The steel

INDEPENDENCE DAY

The waste should go

Into the dustbin

Lying across the street

Sitting within its own rancidity.

Add a barbed wire.

A brave army person.

A poet carrying trash:

A heated argument.

The army moves

With rifles and batons

About to hit the poet;

Everybody knows

Where the plot of such situation goes.

But, in that frozen hanging moment

The poet IS the trash.

One angry syllable 

And he will go dead down

Into the trashcan of a rotting nation.

THE PLACE BENEATH

Beneath the scatological architecture

There's no breathing

The windpipe shoved down the mouth

Is the rectal passage where

The shit of politicians and 

Piss of leaders is cunningly whisked

With the blood of martyrs 

Beneath this shitty metaphor

There's no smelling also

You can pass

The putrid smell as fragrance

Make the roses blush -

Kiss the windpipe clean

And call it all a holy structure

Beneath this beneath

People live

And survive 

HOME

Home is rooted deep

And one has to go 

Through immense parenthood

To reach the depth, the base.

At the same time,

The carpernter knows

How high to climb

To give this home 

The roof it needs.

In between all this - 

We laugh, fight, celebrate, sleep, die

We invite strangers, friends, workmen

We share jokes, teas and lineage.

Home does not plunge

From height into depth,

It does not leap from below,

It moves in every direction.

Home is always a border:

Somewhere between haven and haunting,

Between insider and outsider - 

A family yet to come. 

The Dog's Way of Life

Alama Kamal ud Din Al-Damiri in his book Hayat ul Haiwaan elucidates numerous qualities of Dog. That Dogs are hardworking, loyal, protect the master and his house. That Dogs stand vigil most of the night and even if asleep are alerted by master's slight gesture. That Dogs have the potential of taking instructions etc etc. What interests me is one specific quality: that one of the qualities of Dog is that he can distinguish between a dead person and alive. Dimiri relates the practice to Romans that they never buried their dead unless and until Dog authenticated it.

In his lectures, The Courage of Truth, Foucault connects Greek Cynics with Dogs. For him the Cynic's way of life is a dog's life. Foucault insists also in Fearless Speech that the word Cynic has canine origins: kunikos meaning dog like. For Foucault Cynics and Dogs share many qualities: Dogs scandalize and do in public what people do in private, in the same way Cynics scandalize hypocrites. Dogs live in poverty and are exposed without protection, in the same way Cynics possess nothing and are always exposed to the scorn of society. Dogs bite and bark, in the same way Cynics bite and bark institutions and ill social practices.

These qualities give Cynics the courage to speak the truth - parrhesia.

Damiri narrates a hadith through Umrao bin Shuaib as recorded by Muhammad bin Khalf Marzabaan in his book in which Prophet (SAW) praised the Dog over a man who was disobedient and violated the sacred custody of his brother.

The Dog's way of life is the best way to be radical in the society. Spiritually if dog can distinguish between dead and alive, this quality is enough to tell you whether you are spiritually dead or alive. Baba Bulleh Shah beautifully sums it all up: 

rati jaage te shaikh sadawen par raat nu jagan kutte tain thi uthe

rati ponknu bus na karde fir ja raran vich sutte tain thi uthe

yaar da buha mool na chad'de pawen maro so so jutte tain thi uthe

bulleh shah uth yaar manale nai te baazi le gaye kutte tain thi uthe

They keep awake at night and they serve;

The Dog's are better than you!

They do not fail their duty of barking;

They they got and sleep on a rubbish-heap.

The dogs are better than you!

They do not leave the door of their master,

Even if they get a shoe-beating from him.

The dogs are better than you!

O Bullah, but some wares for your journey,

Or else the dogs will win the game.

The dogs are better than you!

Then it connects to the dog of Ashab e kahf and to The dogs of Faiz ... And the connections go on and on!

PS: Please keep the dog in you alive 😊

FOR DADI

My grandmother spoke three languages

And in three languages

Could she pray for me

I have chosen this language

A language she couldn't understand

To express my love for her

In the end

It all comes down to this:

The enormity of love

The deformity of language

And the ultimate intimacy between the two 

VIEW FROM THE WINDOW

Windows are always on the verge

Of rooms

Of houses

Balancing finely between

Inviting in or out

Like eyes

Seeing and dreaming.

Then there are houses

That can't even be called houses

Where the metaphor hangs

Between a window and a door.

One conveniently leads to another.

Our ancestors understood this dilemma

Advising us not to open 

The windows when

The neighbours are bickering

Or making love.

In those moments

Houses become a divine window

Opening into one another.

Windows, they advised,

Should always open into hearts

Not into blinding green gardens!

WAQT

Mai is zalim duniya ke

Har gunaah pe 

Kalam uthane hi wala tha

Ki meri beti ne mujhse poocha:

Baba, tum ab bhi zinda ho?

Uski awaaz 

Maazi ki khasta kok se

Ya mustaqbil ki ujdti qabr se aarahi thi

Ye haal ke baanjhpan mein

Tai kar pana

Namumkin hai 

وقت

میں اس ظلم کے

ہر گناہ پر

قلم اٹھانے ہے والا تھا

کہ میری بیٹی نے مُجھسے پوچھا:

بابا, تم اب بھی زندہ ہو؟

اسکی آواز

ماضی کی خستہ کوک سے

یہ مستقبل کی اُجڑی قبر سے آرہی تھی

یہ حال کے بانجھپن میں

طے کر پانا

ناممکن ہے 

‘All Our Monuments are Mausoleums’

(The article previously appeared in The Citizen)

I

Recycling History

In Micheal Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) when Anna finally shoots Paul’s friend Peter after their exhaustive sadistic games, Paul rectifies and resurrects his friend by searching the remote and literally rewinding the whole scene for himself and for the audience. This is what we do every time an event not of our liking (ideology) occurs; we search for a remote, a website, a video, a browser that rectifies and resurrects the event for us. Haneke’s movie emerges as a critique of torture-porn and war-porn culture of mass media. The movie continuously breaks the fourth wall and in certain iconic scenes (like the one discussed above) makes the viewer conscious of the fictionality of fiction and questions our position as consumers. The present condition of the world harnesses this interpretation. While on the one hand we are exploring Mars, on the other we are still suffering from poverty. While #metoo movements with strong-willed celebrities enlighten our faces, 4.1 million girls around the globe are at the risk of undergoing female genital mutilation, while we have cluttered the outer space with our satellites, Earth’s environment is breathing its last, while the slogans and processes of Democracy are getting sharper, Palestinians and Kashmiris go on suffering, while time seems to be progressing it also at the same time seems to slope down into decadence. The time it seems, like Hamlet, is ‘out of joint’ or history like Paul’s remote is rewinding itself to rectify its mistakes before us, so that the fictional-plot goes in the desired direction. All the dreams of Enlightenment and Modernism end in nightmares and any promise of progression of time/history falls into pieces. Kant, Hegel, Marx and others can be seen wearing the mask of ideologies suffocating under the heavy debris of their grand histories.

Is this terminus ad quem then? But we have neither seen Apocalypse, Anti-Christ, Messiah nor Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’. We are stuck somewhere in-between. History it seems is on a loop, cycling or better ‘recycling’ to use Jean Baudrillard’s word.  For Baudrillard, “History has only wrenched itself from cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable.” However ironic it may seem, for Baudrillard the ‘end’ does not occur because of the termination or lack of something. On the contrary, it happens because of the excess of it – the excess of sex in pornography, for example, is the end of sexuality in it – the hyperreal. It is like Tyler Durden in Fight Club inserting those porn-shots within an excessive-emotional-hollywood-marketed family drama because they all belong to the same domain of hyperreal.  “The idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess.” Likewise, the excess of events (more importantly the dissemination of any event in real-time through 24/7 news networks and the bombardment and proliferation of commentaries) put an end to history. “All our structures” says Baudrillard “end up swelling like red giants that absorb everything in their expansion.” It is like metastasis, the very growth of the body that ends the body – the body politic or the body social. So, then why does it not end, what’s Baudrillard’s deal with ‘recycling’? 

One of the many answers that interests is his concern with the leftover ideologies. For Baudrillard, “the defunct ideologies, bygone utopias, dead concepts” like “Church, communism, ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies” are all here with us and history has become its own dustbin just like “the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.” This historical and intellectual waste scattered all over the dustbin of history poses a larger threat to us than industrial waste. The only possible function left for History is to “either perish under the weight of the non-degradable waste of great empires, the grand narratives, or the great systems” or to “recycle all this waste in the synthetic form of a heteroclite history.” It is for this reason the history never comes to an end because the ‘leftovers’ are all settled here and there is nothing that “will rid us of the sedimentation of centuries of stupidity.” The history through its “retroversion . . . to infinity” recycles the leftovers or like Paul’s remote replays itself rectifying or whitewashing any error.

This labouring in Baudrillard’s theory helps us to answer the earlier comparisons enumerated above – the heteroclite elements of progress and decadence within the democracies all over. The history is recycling and many a time recycles the fascism within democracy, or sometimes simply stupidity because democracy and Human Rights are nothing “but the confused end-product of the reprocessing of all the residues of history.” Sometimes the history recycles someone like Trump or reprocesses a Modi for democracy. This is what I was reminded of as I read Aijaz Ahmad’s ‘Post-democratic State’ written recently for Frontline.

There is a strong academic tendency to read both these figures as tyrants or fools and many theories tempt us to go into that direction. What we tend to forget is the process through which they came to the forefront as leaders of the two ‘great nations’ – they did not appoint themselves as leaders but were elected through a democratic process of election. Dismissing them as tyrants undermines the sacrosanct process of electioneering and voting so vital to the democratic life. One is reminded of Gilles Deleuze when he says, “a tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.” This is the time then one should shift the focus away from the subject to the system, the process – the Democracy. The question that begs the answer is, how come the 21st century democracy gives birth to such politicians and how these politicians are able to survive within that system? Is the system then so favourable for people like these? 

There are a certain number of behavioural patterns that are unique to such leaders – narcissism, controversies, attention, and approval. That is why they always have an almost pathological need to ‘pose’ – media, camera and social networking come in handy – the theatricality. Another aspect of this theatricality is the blatant and gross visibility of power against minorities or enemies. There is no ideology in force here, no hegemony, no secrets but an open agenda – visible and excessive. The power wears no masquerade, we are back to Royal power. Baudrillard’s history has recycled once again and a leftover residue is reprocessed into the system. There is no need to go through Michel Foucault’s ‘Disciplinary Societies’ when we are back to the spectacle, the theatre. If history recycles itself then maybe we have to recycle the theory too and go back to the old societies and their theatricality of power to understand the present paradoxical scenario. When considered, the idea does not seem so farfetched – theatre and democracy are twins more like the two strands of DNA.

II

Demokratia or Theatrokratia

Around sixth century, Athens was a warring nation of tribal and foreign conflicts and Pisistratus, a tyrant (not actually a tyrant but one like our leaders) among others was trying to unify them. Greek poetry had already started with Homer around eighth century giving way to Bacchylidian lyrics by seventh century. It is worth noting that during sixth century Athens was not the great nation that we now know. Instead, Sparta, Corinth, Sikyon, and Samos were the cities of importance.  The importance of dates lies in the fact that the rise of Athens is synchronous to the rise of democracy and the rise of democracy is coetaneous with the establishment of the theatre. Around late sixth and early fifth century, Pisistratus established a single festival of Dionysos at Athens, the city of Dionysia. It was “an official celebration” around performances which provided the audience a chance to affirm themselves as citizens of the polis. Simon Critchley summarizes this sentiment when he elaborates on Simon Goldhill’s point that theatre was the ‘glue of democracy’ then.  A grand spectacle and theatricality as a tool to discipline and control people was what it was reduced to when it reached Elizabethan England. “We princes are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world”, Queen Elizabeth announced to a delegation of Lords and Commons. Stephen Greenblatt examines Elizabethan power in relation to theatre brilliantly and succinctly in his essay ‘Invisible Bullets’. “Elizabethan power” he writes “depends upon its privileged visibility. As in a theatre, the audience must be powerfully engaged by this visible presence . . .” Here, we are back to our present democracy of Princes with their visible presence and power. It means that in a theatrical-democracy the truth is less important than the performance. In fact, the spectacle of a lie performed with full theatricality can outwit truth. Democracy begs theatricality. It was perhaps for this reason that Plato was so afraid of theatre that he calls demokratia (democracy) theatrokratia.  Theatrocracy/democracy then becomes “a society of the spectacle that legitimates itself through the production of theatrical or mediatic illusion that gives the impression of legitimacy without any genuine substance.” Are we really then a society of the spectacle that Guy Debord warned us long back? “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” reads the first thesis of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Reading Baudrillard as an uber-Debordian affirms that not only are we but that we have ‘progressed’ abysmally.

Postscript

With players as diverse as news channels, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, websites – democracy has become a mere theatrical game won by the best actors and directors with a large number of audience. BJP has understood it like no other party. One is reminded of Frank Underwood from Netflix series House of Cards. In the second season when he is a “heartbeat away from the presidency and not a single vote cast in [his] name” Frank proclaims: Democracy is so overrated. Is it or not?

One thing that strikes out through Haneke’s Funny Games, House of Cards and Greek theatre is: talking to the audience. For Plato, the only antidote to the poison of deceptive-theatre is philosophy or what in modern vocabulary can be called education. “The theatre was a space” writes Simon Goldhill about Greek Theatre “in which all the citizens were actors.” An educated populace, an engaging public is the only audience to this grand theatre. Frequently breaking the fourth wall and involving more and more educated audience, that is the only way to ensure whether democracy is overrated or not!

--------------------------------------------------

i. The title is from Jean Baudrillard’s book The Illusion of the End.

ii. From Ian C. Storey and Arlene Allan’s A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama.

iii. Tragedy, the Greeks and Us.

iv. Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s Stay Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine.

MAI AUR TUM

I

Dil mohallay se door nahi tera ghar

Magar

Ab mai nahi

Us shehar mein rehta hoon

II

Tumhare hijr kay daag ab mai

Zahan ki dhoop se dhota hoon

II

Suna hai

Neend mein jaagti ho mai ban kar

Mai bhi apne khwabon mein

Mai ban kar hi sota hoon 

میں اور تم

I

 دل محلے سے دور نہیں تیرا گھر

مگر

اب میں نہیں

اس شہر میں رہتا ہوں

II

تمہارے ہجر کے داغ اب میں

ذہن کی دھوپ سے دھوتا ہوں

III

سنا ہے

نیند میں جاگتی ہو میں بن کر

میں بھی اپنے خوابوں میں

میں بن کر ہی سوتا ہوں 

KNOCK KNOCK

"Knock knock!

Who's there?"

There are no such jokes in Kashmir.

The door and the usher 

Both pulverized

Inside the joke, yes!

The dead laugh echoes throughout

The same old 'laugh track'

Running behind all the sitcoms. 

METAMORPHOSES

Ovid's antique pen pecks the page

And stops after a mythological stretch

Searching for a title.

A man searches his lost goat

Somewhere under the sweltering desert sun

His whole body dripping by the blisters of his feet

Fuming and breathless.

Somewhere Goethe's sagacious literary eyes

Examine the etchings of Roos.

The man finally finds the doe

Blisters burst and he hugs her

Like a mother

Overcome by sympathy

He wants to become Roos' sheep

While God proclaims to his Angels

The person is ready to become Moses

Ovid writes Metamorphoses.

This is how begins

Art, literature, religion -

This is how animals become humans. 

DOU QOUMEIN

Humare aur tumhare beech

Ek sangeen tamasha hai

Ek behuda mazak

Ek behra shor hai

Mazhab ka dhuan

Aur nafrat ki andhi deewar hai

Humara aur tumhara milna

Is sadi 

Is janam

Is zameen pe mumkin nahi

Humare aur tumhare darmiyan

TV ki gehri screen hai