Throwing the cat among the pigeons

When our parents were growing up, there used to be a huge sheri-bakra divide in the valley. So essentially there were lions and there were lambs. Srinagar was a very dangerous jungle. The lions would attempt to frighten the lambs and call it fair. These were democratic rules of the jungle. The circus masters in Delhi cheered them on. This carried on for a long time.

Then one day the lambs got together in Srinagar, in Sopore, in Islamabad, in Bandipore, in Kupwara, in Kokernag — all over the place. They decided enough is enough. If the lions can maul us, and call it democratic, let us beat them at their own game. Let us run for elections. Let us show them we are not meek pushovers. The year was 1987.

Sure enough the lions panicked. The circus masters in Delhi were alarmed. They were afraid of two things — a) lions are a better deal. When they perform, the audience claps, b) lambs were untested. They were ideologically inverse, even if easily bullied. Also the lions had many ruffians and butchers on their side. Intellectuals are brilliant but they are not good at rigging elections.

So the lions — cunning old boys that they were — beat them at the democratic exercise. Lambs lost badly. Their votes floated in the Jhelum and flowed all the way to Pakistan. The ringmasters breathed a sigh of relief. Geelani sahib — whom Sanghi retards like to call a broker these days — and others went into oblivion. The lions continued their rule, unchallenged.

A few years later there was mutiny in the jungle. The lions fled. Their ringmasters vanished into thin air. What started as a take-over, a revolution of sorts, soon turned into pandemonium. While it is true that uprisings, because of their very nature of insubordination, are usually messy, ours was a little extra sloppy. Two and a half decades on, we are still unsure about what hit us in 1989.

What we remember — for sure — is everything that transpired in this interim. The horrid, hellish stuff that took place. But even before we could figure out how to make our way out of the woods — that are deep and dark, the ringmasters were back. This time around they had another set of creatures to cheer on.

And as if to paper-over everything that we have been through, and make little of our collective indignations, we now have a new name: cats. Suddenly it feels as if a cat has kittened in our mouths. Move over, bakras. The cats have cometh.

Ms Mufti is a fellow Kashmiri. If we have cat whiskers, she too has cat claws. Eventually all cats are gray in the dark.

Sameer

Why so serious?

Humor is a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one's bottom

The spoof appears to have run aground. Omar is an angry young man because someone attempted to lampoon him in a picture on FaceBook, along with his dad and grand-dad. The image appears to be a rip-off from a poster of a popular film ‘Three-idiots’. The Abdullahs’ – Kashmir’s high-brow first family – are mimed as Kashmir’s ‘Three-idiots’. An instance of Juvenalian satire, it would pass as just another gag in any civilized polity. Except Kashmir. Suddenly the ruling cabal is agitated, like an aged volcano.

A hurried press conference was called in Jammu to denounce the lampoonery. Rahim Rather, an old National Conference [NC] strong man, was flanked by two rising stars on the NC horizon Nasir Sogami and Devender Rana [expected to keep pouring paraffin in the NC lamp in Srinagar and Jammu respectively for many years to come]. They vented their ire on Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the opposition, and no Lal Ded herself. Ms Mufti was accused of forwarding a text to friends, asking them to check the picture out. Now Zardari was last seen giving final touches to a new law in neighboring Pakistan, attempting to gag those ridiculing him in texts. NC may well move a similar bill. AFSPA can wait.

Prof Howard Zinn, the very fine author, professor and intellectual who wrote tirelessly on civil liberties died in a swimming pool in Santa Monica, California last month. He often used to refer to Thomas Jefferson’s famous letter to Abigail Adams -- written during Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts -- “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.” It is not known whether the NC bosses know that in satire, irony is often militant.

Humor is like an aphrodisiac, which needs to be popped once in a while. In London, the city I love, Punch was a ground-breaking magazine of popular humor that often involved satire of the contemporary political scene. There are so many references and pastiches of wit in Islamic culture itself. Arabic poetry, the genre of satire, called Hija, mixes amusing anecdotes or wit in a grave subject to make it just more palatable. Satire gained currency after Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes elaborated on the Greek thinker Aristotle's Poetics.

Nearer home in the good old innocent days, our folk singers, Bhands used to fuse play and dance, to portray social traditions and evils, bringing out the satire in them. Our Ladishah is a beautiful sarcastical form of singing. It is humor loaded with political reproof. In the present day Kashmir there are just press conferences, where particles of froth can be seen floating about in abundance.

We learn three new things from the ‘Three idiots’ joke and the subsequent press conference: Mehbooba Mufti – with that black cell phone of hers – is a gamester. Omar has two spots of angry red on his cheeks. Our humor has been molested.

Must be the conflict.

Sameer