Letter to The General

Letter to The General

While General Pervez Musharraf is still figuring out how the maps in his book escaped being rubber-stamped by the Indian Foreign Ministry wonks with the warning ‘neither correct nor authentic’ legend, here are tips to help cure the embarrassing Irony-deficiency evident in his memoir In The Line of Fire (Free Press, Simon & Schuster, Pages 352, Price Rs 950)

Dear General Saab,

Here are some words that do not appear to be part of your, or your ghost writer’s, vocabulary which are so vital for a head a real democracy (we’ll explain that in a moment). Then there are words which you seem to have used in a very ironic sense without realising it. You know, funny thing is that the most embarrassing thing at times is that one is not embarrassed enough.

Acquired Taste: Don’t tell us commandos have democracy on their mind. A typical action hero, you found your guerilla style wanting once the coup you staged from the PIA flight PK 805 was fait accompli. So, instead of the wine-tasting courses you’d planned for your superannuation, you’re wrestling with abstracts like ‘institutions,’ ‘constitution,’ and ‘development.’ Neophytes are always initially more anxious of getting it right. But give your new taste some time, you might end up as a connoisseur. Thumbs up, General.

Application: Your tutor in Turkey Madame Kudret, taught you mental mathematics, geography and English. Your one-track, K-on-my-mind (see K) mindset crippled your English vocabulary. But Madame’s other lessons you applied diligently to plan the logistics and tactics of the Kargil operation. And remember your ‘romantic’ uncle Ghazi Gulam Haider who, in jest, not just slapped an innocent stranger once on his bald head and then apologised feigning mistaken identity, but did it again? You were quick to absorb a lesson you never forgot -- of getting away with a crime or a misdemeanour by repeating it and apologising for it every time. Smart boy, Pervez!

Banana Republic: Tropical countries mostly, with ludicrously frequent regime changes. General, you’re right. Pakistan is not one. It is indeed ‘a stable nation,’ as you proclaimed in New York recently, where you had gone to launch and plug your book… sorry... to attend the UN General Assembly’s 61st session. As you (nervously?) dismissed the rumours of coup in the non-banana republic of Pakistan, did you for a second think who could be behind these canards? The Baluchis, the army, the ISI, the jihadis, Al Qaeda? Sounds more like a banana-split republic scenario to us?

Brinkmanship: As a major in the Special Security group (SSG), Pakistan’s elite commando outfit, ‘world’s best,’ you ran your own ‘Pervez Musharraf Confidence-building and Nerve-testing Centre’ making men under your command hold ‘self-made grenades’ which they were expected to throw three seconds before they exploded. Hmm. That explains Siachin, Kargil and the near-war in 2001 which ended when India blinked. Conan O’Brian, please give the General a chance on your show’s staring matches.

Barkha Dutt: Dutt was sent to Kargil along with Bofors guns to get you, and get you they did. She, along with the other famous General-molester Karan Thapar, are the muses who inspire you to sort-of free your own media to wage war by other means.

Candour: Cynical glibness and devious charm help you appear more candid and transparent than you can ever really be. As a student in Lahore’s FC College, you exploded serial bombs around the principal Dr Dutta’s residence. You confessed. Said sorry. And he let you go. You write: “That is when I learnt the power of truth, a lesson that has never left me.” Baloney! You learnt that phoney sincerity and calculated candour can save ass. You’re openness personified while spilling state secrets, but when it comes to showing us a bit more of Pervez the man, you’re as silent as Osama’s mobile. But for all your Freudian slips, you’d still be a total puzzle to your readers.

Democracy: On your edgy Agra visit, just out of the cantonment life back home, you found everything about Indian democracy strange. Can’t blame you, you’ve hardly ever lived in one! (Irony, General! See?) When the final draft of the joint declaration was also binned by the backroom boys and the cabinet, you were shocked at the way we do things here. An authority above you and Vajpayeeji? That’s ‘sham’ democracy, where there are no checks and balances. And, no, the ISI and the army don’t count.

Discretion: Did you have someone from the home and foreign office vet the book for inadvertent indiscretions or disclosures of sensitive information? Don’t unlock your Glock, General, it was just a suggestion.

K-word/Kafka: 'K' is for...is for...Kafka! You kan say to Manmohanji, ‘First resolve the Kafka issue before we admit there is kross border terrorism.’ Read Kafka’s The Kastle to appreciate the chilling meaninglessness of set patterns of behaviour and konditioned responses. You want an ‘outside the box’ solution for the Kafka issue. But what if we tell you, the K-word is the box?

Khan Market: AQ Khan’s, ahem, ‘enterprise.’ Excellent after sales service. And yes, free home delivery. Now even the grass-eating North Koreans think they have a chance against the Yankees. All the while the Pakistani army and the ISI sniff nothing? Only their own five chalk lines, see Pakistani Exports

Media: You’re laddishly glamour-struck by the international media and believe everything they spout. And you parrot their lingo to scare the world -- ‘nuclear flashpoint’, ‘eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.’ Free Pakistani media? For starters, no more arbitrary arrests and Tehelka-style harassment (don’t snigger, General, democracy is a work in progress) of your media persons. Look for a subbing job at NDTV when you’re finished with Pakistan, or perhaps it with you.

Obsession: KafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafka KafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkavKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafka... see Kafka.

Pakistani Exports: to fake Indian currency, jihadis, the intriguing new concept of ‘real’ democracy, packaged lies, Punjabi-accented English, pot, RDX, nuclear technology, and detainees for Guantánamo Bay. Junoon and Strings are in high demand abroad, but you feel threatened they will upstage you. Did we mention the famous Pakistani visa?

Paruresis: Don’t bother checking your book’s index, you find the word there. It’s a condition where a person cannot pee when some one is watching. Pakistan’s political class is afflicted by political paruresis. With the army watching over them, no wonder they just can’t ‘P’ (for Politics, we mean).

Rough Neighbourhood: Karachi of your childhood. But instead of fearing or loathing it, you became its dada geer after ko-ing the bully after your brother Javed’s kite. You insist you still live in one. Did Musharraf make the neighbourhood bad or it him? Tricky one, that.

Pluralism: when the General speaks in many tongues? No. It is a simple tanga, that still run on Lahore’s streets, with not one but many horses in the front. Some even at the back. Ok, seriously, just let Benazir, Nawaz, Imran, the mullahs and the fundos, all have their say and then let people decide whether they want Bollywood movies on pirated or original DVDs. That would be more like it.

Politics: Popular politics. Your biggest fear, miles outside your comfort zone (read ‘the barracks’). You keep thinking of a makeover and discarding your military fatigues, but are afraid to. For good reasons too, General. To be elected a leader and to work within the constitution (if you recall, that was the first thing you messed with after you took over the TV station, we mean Pakistan) without firepower needs more guts than shooting down a helicopter with a leftover Stinger.

Pre-Irony: you snootily deride Bollywood. But we say, look who is talking. The treacly tripe you deal out about being the best soldier, best general, best thing-that-ever-happened-to-Pakistan, ignoring Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, even Qaid-e-Azam (whom you conveniently kill so early in the book), Junoon, and Strings, is akin to the pre-ironic this-film-is-hat kar statements Ashwarya Rais, Sushmita Sens, and your own Mira make.

Sitting Ducks: At the Gol Bashi lake in Ankara, duck-shooting with your father you discovered your predilection for sitting ducks --because the flying ones were beyond you. Until Barkha Dutt and our boys arrived in Kargil, you thought you were back at Gol Bashi.

Understatement: You write AQK ‘brought some drawings of centrifuges along with him’ from Netherlands where he worked in a uranium-enrichment facility. Teehee. He nicked them.

X: the unknown. Too many in your book. You don’t even tell us what movies you watched in Lahore when you slipped away to Regal Cinema from the FC College hostel.

We had more words, like Backtrack, not the same as Track-two or Backdoor diplomacy, but we’ve heard you’re busy reading and revising your book. Hope our counsel benefits the new edition.

Yours Truly,
Neeras Anthem

Getting There

The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers
By Sarnath Banerjee
Penguin Books India
Pages 263
Rs 395

In the West, the graphic novel is an exploding category in publishing. Graphic novels win Pulitzers and figure in the Top-100-Novels lists of influential magazines. They tackle pretty much the same ground as literary novels do, hence they can be complex, difficult, and even simply obtuse like any other New York Times bestseller. Like their picture-less cousins, they are a form that is being defined with every new exemplar.

In India, though the comic form enjoys as much popularity as it does in any culture that has bored, housebound school kids, the graphic novel only emerged recently with Sarnath Banerjee’s charming Corridor. Just over hundred pages long, it is a soulful, witty take on Delhi’s city-town mix, trying to capture “the alienation and fragmented reality of urban life.”

In his second, more ambitious work, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, Banerjee brings Cartaphilus -- the Wandering Jew of the myth, who was cursed by Jesus to roam restlessly around the world till the Second Coming -- to Calcutta. The earliest cosmopolis of the Empire, Calcutta has since long been home to the Armenian diaspora. The Barn Owl conveniently uses one of them as an avatar of the peripatetic Jew: A self-appointed chronicler of the city’s oddballs and their capers, a connoisseur of scandals -- its earliest gossip columnist, who puts it all down in a book called The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers.

Banerjee’s narrative cuts to modern day Kolkata and London, where his alter ego, Pablo, a deracinated, funds-starved, oversexed, long-haired flaneur, juggling non-relationships, a flagging libido, and insatiated Viking Amazons, one day decides that he will go to Calcutta to claim three objects his deceased grandfather had left him in legacy: A pair of Humboldt binoculars, an old Murphy radio, a Norton Pre-War, and the antique book that could fetch a small fortune, the scandalous The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers.

The Barn Owl chugs along from that point as novel of quest, which gives Banerjee an excuse to bring alive Paris, London, and Calcutta in his deceptively casual pen-drawings. The story also traverses time-periods, scouring the armpits of history till it becomes a heady mix like Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code -- a potpourri of the occult, history, afternoon sex and other obsessions, and of kooky secret societies.

A compulsive raconteur, Banerjee regales his readers with stories within stories, stories obliquely told, stories that read like exquisitely written shorts and essays. While not contributing much to the plot, they yet add a lot to the graphic novel’s texture and make the form alluringly footloose.

Those who have read some of the celebrated graphic novels -- like Chris Ware’s magnificently drawn exegesis on loneliness, Jimmy Corrigan; Marjane Satrapi’s engaging personal-political memoir, Persepolis; or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, whose sophistication reinfuses Holocaust literature with new poignancy -- are struck by their autobiographical intensity, sustained narratives, depth of characterisation and fearless individuality. Banerjee’s works, though equally nonpareil, choose to be less introspective. His infectious, childlike inquisitiveness about the possibilities of this mix of word and images, is the engine that powers his works. They are not, however, short on something deeper to convey: both Corridor and The Barn Owl could be together read as a meditation on desire and possession. Suffused with the exhilaration of pick-and-choose postmodernism where everything -- even time and space -- coexists simultaneously, Banerjee’s art aspires to be entertaining and cerebral at the same time.

Banerjee’s most abiding contribution to the graphic novel is that so early in the form’s history, he has developed an idiom that is unmistakably Indian, yet world-class. But it will need more than one Sarnath Banerjee to unleash in India a Manga-like tsunami.