The only woman who can make Musharraf take off his clothes

The world is an evil place and you have to adopt evil ways. Hence the title. You have to decieve in order to lead - or atleast that seems to be the mantra of our leaders.

To ensure continuity of the status quo, our leaders time and again embroil themselves in certain national conflicts that absorb all energy and leaving the feeling in the air that the rest of the work needs to be left for another time.

That's how we have been led....by the noose. Just to flashback, not even in the distant far, a mere 5 years, even, and soo much has happen that our brains are over-taxed by conflicting information of conflicts.

Right now it's Benazir's return. Before that it was the crackdown against lawyers and the countrywide breakdown. Before that it was May 12th when Karachi easily reflected what life would be like in war-torn Beirut at the height of the crisis. Before that was the continuing saga of Lal Masjid and the Chief Justice. Somewhere in the middle was Nawaz Sharif's aborted attempts of return and Shoaib Akhtar's shenanigans.

Before that was continuous detention of political prisoners. Before that was the political assassination of a politcal figure and a tribal leader of great standing even if cruel ways - Nawab Akbar Bukti...Before that and continuing todate is the ongoing saga of militants in FATA region, especially Waziristan..

And God unleashed some divine wrath in the middle, too. The October Eight earthquake in the already war-torn Kashmir region destabilized lives even further. Safe estimates suggest that it killed a million and made another 3 million homeless.

And the rest have now become more dependent on official aid, political concessions and moments of army benevolence. Cynics suggest it will expedite the process of recruiting foot-soldiers.

But that's how it's been. The political climate has been simmering for a while now. Benazir's imminent return means that Karachi will be a cauldron of activity. 80,000 members are expected to welcome BB

From the alliance of political parties supporting PPP, only one party has stepped forward to join the ranks of PPP foot-soldiers in welcoming home their patron saint. Funnily enough, I had never expected such a party to exist. It's the 'All Pakistan's Minority Alliance' and is led by one Prince Rashid. So this party is an alliance of minorities, who number around 5% of the total population in generous official estimates that probably want to cover up a healthcare genocide of Aremenian-Turkish levels. This means that the alliance of minorities is the only party with the cajonies to welcome BB...or an urgence for a voice in the political apparatus, to expose themselves so much in such a volatile environment. It could generally be said that 'they have nothing to lose', but in Pakistan you always have your life...

While the party members are expected to descend in full force in Karachi by tonight, the city already is painted in PPP colours. Cross-roads are brimming with billboards with shots of Benazir with an inviting smile and Zulfi bathed in rhetorical exuberance.

And streets and avenues are lined up with hoardings and boardings. Ethnic supporters have set up camps at different junctions....setting up free-style dance fun to the tune of traditional PPP songs....they are catchy, too, if you have listened to them since childhood.

Though they are expected to become a nuisance. Cause blockades and jams....attempting merry-making on important roads holding up traffic...Just to incite conflict and then press home the numbers advantage. That's the prevalent psyche of collective groups in my society. Like a bunch of swaggering adolescent newbies emerging out of the pub to confront fans of a rival football club.

Surprisingly, MQM, the street-thugs of Karachi and also the ruling party, have stayed quiet over the developments. A few complaints have been heard about the using of excessive hoardings as illegal...but otherwise, they say that will welcome the return of Benazir.

Musharraf, though in an interview to a private channel, suggested that BB should delay her return until the Supreme Court ruling on his uniform issue. But everyone has to look after his goat and so BB insists on returning as per schedule.

And with the permeance of media, and talk-shows and opinion-makers and opium-takers, a lot of politicians appeared on a lot of channels and said a lot of things. Sheikh Rasheed, minister emeritus of the political appartus, gets the vote for making the most attempts to not sound hackneyed.

Sher Afghan gets the nod for the most obtrusive.

Wasi Zaffar for being the most stupid.

Well, they are windbags, generally. They are asked one question.....and they meander on generalities until they come to the point where they hail their party leader - whether BB, Nawaz, or Mush - as the sole honest guardians worthy of executing the people's will and the preferred choice of the people.

So I was watching this tv show, and there was this windbag, Nafis Saddik or Siddiqi, from the PPP...who when asked various tricky questions about Benazir's volte-face decision to mend fendces with the army government and a direct comparison of her return and Nawaz's aborted attempt, the said minister, mr Nafis Sadik droned on upon length over the various methods through which the people of the country expressed its un-said desire of being governed by Benazir....but I will try to reproduce the beginning and the end of his defense of benazir.

Mr Minister on TV Channel: "Benazir is the only woman in the world today who can make Musharraf take off his uniform...........[and somewhere before the end where I zone out]....she is the only woman in Pakistan today who can sell the image of Pakistan to the West.."

I know we have to be candid and we don't have to trashy but sometimes on tv it just sounds wrong.

As wrong as the caller on the same show, a man of the army. He rebuked claims of the PPP minister that PPP members were victims of flogging when Zia imposed martial law after taking over power from Zulfi Bhutto in the 1977 coup. He claimed that he was the supervisor of Jails and there were only three reported cases of flogging and that were on the charges of 'Sodomy'.

Yes, 's-o-d-o-m-y.' The minister intially couldn't scuffle his giggle and the cheap producer of the show did manage to get some image but it was less than 2 second and appeared as a jump. [Jump refers to where video comes-and-goes off the screen real quick without allowing you the time to absorb the details of the image]

However, the panel of political experts discussed sodomy for a while and then they moved on to something irrelevant and I flipped the channel.

Apparently they have found a new dinosaur in Brazil. And it's also dead. But the fascination with the ugly creature continues with millions spent on research and billions on hollywood movies. Also, some money on reordering young people's prejudices against these monsters by presenting them as lovable pets in silly cartoons.

Also, not very far away from the birth-place of Ronaldo, or from the jungles of the Amazon, an aspiring writer murdered and ate his girlfriend. The man from Colombia was into animal-porn, sadomasochism and apparently obsessed with de Sade's '120 Years of Sodom'....but not in a similar way as the Army-man-caller-on-stupid-political-show.

Mr Juan also made one his ex-girlfriends sell copies of his porn novel on streets for pittance. A true conservative. He had stored his cut-up girlfriend's thigh in his fridge and was planning to send it to her family as a thanksgiving present.

The things that these freaks cook up. No better than the lot we have in Pakistan...where feudal lords, the local aristocracy as left behind the Britishers, wield absolute power in courts of laws that are of their own making. And the cases generally discussed in these courts are about honour and the general punishment is the public stripping and rape of the sister of the offending party or the obligatory murder of the man (and woman) who has dishonoured the family....with dishonour meaning everything from infidelity to the chance glance at a passerby which was construed as 'exuding desire or lust' ....all these provide enough reason to murder(or rape or strip or all three together or any two in a preferable combination) a woman(mostly).

The latest crime against woman in Pakistan is the murder of a lady teacher in a village in the NWFP - the stronghold of the religious parties and much-touted breeding ground of militant Islam.

Among other interesting stories, Fidel Castro has been out of power for over a year. Che Guevara has been dead for 39 years.....it was his anniversary a few days back.

Conflict and persecution of protestors continue in Myanmar. Iran maintains its beligerent stance in the face of global pressure. North Korea is finally getting things done the way it wanted and it is showing that America has learnt it's lesson in dealing with the Oriental race.

Maybe it's left to the Arabs and the Asian-Aryans to provide the sucker-punch to Uncle Sam that will start a new period of cultural imperialism...shifting the focus of North America to EuroAsia.....with production dominance emanating from China and the Korea's and Japan leading in technological effeciency. Australasia and the Pacific rim can also emerge as power brokers. And Papu New Guinea will become the next super-power.....in pinball.

Dream on.