The rain on your parade

da khwar lasme spogmay July 23, 2009

i haven’t been for landhi for several years now. this is a statement which requires explanation. karachi is supposedly spread out over an area approximating 3,700 square kilometres – though every website on the net has its own variant, ranging from 200 to 20,000 – and the fact that the development of the urban sprawl was not planned for the first sixty (post-partition) years of the said sprawl, resulted in what at times looks like a surprisingly well planned city with five or six industrial areas operating in their own cocoons of commercial and residential areas. so, most people do not need to go to the outer regions – i won’t call them suburbs – for the entire span of their natural lives and actually visit other cities more often than they visit places like gulshan-e-hadeed, surjani town or gulshan-e-maymar. or landhi.

i haven’t been to landhi for several years now. at one time if you headed toward dawood chowrangi from the intersection just before the main quaidabad you would see a bulding looking like a world war 2 bunker on your left, below the bridge, with the rather incongrous name of gulistan talkies painted across its roof – with an even more incongruous billboard wth the tradionally handpainted movie posters for the movie of the week which would probably have something like star wars or the godfather or rocky on it. this was confusing. one day, we investigated and found out that the movie on the poster was just for the poster and that what the projecter cast on the screen for a piddling 2 rupees per person was smut of the worst kind (or best kind, depending on your preferences). now, karachi isn’t exactly kabul but it ain’t amsterdam either. you can get anything anywhere but there is a certain degree of fallout that you have to weather with the force of your wallet or your daddy’s clout. so we didn’t bother entering the place - especially having noted the police mobile parked right outside its gate.

we went someway down the road to a more conventional theatre called nargis of all things, to watch something “safer” – like standard fare lollywood dishouts. and it was here that i realised that the film industry of pakistan is capable of dishing out the most ridiculous sequences ever commited to film - and if you haven’t kept yourself updated with modern day crap on youtube you don’t know what a compliment (or insult, depending on your sense of humour) that is. what we watched that fateful day was one of the industry’s more succesful flops of the year 2005, sarkar. consider the following lyrics from one of the songs on the 27th of the obligatory 43 item numbers per movie:

badan badan pey khoya lapaitway
mein tujh pe laitoon
tu mujh pe laitway

(wrap [a certain kind of sweetner made from milk] over bodies
i’ll lie on top of you
you lie on top of me)

and if you think the director swayed away from the literal for a minute, you’re sadly mistaken. but at least the movie had a decent storyline, as storylines go in lollywood. it was your standard fare gandasa/kalashnikov culture flick which show a good guy taking the bad route, meeting a worse guy on the way and culminating with him killing a million baddies after having danced everytime it rained with a series of cows masquerading as starlets who had been clothed by the guy who designed the outfit for brothel barbie. like i said, standard fare. if you have not explored lollywood - a sad but enlightening depiction of pakistani culture, shorn of the facade of propriety we maintain - you have to visit hotspot. especially the stuff they’ve got on legendary lollywood flicks like haseena atim bum and international gorrilay.

but i leave you with something more in tune with the times, what with michael bhai jackson passing away and all and the one minute silence in the sindh provincial assembly to commemorate his death (as opposed to the complete apathy towards the hundreds of lives lost in the swat operation).

in the late eighties or early nineties (i can’t remember which – before documented history anyway) i watched a movie which STN aired on thursday night primetime called prince. it starred the “dashing” action hero afzal khan rambo and his wife sahiba with a special appearnace by legendary pakistani folk singer arif lohar as himself. i can’t remember what the movie was about but the opening sequence will remain with me all my life but as their is no guarantee of when said life will end i thought i’d put it down for you to cringe and shudder with shame by ( i know the wannabe cool readership of this blog and their proclivities).

the movie opens with sahiba acting like a spoilt child on her birthday saying she wants michael jackson to be at her party. her brother, being the kind of obligatory idiotic elder brother every girl in pakistan has to have, asks rambo what to do who assures him that he will take care of it. cue to the next scene, a shot of sahiba pouting at the foot of what is more a conference table than a dining table with hundreds of people standing around her trying to cheer her up when all of a sudden her face lights up at the sound of disco music. shee looks up and guess who’s on the table in white socks, leather jacket and tight trousers? rambo, of course. the lyrics are self explanatory.

aap nay yaad kiya
agaya mein
na dikhaye mujh se zyada koi ack-shun
i am michael jaaik-sun

cringing just yet? if its any solace, the period is known as the dark ages of lollywood*

*for a more serious discussion on lollywood and why it is what it is, look up nadeem farooq paracha’s archive in dawn‘s images sometime.

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the title of this post is the name of the pashto version of catwoman. she weighed 350 pounds.

feline, very feline.