We’re in Pakistan at mid-summer 2011 — “the country that could kill the world,” in a native line that lingers. Or maybe the new normal. Think of Pakistan, we’re told by Pakistanis, as a model or perhaps a warning of the rising, rough, tough inequalities in the world, even in our embattled United States…
Early on we planned to see this nightmare aslant — less with oft-quoted strategists, more with the imaginative class, so to speak: with the typically grim but mettlesome singers, story-tellers and artists of Sind and the Punjab. They are wonderfully available, individual, candid women and men who have their own dark, truth-telling traditions. They each tell different stories, of course — and almost all of them different from the standard line of an “Af-Pak” crucible of global terrorism. Many of them point rather to “Indo-Pak” roots of the modern turmoil, in the Partition that carved two wounded and unequal sibling rivals out of the British Raj in 1947.
Lydon at large in Lahore, by the gun where Kipling’s Kim held forth: “Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon,’ hold the Punjab.”I am deeply interested in the anxiety that has escalated in 2011, in the assassination of Salman Taseer and the official murder of the Sy Hersh of Pakistan, Saleem Shahzad, which has rattled our best friends in journalism. In general, though, I’m drawn to Pakistanis who can think about the long story, as far back as birth by partition, and who can think of Pakistan’s trajectory ahead for a generation. It’s part of the lure for me that Pakistan has a booming literary culture that is more and more linked and noticed in the West; also that it has a talented modern pop music culture that is heard all over the Indian airwaves, and all over Asia.
Listen to all 21 interviews in extended play below. Or click here for our distillation of the series into two radio hours.
