Are We Elitists?
Chances are you are reading this on aggregator Bloggers Pakistan where bloggers pontificate on politics, religion, arts, culture and life.
In the past few months these names surfaced most in the blogs - in no order - Musharraf, Iftikhar Chaudhry, Aitezaz Ahsan, Zardari, Sharif, Kiani, Bush, Mehsud...
If I could hazard a guess, I would say none of the bloggers here are the type who routinely and exclusively depend on buses as a transport mode. This is a valid benchmark because most bloggers come from a certain economic bracket.
To continue in this vein, only a few would perhaps know the price of flour, ghee, rice and meat. Which is the reason why I have not come across the thoughts expressed in the following column today by an expat working in Pakistan Chris Cork in The News:
Oddly, it is the price of eggs that seems to stick in my mind every week. Last week they were 55 rupees a dozen, this week they are 58. As I ride a bike and do not drive a car I am less observant of the price of fuel than I am of eggs, but motoring friends tell me that their cars are ever-more difficult to afford to run, and ‘leisure and pleasure’ driving no longer an option. Comparing the daily record of my expenditures with that of the same time last year I can see that my household expenditures have risen by 27 per cent over the figure for last August.
***
I stopped at "bus rides" as a metaphor, but in The people vs expats, aunties and urbanites, Mosharraf Zaidi has been more blunt in tackling Maculay's Aulad:
The trouble is that the naïve coffee-table class that reads and writes in the English language press is so uncontrollably narcissistic that it fails to recognise the inherent legitimacy of a spoils system in a country where there are over 40 million people below the official poverty line, and another 80 million that probably cannot afford to eat most of the food advertised in this newspaper.
Desktop activism, and "auntie" politics has not achieved anything of note in Pakistan's young history, yet having a desktop and being an "auntie" seem to have become qualifications to determine the fate of Pakistan's 172 million people. This is sheer arrogance of a magnitude for which there are no words. Moreover, this is a kind of arrogance for which there is little evidence of justification. It is inexplicable why freshly minted Harvard and Cambridge graduates think they are smarter than illiterate, fifth-grade dropouts from villages across Sindh and southern Punjab. After all, it is the villagers that rule Pakistan, their representatives and leaders in the highest offices in the land. What have the expats, aunties and urbanites got? Not much, except a few YouTube clips of a washed up politician reading poetry.
In the past few months these names surfaced most in the blogs - in no order - Musharraf, Iftikhar Chaudhry, Aitezaz Ahsan, Zardari, Sharif, Kiani, Bush, Mehsud...
If I could hazard a guess, I would say none of the bloggers here are the type who routinely and exclusively depend on buses as a transport mode. This is a valid benchmark because most bloggers come from a certain economic bracket.
To continue in this vein, only a few would perhaps know the price of flour, ghee, rice and meat. Which is the reason why I have not come across the thoughts expressed in the following column today by an expat working in Pakistan Chris Cork in The News:
Oddly, it is the price of eggs that seems to stick in my mind every week. Last week they were 55 rupees a dozen, this week they are 58. As I ride a bike and do not drive a car I am less observant of the price of fuel than I am of eggs, but motoring friends tell me that their cars are ever-more difficult to afford to run, and ‘leisure and pleasure’ driving no longer an option. Comparing the daily record of my expenditures with that of the same time last year I can see that my household expenditures have risen by 27 per cent over the figure for last August.
***
I stopped at "bus rides" as a metaphor, but in The people vs expats, aunties and urbanites, Mosharraf Zaidi has been more blunt in tackling Maculay's Aulad:
The trouble is that the naïve coffee-table class that reads and writes in the English language press is so uncontrollably narcissistic that it fails to recognise the inherent legitimacy of a spoils system in a country where there are over 40 million people below the official poverty line, and another 80 million that probably cannot afford to eat most of the food advertised in this newspaper.
Desktop activism, and "auntie" politics has not achieved anything of note in Pakistan's young history, yet having a desktop and being an "auntie" seem to have become qualifications to determine the fate of Pakistan's 172 million people. This is sheer arrogance of a magnitude for which there are no words. Moreover, this is a kind of arrogance for which there is little evidence of justification. It is inexplicable why freshly minted Harvard and Cambridge graduates think they are smarter than illiterate, fifth-grade dropouts from villages across Sindh and southern Punjab. After all, it is the villagers that rule Pakistan, their representatives and leaders in the highest offices in the land. What have the expats, aunties and urbanites got? Not much, except a few YouTube clips of a washed up politician reading poetry.
posted by temporal at 9/16/2008
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