[Social Eye] What they didn't tell you about NUST...

When I got into NUST's sprawling H12 campus, a couple of years back, in my mind there was this lavish place full of opportunities and unbridled promises of success. Well, it didn't turn out the way everyone sees it from the outside but it was still good enough to be labelled Pakistan's premier engineering and sciences institution.

Come the fall semester of 2013, everything started changing at breakneck speed. The university started curtailing student freedom and the administration got extremely autocratic overnight. Rules were implemented to cut down on 'immoral activities' and bring in 'more discipline'. It was as if someone from the dusty, Taliban-infested region of Islamic Emirate of Waziristan has taken ahold of NUST's reins.

Students are to be locked in their hostels post 7:30 p.m. and anyone seen roaming around after this cut-off time will face probable suspension along with a hefty fine. The university's cafeterias are off-limit for guys after 5:00 p.m., to deal with the gender inter-mingling beyond the class room. Guys and girls are not allowed to sit together on pavements and in lawns after this time as well. The girls living in hostels will have to acquire guardian permission to leave university premises.

The Taliban would sure love NUST now.

If these restrictions were not enough, the despotic NUST administration have banned students from expressing themselves through or enjoying entertainment. Loud music in cars is banned. Concerts are banned. Torrents can't be accessed. Websites pertaining to movies and games have been filtered-off. In short, the life in NUST is mostly a grayscale prison wall that you have stare at all day with a few flashes of the azure sky here and there.

Talking about the net, it is pathetic. When I first came into NUST, the internet speed was like a dream. Touching 40 Mbps at times but now, due to an unresolved feud with the service provider, the speed barely crosses 0.60 Mbps during peak-times. Even Google opens laboriously.

Only recently, a rumor has started circulating that the NUST admin wants to impose uniform on the students, in order for them to dress 'morally'. This would be the final nail in the coffin for this NUST campus whose student body is already reeling with unforeseen constraints. It is like they think we are academic robots who should check into classrooms each day, check-out, go to the hostels and sleep soundly. No substantial fun and stuff in between.

K.

People give various reasons for this sudden onslaught. Some say that this is all because of E&ME, an army-run campus of NUST, which is dethroned for the first time in 34 years as the top merit electrical and mechanical engineering university in Pakistan. This might be so because student life in E&ME is close to non-existent, the administration is nothing short of a dictatorship. So naturally more and more students opted for the more lax SEECS and SMME (both NUST H12 schools) and E&ME's merit fell. In order to nip the problem in the bud, E&ME's representatives, who are believed to have considerable clout in NUST's governing board are for a uniform autocratic environment across all schools of NUST. This might bring back E&ME's recently lost glory but at the expense of student freedom, here at H12.

All these moves are questionable as they tend to force people to change their way of living much like Kim

Jong Il had altered the way North Koreans live. But the most acrimonious of these all is putting red-tape across the whole idea of co-education which permits male and female students from communicating as they please. This is the whole problem with the Pakistan society that it has put males and females into separate boxes. Women are just seen as sexual objects and need to be hidden way in some basement for their whole life. If, by any chance, they tend to get out of that basement, they have restrictions and constraints forced upon them thus stigmatizing their existence. Universities are from where the society gets its cream. If this cream isn't open minded and lives in a box of seclusion then how can we curtail the rampant gender disparity in the country? This is why I am vehemently against this rule which has been forced into effect in Pakistan's top ranked engineering university.

Student liberty is an essential part for a university. After all beyond the flash and glitter of universities lies the monotonous corporate life. This is why I hope that NUST administration rolls back on these new laws. If not then I sure as hell hope that they have their ranking shaved so that this new authoritarian admin (which I picture with a knee-length beard and a shalwar rolled up to mid-shin) is fired for good.

THERE IS A FOLLOW-UP POST TO THIS HERE. DO GIVE IT A READ, ITS IMPORTANT FOR CLARIFICATION.

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Making Sacrifices: Enter, Movies. Exit, MVs

In recent times Pakistani music videos have become a shadow of their former selves. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that Pakistan's cinema is finally coming out of dormancy. Celebrated music video directors like Jami, Saqib Malik and Bilal Lashari seem to have given up on music videos and taken up directorial jobs for feature films. This is both good and bad. Good in the sense that Pakistan's struggling cinema needed them as much as lungs need air and bad in the way that they leave behind an expansive void in Pakistan's music scene which shows no signs of filling up.

Gone are the days when audiences used to relish exquisite music videos like Chal Bulleya, Na Re Na, Sajini, Ankhon ko Ankhon ne, Mehbooba, Piyareya and Garaj Baras. These videos were a viewing pleasure with well-crafted stories that relate with the lyrics impeccably. Now we are treated to unpolished and crass crap featuring a make-up laden, Prada-clad girl swaying about and an over-styled singer trying his best at lip-syncing.

In fact, Ali Azmat's Garaj Baras, was the video that sent me down this spiral of reflection. I was just browsing through some old Coke Studio videos on YouTube (CS withdrawal syndrome, I didn't get my expected summer fix this time) when all of a sudden this video popped-up in the suggestions list. I clicked on it and despite the potato-quality of the upload, was thrown down the memory lane. I miss videos like these which engross you and make you think.

For instance, my interpretation of Garaj Baras goes like this: the video basically deals with the magical effect of rain - how it brings about our dormant selves. Monks for instance are very tranquil normally but as heavens pour they seem to let go of the wild beast chained inside of them and become polar opposites of what they were before. They go about swinging chained kettle-balls and splashing water at each other. Ali Azmat, dressed as a monk, screams the lyrics with a rosary strapped to his hand. The rock, belligerent feel of the track goes in perfect sync with this notion. Also, you see Ali Azmat sink back to his former monk-state of oblivious stupor as the rain recedes.

How many Pakistani music videos have you seen of late that ask for your interpretations and inferences? Not many, I suppose. Simply put, Pakistan's golden age of music videos is behind us. However, this heralds the revival of Pakistan's cinema. As Pakistan's acclaimed cadre of music directors step into the big boots and take up the mammoth task of breathing nueva vida into what remains of the once iconic Pakistan motion picture scene. With releases like Waar, Morqaye, Downward Dog, Dastaan and Operation 021 (all directed by former music video directors) lined up, I am sure as hell expecting a lot. On the other hand I am also hoping for a fresh crop of MV directors that can hold aloft the passed flame that is flickering somewhere down on the ground.

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[Social Eye] Sona Chahta Hoon

I never thought that the Pakistani music industry had such an insightful song until I came across a news report featuring it. It goes by the name of Sona Chahta Hoon (I want to rest) and is a single from acclaimed pop singer Najam Sheraz's 1996, debut album Khazana (Treasure).



Well this song is anything but pop. It is four minutes of shrill screams coupled with soothing alaaps. It represents the dichotomy that exists within our society; those who are comfortable and those who can never find ease.

تیرے خوابوں میں، کھونا چاہتا ہوں

Tere khwabon mey khona chahta hun.

Getting absorbed in your dreams is what I want.

میں لمبی نیند، سونا چاہتا ہوں

Mey lambi neend sona chahta hun.

A good night's sleep is what I want.

دیے جلتے ہیں

Diye jalte hain,

Lights, there are everywhere,

سائے بولتے ہیں

saye bolte hain,

shadows, they speak to me,

ہوا چلتی ہے

hawa chalti hai,

the air, it whistles about,

رونا چاہتا ہوں

rona chahta hun.

crying my eyes out is what I want to.

کوئی نغمہ کہیں

Koi naghma kahi

Give me an anthem,

کوئی بارگاہ

Koi barigah.

give me a presence.

دے میں آزاد، ہونا چاہتا ہوں

De mey azaad hona chahta hun

For I want to be set free. 

The lyrics of the song are very deep. This is where the beauty (read: inherent ugliness) lies. Sheraz screams about needing to sleep in a beseeching and tormented way, such that the society doesn't let him sleep, that it is too full of distractions, torture and pain. He further sings about getting engrossed in your dreams, which can be interpreted as a dig at the elite. The elite who have everything and sleep soundly at night with soothing dreams aplenty. In these lyrics lie the crux of the song.


I find it hard to believe that this song is languishing in obscurity in times like these. While, when it got released in '95 (as a single), things might haven't been as bad as they are now. Nowadays, we have insecurity, inflation, terrorism and rampant corruption; the perfect tools for the psychological Inquisition of a common man. This song fits like a glove to today's Pakistan.

On a more casual note, it can be termed as an insomniac's anthem. Which, I know Pakistan's nocturnal youth will take up quite readily. It's popularity will only increase once the people learn that it was actually banned by the government for being too wild. Yeah you read it right.

Whichever way it is, this song needs to make a comeback and I see no better platform for it than the famed Coke Studio. For something so minimalistic, yet so powerful can't be created everyday.

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[Elections 2013] By-elections, what to expect?

Today are the by-elections for 41 constituencies. Here is a list of how the results might look like. Note that whenever there are two or more probably winners, they are displayed in the order of decreasing likelihood. For example PTI/PML-N/PPP would mean that PTI is most likely to win the said seat while PPP the least, however chance remains for all three and will be dependent upon voter swing. Also the percentage of color coding on a seat name represents the probability of a said party winning that seat.

Personally, I believe there should be no by-elections. The ECP should lay down a rule that doesn't allow a candidate to run for two or more seats whether national assembly or provincial assembly or a combination of the two. By-elections are waste of tax payers' money and government resources which could easily have been avoided had this extraneous rule of multiple runnings been aborted..

Anyway:

National (16)

NA 1 (Peshawer)       PTI
NA 5 (Noweshera)      PTI
NA 13 (Swabi)       PTI
NA 25 (D. I. Khan)       PTI/PPP  -postponed-
NA 27 (Lakki Marwat)       PML-N
NA 48 (Islamabad)       PTI
NA 68 (Sargodha)       PTI/PML-N
NA 71 (Mianwali)       PTI/PML-N
NA 83 (Faisalabad)        PML-N
NA 103 (Hafizabad)        PML-N
NA 129 (Lahore)       PML-N
NA 177 (Muzaffargarh)       Indp.
NA 235 (Sanghar)       PML-F/PPP
NA 237 (Thatta)       PPP/PML-N
NA 254 (Karachi)       MQM/PTI
NA 262 (Killa Abdullah)        PkMAP

Punjab (15)

PP 6 (Rawalpindi)       PTI
PP 51 (Faisalabad)       PML-N
PP 118 (Mandi Bhauddin)       PML-Q
PP 123 (Sialkot)       PTI
PP 142 (Lahore)       PML-N
PP 150 (Lahore)       PTI
PP 161 (Lahore)       PML-N
PP 193 (Okara)       PML-N
PP 210 (Lodhran)       PML-N/Indp.
PP 217 (Khanewal)       PPP/PML-N
PP 243 (D. G. Khan)       PML-N
PP 247 (Rajanpur)       PML-N/Indp.
PP 254 (Muzaffargarh)       PML-N/PTI
PP 289 (Rahim Yar Khan)      PPP
PP 292 (Rahim Yar Khan)      PPP

Sindh (4)

PS 12 (Shikarpur)       NPP/PPP
PS 64 (Mirpurkhas)       PPP
PS 95 (Karachi)       MQM/PPP/PTI
PS 103 (Karachi)       MQM/PTI

KPK (4)

PK 23 (Mardan)       PTI
PK 27 (Mardan)       PTI
PK 42 (Hangu)       JUI-F/PTI
PK 70 (Bannu)       JUI-F/PTI

Balochistan (3)

PB 29 (Nasirabad)       PML-N
PB 32 (Jhal Magsi)      JUI-F/Indp.
PB 44 (Lasbela)       Indp.

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[Elections 2013] PTI Won These Elections, How?

To some the results of last week's elections were a total disappointment. Especially after how Imran Khan looked all optimistic about a clean-sweep and how he passed on this optimisim to his followers. I mean here, we are looking for Naya Pakistan where PTI has a simple majority at 136 seats and what did it end up achieving? A mere 29 seats. Thats disappointment for you.

But you have to force yourself to look beyond the numbers. 29 seats are not so much for forming a government but they sure are a hell-of-a-lot on so many other levels. PTI has won these elections, we just don't know it yet. Despite strong set backs from Machiavellian politics and rigging from rival political parties, PTI prevailed as a national political force with votebanks in each of the four provinces and a potential government in the KPK province.

Here is the boil-down of what PTI accomplished in these elections:

• PTI came out of the Colosseum of these hard-fought elections as a mature political force. Something it
  
  wasn't before. It received 17.8% (8.7 million) of the popular vote which effectively makes it the second most popular party of the country after, PML-N.
• It has come out of its home-ground of Mianwali and pervaded across the nation. Previously, the only seat the party won was that of Khan's home constituency in Mianwali. Now it has been able to win seats from some major constituencies in Rawalpindi, Peshawer, Lahore, Karachi, Multan, Sahiwal and Mardan. It has also come runner-up in most of the other constituencies it fought in sometimes by a margin of less than 500 votes. Which is a win in my opinion.
• If you look at these election results analytically, you will see that PTI has impressive votebanks across Punjab and KPK. The influx of new voters in the 2018 elections will definitely help PTI secure more seats at the center. Considering most of the people I know that were barred from participating by age limitations in these elections are fervent supporters of PTI. This is just a hypothesis and PTI's performance in the upcoming elections depends heavily on how well it runs KPK and how does the PML-N performs at the center.
• These elections grant PTI an opportunity to administer one of the most difficult-to-govern provinces in the country, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. This province is a hotbed of the menace of terrorism which will sure be taxing on the coming government. Plus this provincial government will help PTI implement its plan of Naya Pakistan on a smaller scale while the rest of the nation observes.
• PTI has upgraded from something non-existent to a political giant in Karachi. Not many parties can boast of that, coming out of the electoral furnace of Karachi, since the inception of MQM in 1988. PTI managed to grab more than 20,000 votes in Lyari (stonghold of PPP since 1968) and MQM's bastion of Azizabad. Here is a breakdown of PTI's results in Karachi, for the constituency it finished 2nd in:

240 14% Naz Baloch 21094 2nd

241 17% Dr Saeed Ahmad Afridi 27537 2nd

242 5% Akram Khan 10800 2nd

243 12% Zahid Hussain Hashmi 30001 2nd

244 15% Khalid Masood Khan 26252 2nd

245 28% Muhmmad Raza Haider 54751 2nd

246 17% Amir Sharjeel 31048 2nd

247 21% Rashid Siddiqi 35240 2nd

248 20% Subhan Ali 26348 2nd

251 24% Raja Azhar Khan 39766 2nd

252 30% Syed Ali Haider Zaidi 49324 2nd

253 30% Muhammad Ashraf Jabbar Qureshi 58989 2nd

255 11% Khalid Mehmood Ali 19032 2nd

256 28% Muhammad Zubair Khan 67797 2nd 

• Not to mention that PTI won the NA-250 re-elections by a considerable margin. These re-elections were conducted under the supervision of the army in the light of the heavy rigging allegations on the original poll-day. Such results have given more credence to the fact that a band of thugs and goons who consider themselves a secular political party ruthlessly sidelined the people’s mandate on May 11.
• Possibly PTI's biggest achievement is to bring back the youth of Pakistan into the process of
  
  electioneering and subsequently forcing the election fever to spread across the nation. The elections before PTI were banal affairs, comparatively speaking, the youth wasn't that involved in them and the results showed in the turnout figures which hovered from late-thirties to mid-fourties. This time around, all thanks to PTI, the youth, the elite class, the elderly, the former spectators and even the bed-ridden, all came out to vote and the election turnout touched the figure of 60% for the first time since the mesmerizing speeches of Bhutto lured the public out in 1977.
• PTI also made the breakthrough of social media into the whole process of elections; from campaigns to results to reporting rigging. Following the footsteps of PTI, other parties also made their social media cells and tried to vie for public's attention on online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This will help in the elections being fairer and more actively contested.
• PTI, if not conquered, then seriously dented PML-N's bastion of Rawalpindi which is affectionately called as mini-Raiwind by the latter party. It won 6 out of the 14 provincial assembly seats here (PML-N won 7 with one being won by an independent candidate) and 3 out of the 7 National Assembly seats. The results in NA-54 and PP-6 were subject to serious rigging allegations by PTI where the winning margins were less than 2000 and the results were considerably delayed. Subsequently, PML-N is nearly razed from the urban areas of the city and is merely clinging on to the outskirts. This shows that if it doesn't perform this time around then the people of Rawalpindi along with PML-N's other urban strongholds of Punjab are going to reject them completely.
• PTI's 28 seats in the parliament means that the party can take its strong opposition skills from the jalsa grounds to the great hall of the National Assembly itself. With acrid speakers like Sheikh Rasheed, Imran Khan, Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Jawed Hashmi in its ranks it can prove to be the strong opposition that Pakistan has been craving for since the recent times. A good show on the opposition benches will not only help PTI steer the government but also boost its chances in the next elections.
• PTI has been a trend-setter and has transformed itself into a truly democratic party by conducting the largest intra-party elections in the 66 year political history of Pakistan. Teachers, shop-keepers, lumberjacks and carpenters swept away important posts prior to these elections and PTI has truly become the party of the people.
• Last but not the least, the massive, voluntary demonstrations and sit-downs in Karachi (Teen Talwar),
  
  Lahore (Lalick Chowk), Islamabad (D-Chowk), Rawalpindi (Kacheri) and elsewhere in Pakistan against the alleged rigging in these elections perpetuate that the people have come to realize the power of their vote and aim to curtail its misuse. This is probably also a first in Pakistan's electoral history since the mandate of Mujib-ur-Rehman was neglected in the 1970 general elections.

So, after reading this I hope all Insafians will understand that things can only look up for PTI from here. These elections are a series of Twenty-20 games; if PML-N has managed to win the first game the series is still alive and PTI can come back stronger and sharper and hit its opponent like a boomerang in the next game. So don't give up hope yet, there is a long wait ahead but I am sure the game will surely be worth the wait.

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