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I am not so much troubled about the state of the nation as about the state of English in mein liebes Vaterland, which is German for my beloved fatherland, but if some would prefer to call it motherland, I give them mein liebes Mutterland. And that is enough German for the day.

Can something be done about it, English I mean?

Every time, I look at a newspaper report describing an incident, a traffic accident for example, or reporting a statement from the leaders who are in charge of sailing the ship of state, which may appear to some to be sinking, I begin to lose hope, both for English and for the ship.

What, one has to wonder, is the matter with us. Why have we calcified this exciting language called English? Why have we made it so boring, so lacking in the zing that is natural to it? Why do we continue to drag around the living dead of the language, its clichés? And why do we refuse to learn grammar, not intricate grammar that only gray grammarians know, but simple, basic grammar that we should have learnt in the first six months.

Alas! I have no answer to any of these questions. But here is some of what is bugging me on a wet autumn afternoon in Washington.

Consider this report published last week about a protest meeting addressed by a gentleman wearing black: “He said the government knew names of the high ups in government machinery responsible of Karachi blasts but deliberately was not bringing them to the book. (Mr X) vowed to continue struggle till end of dictatorship. He also warned the government that if any activity of terrorism would be happened in the (XXX), the government would be responsible for it.”

And this report is simply too good not to be quoted. Headlined “Prof M threatened of dire consequences,” it states:

‘One of the kingpins of mafia who hurled insinuation on him and the staff for taking principle stand against them and vacating the hostel room from their illegal possession have become active against him again. They are gangsters under the garb of students. The eminent … teacher who is widely acclaimed among the academicians and media reported the matter to (a string of names, Charlie’s aunt excluded) for necessary action but there was no response against his complaints’.”

I do hope I am not committing contempt of court, but here is a snatch from a judgement of one of our high courts: “Whenever the government desires to appoint employees, it lifts the ban on jobs but when asked about the procedure for giving jobs it says that a ban has been imposed on jobs.”

And this is what a much-admired judicial leader is reported to have said: “‘Life is a journey and not the destination,’ he shared with newsmen his favourite words, pledging that lawyers struggle will continue.” Also attributed to him is the observation: “We have told people that they are the owners of Steel Mills, land in Gwadar and farm houses but not the army generals.” Who would want to own an army general, anyway?

This one comes from one of those flying news agencies: “Railways Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed has forecasted that he is not expecting to see Benazir Bhutto as the premier for next term while Maulana Fazl Rehman will play an important role in this connection. ‘The three name game being played by Benazir Bhutto in connection with Karachi carnage is a blame game on her part, which has put the National Reconciliation Ordinance at stake. I was not in the favour of government’s request sent to Mss Bhutto asking her to shelve her arrival. Let the all politicians to return Pakistan.’ he said. He imparted that all politicians should start constructive politics in broader national interests. The media, he said, was assessing the performance of politicians in a strict way which was a health sign.”

And this is what the man in dark glasses who mumbles is supposed to have said.

“Talking to PTV he said how the harmonious environment is nurture in the presence of such a lethal campaign. Terming himself as champion of national reconciliation, he said he was the first who put forward broad based formula covering all aspects aiming to bury politics of hatred paving the way for country’s prosperity.”

I asked my friend M Rafiq in London if he had a story to contribute. This is what he sent.

“Last year when I visited M College I forgot my principle of never discussing English with a Pakistani. I was with WBG, nephew of our late friend, professor of English there with MPhil, and we were discussing English in general. I said things like every country is about fifty years outdated with any foreign language being taught there. At one stage, I got really going and began pointing out a number of awful mistakes of language, idiom and syntax in a leaflet I had picked up in the library there. It was some kind of new regulations for students given out by the college administration. I said that most Pakistanis write not English but something akin to English. WBG got really angry and said, ‘We do not want to teach English English here. We are perfectly happy to teach Pakistani English.’ I left and one of the young lecturers who was sitting there listening to this also left after me. He came with me to the gate and told me that the author of the leaflet was WBG himself. But how was I to know?”

Rafiq had another story.

“The High Commission in London used to bring out a fortnightly four-page thing called Pakistan News edited by Qutubuddin Aziz, Minister at the High Commission (author of a hundred books in English). Every issue was so full of mistakes that I once talked to W (who was there then) about it. He suggested I should write to the editor, which I did. I took the latest issue and pointed out 100 spelling mistakes and only a handful of the many language mistakes. I told him that it pained me to see such mistakes in our periodical read by other embassies and newspapers and offered that I would proofread every issue without charge. W had spoken to him about my impending letter. Aziz wrote back to me saying that if it pained me so much, he would delete my name from the mailing list, which he did.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

General Asif Nawaz Janjua, whose sudden and tragic death in the middle of his term as Chief of Army Staff still baffles many, including his family, was once asked if he would be Nawaz Sharif’s ‘man,’ since it was he who had appointed him. He replied, “When half a million troops move with the direction of your finger, you are nobody’s man but that of the Pakistan army and of your own conscience.”

Since the army staged its first coup in 1958 – not to count the abandoned one by General Akbar Khan and others – followed by similar takeovers in 1969, 1977 and 1999, the Chief of Army Staff (as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto renamed the Commander in Chief, little expecting that one holder of that office would remove and hang him) has been a formidable figure whose long shadow hangs over everything in the country. Benazir Bhutto was once asked why she had accomplished little of what was expected of her. She replied, “Because the army was always breathing down my neck.” Everyone learns from experience, and so has she. Today, she is a living example of the wise saying: if you can’t beat’em, join’em.

Mark Twain said of the weather that while everyone keeps complaining about it, nobody does a darned thing about it. More or less the same thing can be said about the Pakistan army. Very little has been done about it, but more than that, very little has been written about it. Barring Ayub, Musa and Asghar Khan, no service chief has left us a book. That being so, we have to rely on others.

In recent months, much has been made of Ayesha Siddiqa’s book, Military Inc, both at home and abroad. While many have praised it, some have said that her data is old and that she has ‘stretched’ what she had. The argument runs that the Pakistan army is not the all-guzzling, hydra-headed commercial ogre that Ayesha Siddiqa has made it out to be. A great deal of the wealth that the army generates through business and commerce, its defenders maintain, is spent on welfare; the beneficiaries being not only officers, but other ranks as well.

Any new book written by a Pakistani is welcome, and especially welcome is Shuja Nawaz’s long awaited one on the Pakistan army. I first heard of it nearly 15 years ago, but I suppose being in the employ of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he was perhaps not in a position to publish on a subject that might have ignited a controversy. What he did during those years was collect data and deepen his knowledge and understanding of the subject. The army always has a soft corner for its former chiefs – General Aslam Beg could be the exception proving the rule – and the fact that Shuja is the first cousin of General Asif Nawaz opened many doors and several archives to him.

His book, which sees the black light of print in December in Karachi, is called Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army And The Wars Within (Oxford University Press) . Not only does he write about the “wars within” but also about the “wars without.” He has been fortunate in gaining access to some of the in-house assessments of those wars. I also recall his once telling me that he had been able to read the unpublished manuscript of one of the true, though largely unsung, heroes of the 1965 war: the man who saved Sialkot, the late Lt General Abdul Ali Malik, General Akhtar Hussain Malik’s younger brother.

I remember General Abdul Ali Malik telling me a couple of years before his death that he had all but completed the book, but was only waiting to get some maps and data from the General Headquarters (GHQ). I wonder if he ever got that. If there ever was a gentleman and a soldier in deed and spirit, anyone who knew General Malik would place that crown without hesitation on his head.

According to Shuja Nawaz, Pakistan’s history is one of conflict between an underdeveloped political system and a well-organised army that grew in strength as a counter weight to a hostile India next door and a weak political system. He quotes General Jehangir Karamat as saying, “Whenever there is a breakdown in stability, as has happened frequently in Pakistan, the military translates its potential into the will to dominate, and we have military intervention followed by military rule. He concedes, however, that as far as the track record of the military as rulers is concerned, it is not much better than that of civilians.

Nawaz writes that during Zia ul Haq’s time, “there was a major shift in the public expenditure priorities from development to defence. Real defence spending increased on average by nine per cent per annum during 1977-88, while development spending rose three per cent per annum; by 1987-8 defence spending had overtaken development spending.” In 2005, according to World Bank data, defence spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Pakistan was around 3.4 per cent, compared with India’s 2.3 per cent, placing it among the highest burdens of military spending in the world. As Pakistan develops and its economy grows, the opportunity cost of its defence spending will rise dramatically. This is a huge challenge for the Musharraf regime as it ponders its political future on the one hand and the nature of the army that Pakistan needs to ensure its security on the other.

During his research for the book, when Shuja Nawaz asked Nawaz Sharif if he was familiar with the Warrant of Precedence, the former prime minister shook his head and wanted to know what it was. He was told that, inherited from the British, the list establishes the relative ranking of civil and military officials in terms of protocol. Beyond that, the list symbolises the relative roles of officials from the civil and the military in the nation’s polity and provides a map of their relationships. The Warrant of Precedence issued in Karachi in February 1950 ranked the top officials as the Governor General, followed by the Prime Minister, with the Commander in Chief coming in at number 15, below judges of the federal court, chief justices of high courts and deputy ministers. Lt Generals came in at number 21. Today the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) chairman and the chiefs of army, air, and naval staff are ranked at number 6, while Lt Generals remain at par with federal secretaries at number 16. That alone gives us some idea of where the army was in the early years of independence and where it is in 2007. In effect, it means that the Lt Generals of today talk only to the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) and the COAS talks only to God.

Nawaz writes, “As the latest recruitment statistics indicate, Pakistan’s army today is no longer the same homogenous force of the past with its limited recruitment base. It now reflects a broader range of the country’s rapidly urbanising population. The emergence of new media and public discourse also has challenged the military’s ability to control life in the country with an iron hand. Military rule is inherently authoritarian and thus antithetical to democracy and pluralism, which are the bedrock of strong nation states.”

And that seems as good a note as any to end this column on.

Last month, the boorish president of New York’s Columbia University disgraced his institution and the academic community by insulting Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad during what was supposed to be a welcome address. The tabloid American press, which gives an even sorrier account of itself in such situations than its British muckraking counterpart, wrote about the Iranian leader in terms that can only be called abusive.

Then there was The Onion, the American satirical weekly, which, dealt with Ahmedinejad in its own way, but without causing injury. Under the slug Infographic, it wrote:

“The White House is looking at deterring the Iranian nuclear programme with new sanctions. The measures proposed are: Cutting off two-thirds of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s name any time he is mentioned in the press; revoking the country’ membership in the Axis of Evil; ceasing production of monogrammed ‘US and Iran: a Perfect Match’ matchbooks; Miss America not including Iran on world tour; Jesse Jackson to be sent, without an interpreter to negotiate; copyrighting the phrase ‘The Great Satan’ and suing Iran every time it is used to refer to the US; putting restrictions on how much Iran is allowed to hate the US at any given moment; and to stop selling uranium to Iran.”

The Iranian president, who is not among the world’s sharpest dressers, does say some very odd things indeed. For example, when he claimed that there were no gays in Iran, could he have been unaware of the fact that this particular condition has been traditionally referred to as ‘Zauq-e-Ajami’ or the Iranian taste. It also used to be called the Englishman’s disease, but since it is no longer considered a disease, the term is no longer in use.

In our own country, it is the gallant province of the Pashtuns which has been light-heartedly associated with this particular condition or pastime, which is not to say that it is necessarily so. Who knows and who is going to risk finding out!

But this is not the time of year to write about Ahmedinejad or what he says does not exist in Iran, but to invoke the memory of the legendary American actress and wit Mae West, after whom Allied soldiers during World War II named their yellow inflatable vest-like life jacket because of its resemblance to Ms West’s torso. Some of her sayings have gone into the language, for instance: Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? Another time she said, “A dame that knows the ropes isn’t likely to get tied up.” One of Mae West classics is, “A hard man is good to find.” And for all those who do not exactly look like Greek gods, there is hope for them yet for didn’t she say, “ A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire, women will like him.”

Was Mae West good at sums. She must have been because it was she who said, “A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars, that’s subtraction.” Her play on a bird in the bush etcetera is another of her classic sayings, “A man in the house is worth two in the street.”

She had some good advice for lovers, in one case discarded ones, who, she said “should be given a second chance, but with somebody else”. In her book, “an ounce of performance” was “worth pounds of promises”. And her standing invitation to men was, “Any time you got nothing to do — and lots of time to do it — come on up.” Her work ethic was simple, “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” This is how she resolved her moral dilemmas: “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.” And to ladies who take their time making up their minds, Ms West said, “Don’t keep a man guessing too long — he’s sure to find the answer somewhere else.”

And her advice on marriage? “Don’t marry a man to reform him — that’s what reform schools are for.” Once she said, “Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.” Yet another Mae West classic goes, “His mother should have thrown him out and kept the stork.”

She also said, “I believe that it’s better to be looked over than it is to be overlooked.” Of her legendary figure, she said, “I didn’t discover curves; I only uncovered them.” Her advice to women who want to diet is priceless and as good today as it was when given more than half a century ago, “I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.”

She said she liked two kinds of men: “domestic and imported.” Another great Mae West saying is: “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.” She also said, “I’ve been in more laps than a napkin” and “Look your best — who said love is blind?” And what could be a sounder observation than, “Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.” Marriage, she said, is a great institution, then added, “but I’m not ready for an institution.” “When I’m good,” Ms West stated, “I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.” And also, “When women go wrong, men go right after them.”

I am not sure if it was she who said, “Peel me a grape, darling,” but if it wasn’t she, it should or could have been she.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

When you think you have read all there was to read and got to know all there was to know about the Partition of India and what preceded and followed it, there appears another book, which you beg, borrow or steal to know what it is all about. You also expect it to contain things that had to date not come to light. Often, it turns out to be the rewriting of already published material. Academic books or books attempting to be academic, I have come to believe, are mostly written by academics for other academics. They honour and acknowledge one another through copious footnotes. Every time you think you have run into something startling, there at the end of the paragraph, you find a tiny number, which means it has been borrowed from an earlier writer. Few academic books have anything to say that has not been said before. It is the way old facts are put together that makes them readable.

One recently published book that many people interested in the departure of the British from India and the emergence of Pakistan have talked about is Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelmann. The lady with the aristocratic German name went to Oxford, lives in London, and this is her first book. The subtitle is intriguing: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, when a better subtitle would have been The not-so-secret history of the Jawahar-Edwina love tangle. The book claims to have “new material”, but what there is of it exists in its and bits, some of it interesting, even at times scandalous.

The book’s thesis that Quaid i Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah “united” with Winston Churchill to create Pakistan is questionable. For one, it would be out of character for the Quaid to engage in secret understandings of the kind the book suggests he did. Churchill, in any case, was against ending the Raj and is on record as having said that he would not have presided over the liquidation of His Majesty’s Empire. Churchill might have admired the Quaid who, unlike Gandhi, was straight. Gandhi often spoke in riddles, and it was not easy to get a straight answer from him. The Quaid was very much an Englishman – the idealised kind, that is – who was honest, truthful and who did not mince his words. The author’s assertion that “if Jinnah is regarded as the father of Pakistan, Churchill must qualify as its uncle; and, therefore, as a pivotal figure in the resurgence of political Islam” can only be described as silly.

There is little in Tunzelmann’s book that wasn’t known before, but it is not without interesting sidelights, some of which will make up the rest of this column. Mountbatten was gay and he and Edwina had an open marriage. He was never jealous of her lovers, of whom there were many, including a man from the Caribbean who belonged to London’s night life. So impressed was the future vicereine of India with him that she presented him with a jewelled sheath. Mountbatten was what one might call “ ulta-pulta ” or AC/DC. One of his lifelong friends was Noel Coward who wrote to him after a holiday in Malta, “Dear dainty darling, I could not have enjoyed my holiday more. . . Please be careful of your Zippers Dickie dear and don’t let me hear of any ugly happenings at Flotilla dances. Love and kisses, Signal Bosun Coward.”

Tunzelmann writes, quoting a 1949 report from The Economist, that so disgusted was the Quaid after the Second Roundtable Conference, with the attitude of Gandhi, that he returned to private life in London. However, when it was reported to him later that Nehru had said at a private dinner that Jinnah was “finished,” he was so furious that he packed up and headed back to India with the intent to “show Nehru.”

That the Quaid has generally failed to receive fair treatment from historians is not hard to understand, and I will not go into the whys and the wherefores. Tunzelmann is no exception. Referring to a speech the Quaid made on 27 March 1947 in which he accused the British of deliberately conspiring against the Muslims to try to force them into staying in India rather than creating their own state of Pakistan in order to produce greater bloodshed and destruction after their departure, Tunzelmann accuses the Quaid of “attempting to conspire with the British to create Pakistan for more than seven years.” To describe the Pakistan movement as a Jinnah conspiracy with the British is not history; it is unvarnished bias.

From Mountbatten’s personal papers, Tunzelmann quotes the following conversation after the Quaid refused to accept Mountbatten as the Governor General of Pakistan. When the viceroy told him that he would have more power as Prime Minister of Pakisan, the Quaid replied, “In my position, it is I who will give the advice and others who will act on it.” “Do you realise what this will cost you?” asked Mountbatten. The Quaid answered, “It may cost me several crores of rupees in assets.” The viceroy retorted, “It may well cost you the whole of your assets and the future of Pakistan.” Then Mountbatten “stormed out” of the room. According to Tunzelmann, Jinnah said no to Mountbatten because he had found out that Nehru had been shown the secret June 3, 1947 plan by the viceroy at Simla on May 10. He had also learned that Nehru had been allowed to rewrite it. Mountbatten shared Nehru’s dislike for the Quaid.

In 1946, Nehru predicted to Jacques Marcuse, a journalist, that India would never be a dominion. There never will be a Pakistan, he said, and when the British go, there will be no more communal trouble. He did have the honesty to admit to Marcuse a year later that he was wrong. In October 1947, the Quaid, quite ill and deeply unhappy because of the communal killings and the refugee influx, wrote to Attlee, “It is amazing that the top-most Hindu leaders repeatedly say that Pakistan will have to submit to the Union of India. Pakistan will never surrender.”

Now a word about Kashmir. Tunzelmann writes, quoting the Lahore-based British diplomat CB Duke, that Maharaja Hari Singh meant to create a buffer zone on uninhabited land between Kashmir and Pakistan. Muslims were pushed into Pakistan or killed. Hindus were sent deeper into Kashmir. “India would deny that any holocaust had taken place, perhaps because it has secretly been providing arms to the Dogra side. The figures are open to question, but the fact that Muslim civilians were persecuted by the Maharaja’s troops is not.” Duke saw 20 burned villages along the Chenab inside the Kashmir border and noted that many of them contained the ashes of a mosque. He wrote, “The Maharaja has ordered the ethnic cleansing under the guise of a defensive strategy.”

As a native of Jammu, I can confirm that it was so.

We are not only living through interesting times; we are also living through exciting times, no matter what side of the divide any of us is on. Benazir Bhutto is going back to Pakistan after eight long years. The strain of living between London and Dubai and travelling four to five times a year to the United States had begun to show. During this exile, she has raised three children, taken care of an ailing mother and waited for her husband to be let out of jail.

She hasn’t had an easy life. Come to think of it, her early youth was swallowed up by the draconian regime of Zia-ul Haq. She spent many years in confinement. During those awful days, attempts were made at assassinating her character as a woman. Efforts were made to hunt around for “incriminating” evidence of her “philandering”. None was found because none existed. Those were pre-Internet, pre-Photoshop times. Had the technology of doctoring photographs been available then, one can imagine what they would have come up with.

Not that the effort has been quite given up. Some months ago, a crudely doctored photograph of Benazir was doing the rounds of the Internet showing her wearing a bikini, as if the wearing of a bikini makes the wearer a moral outcast. It makes you sick to think that there are such people in the world.

While it is easy to denounce her for negotiating with Gen Musharraf and working out a deal that gives her one-third of what she had bargained for, it will only be fair to look at the justifications she has offered.

But I would first like to put my own feelings on record. It doesn’t make me feel good that she should have acquiesced in Gen Musharraf getting himself re-elected in uniform, something she had said she would never agree to. It reminds me of Byron’s lines, though written in an entirely different context: A little still she strove, and much repented, and whispering, “I will ne’er consent” – consented.

It does not make me feel good that her party did not resign its assembly seats, thus giving the Musharraf election a certain legitimacy. It doesn’t make me feel good to see that her closest adviser is not Aitzaz Ahsen or Raza Rabbani but a renegade policeman who should be in Adiala rather than by her side. Adiala, I may add, was once described by Sheikh Rashid Ahmed as Pakistan’s only “five-star jail”.

It doesn’t make me feel good that she will be allied with a party that has always employed gangster methods to enforce its will. And it doesn’t make me feel good that with Article 58(2)(b) remaining in place, she would become, if indeed the two-term ban is removed, the female version of Shaukat Aziz. Nor do I feel good about the fact that the arrangement with Gen Musharraf has been mid-wifed by the Bush administration. We should make our national decisions ourselves.

Has Benazir given the kiss of life to a tottering regime? This is where that old friend of my Mall-gallivanting days, Naveed Malik, comes in. When he called me from Lahore, having just returned from London, I asked him if the regime was tottering and what in his view the Supreme Court (that everyone insists on calling the “apex” court) will come up with. Naveed Malik whose great romance in life has been politics and who was one man Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan considered his principal pupil in the art and craft of politics, answered with a story.

Soon after ZAB’s ascent to power, the great Malik Ghulam Jilani, whose romance was also politics, with Naveed Malik in tow, appeared at the Lahore High Court. His prayer was simple: a man by the name of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in illegal occupation of the President’s House in Rawalpindi from where he should be ordered ejected. The judge asked the court to be cleared and when only Jilani and Naveed Malik and His Lordship were left, he said, “Malik Sahib, why don’t you go to Mochi Gate and try to get Bhutto ejected from that house in Rawalpindi. I can’t eject him.” Naveed Malik’s next yorker was, “If Bibi gets him out of uniform, is that a good or a bad thing?”

I asked Naveed Malik if he would do this time for Benazir’s arrival what he did when she arrived in Lahore from London on 10 April 1986 to that mammoth pubic reception, where the biggest welcome sign was one put up by Naveed Malik. “I will be in Karachi when the Lady lands,” he replied.

It was after our conversation had ended and Naveed Malik, whom Sardar Muhammad Sadiq used to call “Leader”, was on his way to his daily powwow at Pearl Continental, that I saw PJ Mir interviewing a very laid-back Gen Musharraf. When asked about Benazir’s return, he said, “I would say she should not come before. We must tide over these problems.” “She should come later,” he was asked? “Yes, certainly,” he replied.

I leave Naveed Malik to work that one out.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

To those who might assume from the title of this column that space aliens have landed in America, my immediate assurance to them is: Not yet, but wait. ‘Aliens in America’ actually is the name of an American TV sitcom that debuted last week, the aliens in this case not being ET’s first cousins with egg-like heads and big black bulging eyes but a 16-year old Pakistani schoolboy by the name of Raja Musharraf.

That the makers of the comedy, who probably expect it to create goodwill and understanding between “Middle Eastern Muslims” and Americans living in the Midwest should have chosen to identify a Pakistani as an “alien”, defeats the avowed purpose of the show. There are millions of Pakistanis living in the United States and the number of Muslims in the country is around six million, which is roughly the number of Jews who live in this country.

The fact that a young Muslim Pakistani exchange student (who in real life is a South African Hindu from London) should be called an “alien” who has landed in America is indicative of what can only be called the post-9/11 American mindset. Muslims are “aliens” and a Muslim who is also a Pakistani is alien-hood personified. The title of the show alone is racist enough to widen the gulf between “us” and “them”, Muslims in general and Pakistanis in particular being “them”.

The comedy is built around the arrival in the small town of Medora, Wisconsin, of a 16-year old international exchange student Raja Musharraf (the name chosen shows that Americans are more than familiar with the more famous bearer of that name) and the effect he has on the family that has sponsored him. The Tolchuck family opts to host an exchange student from abroad because the son is having trouble at school, being seen as “uncool”. The family believes that the presence of an exotic exchange student will do their son’s image the good that it badly needs, and, hopefully, it would put an end to his being bullied around in school.

The Tolchucks are inspired by the brochure, shown to them, with a blond, Nordic young man on the cover. They dream him to be a Scandinavian Adonis, a super athlete. They hope that their nerd of a son, Justin will bask in the blond god’s reflected glory. That is why they have volunteered. They arrive at the airport to receive him but what appears is no handsome blond Nordic god but a dark, slightly-built Pakistani wearing a white shalwar-qameez and a matching skullcap. For a long while, the family stands there in shock, utterly petrified. That is not what they had bargained for. Where did this thing from outer space come from? If this is not racism, then I am Charlie’s aunt.

Justin, who is proud of having finally got rid of his braces, is already in shock, having found that the school bullies have put him on the list of the “ten most bangable girls in school”. The arrival of Raja Musharraf brings down his stock by more than a few notches. There was much that I found improbable about the show, such as the fact that a young lad travelling to the US as an international exchange student all the way from Pakistan would be dressed the way Raja is dressed. A kid who would make it to America on that programme would be wearing jeans and a baseball cap with the visor turned around.

When Raja comes to the class, the teacher introduces him as a “real, live Pakistani” who practices “Muslimism”. He is told by the mother who is the take-charge type, how different he is from “us”. She also says, “We are so uneducated about Pakistan.” Elsewhere, he is described as “the kid from the village of Pakistan”. Pakistan, a village! It must be the only village in the world with a population of 160 million and a nuclear bomb or two.

Raja Musharraf is shown on the first day suddenly bursting into the loud intonation of the kalima-e-shahadat (and he gets the pronunciation all wrong, being South African and a non-Muslim) and begins to offer namaz. The mother protests to the school that what has landed in her home is not what she had bargained or hoped for. “How could you do that!” she asks. She is told that she has to put up with what she has got.

However, she decides to send Raja Musharraf packing and buys him a one-way ticket to Pakistan. She tells him that she is sorry but he has to leave, then adds that his mom must be missing him. Raja replies that both his parents are dead. That melts the mother’s heart somewhat and she decides to let him stay.

One understands that in subsequent episodes Raja Musharraf will begin to win over those who see him as an “alien”, but no matter how the producers of this series do it, the treatment will always remain condescending. Raja will at best be projected as a charming curiosity, someone from an alien culture, who will always remain an alien. I am sure the last episode will show him flying home, still wearing the white shalwar-qameez and skullcap, the same outfit in which he landed.

It is the condescending quality of such presentations, be they TV shows or movies, which one feels slighted by. I should add that the title song is sung by our own Salman Ahmed, formerly of Junoon, who said in an interview what his schoolboy son told him, “Dad, you gotta sing this song for peace, so that Americans understand that Muslims are people too.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

I write this in the middle of September, which is exactly four weeks from that time of year when Abdul Hamid Khan would unbox his blue City Club blazer with its emblem of a blazing golden sun. He would have it ironed – if there was someone at hand to perform that service in his bachelor’s lodgings – and put it on. That was the signal for the cricket-minded of the city of Sialkot that the season had been officially declared as having arrived. The blazer would stay on Khan Sahib’s ample girth till the season was done around the middle of April. You could set your calendar with the help of the first public sighting of Khan Sahib’s blazer. If the blazer was on him as he came leisurely walking into the big city roundabout named after Iqbal but known for upside-down drums painted white – hence Drummaan wala Chowk – you knew it was the 15th day of October.

Abdul Hamid Khan, whom everyone called Khan Sahib, was cricket’s greatest devotee in the city, if not in that part of the world. His other passion was chess. He also had a keen ear for music, and though I never asked, I once heard that he could play an instrument or two. Even if that was not true, I do know that even when engaged in a heated conversation with a friend or acquaintance, of whom the city was full, one of his ears was cocked to what was playing in the background from that radio that rested behind the high chair on which sat one of the four brothers – Ijaz, Agha, Riaz, Soofi – who owned Amelia Hotel and who, taking turns, oversaw its business.

Hamid Khan’s place of work was a five-minute walk from Amelia Hotel. He was superintendent of the city’s lone octroi establishment, although I can swear that I never saw anyone place a single teddy paisa in the municipality’s coffers. Much of Khan Sahib’s time was spent drinking tea and gossiping with friends at Amelia Hotel or Syed Nazir Hussain Shah’s establishment called Whiteways, which sold the cup that cheers, but only to permit holders. Some select friends were the exception. Their “quota” could be put on a teeotaler’s permit, obtained for that express purpose. Khan Sahib never touched the stuff, but he did not mind others imbibing, as long as they did not keel over, talk ignorantly about cricket or brag about themselves. Khan Sahib could not stand braggarts, whom he could deflate with a single well-aimed barb.

There has always been a pretence in Pakistan that it is a dry country, which is like saying that Jacobabad is a hill station. If you were a non-Muslim - and some drinking people who were not, had declared themselves non-Muslims for the specific purpose of obtaining a permit, it goes without saying that they were fully confident of a forgiving God in whom they believed fervently. However, if you did not wish to take that chance or risk coming to the Almighty’s attention on a bad day, you could go to one of the nice doctors in the city and obtain a certificate that said, “I’ve examined this patient, and I hereby certify that he needs to drink alcohol in moderate quantities for reasons of health.”

But let me return to Hamid Khan. He had gone to Murray College about the same time as Faiz Ahmed Faiz. They might even have been class fellows, though I never asked either Faiz or Hamid Khan. I do know that Faiz knew Hamid and Hamid knew Faiz. Faiz’s great ambition as a boy was to play test cricket. That was also true of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Both Faiz and Bhutto were most knowledgeable about the game. Faiz only watched TV when a cricket match was on. The discerning gentleman that he was, he gave the idiot box a miss at all other times.

Hamid Khan used to say that there was not a single major match played at Lahore since the time of Lord Tennyson’s team that he had not gone to watch. His memory for cricket statistics was phenomenal. The entire family of the Khans of Beriwala Chowk, Sialkot, was made up of cricketers. Khan Sahib’s brother Major Aftab Ahmed Khan played for the Northern India Cricket Association (NICA) in the Ranjhi Trophy and for the Muslims in the Bombay Pentangular. He also played for the Maharaja of Patiala’s team. Maharaja Bhopinder Singh was a fine cricketer and a great lover of the game. Khan Sahib’s nephews, Maqbool “Boola”, Khalid “Khalo”, Hamid “Hamo”, Babar and Jehangir “Jango” – as well as their father Feroz Khan – were all natural-born cricketers. A Sialkot wit once said that the Khan brothers learn how to play at the pre-natal stage. Khan Sahib’s cousins, Agha Mumtaz and Agha Sarfraz, were wonderful cricketers. Agha Mumtaz played for Northern India in the Ranjhi Trophy and I think also in the Bombay Pentangular, while his brother, who is now a much-visited divine, bowled leg breaks and googlies, which he must be deceiving the devil, the Great Deceiver, with since he took to the contemplative life.

Hamid Khan was a big man and I have never seen anyone bowl a bigger off break, nor have I witnessed a crosser bat than the one he wielded lustily and without any sense of responsibility, that being the only privilege of lower-order batsmen. You did not have to watch Khan Sahib in slow motion to conclude that between the moment his right arm appeared high over his head and the moment that round red missile in his massive paw of a hand was released, there occurred a split-second pause which was followed by what Sharif Chacha of Friends Club, Lahore, once described as “stoning.” In short, Khan Sahib was a chucker, but woe to him who dared even think the thought within Khan Sahib’s hearing. His bowling action was not suspect: it transcended any such limitations. It could be called blue murder. Khan Sahib attributed such reactions to some people’s inability to play the off break. He once famously observed, “He who bowls a lesser off-break than mine, is no bowler; and he who bowls a bigger one is a nut.” He could have the ball move into the batsman at an angle of 45 degrees, so it was prudent not to attempt a “well-left” when facing Hamid Khan from the City End.

Every cricketer of note knew who Hamid Khan was. Come to think of it, small town cricket it is that has given Pakistan and India some of its greatest players. And it was the Hamid Khans of the subcontinent who shepherded those nurseries. Their contribution to the glory of the game, though unacknowledged, remains immense. I don’t suppose Dr Nasim Ashraf, who now heads the Pakistan Cricket Board, ever heard of Abdul Hamid Khan, but he would earn eternal merit in the eyes of the Great Umpire in the Sky were he to help found a tournament in Sialkot in memory of Abdul Hamid Khan, that great lover of the game who bowled a mean off break and wielded an even meaner bat, especially if somebody made the mistake of lobbing him an off break.

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