Welcome to the new
Great Game.
As I explained to my cousins last night, we are all pawns in the new Great Game and the only thing we can hope and pray is that the powers that be either get bored, get booted out, or find something else to while away their time and let us poor souls be.
After all how could burning 800 wholesale shops owned and run by the Memon community help a cause? I guess there must be a central exchange of sorts where you could go and get these standard contracts executed. A bomb goes off in an Imam Bargah in Gulshan and 6 kids are burnt alive at KFC after customers and staffs are systematically robbed in a spontaneous outpouring of grief. Two years later, another goes off in Pindi at the haunt of ghosts of lives cut short of premiers and premiers to be and ATM’s and cell phone SIMS are converted to cash in a spontaneous outpouring of shock and outrage. If the gestures weren’t so obscene, the violence not so pre-mediated, the repetitiveness and crudity of the plot would actually be funny. Like bad movies out of Lollywood (do you ever remember them making a good one), one would roll on the floor, laughing at the stupidity of their contrived production and the gullibility of the audience. Bomb, die, burn, repeat…
And if you are not happy with the results, we will do it all over again, on the house, no charge.
But then one finds out that at times the stakes are pitifully small for a message that is so filled with grief. The 6 kids at KFC were fodder for a then provincial minister vying for the CM slot. Three days of violence in Karachi two December’s ago had a point that we all missed, at least I did. The blast in front of Sheraton was a reprimand for an unpaid bribe in a foreign land. Metal and the absence of cash exchanged for a crater and corpses in a morgue. I wonder who forgot to pay whom that we saw the tragedy that was December 28 unfold in front of us, last night.
So despite what the media says and it says so little given the conversations that go on for days at end, please remember that the Central Exchange where our friends go to get these contracts executed can only do one theme. There are no awards for creativity, clean execution or intelligence. There are no awards for allegiance or loyalty, no slots for enemies or friends. Only blood, gore and body count; and lives disrupted and cut short.
After all it is the new Great Game, the rules for which were written hundreds of years ago. And if you don’t have the balls or the taste for being a spectator or a player, or the patience or faith for waiting out the players, you shouldn’t be here.
Don’t try and look for meaning, for there is none. Only a pattern and a message that loops; bomb, die, burn, repeat…