It was Balochistan’s fifth uprising since 1947, and everyone agreed it was the worst. Schoolchildren refused to sing Pakistan’s national an...
It was Balochistan’s fifth uprising since 1947, and everyone agreed it was the worst. Schoolchildren refused to sing Pakistan’s national anthem; university students burned their books on Pakistani history; and on 14 August, Independence Day, Baloch nationalists hung black flags outside their doors. Despite its low profile, it seemed a consequential conflict – another quivering strand of Pakistan’s DNA that threatened to pull the country apart.
How did it get so bad? One answer was offered by a grandiloquent Baloch chieftain – a tribal aesthete, poetry lover and insufferable snob whom I had met six years earlier, in the course of an unusual English lesson.
An elderly tribesman with kindly eyes and a dagger tucked into his waistband cleared his throat and spoke. “Hell hath no few-ry like a...woman scorned,” he intoned in halting English, stumbling over the words as if they were rocks in the desert. “Love and...Attach-ment. Tides. Of. Life.”
His teacher, a bespectacled man with flowing white hair, harrumphed impatiently.
“Essay titles,” said Akbar Bugti, turning to me. “I set them an essay every ten days or so, in English or in Urdu. Cash prizes for first, second and third. Just to give them an idea, you know – to agitate their minds.”
Goethe, Sartre, and “Iliad”
It was...
