woke up sucking a lemon

On my way to class today I happened to glance at the rather bright screen they've erected near Regent Plaza which keeps showing the news in mute. They have one on Tariq Road and I swear it lights the place up like a ghetto Times Square.
It's funny they're showing these silent adverts with women and doctors giving those informative speeches. While you're not disgusted by aunties with saccharine voices insisting they love their families and showing it by lovingly feeding them chunks of fried garbage, you can notice the has-been starlet and the frustration she packs for having an idiot of a husband and having to resort to do this cooking oil stint to pay the bills and pretending to love a kid who's a little bitch offscreen by making him ingest fatal amounts of cholesterol.
The kid should know that the future of child stars is not bright in Pakistan. At most he'll end up on the back page of Young World wearing red hotpants, sweets in his hands and a hole where self-respect used to reside. The Aunty knows about this hole all too well.
And the name of the channel on the screen? GOOD NEWS TV. Bits and pieces of other news thrown together without the voice track. It's brilliant! And I'm going to tell you how to get GOOD NEWS at home.

Step 1. Open your television to Geo
Step 2. Hit mute

It works every time.

x

But news isn't all that bad. There's some construction happening on this side of the bridge that is soon to smooth out the traffic to Defense and Clifton. Somebody built an awesome looking structure on the chowrangi between the two Habib banks on Tipu Sultan. Big TV screens are springing up on the road. Sharfabad got one of those cool signals with timers! Modrenity ki inteha!
Speaking of, the normal Pakistani man loves to be modren. But the very mention of a woman being modern, one in question usually starts sputtering out denials. The males here on the other hand will have no qualms about rising unabashedly to the occasion and some will even fake it. I love it when some poor fool loses it in a dispute and in that moment of confused anger, starts swearing in English out of spite. Fuckyou you! He had the last say but definitely not the last laugh.
For a woman in Pakistan, being called modern or advanced or tez is like being equated to a slut apparently. You just can't call a woman that. But they don't love it any less than every man. Men will have their boys' night out talking in lewd detail about her tits and ass, and women will have their kitty parties talking in lewd detail about her "figure" and her nonexistent sleeves. Throw in an argument and a resultant pillow fight and we have the opening scene of an all-girl porno.

And what the fuck is up with everyone about going sleeveless? Why is it an issue on another level? Though for men, I can understand. It looks...unsightly. It doesn't make sense, however, when mothers start giving shit to their daughters about their clothes having no sleeves. They aren't okay with sleeveless shoulders but they're cool with inch of cloth carefully labelled sleeves. It makes it look less like morals and more like appearances. God have mercy, I'm not learned in Islamic injunctions and arguments of modesty to say anything in ethereal terms but in humble rationale, I can't think how a flap of cloth makes any difference to a woman or society in general. Like Bob never used to say ironically, times...they are a changin'.