The Pakistani literati and Twitterati have been in Karachi for the last few days for the city’s fourth literary festival. The hashtag has been KLF and KLF 2013. But to me and many others KLF will only mean one thing: The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.

Here are some of the reasons why there is only one KLF that counts:

The duet with Tammy Wynette.

3am eternal

Burning a million quid

Sheep and machine guns

Daleks

I’m guessing the appeal of this KLF will be lost on some of those holed up at the other KLF, but each to their own.

Literary festivals are a Western construct. Throw off your shackles South Asia! You’ve nothing to lose except William Dalrymple!

“I saw more south Asian writers in the early 1990s in London, Sydney and New York than India,” he said. “And it’s great for international writers too because they can get away from their damp bedsits each January and speak to pretty girls under the awnings in Jaipur, surrounded by elephants and palaces.”

That’s Dalrymple, quoted in a press release story from the Guardian about Lahore Lit Fest. If you really want to read it here is a link. Although the sub-head talks about Lahore restoring its cultural tradition there is no information about who or what features in that tradition. Nor is there mention about the rivalry between Karachi (which is having its fourth festival) and Lahore (which is having its first). A sidebar or an accompanying blog would have sufficed. Such detail or nuance may be lost on the layman, but presumably anyone reading an article about literary festivals in the first place has a passing interest in detail and nuance. Ho hum.

Disclosure: I’ve only ever been to one literary festival and the highlight was a well-known writer flirting with me in the science section of a bookshop. He was fingering the spine of a chemistry book. I rest my case.

The Jaipur Lit Fest has just taken place. In a few weeks time there will be the Karachi Lit Fest. The Burma Lit Fest is taking place in between the two. Then towards the end of February there is the Lahore Lit Fest. There are 30 literary festivals in India alone. Keep up!

I know what you’re saying - Hay, Cheltenham, Oxford. These happen within weeks of each other with the same faces popping up, plugging their books, rolling out the same anecdotes, putting the world to rights, being self-absorbed and speaking from on high. Indeed Hay has enough franchises to rival Chicken Cottage.

As of yet the KLF has not published its schedule of speakers, leading one journalist to accuse the organizers of being shoddy. But hey, there’s two weeks to go! That’s an eternity in Pakistan. Besides, the line up of participants haven’t varied all that much in the last few years for KLF. Oh look, there’s Mohammed Hanif! Mohsin Hamid! Raza Rumi! Kamila Shamsie! It’s like subcontinental literary festival bingo. You get a full house with William Dalrymple - who is like the Kim Kardashian of literary festivals. A Lit Fest without him is like a Daily Mail side bar of shame without KK. Dawn even described Dalrymple “as the the most recognisable British face in South Asia”. David Cameron will be devastated. To be fair to Will he has just written a book - about Afghanistan - which has had fantastic reviews.

What I like about KLF is that it is free, open to all and that the number of visitors are on the rise. It, and the event in Lahore, encourage young people not only to attend but to write and to think independently. This is a good thing - demystifying literature and Writing (with a capital W) as a way of increasing the critical mass of English and Urdu literature coming out of Pakistan. It is crucial that Pakistani literature gets attention for being good rather than being Pakistani, as the last few paragraphs of this 2010 Independent article observes.

But this leaves me wondering about other art forms in Pakistan. How much effort is expended on promoting art, dance, drama, film, music? What is the impact of lit fests on these art forms? Do they benefit from a ripple effect, socially or economically? Who takes part in these festivals and why? Who goes to these festivals and why? What about the bilingual aspect of Pakistan’s Lit Fests? What sort of coverage is there of Lit Fests in the Urdu language press? How do sales or publicity of Urdu language books compare to their English language counterparts? Is there a language barrier? I’ve no idea what Amadou and Mariam are singing about but I happily pay for their music as do millions of other people.

I’d like to know more about the Pakistani art scene as a whole and not just in a way that translates easily for an international audience (this is where literary festivals are a useful device as they are basically all the same).

Ah, but what about freedom of expression? I hear you ask.

Well according to Mohammed Hanif (you can find the full quotation in that Indy article I linked to earlier) lack of freedom never “stopped writers and other creative artists in Pakistan. In fact, some of the best literature in Pakistan has been produced during the worst military dictatorships.” So there’s your answer.

But what about the work of contemporary artists? Or was the drooling over Pakistani art just a phase? Where are the Mohammed Hanifs and the Mohsin Hamids of the music world? And what about film? I am shamelessly going to plug a post I wrote last summer about the loneliness of the independent film-maker in Pakistan. Disclosure: Hammad Khan is a friend of mine. Is it that other art forms are too Pakistani for international consumption?

Here’s Mohammed Hanif again, back in 2010.

The boom… is basically half a dozen writers getting published worldwide, winning awards and getting good reviews. And because they write in English, in a globalised world they get much more attention than their counterparts writing in Urdu or Punjabi or Pashto. But I do hope they are getting this attention, because they are telling some good stories.

So let the Lit Fests inspire the next generation of Kamila Shamsies and Bina Shahs, but let them also pay more than lip service to other Pakistani artists and art too. Maybe one day South Asia won’t need William Dalrymple.

Or why Africa is the new everything. Military activity brings out the worst in people - and I’m not talking about militants.

In case you missed it Africa - yes all of it - is the new Afghanistan. How could it not be? It has crazy Muslims killing innocent Muslims and lopping off their bits. The entire continent is antagonising Western governments, while simultaneously highlighting the shortcomings of local security and law enforcements, to such an extent that boots on the ground are inevitable. It sounds so familiar. Any western intervention in foreign lands is almost immediately described as the new Afghanistan. Exhibit A:

Will Libya become the new Afghanistan? asked ABC News in September 2012

Libya IS [my emphasis] the new Afghanistan, said the Telegraph in August 2011.

A few months before the Telegraph arrived at that conclusion the Defence Secretary Liam Fox said Libya WAS the New Afghanistan.

Exhibit B:

Last October Al Jazeera asked whether Syria was the new Afghanistan. There’s a pattern emerging.

There are a few reasons why Africa/Mali/Algeria is not the new Afghanistan (which, remember, is the new Vietnam) but that hasn’t stopped experts from drawing comparisons. And, because nobody knows WTF is going on, they get away with it.

North Africa is the new Afghanistan, says Front Page.

When Obama took office four years ago, North Africa wasn’t keeping CIA analysts up at night. There were known trouble spots in the region, but no one thought that it was likely to turn into the next Afghanistan. Then along came the Arab Spring.

North Africa: the New Afghanistan? asks ABC. You see NA = North Africa. NA also = New Afghanistan.

Will Mali become a new Afghanistan? wonders Arab News. Arab News? C’mon guys! You’re Arab! You should know better. Oh wait.

USA Today has a different take on the situation: Is Africa Al-Qaeda’s new launch pad? Yes, that’s the whole of Africa. As opposed to the Africa that is home to groups that we’ve already heard of - AQIM and AQAP.

Salon doesn’t fall into the same trap though, oh no. It asks: Is Afghanistan worse than Vietnam?

Here are some very good reasons why Africa is not the new Afghanistan

The grand-sounding AQIM hides a chaotic reality. The group has singularly failed to unite disparate local groups spread along the north African coast. Even in Algeria, militants are split between the north and south – and these two factions are split again, into rival bands. Finally, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the man suspected of orchestrating the refinery attack, leads his own breakaway group that does not even pay nominal allegiance to the southern AQIM faction, let alone the group as a whole, and certainly not to al-Qaida. If they are “al-Qaida-linked” then the chain is a very long one.

That’s from the Guardian’s Jason Burke, who knows more than a thing or two about all things Al Qaeda. A few days later he said something similar, mostly because the likes of Cameron started talking about an existential, global threat and clearly some calm and perspective was needed.

Cameron did avoid talking of a “war” but, as his own intelligence services and foreign affairs specialists have long advised, the “single narrative” of a cosmic planetary “existential” clash is, for theological as well as psychological reasons, one of the best recruiting tools the militants have. Such rhetoric therefore risks being counterproductive. The new challenge this decade may be an unforeseen one: the hard-learned lessons of last decade being neglected, if not deliberately unlearned.

Professor Michael Clarke, now of RUSI formerly of King’s College London, warns that western responses to African events are not a continuation of  the same jihadist challenge that produced the 9/11 attacks and much else thereafter.

How many Pakistanis have been killed by their own countrymen recently?

23 January: Four pro-government tribesmen are shot in Badaber, Peshawar. Two former peace militia members killed in Kari Haider Khel, Tank. Police actions kill three men in an ‘encounter’ in Faisalabad.

22 January: A Shia doctor is killed in Peshawar. A woman in Mastung, Balochistan, has her throat slit and her body dumped near a police station over an alleged elopement. Six people are killed in Karachi: torture and beheading to blame.

21 January: Two security personnel killed by an IED in the Mohmand tribal region.

20 January: Seven people killed in Karachi. The body of a 16-year-labourer is found in Bara.

19 January: Suspected terrorists kill two people in Kot Azam, Tank district. Two suspected members of the Balochistan Liberation Army are killed in Mastung.

18 January: Kamran Faisal, charged with investigating corruption allegations against the prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, is found hanged in Islambad. His uncle said the body bore signs of torture. I don’t think anyone believes it was suicide. Eight people die in Karachi. Armed men kill a school principal and his son in Kharan, Quetta.

17 January: Five people, including two women and two children, killed by shelling in Miramshah, Waziristan.

15 January: 18 - I’ll say that again - 18 bodies are recovered from Bara tehsil in Khyber Agency. 

Does this mean NOBODY was killed on January 16? What happened? Did Pakistan take the day off?

I apologise for the bleakness. Here is a picture of something cute.

A cloud of doom hovered over the commentary on Pakistan too. Here is some Pakistan reading.

Ajai Shukla writes about the difference between Indian and Pakistani reaction to the killing of soldiers on the Line of Control (h/t Shashank Joshi).

…the fortuitous outcome of Pakistan’s single-minded focus on Tahir ul-Qadri’s so-called Long March was that New Delhi’s tough response to brutality on the LoC went almost unnoticed in Pakistan, allowing Islamabad (which has little appetite for roiling the waters) to settle for a pro-forma response. This avoided an acid exchange of tit-for-tat statements that would have united Pakistan’s divided anti-India constituency.

Ah yes, Qadri…

The man and his not so million-strong march occupied Islamabad in addition to swathes of column inches, screen time and hot air. Things in Pakistan happen so quickly it’s best to wait to let the dust settle. Who could have predicted that even as the cleric was in his luxury shipping container making his demands the Chief Justice would issue an arrest order for the prime minister? It’s Pakistan, nothing is accidental. Anyway, here’s Huma Yusuf on the symbolism of the shipping container in Pakistan (no really).

But what were once symbols of the globalized economy and regional trade have become markers of Pakistan’s deteriorating security situation.

Shipping containers, which have been used to transport NATO supplies through Pakistan to Afghanistan, now represent rocky U.S.-Pakistani relations. In 2011 and 2012, to protest the killing of Pakistani soldiers in American airstrikes, the Pakistani government blocked the passage of containers for seven months and threatened to only allow the resumption of shipping for exorbitant transit fees. The containers have also become a favorite target of militants who oppose Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States in the fight against terrorism.

The sectarian violence of the last few weeks continues to be felt. Dawn has this photo gallery of Bara villagers protesting in Peshawar while Al Jazeera has this feature on the plight of the Hazaras. The article carries an extract from those tools over at Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which claims responsibility for the Quetta blast. 

If it is the will of God, in 2013 Lashkar-e-Jhangvi will not allow any Shias to remain living in Quetta […] we will carry out such attacks that the enemy will, with the will of God, not have any escape. […] Our message to the Shias is simple: be prepared to kill, or be killed

The original LeJ statement can be found here. Not for nothing have the attacks on the Hazara been described as genocide.

Here is a puppy.

Bombs tore through Pakistan on Thursday and killed at least 100 people, most of them Shia. It is not the first time militants have targeted the Hazara community and it won’t be last. What sets this bloody incident apart from others, however, is the wider response to it.

Dawn newspaper reports:

From Karachi to Islamabad, Shia parties such as Majlis-i-Wahdatul Muslimeen (MWM) and the Imamia Students Organisation (ISO) as well as civil society activists gathered to protest the three blasts in Quetta on Thursday which claimed over a hundred lives – most of them of Shia and Hazaras.

On Friday, distraught relatives of the victims had begun a protest in Quetta. Accompanied by coffins holding the bodies of those killed on Thursday, they said they would not move or bury their loved ones till the army took control of Quetta.

By Saturday, a stunned nation appeared to have rallied around in support of the protesters by holding protests. In Islamabad, a protest organised by Shia groups blocked a main road for several hours. Although the protesters dispersed late in the night, they promised to return for a peaceful demonstration on Sunday morning.

The same newspaper, on its homepage, carries the headline: “Turning Point?”

There have also been protests in Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi with people criticising the provincial government for failing to protect Shia Muslims in the region. This neglect comes in spite of years of shootings, suicide bombings, hundreds of lives lost and reports that sectarian violence has become more pronounced. Human Rights Watch said at least 320 members of the Shia population were killed in targeted attacks last year. The Financial Times and the BBC have decent primers on a situation that is by turns bleak, chaotic and confusing not least because it is competing with other, multiple nightmare scenarios for the country. Dawn has a timeline on Hazara killings in Balochistan. The South Asia Terrorism Portal has datasheets on how people are dying.

So why are these protests happening, why now? How have Pakistanis gone from trashing their cities in fury at a schlocky no-mark anti-Islam film to enduring freezing temperatures to mourn alongside the genuinely demonised and persecuted? I fully accept that not all Pakistani Sunni Muslims are expressing solidarity with their Shia Muslim countrymen, that those registering their anger are in a minority and that the number of this weekend’s protesters pales in comparison when compared with other public demonstrations. But it is an improvement. That there is any measurable outrage at all is amazing given the country’s catastrophic start to 2013. Indeed the BBC’s Pakistan correspondent Aleem Maqbool remarked it was unheard of for people to still be protesting on a Sunday when the attacks had taken place on a Thursday. The writer Bina Shah was more downbeat about the ramifications from the latest bloody episode.

…while they are physically killing the weak and the vulnerable - the Shias, the Christians, the Hindus, the Ahmedis - the rest of us are suffering from this cancer too. We cannot be healthy when parts of our body are being amputated in the most brutal way. How do you live in a country that’s killing you, bit by bit? I don’t know. But I suspect we’re all about to find out.     

You can read the full post here.

Shah is right. It is not simply the Shia Muslims of Pakistan who are being attacked, it is the Ahmedis too. The dead have their graves desecrated, the living have their mosques destroyed and their brethren gunned down. Christians are hounded on spurious blasphemy charges. Where is the government in all of this?

President Zardari and his cabinet was busy in what they saw as a matter of greater importance – staving off  Tahir ul Qadri, an otherwise unknown cleric, who seems to have caught our political leadership napping. Simply by saying the right things and launching a march to Islamabad, he has upset the great democratic government which supposedly owes its strength to its popularity amongst the people. So shaken is the government by Tahirul Qadri that it has drafted in thousands of law enforcement personnel from other provinces to save its seat of power. Maybe it would have made more sense to deploy some of these personnel for the safety of the Hazaras.

Instead of catching the bull by the horns, we continue to ignore the problem. First the Ahmadis were attacked. Then members of other religious communities. Now it is Muslims of different sects. What next? When will we wake up from our slumber and realize that unless we deal with this problem, gradually no one will be left alive or unaffected in this great country of ours?

That extract is from a blog by Kamal Siddiqui and it can be found here.

Lest anyone get too misty-eyed about the country turning a corner, Zainab Imam writes on the reality of being a Shia in Pakistan.

93 of us perished yesterday. I don’t mean Pakistanis, I mean Shias. And as much as it pains me to identify myself as something before a Pakistani, this state seems to have left little choice for us.

Dawn was right to use that question mark.

I don’t want to discuss Tahir Ul Qadri for the very reasons mentioned by Siddiqui. The cleric and his much publicised long march are a distraction and a drain on the country’s already exhausted energies and resources.

He should realise there is a time and a place for everything. Now is not the time, Pakistan is not the place. His march could “scupper elections”, as Saeed Shah writes, by causing polls to be delayed or even cancelled.

Mr Qadri insists he wants the elections to be held on time and that his reforms could be implemented without delay. He has called for the Election Commission to “pre-clear” candidates, after checking that they paid taxes and had not defaulted on loans. But political observers see a wider agenda. Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch, said: “It appears that Tahir ul-Qadri wants to derail the democratic process.… This would be entirely unacceptable because Pakistan is on the cusp of the first transfer of power from one civilian government to another.

His prominence and sabre rattling has rather captured the imagination of the media for two reasons: he’s not Imran Khan and journalists tire of writing the same Pakistan story over and over again namely Taliban/death/India/Taliban/death/cricket. Qadri’s rhetoric and showboating come as a breath of fresh air.

But it’s not the first time he’s stolen the limelight with a well-meaning but ill-judged initiative. In 2010 he launched a 600 page fatwa condemning terrorism. The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker assessed the enormous edict here. As Pakistanis, Afghans and Iraqis will tell you - if they weren’t so busy tending to their dead and injured - Qadri’s fatwa doesn’t have as much penetration as suicide bombs do.

That’s as much space as I’m prepared to give Qadri. If you want to know more about him you can find things here and here and here (that last link from Canada’s Globe and Mail). 

In Case You Missed It - and it’s easily done with so much of it around - here is this week’s death toll in Pakistan. It is not comprehensive - I am entirely reliant on media reports for numbers - so this list is only indicative. It is indicative THAT YOU SHOULD NEVER GO ANYWHERE NEAR QUETTA. Drone deaths are well documented elsewhere so are not included here.

January 13 2013: A blast in North Waziristan kills 14 security force personnel. Separate explosions kill two militants and a person in a market. One person dies after an IED hits a passenger coach in Parachinar. A teenage girl is shot by her brother in what western media would call an “honour” killing.

January 12 2013: A child dies in Brewery Road, Quetta, following an IED blast. A nurse is shot dead in Nowshera, KP.

January 11 2013: Two men die after unidentified armed men attack a Nato supply terminal in the Hazarganji area of Quetta.

January 10 2013: At least 114 people killed in bomb blasts in Mingora and Quetta. A Pakistani soldier is killed in a Kashmir border clash. Three people are shot in “different incidents of target killing” in Quetta.

January 8 2013: A man is shot in Quetta.

January 6 2013: A Pakistani soldier is killed in a Kashmir border clash.

I left the Guardian in March 2012. I didn’t get snapped up by another paper. I’m hardly the most prolific freelancer and I haven’t written a book. I know lots of journalists - lots of Guardian journalists especially - have succeeded in one or more of these areas. Sometimes these people write about their reasons for leaving. I resisted because nobody knows who I am or really cares why I’m not there anymore. I’m not a Name, I’m not a brand. So this post isn’t about what you think of me, getting you to like me or touting for business, it’s more my way of articulating what happens when you fall off the radar and finding a way of writing for myself.

There’s a bit of existential angst that comes with leaving a high profile organisation. I started to ask myself whether I was who I was because I worked at the Guardian or whether I worked at the Guardian because of who I was. Then I snapped out of it and thought about what to do with my voluntary redundancy cash.

So what am I doing? I’m reading a War Studies MA full time at King’s College London, specializing in Afghanistan and South Asian Security Issues and Civilians and Extreme Trauma. As a journalist, you’re very good at picking things up quickly and dropping them just as fast. But I wanted to know more, I wanted to learn something. Picking up a book at the weekend or reading a few pages before bed wasn’t enough. I worried that a part of my brain had withered away and that I was too old to sit in a classroom.  It hasn’t and I’m not, which is a relief because I’m self-funding my way through this degree. The decision not to freelance - or freelance much - is due to finances. I can’t afford to be distracted by pitching for work (especially when there is precious little paid work out there) and if I don’t get a distinction in this MA I’ve wasted my time.

I still class myself as a journalist, though, and this break is my maternity leave. I won’t have a screaming infant, puke on my blouse or poo on my face to show for it at the end of this process, but I will have a qualification and a mass of knowledge that would have otherwise eluded me.

I could have stayed at the Guardian but there’s every possibility that I would have made no progress had I done. In fact, by the time March 2013 comes round I’ll be streets ahead of where I was 12 months beforehand. In the months since I’ve left I’m happier, fitter, younger looking (honestly), more confident. I feel like I used to and that’s such an improvement on how I have felt about myself in the last three years.

I’m going to use this blog to write about things that interest me. So that’s mostly but not always Pakistan. I thought of a little strapline too - “I give a shit about Pakistan so you don’t have to” but decided maybe it was a little too dark. I am going to try to write once or twice a week and, this is awful, I plan to document how people are dying in Pakistan. A lot of time is spent documenting who or how many die in drone strikes. It’s a matter of international interest, because it involves the US and UAVs. But I think anti-Shia violence does more to destabilise the country, although this reality will be of less interest because it’s just Pakistanis killing each other, right? I also hope to include links to some of the best reports and blogs on Pakistan out there. I’m going to start with these two articles - one from the excellent Rafia Zakaria:

The challenge of the Pakistani writer is to find new ways of writing about death. Death is everywhere inside bottles of cough syrup, lurking around the first aid boxes of health workers, in snooker clubs on Alamdar Road in Quetta, on the Super Highway in Karachi. Death skulks on street corners if you don’t’ hand over your mobile phone fast enough, on the window ledges of office buildings, in altercations outside apartment buildings, in slums and suburbs. Writing about Pakistan and for Pakistanis is writing about death, making death digestible, death in vast doses that choke when they hit the throat, death that threatens to numb the living before they die, death that curses and kills and bloodies and weeps but refuses to reveal which murmured prayer will yield some respite from this time of constant endings.

The other one is from M Ilyas Khan, who writes for the BBC about anti-Shia militants:

Wednesday’s bombings of a Shia Muslim neighbourhood in the Pakistani city of Quetta that killed almost 100 people is a grim reminder of the power of sectarian militants to act as the arbiters of peace - and war - in this country.

Since 2004-05, they have steadily spread their wings in south western Balochistan province, where the ethnic Hazara community of Shia Muslims has been their main target.

Figures released by the Balochistan government place the number of Shias killed in the province between 2008 and 2012 at 758. Members of the Hazara community say the figure is much higher.

Yes you read that right - at least 758 deaths in Balochistan alone in four years. The drones don’t look too bad now do they?

Anyway, if things are really grim and hectic in Pakistan (which they normally tend to be) posts might just read like A Shopping List of Death. Like I said, I’m giving a shit about Pakistan so you don’t have to.

Ramadan has only just started but already the stories are coming in. It’s silly season for Muslims.

The first one, via the excellent Hojabi facebook group, was about Ramadan nail art from Minx. Yes, because what Muslim women really want when they’re fasting are trendy talons. I thought this was a joke until I went on to the Minx website. It’s the second year for the collection and nobody has really pointed out the bleeding obvious (pardon the pun).

For the uninitiated (i.e non-Muslims) out there the Minx enterprise is a little redundant.

Muslim women are not allowed to pray while wearing makeup or nail polish, unless it’s that time of the month (shark week lol) when women are not expected to pray at all. As a matter of fact all muslims are supposed to perform a specific cleansing ritual also known as ablution before each and every prayer, and if a person is wearing nail polish, then the water won’t reach the person’s nailbed during said cleansing ritual making the ablution invalid. Others believe that it’s okay to wear nail polish and pray with it on, provided that you wash your hands and clean your nails thoroughly before applying said polish.

This is Glamour’s take (from Ramadan 2011) about the “halal holiday” collection:

I admit that I don’t know much about Ramadan—just that it’s an extended time of inner reflection that involves fasting—so I’m looking forward to our readers’ input on this particular nail idea. I wonder: Are Ramadan-themed nails an appropriate way to celebrate this particular religious holiday? Would you wear them? I can’t imagine wearing, for instance, Yom Kippur nail patterns (this somber Jewish holiday also involves fasting), but maybe that scenario is different.

What are your thoughts on the Minx Ramadan collection? On religious-holiday-inspired nails in general? Let’s discuss in the comments below!

Isn’t mosque a place where you actually go to pray? I don’t even go to Espresso, but like any other establishment it is not their job to operate a “prayer hall”.

A coffee shop is for coffee. A mosque is for praying. Pakistan isn’t the kind of place that’s short of places to worship. Why go to a coffee shop when it’s prayer time?

The third story is about how Ramadan will worsen Olympic traffic chaos because the month of fasting coincides with the massive sporting event/white elephant.

I think you’ll find it’s the other way around. The Olympics coincide with Ramadan. So there. Anyway. Here’s the story:

Ramadan is set to add to London’s Olympic traffic woes as thousands of Muslims squeeze into non-Games lanes to worship at the many mosques that surround the Olympic Park.

Every year during the month of August, vast crowds of worshippers descend on east London - one of the most concentrated Muslim communities in the country -for nightly prayer.

Local councillor Abdal Ullah said the influx of people to the area, between central London and Stratford, will play havoc with Games road links and traffic hotspots.

The district surrounding the Olympic Park is home to more than 250,000 Muslims and almost 100 mosques.

When I worked at the Guardian I got a phone call from a PR guy asking if I would appear in an advertising campaign designed to persuade Pakistanis not to carry out terrorist atrocities in the West or indeed anywhere else. It was called I Am the West. I declined a starring role. But I did write a story about it.

Now, through Twitter, I learn that the Foreign Office has embarked on another campaign. This time - to teach people about how brilliant/misunderstood/promising/broken Pakistan is.

It’s called Speaking Up for Pakistan: What Would You Say? Here’s the video and here’s the blurb:

What comes to mind when you think about Pakistan? These people all have their own ideas about the politics, economics, culture and security of Pakistan, its place in the World, and the British Pakistani diaspora. What do you think about what they have to say?

I have some questions. The first (second, third, fourth, fifth) question is why? Why was this video made? Why now? Who is it aimed at? How much did it cost? How did the Foreign Office choose the pundits? Are Pakistanis the new Muslims? That last question sounds a bit weird but there was a time when the UK government was casting its net far and wide for representatives from the Muslim community so I wonder if this is simply a diffusion line. Most of the filming appears to have taken place in Whitechapel, east London, which is predominantly Bangladeshi. Yeah, nice research there Foreign Office.

I was in Pakistan earlier this year and I think it’s an amazing, exhilarating yet dysfunctional and infuriating place. I can tell you why I love it - but there is no ulterior motive behind it. I don’t care whether you go on holiday there or not. I’d rather you didn’t because I’d like to keep it for myself. But I do wonder WTF the Foreign Office is up to.

One of the last things I did in Islamabad was attend a talk by the filmmaker Hammad Khan at Kuch Khaas, an arts and culture set-up which is attempting to breathe some life into the city that always sleeps. Khan never studied film-making (he’s a lawyer by training) but he’s managed to make a handful of film for next to nothing. His most recent release was Slackistan - about life in Islamabad. It got him into film festivals, on the red carpet and a Wikipedia entry. Oh and a ban from the Pakistani film board because cuts weren’t made to the film. The subject of his talk was “From Viral to Very Real” - going beyond sharing and social networking sites to have a sustainable career in film-making. You’d think that, with an independent cinema scene up for grabs, the event would be packed to the rafters. It wasn’t. But that’s Islamabad for you. Kuch Khaas - the cafe area - was packed before the event and a little while into it. Then everyone disappeared. There were people in the audience, just not as many as I thought there would be. Passion, said Khan, was one of the things that was lacking in Pakistani film-making.

A lot of people are relying on social media as the be all and end all of their film-making. The problem with social media is that there is no rejection. It’s about natural selection, art has value and it is set by people with critical credibility. Viral success is fleeting and it gives you instant outreach. Use viral as the icing on the cake, not the cake, it can lead to inertia and self-satisfaction.

He admitted there were particular challenges facing Pakistani film-makers - no festivals, cinemas are unlikely to show independent offerings and, commercially speaking, art films have little traction.

Film is not an industry (to the establishment). It is not a viable sector, it’s dead to them. There is no critical appreciation of cinema. Kuch Khaas cancelled a short film event because there were no entries.

Pakistan is not short of art or artistic tradition. It has music, literature, paintings, theatre. It is not an uncreative society - everyone is a poet, a storyteller, a singer. That’s what baffles me. With the exception of music (see Atif Aslam) the visual and performing arts are not money-making operations but they are considered integral to Pakistani life. So what gives? Here’s what Hammad had to say (in response to my question):

Film has never been in the blood of Pakistan. It has always been linked to a lower art form. It has not been embraced like it has in Iran. I don’t think there was a golden era of Pakistani cinema. It is dead. There are ashes. We have to start something new because the importance of images has never been more important. We have to have cinema of some form. We don’t have that grasp of cinema. It has to be sustainable for its own sake, not as part of an agenda.

There are Pakistani film makers out there. Shoaib Mansoor has enjoyed critical and commercial success with Bol and Khuda Ke Liye. I haven’t seen either of these but I’m aware of the plots and they are, well, a bit Pakistani film by numbers. Taliban? Check. Oppressed women? Check. There’s also a film out that has had all the papers swooning - Mud House and the Golden Doll - but it looks and feels dated. Maybe I’m being unfair but seriously, watch the trailer. What did people in the audience have to say? Well, it just sounded like they were being complacent, lazy even. “How do I get my film into a festival” “We don’t live in London” “Nobody’s interested in Pakistan”. To which my answers are: “er, google?” “So what?” and “Are you nuts? Pakistan is so hot right now!”

Hammad’s next film is about a 26-year-old urbanite who inherits a princely title after his father dies suddenly. It’s a true story. He goes from the ease and comforts of life in Islamabad to the mountainous valley state of Nagar, which is the poor cousin of Hanza.

I did pop over to see the (new) prince of Nagar, who gave us tea and biscuits and offered us a new page in the visitor book.

Hammad spent a week or so in Nagar, making a promo to show backers in the UK. Here’s hoping it goes well for him - and for the other indy film makers in Pakistan. Hammad’s best advice was - you can’t be a film-maker if you’re not making films.

Touristani’s photostream on Flickr.