I haven’t blogged in a couple of weeks because I’ve been working hard to complete a first draft of the new book I’m writing. Over the summer the project’s deadlines have gone from vague and self-imposed to firm and interdependent. This is helpful, because it concentrates the mind and ensures that things get done. At this point, completing a draft by the end of August will allow me to take a month or so to polish it at relative leisure, before the assembly line of copy editing, design, printing etc. kicks in. This in turn will mean the book will be published on schedule in the spring, hopefully by early April.

By the way, I’m tentatively firm (how’s that for an oxymoron?) on a title: Overtaken By Events: A Pakistani Road Trip. To me, that title and subtitle seem both catchy and accurate. If you have any thoughts on the title, please add a comment to this entry or drop me an email. We’re starting to work on a cover design, and sometime in the next month or two I’ll put that online and start accepting straight pre-orders for Overtaken By Events. In the meantime, you can support the project by purchasing the $50 two-book offer.

I’ve already scheduled quite a bit of public speaking regionally around Seattle and Portland through the autumn, as well as in Texas in mid-November and Colorado in early February, plus Fresno in early October and possibly a trip to Chicago, Toronto and New York in the second half of September. I expect to sell out the remaining stock of Alive and Well in Pakistan at these and other events between now and spring, and this will help cover the costs associated with publishing Overtaken By Events. You can help by either inviting me to your city or group, or simply by purchasing a book or books online (or arranging with me by email to do so by credit card or check).

The title of this entry alludes to something else that’s on my mind. I showed slides of Pete Sabo’s photographs and spoke about our trip last weekend at a home in Vancouver, Washington. Afterwards, several attendees told the host they had enjoyed the evening but wondered what “next steps” I propose. And that’s the thing: I’m not about “next steps”; I’m about honestly narrating stories I hear and experience. This isn’t the same as being “objective” - that ersatz ideal of the American media establishment - but I am a reporter, not a policy wonk. And one of the guiding tenets I’ve long followed in my work is that understanding should always precede both judgment and action.

A Pakistani friend recently urged me to include a chapter at the end of my new book titled “Solutions”. I tried to explain to him that I’m a storyteller, not a solution provider, but he insisted: “You don’t have to change what you’ve already written - just add a chapter about solutions.”

Well, that’s what Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Fritz did in his otherwise excellent book about refugees worldwide in the 1990s, Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World. Fritz lost me with his last chapter, which seemed dictated by a very prosaic-minded publisher and laid out his recommendations for US policy on refugees. Policy is important, but so many people are already writing and talking about it, ad nauseum. And policy recommendations become dated very quickly, because political situations are ever changing - especially these days. Where I believe I can be useful is by doing what I’m inclined and built to do: helping change the way the global public sees and thinks about Pakistan, by simply and honestly narrating my experiences and encounters there.

This creates a different, fuller, more accurate context than the blinkered and alarmist context portrayed in most media outlets. As Todd Shea likes to say, on television Americans see 2% of Pakistan 100% of the time. What I’m about is showing at least some of the remaining 98% - people getting by, doing interesting and ordinary human things: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Solutions are another matter. I hope we find some, and I’d like to help. But Pakistan isn’t only, or even primarily, a problem for US or even Pakistani policymakers. First and foremost it’s a country where people live, and my main role is to tell some of their stories.

All that said, I do plan to include in the new book - and add to this website - a page listing Pakistan-based and Pakistani-led organizations and resources that I admire and recommend.

I should have posted this a week ago - a link to the latest installment of my fortnightly Dawn column:

“Perhaps the statement is that he’s choosing not to engage with the hard issues that Pakistan represents, for reasons of personal preference or discretion. I won’t fault him for that. But, as a longtime admirer, I do regret it. If ever a country cried out to be complexified rather than peopled with cliches, it’s Pakistan.”

Indian filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt with Ethan Casey and director Sanjay Jha, at the mahurat for Jha's film Deshdrohi 2: 26/11 War in Mumbai, March 3, 2009. Photo by Pete Sabo.

Here’s a chunk of dialogue that I transcribed recently, from an interview I did in early March in Mumbai with the well-known Bollywood filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt:

“Prior to the attack in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a kind of demonizing of people of the region which kind of made the American people look the other way. And then through very clever tools of control, they made sure that the images of the barbarism came back home.”

“Do you think that that can be changed in America now, under the new administration?”

“I wonder. I don’t think even America, in spite of the happy ending that you have superimposed on this tragic situation, is still not really going to look unflinchingly at what you have done over the last eight years to the world. The so-called War against Terror has only enlarged the war.”

“I think that’s something that’s done a lot in Hollywood,” I suggested. “Americans have a habit of superimposing happy endings on any story.”

“That’s what an average man wants. He wants fairy tales to lull him to sleep.”

“Do you feel that Obama’s election was that?”

“I think that the American dream of a black man in the White House is a yarn that the young people of America made into a concrete reality. That is not to take away the charm and the charisma of the man. He has a charm, he has a charisma. But what is the magic wand that he can flash and resolve the problem? A nation which has supported a war of demonic proportions had it coming. You are the architects of doom of the human race. No power is going to reverse it. What you have started, you cannot reverse now. Because you can’t start a war – even the Second World War was supposed to be a good war. Look what happened: it led to the catastrophe of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This war was the so-called War against Terror, against those values which you say are barbaric. And repeated through tools of mass distraction, amplifying to the world that your vision is the sanest vision and the most civilized, the most humane vision. How? By censoring? By buying people off? By getting wordsmiths to work on your payroll? Bush’s America was far more dangerous than Hitler’s Germany.”

“In what way?”

“Look at the magnitude of destruction. You’ve not even begun to finish a body count.”

“Do you think there’s any potential for American people to face that honestly?”

“I don’t think so, as of now. As of now there’s a euphoria of getting the slum kids onto the Oscar dais and putting the black man in the White House. You’re patting yourself on the back that how fair a nation it is. But I want to know one thing: will the American people come to terms and deconstruct the war industries that you have as your lifeline? The lifeblood of your nation is the war industries. It’s not because you hate the world. That’s the only route to survive. The mosquito doesn’t bite you because it hates you. It has to bite you because if it doesn’t bite you it can’t get your blood, which is its only means of sustenance.”