Lahore, as seen from Mumbai

MUMBAI - The unavoidable topic - this week's elephant in the subcontinent - is the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.

Pete Sabo and I returned Tuesday morning to our friend Kurien Abraham's apartment in Santa Cruz East after interviewing Mahrukh Inayat, a reporter for Times Now, India's top-rated English-language TV news channel, about her native Kashmir and her experience of reporting the 60-hour terrorist siege in Mumbai last November. Kurien walked in and told us about what had just happened in Lahore, and we spent the next hour watching Times Now.

Mahrukh's boss, Arnab Goswami, was hosting the Breaking News coverage. Kurien and others described Times Now to us as "the Fox News of India," but now he clarified: "They're not actually right-wing; they're sensational. Anything that sells." Goswami called Lahore "the epicenter of the political free-for-all in Pakistan right now" and interviewed K.C. Singh, former secretary of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, who suggested that if Shahbaz Sharif - brother of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and strongman of the country's crucial Punjab province - were still running Punjab (he was sacked by the Supreme Court last week), the attack might not have happened. "It's a very, very dangerous vacuum that's been created at the center of Pakistani life," said Singh. "I think America needs to stop supporting President Zardari and stop pushing the Sharif brothers into a corner."

I know Liberty Circle, the scene of the attack, well. The suit I've been wearing to all those Pakistani charity banquets and gatherings around North America was tailor-made at a shop in Liberty Market just down the street. If you've read Alive and Well in Pakistan, you'll remember the long passage recounting the Pakistan-South Africa one-day cricket match I attended at Gaddafi Stadium with great enjoyment, in the general enclosure (the cheap seats), in September 2003. Now, there's serious talk of Pakistan becoming a "no-go zone" for international cricket - and anyone who knows this region knows that that's a big deal.

The fact that the attack hits home for me personally does give me pause, but it also underscores what I feel as a vocational compulsion to bear witness. That, and eliciting and transmitting human sympathy and understanding, are really the only useful things a writer can do.

I intended this post to cover some interesting conversations we had here in Mumbai about Pakistan and related topics, but the Lahore attack happened. Perhaps I'll write another one Friday night on the train to Hyderabad and post it from there.

The photo accompanying this post is of me at Juhu Beach with Vidha Saumya, a young Indian woman who recently studied at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, where I taught in 2003-04. You'll hear about her in future posts and in the planned new book.

The Elephant in the Subcontinent

That's the tentative title I'm thinking of for the new book that Fawad, photographer Peter Sabo, and I are hoping will result from the six-week trip that starts tomorrow. The subtitle would be "Conversations in India and Pakistan," and the idea is to ask difficult, trenchant questions - both contemporary and historical - on both sides of the border between the two "frenemy" countries.

The danger in the title, of course, is that it might be misunderstood to be a book about elephants. (If so, we'll be in good company. An American publisher turned down Animal Farm because, as they explained to Orwell, they weren't interested in stories about animals.)

I'm writing this at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday in Seattle. 25 hours from now Pete and I get on a plane to Atlanta en route to Mumbai. I'll be blogging on this site at least once a week during the trip.

That's all for now, I guess. Next time you hear from me, I'll be in Mumbai.

Speaking of Pakistan ...

www.speakingofpakistan.com

A special message from Fawad and Ethan about where our project came from, where it's at, and where it's going:

Throughout 2008, as part of our work together on a feature-length documentary highlighting Pakistan's human dimension - real-life experiences from the lives of ordinary Pakistanis are up front; politics and violence in the background - we traveled extensively around North America, introducing ourselves to Pakistani communities in places like Chicago, Silicon Valley, Vancouver, Washington, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

We began to realize that there are many interesting stories right here: stories of immigrant struggle and ambition and generational change; Pakistani stories that are also American stories. We also began to understand the particular challenges that face the Pakistani community in the United States, and we started a conversation about these in a speech in San Jose, California.

During the second half of 2008 we shifted focus toward the mainstream American public, whose need and hunger for reporting and understanding about Pakistan, and the Muslim world in general, is poorly served by traditional media. In November we spoke to large audiences at events sponsored by PILLAR in Colorado Springs and St. John's Cathedral in Denver. These talks were prototypes for what we will be doing much more of during 2009 and beyond.

In late February, along with Seattle-based photographer Peter Sabo, we'll be spending six weeks in India and Pakistan. After we return in mid-April, Ethan will be writing article-length reports for the Web and possibly a new book, and Pete will be editing his photos in time for our first post-trip public presentation, at Town Hall Seattle. Fawad is working on a book about the experience of being Pakistani in America. And we're booking speaking engagements nationwide.

In an era of dying newspapers and shrinking coverage in traditional media of both global topics and the arts, we're blazing a trail made possible by digital media: we're doing it ourselves. We're doing what Professor Jay Rosen of New York University praised one of our role models for doing six years ago:

"In 2003, Chris Allbritton said, in effect, I can get to Iraq, you can't; I'll send back reports, post them on the Net, and some of you will pay me something. Trust me, it will work. This was a public transaction, and it did work. It had an idea built into it that journalists have been reworking since about 1760 or so."

If you share our goals of improving Americans' access to international perspectives and enhancing the conversation between the West and the Muslim world, you can support us in a couple of ways. You can make a financial contribution in any amount (see the right column of this page).

Think of your contribution not as a donation to charity - it's not tax-deductible, unless you donate through the Northwest Film Forum - but like a subscription to a newspaper or magazine: you give us a little money, we give you reporting from Pakistan in various forms. If you value what we offer, please give us some of what we need in order to offer it. Any contribution in a multiple of $100 entitles you to the same number of copies of the book Alive and Well in Pakistan (e.g. for $500, in addition to our thanks, you get five copies of the book to share with friends and contacts).

You can also invite us to present our slide show to your place of worship, university or high school class, or civic group. If your group or institution can pay our travel expenses and an honorarium, thank you; those are welcome and needed. Personal contributions also help us defray our costs.

Finally, you can purchase the book Alive and Well in Pakistan and, soon, other media products we plan to offer for sale.

We're starting the Speaking of Pakistan public speaking initiative offering the two of us as speakers either separately or together. Fawad is based in Chicago, Ethan is based in Seattle, and each of us is happy to speak to small and local groups in and around our home cities. Joint engagements are the most effective, especially to larger and more formal audiences. We also hope soon to begin offering selected other speakers from among our extensive network of relevant contacts.

Fawad Butt and Ethan Casey