Back and blogging

Pete Sabo and I arrived back in Seattle on Saturday, and we're currently recovering from jet lag and catching up on correspondence and other work. Our six-week trip through India and Pakistan, from Mumbai to Karachi entirely overland, was chock-full of fascinating if sometimes exhausting encounters both planned and serendipitous, and I've only just begun processing it all.

My plans to write a fully-fledged sequel to Alive and Well in Pakistan - a first-person travelogue of which this six-week trip will be the narrative spine, but covering the action-packed past five years (2004-09) of Pakistan's history - are now firm. I'm exploring several options for publishing it in book form, hopefully sometime in mid-2010.

But in the meantime, the nature of the project itself as well as changes in both the possibilities and the economics of media compel me to start telling the story of the trip - and by extension reporting on the themes and topics of contemporary Pakistan and its place in the world - now. I'll be doing that, at least once a week, in written form on this blog starting next week, drawing on two full notebooks' worth of notes and many hours of audio recordings that I'm starting to transcribe. Pete took about 6000 photographs during the trip, and we'll also be presenting some of those here and elsewhere online, as well as in the in-person presentations I'll be giving around the US starting next month.

I also am hoping to relaunch the column that I used to write weekly for the Pakistani newspapers Daily Times and The News. I'm approaching contacts at both of those papers and at the leading daily Dawn, but if you can help make any relevant connections to help me begin publishing regularly again in the Pakistani English-language press, please email me at ethan@ethancasey.com. Similarly, I'd welcome any opportunity to write for newspapers or magazines in India.

On May 5, 2009 I'll be presenting the slide show and report from this trip for the first time, at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Vancouver, Washington. Later in May we have presentations scheduled in Seattle, Portland, San Jose, and hopefully Vancouver, British Columbia - stay tuned for full details on those and other dates, and by all means let me know if you'd like me to come to your city.

There are about 190 copies of my first book, Alive and Well in Pakistan, currently available in North America. I've just purchased most of these and will be offering them for sale online and at speaking engagements. I'm happy to sell them at the normal retail price, since a printing is in the works. Because availability is limited until then, though, and because this project needs support, priority will go to anyone who contributes $100 or more online (via the ChipIn widget on this site) or by check. So if you don't yet have a copy of the book Ahmed Rashid calls "magnificent" and Edwidge Danticat calls "wonderful ... so worldly yet personal," get yours today!

You also can support the Alive and Well in Pakistan book-and-blog project by telling others about it, urging them to join our mailing list (by emailing aliveandwellinpakistan@gmail.com), and inviting us to speak to your congregation, civic group, or university or high school class. If you're in Pakistan or India and would like a copy of the first book, you can also write to that address and we'll do our best to make arrangements for you to get one.

I'll be back next week with the first proper post-trip blog entry. The photo is of a visit we made to a Human Development Foundation school outside Lahore with HDF board member Dr. Shahnaz Khan, April 4, 2009.

Hi from Pakistan!

We've been in Pakistan for twelve days, and not incidentally it's also been twelve days since I posted a blog entry. It's been a very full twelve days, and I look forward to telling you all about it in future blog entries, in slide shows, and in the new book.

I'm ambivalent about blogging while traveling anyway, because traveling has to take priority; particularly in this era of global virtual connectedness, direct in-person experience is crucially important. So I'll be sharing more substantial material with you on this blog beginning very soon after I return home to Seattle on April 11.

For today, I'll say: Pakistan is, as ever, a jumble of maddening contradictions. The provisional triumph of the lawyers' movement on March 15-16 is arguably (or potentially) historic and merits a lot more, and sustained, respectful attention in the West and elsewhere outside Pakistan. Urban Pakistanis, whether they consider themselves "liberal" or "religious" or both or neither, are very worried about the situations in Swat and Waziristan and, indeed, in the Punjab, which is Pakistan's heartland. Everyone I've talked to has ruefully confirmed the apparent wisdom of my decision not to visit Peshawar. And yet the rest of the story is that life goes on.

The conditions that have kept me from blogging might be interesting to relate. For a week, Pete and I were in Islamabad, where the place we were staying happened to be somewhere without wi-fi. Our only options there were either to buy a card to connect via dial-up, or (as Pete discovered late in the week by trial and error) by going up on the roof and standing in a certain corner where we could pick up a neighbor's unsecured network. On a nearby street we could use an acquaintance's ethernet cable, but only outside of office hours, and we lost that option when his service got cut off because he hadn't paid his bill. So, out of desperation, we discovered that the Pizza Hut at the Jinnah Super shopping area had an unsecured network, and I could use it when we happened to be there, either stealing the network while sitting on a little concrete wall outside, or by sitting in a booth (and buying some food we didn't really want) in a crowded Pizza Hut.

Here in Kharian, a town on the Grand Trunk Road between Islamabad and Lahore where we're visiting an innovative small hospital, the only place I can get online is actually a hospital room, where a nurse sits at a desk with an ethernet connection. I happen to be alone in the room as I write this, but only because I insisted I needed 20 minutes by myself, and people are waiting for me.

We're driving two hours towards Kashmir today and back in the evening; we've delayed our return to Lahore by a day because of a high security alert in the wake of an attack yesterday on a police academy in which a couple of dozen policemen were killed. "I think security disturb you, you guys," said our very nice young driver, Tahir, meaning the checkpoints on roads entering the city. "You foreigners." So we're going to Kashmir today instead.

The photo is of Tahir (at right) on the Grand Trunk Road between Kharian and Lahore.

More soon!

On being overtaken by events, and personal danger

First of all, thank you very much to those of you who made financial contributions after I posted the last entry. My collaborators and I appreciate your support and, as soon as I can, I'll be sure to thank each of you personally. If you haven't contributed yet, or in a while, please consider doing so through the ChipIn widget in the right column of this page. Literally any large or small amount is helpful both concretely and in terms of our morale.

Writing about Pakistan, one is always being overtaken by events. This is one of the reasons I prefer writing books to writing topical articles that all too quickly become yesterday's news, and why my instinct is to hesitate to opine on Pakistan. There's plenty of opining out there already - too much, in fact.

When terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore on March 3, who could have predicted that less than two weeks later the situation in Pakistan would be so (provisionally) encouraging, the mood so (cautiously) jubilant? If you're not familiar with what happened in Pakistan on Monday, read this article.

I intended to write and post blog entries about our visits to Hyderabad (Deccan) and Delhi, but those can wait. In fact, I've already decided that I'm going to post weekly after this trip, drawing on the material from this trip for the blog even as I rework and repurpose it for the new book I'm writing. The book, by the way, is blossoming nicely into a fully-fledged, full-length sequel to Alive and Well in Pakistan.

In the meantime, I'll do my best to blog as often as possible while traveling, though practical considerations sometimes make it difficult. I'll try to post frequently, rather than composing formal 700-word essays, until I get back to Seattle in mid-April.

In this post, I wanted to comment briefly on the concern that many Indian as well as American friends (and relatives) have expressed for me and Pete Sabo as we get closer and closer in both time and space to our border crossing into Pakistan. I don't mean to sound high-minded, but I do feel a moral, or at least personal, compulsion to bear witness, to be there, to show up when a place and - more to the point - people I care about are being affected by the vicissitudes of contemporary history.

I don't think this is something everyone needs to do, or should feel compelled to do, but somebody does need to do it. If no one did it, we who live on the safer side of the looking glass would never have any direct, or even credible second-hand, knowledge of what actually happens in countries we consider "dangerous". Allowing the mere possibility of personal danger to keep us from ever visiting, say, Pakistan would be tantamount to expressing indifference to the fate of those who have no option but to live there. And I'm not willing to do that.

Plus, believe it or not, many people who live in Pakistan actually like it there, for many good reasons.  :-)

I took the photo that accompanies this post. It's Pete Sabo, my friend and traveling companion who is taking most of the photos on this trip, with a camel in the background, in Agra near the Taj Mahal last Sunday. I thought you'd like to see the face of the guy who's usually behind the camera.