STF wrote:I'll take something written by someone from a country where the penalty for getting raped is being stoned to death with a grain of salt.
Get stuffed, will you? How many Pakistanis do you know? I'm half-Pakistani myself, so I guess that you'll choose only to believe half of what I'm writing, O civilised one. Bigot.
Mohsin Hamid is a friend of a friend of mine, and an excellent and intelligent writer (check out
Mothsmoke). He's witty and in public can be provocative without being sanctimonious. My friend tells of a launch that they both attended for a biography of Captain Cook. The biographer painted Cook as a great explorer, rather than the plunder-happy murderer that some of us think of him as. So at the Q&A, Mohsin posed a question.
"So did Cook kill anyone?"
"Well, yes..."
"How many people did he kill?"
"Ah, well, not too many."
"One, two, three...?"
"No, more than that."
"Ten, twelve?"
"Ahem, well, more than that."
Of course, it was fucking hundreds!
I liked the article. Thanks Galanter. His description of how Pakistan changed tallies well with what my mother tells me, although she was from Hydrabad rather than Lahore.