MEMO FROM PAKISTAN: SATIRICAL SONG, A YOUTUBE HIT, CHALLENGES EXTREMISM IN THE COUNTRY

[Another line in the song, “where Ajmal Kasab is a hero,” makes a reference to the only surviving Pakistani gunman involved in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. Still another line, “cleric tried to escape in a veil,” alludes to the head cleric of Islamabad’s Red Mosque —which was the target of a siege in 2007 by the Pakistani government against Islamic militants — who tried unsuccessfully to break the security cordon by wearing a veil.]

By Salman Masood

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A satirical song that takes a tongue-in-cheek swipe at religious extremism, militancy and contradictions in Pakistani society has become an instant hit here, drawing widespread attention as a rare voice of the country’s embattled liberals.

The song, “Aalu Anday,” which means “Potatoes and Eggs,” comes from a group of three young men who call themselves Beygairat Brigade, or A Brigade Without Honor, openly mocking the military, religious conservatives, nationalist politicians and conspiracy theorists.

Their YouTube video has been viewed more than 350,000 times since it was uploaded in mid-October. The song is getting glowing reviews in the news media here and is widely talked about — and shared — on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The name of the band is itself a satire of Pakistan’s nationalists and conservatives, who are often described in the local news media as the Ghairat Brigade, or Honor Brigade.

Local musicians have produced work in the past vilifying the West, especially the United States, but rarely do they ridicule the military or religious extremists, and none have had Beygairat Brigade’s kind of success.

Sung in Punjabi, the language of the most populous and prosperous province, the song delivers biting commentary on the current socio-political milieu of the country, in which religious radicalism and militancy have steadily risen over the years and tolerance for religious minorities is waning.

Just this year, a governor who opposed Pakistan’s contentious blasphemy law was killed by one of his guards. The assassin was thencelebrated by many in the country, including lawyers who greeted him with rose petals and garlands.

The song rues the fact that killers and religious extremists are hailed as heroes in Pakistan, while someone like Abdus Salam, the nation’s only Nobel Prize-winning scientist, is often ignored because he belonged to the minority Ahmadi sect.

“Qadri is treated like a royal,” wonders the goofy-looking lead vocalist in the song, referring to Malik Mumtaz Qadri, the elite police guard who killed the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, in January after he challenged the blasphemy law.

Another line in the song, “where Ajmal Kasab is a hero,” makes a reference to the only surviving Pakistani gunman involved in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. Still another line, “cleric tried to escape in a veil,” alludes to the head cleric of Islamabad’s Red Mosque —which was the target of a siege in 2007 by the Pakistani government against Islamic militants — who tried unsuccessfully to break the security cordon by wearing a veil.

The song even makes fun of the powerful army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, for extending his role for another three years.

Potatoes and eggs “never tasted so good,” wrote Fahd Husain in a commentary on Tuesday in The Daily Times, a newspaper based in Lahore. “They will always be credited for being politically incorrect when most needed, and giving voice to all those Pakistanis who live in fear.”

The popularity of the song on the Internet has made it a sensation across the border in India as well, surprising the band members, who have been incessantly asked whether they feel they have put their lives in danger by ridiculing the mighty.

There are certainly enough provocations to rile nationalists and conservatives. At one point in the music video, the lead singer holds a placard that reads, in English: “This video is sponsored by Zionists.”

The band members chose to upload the song on YouTube instead of handing it to television networks because they said the work was too offbeat and might be censored. Not surprisingly, some have criticized the song and its taunts as pedestrian and in bad taste.

“We were not expecting such a huge response,” said Ali Aftab Saeed, 27, the lead vocalist, who lives in Lahore, a city that is often considered the country’s cultural capital.

He said the assassination of Mr. Taseer was the inspiration for the song and its lyrics.

Resistance poetry and literature are not new to Pakistan, and they raised spirits during the somber years of military dictatorships.

During the protest rallies of the seminal lawyers movement in 2007, when they led the campaign to oust the president, Pervez Musharraf, the lawyers would sing and dance to a poem written by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, considered a giant of Urdu literature. Habib Jalib, another famous Pakistani poet, wrote several poems against Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator in the 1980s.

But “Jalib is irrelevant to the generation of urban, young, middle-class kids that Beygairat Brigade is addressing,” said Nadeem Farooq Paracha, a culture critic based in Karachi.

“This band is offering an alternative narrative to the one this generation has grown up on, and provides a counternarrative to establishmentarian and conservative notions of politics, history and society advocated by televangelists, conspiracy theorists and, of course, the right-wing electronic media,” Mr. Paracha added. “And what better and more effective way to do this than by using satire and pop music.”

The band members, on the other hand, have no pretensions of being revolutionaries, activists or intellectuals, though they do feel that the song represents those who do not believe in extremism and want to live peacefully.

“At the end of the day,” said Mr. Saeed, the lead vocalist, “we are just musicians who raised some questions.”

@ The New York Times

ONLINE ANDBY PAPER AIRPLANE, CONTRIBUTIONS POUR IN TO CHINESE DISSIDENT

[The donations began pouring in on Thursday, many of them delivered electronically and accompanied by politically tinged comments. “You helped them to design the Bird’s Nest, but they sent you into a bird cage,” said one donor, referring to Mr. Ai’s role in designing the Olympic stadium in Beijing. “You charged them fees, but now they fine you more than hundreds of times that in blood and sweat.”]

By Andrew Jacobs

Kyodo News, via Associated Press

Ai Weiwei on Tuesday. He has 

received more than $550,000 to 

pay a $2.4 million tax bill.

BEIJING — In the days since the Chinese government delivered a punitive $2.4 million tax bill to the artist Ai Weiwei, thousands of people have responded by contributing money in a gesture that is at once benevolent and subversive.

More than 20,000 people have together contributed at least $840,000 since Tuesday, when tax officials gave Mr. Ai 15 days to come up with an amount that was more than three times the sum he was accused of evading in taxes.

“It’s surprising; it has really changed my perspective on people,” he said in a telephone interview on Sunday, describing how scores of supporters, some of whom traveled from distant cities, have been delivering cash to his home.

One of China’s best known artists and a voluble government critic, Mr. Ai was detained in April and held for 81 days at an undisclosed location, ostensibly on tax evasion charges, according to the state-run news media. Mr. Ai insists his prosecution is politically motivated.

During his confinement, he said his questioners were only interested in discussing his activism, particularly his role in the so-called Jasmine Revolution, the call for pro-democracy protests inspired by events in the Arab world. Mr. Ai said he was not involved in organizing the protests, which were effectively stymied by the Chinese authorities.

Since his release in June, Mr. Ai, 54, has kept a low profile, one of the conditions of his bail. But the imposed silence ill-suited the artist, who has increasingly bridled against the restrictions, among them a prohibition against talking to the news media or communicating publicly through Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service.

Since the amount of his fine became public on Tuesday, Mr. Ai appears to have shed any reluctance to speak out and has criticized the tax penalty as an act of naked retribution for his critiques against the governing Communist Party.

The donations began pouring in on Thursday, many of them delivered electronically and accompanied by politically tinged comments. “You helped them to design the Bird’s Nest, but they sent you into a bird cage,” said one donor, referring to Mr. Ai’s role in designing the Olympic stadium in Beijing. “You charged them fees, but now they fine you more than hundreds of times that in blood and sweat.”

Some contributions have been small — symbolic, fractional sums of the total — while others have totaled thousands of dollars. Mr. Ai said one businessman offered him 1 million renminbi, about $157,000, but he turned it down, saying he preferred to receive smaller sums. Mr. Ai has insisted on describing the money as loans that he will repay.

On Monday, one of China’s more stridently nationalistic state-owned newspapers, Global Times, published an editorial in its English-language edition that criticized the campaign, warning that it might constitute “illegal fundraising” and insisting that the expressions of public support should not be construed as absolution for his crimes.

“These people are an extremely small number when compared with China’s total population,” the editorial said of the donors. “Ai’s political preference along with his supporters’ cannot stand for the mainstream public, which is opposed to radical and confrontational political stances.”

On Sunday, after his Weibo account was disabled, dozens of people began arriving at the gate of Mr. Ai’s studio on the outskirts of the capital. He said a number of people had folded 100-renminbi notes into airplanes and tossed them over the walls of his compound.

“Over the past three years, during all the efforts I’ve made, sometimes I felt like I was crying alone in a dark tunnel,” he said. “But now people have a way to express their true feelings. This is a really, really beautiful event.”

@ The New York Times