In Praise Of The Un-Macho
By Mohsin Hamid
TFT has always been a rather strange beast, a platypus among newspapers, if you will. It begins with the hard beak of an editorial and, sometimes, a piece of investigative journalism. It continues with a body of softer, hairier stuff: pages of humor, irony, and wry observations. Its peculiarity evokes in me a sense of great fondness. And I wish it a happy fifteenth birthday with the sort of smile one gives to an old crush, because a decade ago, in the summer of 1994, it published the first article I ever wrote.
Najm and Jugnoo were family friends, and I reported for duty in their offices after having just completed a month of selling Honda Civics on Queen’s Road. They took me in, sat me down, gave me an assignment, sent me out to write, and printed what I came back with. I saw my words in a newspaper for the first time. My dream of being a writer took one step closer to becoming reality. I went back home that night and stayed up late working on the second draft of a novel that would take me another five years to finish. I have not written for TFT again, until now. But I have not forgotten the experience. You don’t, after all, forget your first kiss.
Ours is a society bombarded with machismo. We have a commando as our president. We read about warrior-martyrs in our schoolbooks. We pull wheelies on speeding motorcycles in heavy traffic for no apparent reason. We grow beards and buy guns and build our biceps and get into fights over God, girls, and imagined instances of disrespect. We are tough. And we need to be. Ours is, after all, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world.
But we also need to dream, and it is difficult to dream when someone twice your size is staring you down. It is difficult to relax under such circumstances, to smile, to notice beauty. It is difficult to indulge in sensuality. It is difficult to find the space in which to be spiritual, to contemplate the tension between your infinite imagination and your finite body.
There is a story told by Zen monks. A man is walking along a cliff. He hears a roar, and ahead sees a hungry tiger. To save himself, he starts to climb down the face of the cliff, where the tiger cannot follow. But as he descends, he hears another roar, and looking down, sees another tiger waiting for him below. So he clings to the rock, his strength failing, as the tigers wait for him. And at that moment, he notices a wild strawberry growing out of the rock. Carefully, he plucks it and puts it in his mouth. Ah, he thinks, shutting his eyes, how sweet it is!
TFT is special because, hard bill aside, so much of its body is decidedly un-macho. A great deal of strength is required to be un-macho in our society. And strong, dedicated un-macho-ness is essential. It opens up space for expression which might otherwise be bullied into silence. It allows us to focus on the taste of a strawberry, instead of dwelling only on the terror of inescapable tigers.
For that, I wish TFT a very happy birthday.
(From: The Friday Times)
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