Imran Khan seems bent on showing the world that he shouldn’t be heading a political party, but should be leading the revival of the Pakistani cinema as its leading scriptwriter. Witness his claim of why he did not get out of his vehicle during his appearance at the Islamabad Judicial Complex: ‘they’ were going to kill him in fulfillment of the ‘London Plan’. That mention of the London Plan made me regret the death of Adib, the great character actor, who had a yellow wig that allowed to essay all those foreigner’s roles. Another great one for Englishman’s roles was the late great Agha Taalish, who relied not on a wig, but a vaguely military uniform and fierce mustachios.
Or maybe Imran has been watching Ertogrul, the Turkish television series about the founder of the Ottoman dynasty. One of the noticeable conventions of Turkish teleplays, especially about Ottoman sultans, is that a character isn’t dead just because they’ve been killed. If the plot needs them, they will come back to life, and the play will explain how the person’s life was saved.
Is that what Imran imagines will happen? That everyone will think he’s dead, only for him to come back, alive, after a while, to the discomfiture of Mian Shehbaz Sharif and Rana Sanaullah
I wonder if there’s anyone in his party who can tell him it doesn’t work that way. In real life, if you get killed, you’re dead. You stay dead, and the play goes in without you.
Of course, what the script has still not got is some way of bringing in horses. Viewers of Ertogrul might have noted that there’s a lot of horses involved, and there are long scenes consisting of just some Turks riding horses. It’s the Turkish equivalent of the old-time Westerns, which I’m sure Imran was brought up on.
Maybe one way of writing horses in, would be to have mounted police for crowded control, and have them responsible to trying to ride down Imran. Of course, in addition to writing the script, Imran will be thehero of the film, and will wrestle down one of the cops, and will take over his horse. He will somehow get a gandasa (probably thrown to him by Ali Amin Gandapur, who cannot be left out of the situation), and then ride hard against Shehbaz who will suddenly appear on the scene on a black horse, sporting a Stetson and a buckskin vest. Imran should lose, because you never bring a gandasa to a gunfight, but Imran not only stars and writes the script, but he also directs the film and composes the music. (Ali Amin wrote the songs, though.)
Then there is the scene where Imran, wearing a white hat, confronts the Chief Election Commissioner, in a black one, in his office, and forces him to hold an election. I suspect that Imran imagines an election to be something like the shootout between the hero and the villain.
Or maybe he thinks it is something like the earthquake that shook the country. It was 7.8 on the Richter scale, which is about the same as the one that recently git Turkey and Syria. That caused more than 50,000 deaths all told, the majority in Turkey. That was like the earthquake that hit Kashmir and KP in 2005. So that either means we had a close shave, or were blessed.
I suppose the later blessing should count, which saw us start Ramazan with Afghanistan and the Arab world. The moonsighting is now happening on the same day as the Arabs because now we know that the moon has been sighted there. I still don’t understand why the evidence of someone in Kabul is unacceptable, but that of someone in Peshawar is. Does the Almighty ask for one’s passport? Well, let’s see if we have Eid on the same day.
But seriously, maybe the statement by Zalmay Khalilzad shows how deeply Imran has divided the US establishment. It’s another victory for the Kuptaan, isn’t it?
