Entertainment in Pakistan

It was in 2003 that I was in Ankara (Turkey); one of the acquaintances put a question that dumbfounded me. He asked: what’s the people’s entertainment in Pakistan?

I had no immediate answer astonished me. I smiled and told him to let me think and find it.

I tried to imagine Pakistani people (and my family) back home and see what’s there they mostly entertain themselves with and said: They watch TV!

Now it’s 2012, and things haven’t improved a bit. The top most entertainment is still TV watching. Here for most of the citizens, social life, and out of home enjoying is almost non-existent. Music concerts, art exhibitions, and things like that are rare, and it is Ashrafiya, the elite classes who, it seems, have appropriated all such manifestations of higher level of aesthetic life!

I did dwell on that issue in my book, The Rise of State Aristocracy in Pakistan, and hope to translate it or hope to have someone to translate the book into English.