In 1962, 500 American families arrived in what was then W Pakistan. They were mostly construction workers & their families who came to Pakistan after San Francisco-based, Guy F. Atkinson Construction Co., obtained a $510 million contract to build Mangla dam on river Jhelum 1/
"[T]he history of Pakistan reveals that inequality and poverty are no more natural than the floods: Both are colonial legacies perpetuated by contemporary arrangements of sovereignty and financial dependence."
@MairaHayat
1. It’s for Pakistanis to demand accountability from their state. It’s for the Global North to PAY ITS DEBT TO G South & ppl in the rich world need to be asking THEIR states such Qs, NOT if Pakistan’s gov can manage funds. Corrupt dysfunctional GS states discourse
Super excited to be starting as Assistant Professor at Notre Dame this fall. Especially excited to be an anthropologist at an interdisciplinary school. Looking forward to developing conversation & public engagement on climate change, post/coloniality and environmental politics,
I’m the doodh patti queen (rivalled only by the father) so today when I made rotten chai it put me in a rotten mood so here’s a rotten something u can make too
Don’t talk about Pakistan’s in/abilities wo talking about the INTERNATIONAL DEBT REGIME it is a part of - how can and should indebted states think of invest in welfare social infrastructures?
So many gora academics have made careers out of the Middle East. Not a sound. Not a fucking sound. How do you do it though? Turn lives worlds politics into projects, do your thing, and then move on
25% of the world's population - a quarter of all the people that exist in the world - live in South Asia. If your climate change/politics/justice events and panels have zero South Asia representation you *really* *really* need to reconsider
I am now in possession of disturbing Lahore news: a designer made wedding clothes for a big army person’s family, army person family unhappy with the clothes, ‘raided’ the designer’s place, now multiple Lahore families are missing wedding clothes thanks to raid 🤯
FINALLY I CAN BE THRILLED TO ANNOUNCE TOO: This anthropologist got an Antipode accept. My article is titled "The Duty of Water: Land, Labor & the Racialization of Waste in Colonial & Contemporary Punjab." I CAN'T WAIT TO SHARE OMG I AM SO EGGSITED, I'm going to drown in chai now
2. is racist old and colonial. These Pakistan floods demand different sets of Qs & answers depending on where you’re located where and how you live who you are. Leave accountability politics to Pakistanis - they’re well able to handle it. You ask after loss & damage for starters
It really, very much, immensely hurts to hear Pakistani ppl say the west owes us nothing they were superior so they colonized us. Imagine what a good history curriculum in our schools could have resulted in by now. My heart breaks more than I feel fury/fewreeus
1. I was attending a training for revenue officials as Imran Khan was being arrested. Am I a bad person if I think the real problem is our public education? The session on Islamic ethics was > 2 hours & under discussion was if a woman can be divorced if she’s menstruating,
I've been stupendously lucky friends! Next year I'm going to be at IAS Princeton InshAllah. Book: happen. Also tell me about the best e coast chai places (other than my own, eyeroll), nihari options etc. SUPER eggsited! 🙏🏽
3. I was on
@BBCWorld
to talk about some of this re the floods in Pakistan. There’s also a desperate need to break the state down in climate conversations - not to discount or excuse it but to understand it/use it better. No space/time here but hopefully soon 🙏🏽
I am not a fan of scholars going all scholarly. I’m also not a fan of lawyers going all lawyerly. Because some of us r upset & outraged doesn’t make us a lynch mob. Let’s b careful here – there r actual lynch mobs in the country and they take lives. Due process is not at stake
This really exciting thing hpnd to my dissertation! It got a prize I give a talk as part of this on April 2, Berkeley. If you’re into water&bureaucracy pls come. Also when ppl share in your joy it’s juz the best feeling in the world💃🏽 *royal,but poco wave*
Ahsan Iqbal
@pmln_org
says: the Flood Protection Programme was a 10-yr plan split (2 phases) ok'd in 2017. Exchequer devoted Rs. 17.5 billion to it. In last 4 yrs not a rupee was spent on this plan. Who will answer for this?
@PTIofficial
@Jhagra
@ndmapk
I am so tired of ‘us’ being lectured to to be mindful of UR feelings - a third of the country is under water & we must not piss Americans off? The whole point of LandD & READING EVEN A TINY HISTORY TEXTBOOK, is to recognize why GS debt exists how rich became rich what GN OWES GS
1. I'm seeing a lot of Global South v. Global North & climate reparations takes. Maybe it's 'speaking truth to power.' It's probably great for personal brands. But I doubt it will help bring relief. Pakistan gets one chance to rally the world.
A short thread on advocacy.
It happened it happened God no it happened. I signed off a very formal very professional very important email with “Love you, Maira” instead of…God no. No. I���m ready to retire.
1. As a brown person schooled etc in Pakistan I've had to hear more times than is humane that the British made us this irrigation system. Saying the canals suck is 1 thing. Here's another: it was made by NATIVE LABOR. Canal excavations were made by HAND LABOR. Material was
I was going to say fateha, my husband was driving the car. There’s a checkpost to enter the Walton graveyard. The army guy, rifle half-raised & pointed at our car asked my husband uncsry questions while he looked at me. There were two of them. They looked at me with ugly smug
Home Secretary
@SuellaBraverman
says 'vulnerable white girls are being targeted by British Pakistani grooming gangs', and people have been 'turning a blind eye out of political correctness'.
#Ridge
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube
How does it feel to sit in the comfort of a dry home with a reliable roof, with the security that you will get dengue care, malaria medicines, doctor access, & have money to buy food and still say 'don't give money to Pakistan because corruption?'
#PakistanFloods
Every bit of news about this boat wreck is more painful than the last one - there are kids here, these were kids, this is pure horror this world is full of horror
I’m puzzled by the anger the interviewer is getting for this. We can hate all this and be repulsed by it but what corner are we hiding in if we think these are settled or tired or non-questions in Pakistan?! What JI folks think isn’t inconsequential either, so!!!!!!!
First day of teaching in first job evah as professah and this weather is…BULLOWIN MY BRAIN. But promise me it gets better? It’s only -9 and neighbor said “this isn’t even snow yet sweetie” 🙏🏽🙏🏽 ya Allah yaad rakhna
In his latest outburst EH uses these words for LUMS academics & Pakistani academics in general it seems: “loathsome”
“LUMS is doing ducking bullshit”
“Pakistan has the worst intellectuals on earth” But sure, blame academics for the absence of ‘decorum’
Multiple western media requests & each one wants an accounting of international funding - they want accounts before the catastrophe has ended. Water levels r still rising, only 10% of the population has even been reached by rescue personl, 73000 r women due to deliver next month,
This was such a great effort and I’m depressed and angry AF that it’s been cancelled. Shame on odious men like
@ejazhaider
and the bs and hate they’re spewing
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences,LUMS, in collaboration with the National Institute of Pakistan Studies (NIPS),Quaid-i-Azam University, is organizing an online conference to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bangladesh War of Liberation. Here's the schedule:
Now & then, again & again, I think of how LUMS treated Professor Farhat Haq, the university's 1st female Provost, & am infuriated. A man would never have been treated that way. And the mostly wealthy men that make up the management cmte - what insight into Pakistani seth culture
She was…something else entirely. Taught so many who never met her about death, life, love, pain. I never met her and yet I feel utterly heartbroken. What an inspiring person.
@DrNadiaChaudhri
passed away yesterday evening, having reached the end of her road with ovarian cancer. She leaves behind her Sun and Moon, a loving extended family, colleagues and students, friends around the world, and so many others who have been touched by her & her story 1/n
All those getting protocol at Lahore Airport and making the world’s worst airport even worse: I hope your mangos are never ripe, your lassi always too salty or never sweet enough, the boti in your palao never soft, your chai never hot.
From someone in khairpur, around pir pagaro, doing relief work: no aid so far, no food, no mosquito nets, no tents. Most children have malaria. 90% homes are uninhabitable, people r living w neighbors, in schools or in the open in raised areas. 1
I’m so honored to be delivering the 2019 SS Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies Lecture, Nov 30. I’ll speak abt H2O management as a technology of racialized rule (colonial statecraft+contemporary World Bank prctc); that everyday bureaucracy exceeds structural violence
SO excited and honored to get this year's Sylvia Forman Award for my paper, "The Gender of Corruption: Bureaucrats Bodies and the Female Complaint - Notes from an irrigation bureaucracy in Pakistan"
#AFA
#SylviaFormanAward
#GraduateWinner
The AFA is pleased to announce the 2018 Sylvia Forman Award for an Outstanding Graduate Paper to Maira Hayat, for her paper, “The Gender of Corruption:...
Five years ago, Mashal Khan, a 23-yr old student of journalism, a poet, a brother, son and so much more, was killed by fellow students on his own university's campus in Mardan. Please don't stop being terrified of what Pakistan has done, is doing to its children
I’ve written an article in
@antipodeonline
arguing that dev discourse & practice re waste articulate conceptions of bureaucratic labour, farmer capability, & suitability of irrigration practices recalling a prior moment in colonial h2o governance.
My 1st peer-reviewed academic journal article - Empire's accidents: law lies & sovereignty in the "war on terror" in Pakistan - I am SO eager to hear from u shud u read this. First wrote it in 2012. Deleted it, parts of it all of it, rewrote it, & kept
3. women upset the natural order. There were female officials in the audience. Please excuse me but as these political elites play their games, however these end, we are really verily truly…f&$ked
Person at a lunch: can’t imagine anyone committing to a PhD programme without visiting campus first. Smiles politely in international graduate students. Subah bakhair 🙌🏽
A simple but important step would be to make public what the Pakistan gov's agenda is for the upcoming COP27 next month. Who is on the team, what r their credentials, have they done their homework, are they coordinating w non gov actors?
@sherryrehman
@ClimateChangePK
/1
hunt for the one woman to befriend to go to the bathroom with midway. We carry bags filled with things you’ve never even seen to help us against one of you. So fuck off, all you men preaching – YOU have work to do on YOURSELF, YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR COLLEAGUES, YOUR FAMILY. Do you
More than 700 people have been killed in floods in Pakistan. These numbers are just estimates - the actual toll is far more horrifying. Can you help? Yes.
A list:
More details here:
Eqbal Ahmad kii zindagi ka aik hissa: "He was granted a parcel of land in Pakistan by Sharif's government to build an independent, secular, alternative university, Khaldunia, named for the 14th-century Arab historian & sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, & patterned on Hampshire College.
MY HUSBAND JUST SHARED HIS BUREAUCRACY SYLLABUS WITH ME AND I AM NOT ON IT. WHAT THE HELL is this. MARRIAGE IS A PATRIARCHAL SHAM. I SHOULD LEAVE HIM RIGHT. OK I WILL YESTERDAY 🤮😡
Today in the ways of elite Lahore: 3 madams at a table at Cosa Nostra and one child and one maid. Maid stood throughout, child misbehaved throughout, women chattered throughout. Table of 4, 4 chairs, the maid is expected to hover around. Reminder of how sick this place is.
Last month I interviewed a woman, (I'll call her) Sadia, in Lahore. She lives on the 3rd floor of a narrow building, in 1 room with her family of 5. We were talking about the heatwave. I said I had told a colleague in the U.S. about temperatures in Pakistan
2. if a man can hit her softly if she goes towards badkari, if abortion is ok, if nail polish is jaiz, if polish remover is halal, that the guy is sarbarah but the woman is still ‘queen’ because heaven under mom’s feet, that hysterectomies are unIslamic, that working
The Anarkali office will never be the same. Siddiqui sahib is no more. May he rest in peace. On days when nothing made sense, no1 met me, no one gave answers or access, I would call his office & tell him I was coming over. Biscuit, chai, stories, his files, my Qs, his lessons 🙏🏽
A police official got her number from the form she had to fill & started harassing her with text messages calling her the sorts of things no one should call another. So fuck your law, fuck your upholders of law. Fuck your sanctimonious bull shit. Before we get on the Daewoo we
Aunt is doing relief goods distribution work in Khairpur. Siasi elites ne tent hathya liyay hain + pani ka bahao aisay kiya hai ke unki zameenain bach jayein. Sindh mein land ownership kii concentration & how this maps onto political power holding = tawba astakhfaar. Feeling sick
#1
) I took Saba Mahmood’s last class at Berkeley, Postcolonial theory in the present, and I will never get over the fact that I took a class with her. There are people you should not get over. In 2013 when I first read about the intellectual, political dislocations
The Q to me was why not use "less loaded" terms like aid. My response was: "I think it’s important to question who finds the language loaded & why? Because loss & damage, anchored in claims for reparative justice, is nothing new – it’s been an agenda item in climate policy & /1
Pakistan’s catastrophic floods have led to renewed calls for rich polluting nations to compensate developing countries for the devastating impacts caused by the climate crisis
I’m so bored by these irresponsible, reflective of not doing ones homework sorts of statements. Such flattening, such generalising *sighs* Anthro socio ‘types?’ Which texts? Which projects specifically? Which frameworks? Western? Leftist? Either or and both? 🙄
American anthro/socio types take western leftist frameworks and keep force-fitting them into everything Pakistani. Plus don’t know anything that happened before they decided to train their attention on Pakistan.
It gives me dil mein dard when people, esp world bank ppl, describe flood irrigation w grand arm swings ‘all that water is wassssssted’ - do u know how that water is regulated by warabandi +moga? No? Ok then pls calm down - there r many issues but your tech utopianism 🤯🤦🏾♀️
My elaichi and chai plea was appreciated. Just to be clear: all of you adding all those other things to chai, it’s chai not palao (eye roll). Also, there is no role for aloo in biryani.
laugh at lewd jokes? Do you talk shit about this or that woman? Do you do rape jokes & then say get a sense of humor it was just a joke? Do you think it’s ok to hit your wife sister daughter? It’s on you, it’s on you all.
What is more beautiful than…(disagree w any and all desi writers who say desi writers should not write about mangos all the time) Pls write about mangos (all the time)
Some more clarity as I celebrate 36 years of my existence, what a gift I am to this world, honestly: 1) I juss wanna be rich enough to travel business class 2) No room in my life for friends who don’t like aam 3) Also no room for friends who don’t like chai
Deeply pained that my uni didn’t recognize my chai setup expenditure for office as a legit research expense. I can expect zero reimbursement. How sad that unis absolutely do not understand how research happens & devalue chai thus. I can’t turn my neck wo chai hello
#academicwoes
2. transferred, the "transfer of earth," (an idiot 1875 text) was done by INDIANS. Now go and have a nice day. And if you say ever again the British made us our irrigation network I hope your chai will spill on your white shirt.
My first peer-reviewed journal article, world 💃🏻’Empire’s accidents: law, lies and sovereignty in the ‘war on terror’ in Pakistan’ will be published in Critique of Anthropology. YAY!! It’s part of a project much older than my dissertation project
Yay our Special Issue, “Between Work & Labor: Valuing Productive Action,”
@anthrowork
is here! 🎉Organized with
@whbutt
& Adam it includes an intro by us 3, essays on construction, agri, scrap, patwar & waste work, & commentaries by
@SarahBesky
@thirana1
More than 700 people have been killed in floods in Pakistan. These numbers are just estimates - the actual toll is far more horrifying. Can you help? Yes.
A list:
More details here:
1/The EIA hearing for the Ravi project on Feb 20th began w a 35 min long presentation. The text on the slides that were shown on a projector was in English, talk was in Urdu (some English). Abt 20 min into the presentation an old man walked up to the stage & told the presenter
Dunya kahan se kahan pohonch gayee aur hum roothay huaye unclone ko hii mana rahay hain...This btw is a classic uncle move - throw a fit, make it about you, obscure the real issue: the inability of Pakistanis to talk about 1971
If I got a rupee for every time Pakistanis sing, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” I’d be richer than I am. Pls don’t fight me I jus wanna make naees frendchips 👵🏼
Want to stress again what great reporting this is it shows how much work is to be done & is being done & it PAINS ME SO MUCH to see there is all this expertise at home but the solution is deemed to be run after ill-suited foreign solutions - l learnt so much from this video
How wise & sustainable is it to import pre-fab homes to rehabilitate floods victims, as being done by govt?
The ad-hoc strategy only means squandering away already limited resources & all the aid we have secured (each unit costs Rs5 lac), experts say.
1/2
#FloodsInPakistan2022
What a glorious day this is, to be celebrated far and wide. I am truly a gift to this world. 😇 💅 Happy birthday to me. It really was a rather good idea to produce me Allah mian. Please have chai to celebrate this day