Pesky Pakis propping up Hollywood poops
by Abbas Zaidi
[ opinion - january 04 ]
I have little appetite for that glittering box called TV. But since I am vacationing these days, I watch it off and on. The other day HBO showed a movie, Raptor.
Raptor is about an American government project to clone raptors which will retain their instinctive, natural, ferocity. They will have human intelligence too. Imagine the lethal combination!
The project is abandoned because the monsters could be far too dangerous. The laboratory where the experiments are carried out is officially closed down for good. However, a spooky weirdo of a scientist carries on the project surreptitiously in the same laboratory. He successfully creates raptors which start killing people in the most violent and, needless to say, intelligent way. No one has a clue what is going on till a detective, the hero, finds out. In one scene, the hero speaks with a Pentagon general about the raptor-cloning project: how has the mega-million project continued, given that the American government stopped the funding long time ago? The general's answer: The source of funding has been traced, and it is - yes, the one and only! - Pakistan that is providing all the money.
In the James Bond blockbuster, the villain, the corpulent Mr Goldfinger, smuggles gold from one country to another. No one in the British Secret Service, including the all-knowing James Bond, can figure out why. In a top-secret meeting between Bond, his boss and a highly-placed British defence officer, James wonders why Mr Goldfinger needs to go through all the hassle of smuggling gold since gold prices are the same all over the world. "No," corrects the British defence officer: The amount of gold that Mr Goldfinger can buy in Great Britain for £30, he can sell for £111 in Pakistan!
Both these movies predate the rise and fall of the megalomaniac, media-hungry Osama and 9/11; so Islamic fundamentalism as a casus belli behind the raptor or Goldfinger projects can be discounted right away. Did the movie-makers think that Pakistan was a place where money flowed in drains and floated in gutters? If the Raptor and the Goldfinger producers had done a wee bit of research, they would have found out that from its very inception, Pakistan has been dependent on foreign aid; and most of the aid goes back to the West, where Pakistani rulers have their bank accounts, businesses and mansions. The Pakistan ruling elite is too Mammonized to be interested in biological subtleties or economic manipulations.
It would be unfair and unwise on my part to draw a conclusion based upon two movies only. Those who watch a lot of movies can do better than I can. However, I will have reflected sentiments of the majority of Pakistanis if I said that there is something for all of Pakistanis to rejoice in: Notoriety is better than anonymity.
