Chapati said ‘giddy’ and fell silent!

After reading all the obituaries for BB, I am only left wondering why Baskin Robins has not yet made a deal with Asif Ali Zardari to make BB their mascot girl. Sepoy seems to have been left with a similar impression — Boy! did she have a sweet tooth, he says. But since he frowned at most of the commentators’ who make BB out to be a person ‘unrelatable’ to the vast majority of Pakistanis — I hoped he will go on to explain how Pakistanis actually relate to her. He takes us on a nice, useful and refreshing excursion ( I really mean it as a complement) through the countryside into which Bhutto’s name is inscribed in a million ways, he brings us to the secure knowledge that Pakistanis do relate to her. If you are holding your breath to find out how and why, relax  — apparently they related to her “as Bhutto.” And there is nothing after that. I am trying not to sound wistful but is that all the ‘vertiginous’ chapati said ? That it is ‘giddy’?

Yes of course it is the Bhutto name. That is why it is so important for Asif Ali Zardari to stake a claim to that name. That is no cipher for any fullblooded South Asian. The question is what does Bhutto symbolize ? What does the name say to the vast majority of people –when it comes attached to all these different faces ? If we cannot decode that, we are really not much better than Tariq Ali — well, yes I include him among the dozens of commentators who have given us the Baskin Robins story — perhaps more finegrained, perhaps with greater detail, but it is still about the good, the bad and the ugly in the palace politics. I suspect the ‘chapati’ has more to reveal and hope that the sepoy will share it.