Well, this happened during the conference, so to get You into the mood…
Sesion is over, me, Jeremy and the Islamabadis are sitting at the pool (the venue was perfect) with feet in water and just doing random chats when…
…understand, most Islamabadis are actually from Rawalpindi. And exactly in this moment of pure relaxation, one (and than another and another one) gets and SMS that in Rawalpindi was a bomb blast with I dont know how many people dead.
Worried expressions come, followed by calls home and checking on everybody possible if they are all right. Thanks God, nobody from their circles got hurt. (…would You care about other circles?) And as the home-checking calls slowly diminish, somebody gets another piece of news…
…a State of emergency was imposed on Pakistan!
Calls start all over again, everybody trying to reach some cousin, brother-in-law, uncle, family friend who ranks the highest in military to find out WTF is going on.
Pieces of news come: TV channels cut off, consitution dumped, flights cancelled, arrests, Islamabad and Rawalpindi closed down… And after a while some of them start to prove exaggerated.
Thats the real story. But the most fascinating was the behaviour of people. As soon as the safety of personal circles of the guys there was checked, the discussion went to for me into quite surreal ways. Seriousness got turned into sarcasm, biggest concern became if they will be on time for exams and all of them sure that the university (in Islamabad) will not do a shit about the chaos and keep up to the schedule. The speed with whitch people accepted the status, adapted and started to think and act as nothing has happened was astonishing.
Some people actually started to wish each other Happy Emergency Day 
Observing this something became clear: stirring any kind of revolution in here will be difficult. People of pakistan have seen a lot and actually expect to see even more. They actually remind me of the character of Donkey Benjamin from “Animal Farm” by Orwell that I read recently. His approach is very clear – things wont change, I will get old and see new things come and become old and I will try to be still there and live my life.
And thats the story, not very entertaining, but giving an image, image that calms some of You down, that might frustrate some people and maybe might explain a few things. Heck, I guess it pretty explains why nothing has changed after all the rallies by lawyers and all those arrests, because the basic question is – why should anything change, why should I change?
Last thing… this article shows how much I suck in trying to be a journalist stirring peoples emotions. If You want some better stuff go to e.g. blog of this guy Emad…
There are two images that stuck in my head… The Black ribbon, symbol of protest against the State of emergency and the pic of the character “V” from the movie “V for Vendetta”… A friend came with a pretty chilling slogan for it “Remember, remember the 3rd of November!” (if You have seen the movie, You know what am I talking about…). What will be remembered? And who except of Wikipedia will? I dont know, ask Benjamin.
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