No Peeking Please, We Are Pakistani

I made a post earlier about the internecion of the English language that happens in Karachi and other parts of Pakistan. Shiraz made some comments about how there are many words in Urdu that are gross approximations of some English words and how, say, 'knickers' becomes 'nayker' and 'pliers' becomes 'plaas.' I agree with him in that there are many words in Urdu that are 'borrowed' from English. Actually, the Urdu language is the bastard child of a rather bacchanalian copulation between Hindi, Persian, Arabic, many of the Turkic languages, and English. The English influence, of course, comes from the English who ruled over the sub-continent unofficially for 300+ years (officially 89 years). And since the English language itself is a mongrel product of various Germanic languages including Yiddish, Afrikaans, many of the Frisian languages, and Dutch, it also makes Kirna right when she says that many languages overlap.

This overlapping of languages became daftly apparent to me today when I saw a sign that said: 'no smoking, no eating paan, and please, no peeking.' For those of my readers who do not know what this means, the term 'peek maarna' is an expression in Urdu and it describes the act of chewing betel nuts, catechu, lime paste all wrapped in betel leaves and then spitting them all out in a long, red stream onto any wall or corner that you are closest to. For my readers who don't know English, the term 'peeking' denotes the act of looking or peering furtively as from a place of concealment. I am not trying to be condescending here, but kAy and Khaver would appreciate why I say that seeing the 'no peeking' sign I got thoroughly confused and its exact meaning is still lost upon me.

That's when the idea for this post came to me and I said to myself, 'why not? We, the Karachiites, are, after all, Masters of the Universe. Where else would you find people who wear 'Mercury' branded underwear, work in 'Venus' Distributors, who take their cars to 'Atlas' Honda, hire guards from 'Mars' Security Services, put 'Jupiter' CPEs near their windows, and buy their fish from 'Neptune' Fisheries. Only in Karachi can people buy gin from 'Moon,' take credit from 'Crescent' Commercial Bank, order garments from 'Star' Textiles, avail the UBL 'Orion' mobile phone banking, go for a picnic at 'Paradise' Point, exchange currency at the 'Glaxy' Money Exchange Company, and buy a laptop from 'Glaxy' Computers.

And this brings me to the real reason I wanted to make this post today because come tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday January 29, 2008), an asteroid called 2007 TU24 is going to rendezvous with Earth's magnetosphere. It's the first time that we are going to be able to witness and record such a phenomenon and no one is really sure what's going to happen. There are predictions of firestorms and light shows in the sky, unpredictable weather, and a power surge that can wipe out all the hard disks in the world. Most of these theories seem kind of crack potted and out there to me, and the only thing that everyone seems to be very sure of is that no one is sure what's going to happen. Asteroid 2007 TU24 is expected to be closest to earth at 1:33 pm Pakistan Standard Time.

The suspense is killing me!