E-mail a friendAli Sethi
airdate June 17, 2009
Ali Sethi is a U.S.-based Pakistani journalist, who's written for The Nation and contributed to The New York Times and other leading American publications. The son of journalists, he's been a prominent spokesman on his native county's civil strife. The Harvard grad has also received much international buzz for his debut novel, The Wish Maker. Highlighted in USA Today's "Book Buzz" column, the foreign rights to this family saga set in one of the world's most turbulent regions have been sold in six countries to date.
Journalist talks about the cultural and economic differences among Pakistanis from different areas. (1:40)
Full interview. (10:34)
Ali Sethi
Tavis: Ali Sethi is the son of a Pakistani journalist who was educated here in the United States at Harvard. He's written frequently about issues facing Pakistan in "The New York Times" and elsewhere. His critically acclaimed debut novel is called "The Wish Maker," which was recently featured in "USA Today's" "Book Buzz" column. Ali, nice to have you on the program.
Ali Sethi: Hi, thank you.
Tavis: Good to see you.
Sethi: Thanks.
Tavis: Let me start, before I get to the book, with the real world, with Pakistan. India's prime minister today said that the time I had come to be at peace with Pakistan, its neighbor. What do you make of that statement and what do you make of what's going on in the region, particularly between these two countries?
Sethi: Well, I live in a place called Lahore, which is very close to the Indian border, and I can tell you that it's been a while. This is long overdue. Peace between the two countries has been in the works, people have been talking about it for a longtime, but it seems like something happens every now and then to sabotage that process.
The last thing that happened was the terror attack in Mumbai that happened last year, and so I think it's really important that the civilian government in Pakistan, which is back after eight or nine years of military rule, the civilian government in Pakistan does want to make peace with India. In fact, all civilian governments in Pakistan over the last 10 or 15 years, at least, have made efforts to make peace with India. It's the Pakistan military that is having, I think, some difficulty accepting that.
Tavis: What gives you reason to believe, then, that the time now is right or ripe for a new way?
Sethi: Well, the thing is that I think the Pakistanis - as you know, I'm sure, Pakistan is experiencing - is undergoing great difficulty the moment. There's this militancy problem in Pakistan, and really, that problem has existed for a long time.
The madrassa culture that in many ways supports this or enables this militancy and extremism and violence has been around in Pakistan, the infrastructure has been around in Pakistan for more than two decades now. What we are seeing now, the suicide bombings, the assassinations, these are things that are new to much of Pakistan.
But these are the manifestations of something that's been developing for a long time. I think working towards peace with India will force the military establishment in Pakistan to finally break its relationship with many organizations that are believed to be - that don't want to make peace with India and don't want peace in that region.
Tavis: To your earlier point, this obviously has been a longstanding battle, this is nothing new. They've been at this for many, many years. You're relatively young - how old are you now?
Sethi: Twenty-four right now; 25 in three weeks.
Tavis: Okay (Laughter)
Sethi: That's right.
Tavis: You started looking up, I'm like, why is he looking up like that? He doesn't know how old he is? Okay, I get it now - 24 now, 25 in a few weeks. So you're a young person. What's it like for a young person today living in Pakistan?
Sethi: I think it depends on where you are in Pakistan. I think it depends on your socio-economic background more than anything else. Pakistan is a country that's internally diverse in many ways and not all of those internal differences are good.
The language changes pretty much every 50 to 60 miles, it becomes a new dialect. People have many different ethnicities, people look different. In the north of Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, people really claim to belong to a different culture than the people who live in, let's say, my part of Pakistan, which is close, as I said, to the Indian border. The people look like me.
People are not fair-skinned, not light-eyed. They don't live in a tribal system. They live in an agrarian society and have for thousands of years. This is the home of the Indus Valley civilization.
So it depends on where you are in Pakistan. I think for the young people who are in the north of Pakistan right now, man of whom, as you know, have been displaced by the military's onslaught now, what they're calling their crackdown on the Taliban - we don't know, because no journalists are allowed to go on their own.
So we only know what the military is telling us, but even from what I've seen I can tell you that in the parts of Lahore, which is my hometown, there are young, aimless people, mostly men, who are just roaming around with shoe polish in their hands because they have nowhere to go. Their homes have been destroyed and they are angry, and many of them have lost their families.
And they're just standing around in alien territory and they don't speak the language much of the time and they don't know what to do. So I think if you're me, you're having a good time right now. I've just written a book. But if you're them, you're not having a good time at all.
Tavis: Help me juxtapose your having a good time now with what you said a moment ago. You are a writer; you have a novel out, to your point, which we'll talk about here in just a second. I mentioned earlier we've seen your op-eds on the pages of "The New York Times." So you're a writer.
A few minutes ago, you said that you can't be sure what is happening in the northern part of your country because journalists, writers, can't get in there. How do you process that as one who writes inside of your country, you can't go a certain place to write about what's happening there because they won't let you there. Help me understand that. What's that feel like?
Sethi: The thing is that I can tell you that many of my journalist friends, many of whom are young people who are in Pakistan right now and have been making journeys up to the north of the country, have been going - some of them have had to disguise themselves in ways. They dress differently, some of them want to have some facial hair when they up there. They don't want to look like urban, middle class youth. They don't want to wear jeans when they go.
They want to draw attention away - they don't want to draw attention to themselves, and that just tells me that it's not just that they're trying to avoid identification by the locals, they also don't want the military to know that maybe there's somebody up there who's got a notepad and who's not embedded.
So you keep seeing - the Pakistani media is very vibrant, mercifully, and very diverse, and I'm very grateful for that and I know most Pakistanis are. We have more than 50 privately owned independent TV channels now in Pakistan. So you see a lot of refugees being interviewed on TV, for example, but even there the accounts are often contradictory.
Some people say they destroyed our homes, and you don't know who they are. Are they the Taliban or are they the military?
Tavis: Are you hopeful about the future of your country, as a young person?
Sethi: Absolutely. I live there, it's my home. I've got to make it work.
Tavis: Yeah. I take that. Tell me about "The Wish Maker."
Sethi: "The Wish Maker" is a story set mostly in the 1990s, which is when I grew up in urban Pakistan in my city, Lahore. And it's really a relatively - that was a relatively peaceful time in my part of the country. In other parts of the country it wasn't as peaceful.
It was the decade of democracy, of the Democratic - well, what we call the Democratic experiment now, because it was preceded by 10 years of military rule and then after that came another 10 years of military rule.
And it was the decade of our two prime ministers, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. And so it was a time in which a lot of changes took place in the cities. My generation, I think, grew up with a slightly more diverse political consciousness than the generation that is maybe just before mine, because they grew up under a lot of censorship in Pakistan, so it's an interesting time to document.
That's what most of this is about, but it's about a family. It's about a family and two kids, a boy and a girl, who are cousins and who are growing up in this house which is being run by two women.
Tavis: Somewhat autobiographical?
Sethi: Not really. The setting is autobiographical in that it's a time and place I recall, but as I began to write it I found I couldn't write about even that period without having to go back into the past that I have not seen myself, because so much was missing from the official history that I had been taught at school and told.
I had to go into the 1980s to find out why things had been the way they were, and then back into the '40s and '50s, to Pakistan's creation. So all of that is in there.
Tavis: Tell me more about this family.
Sethi: This family, well, it's a middle class family in Lahore. The household is run by the boy's, Zaki's, mother, who's a journalist and thinks of herself as something of a feminist, and his grandmother, his paternal grandmother, who's, I think, belongs to a different generation but also is culturally and socially more conservative.
And Zaki's father, who used to be a flying officer in the Pakistan air force, died in a plane crash, so it's an accident, in a way, the absence of that male figure in what is a lot of the time a male-dominated society, but it leads to an interesting situation in the house, and I think it really equips him to look at life in new and interesting ways.
Tavis: There's a lot of buzz on the book. What do you make of writing novels? I've seen your other writings, but this is your first novel. What do you make of this experience?
Sethi: It's an interesting experience. It's sort of like I don't know, I'd compare it to maybe singing a song or making a painting or something. It's a way of expressing something or the other, but it's not the same as tracking the news or being a reporter, which is, I think, maybe more useful, I don't know. It depends on what time you're living in.
The thing about novels is that they have longer lives than news reports, so maybe five years from now, if things are better in Pakistan, this will be of a different value than it is right now.
Tavis: I've talked to a number of novelists on this program over the years, obviously, and some of them believe that novels allow you to say things that you necessarily couldn't say in news.
Sethi: That is correct, but the opposite is also true - you can say things very directly in a news report because you're confined by fact and because you have to at least remove yourself from the news report as much as possible unless you're being experimental and writing for "The New Yorker" or something.
But I think in novels, you can - there's too much freedom sometimes and you don't know what to do with it.
Tavis: Well, let's all pick it up and see what he's done with it. His name is Ali Sethi, the new book is called "The Wish Maker," his first novel. Ali, nice to have you on and safe travels back to Pakistan.
Sethi: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: Good to see you.
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