Daniel Fogg on everything...

Getting Loose in Islamabad

Published in Quint Magazine, March 2013 (page 92) as Quint Staff featuring artwork by Rita Cervetto.

If you’re a kid growing up in Pakistan and probably not too optimistic about you or your country’s prospects in the world, what do you do with yourself at the weekends to dull the pain of living? The same thing kids do around the world – hit parties, dance badly and try to get laid.

And so I found myself in Islamabad on a hot summer evening, surrounded by all manner of the local youth doing what people have been doing for centuries. I run a web company and was over there on business - meeting our beloved client, speaking to new partners and enjoying my time in the city diplomats never want to leave.

The party in question was hosted inside a wedding tent on a golf course on the affluent outskirts of Islamabad. Luckily we knew the right people and didn’t have to fork-out the $50 admission fee.

We drove through the gates and parked up in a sea of identical cars - Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas are the only thing people drive in Pakistan. I saw two groups of boys in their early-20s, hair-styled uniformly in greased quiffs knocking something back in plain view of the security guards. Intrigued, we headed through the crowds towards the sound of electronic music.

The entrance to the venue presented a classic example of bureaucracy – flexible for some, rigid for others. No alcohol was allowed inside, but everyone seemed to be walking in with large water bottles filled with a local favourite – Boris Jelzin vodka (correctly misspelled), distinguishable from methylated spirits only by branding. Tickets were checked after the broken metal detector. The doorman seemed to be doing great business in backhanders from ticket-less punters. No wristbands in sight, only a zip tie which slowly gnawed a groove into my arm during the night.

The venue itself was one of those huge temporary wedding tent structures, complete with plastic windows and PVC doors. There was no bar to speak of, serving alcohol or otherwise, but there was a crappy snack shop outside selling the usual selection of soggy sandwiches and neon-orange Miranda common in this part of the world. I grabbed a can of Mirinda to mix with my Jelzin vodka and headed towards the mass of people inside.

The crowd was a strange mix of wealthy teenagers, 30-somethings in Polo-shirts, married couples and local labourers in shalwar kameez. Most of the people at the party were male. The couples and older groups were sat down on the arrangement of wedding chairs with some standing around the edge of the dancefloor drinking spirits. The teenagers and labourers mixed in together on the dancefloor-cum-mosh pit, thrashing around and “screwing the light bulb”.

At this point, let me back-up a bit, because the music on offer needs some context. I’m from the UK, where we are spoilt with quality dance music from an early age. But this is Islamabad, Pakistan. The rave virus and it’s various off-shoots never really infected this part of the world. So what passes for “great techno” in Pakistan, is in fact cheesy US RnB drenched 4x4 pop music with a smattering of Eastern European trance thrown in for good measure. That is to say, by my tastes, the music was pretty bad.

Two local DJs were behind the decks from the beginning. They did everything to get the energy going, from crowd-hype on the mic to pretending the soundsystem was broken by stopping the music every now and shrugging to the crowd. This was lost on me and most of the other people at the party, because hey, this is Pakistan and nothing works properly anyway. Screw-ups are expected.

As the night drew on, the crowd seemed on edge and tense with anticipation for the arrival of the headline act. Her name was Vika Jigulina and at the time, she was completely unknown to me. A Moldovan-born Romanian singer and dubious “DJ”, Jigulina is responsible for singing over ‘that accordion tune’ also known as ‘Stereo Love’ by Edward Maya. Every single one of you reading this, no matter how old or young, will have heard this song. With over 184 million YouTube plays, I would expect so. Central to the song is a hugely hypnotic accordion earworm that hooks onto your brain and drains the life force out of you. It is playing on repeat right now in clubs across the world and chances are, you have at some point, danced to it in a Jägermeister-induced haze.

But not surprisingly, it wasn’t her musicality or dexterity that the hordes of single, baying men were here to witness. It was something much more… simple.

As Jigulina came on-stage the real reason for the male crowd’s excitement became clear. Lit from behind by purple and pink Parcans, her dress became instantly see-through and the closest thing Islamabad was getting to a strip-show had begun. Gyrating her way through a medley of Euro-trance, most of which I have later realised was her own music, the crowd screamed and moshed as the energy inside the wedding tent start to peak.

Apart from the accordion tune, one other song stood out, because it was either played or sung no less than five times that night - Rihanna’s “We Found Love”. In a place of both privilege and despair, hearing this while I sat and smoked watching everything unfold, this song took on a new meaning and significance. Pakistan is a place where ‘love marriages’ are rarer than ‘honour killings’. Where parental insecurity fueled by a heady mix of caste, status and religion force young adults into relationships largely against their will and understanding. In this place and with this context, seeing couples hooking up at the edge of the dancefloor, local labourers shimmying and wide-eyed, teeth-grinding teenagers moshing in the background, Rihanna’s song took on a new meaning.

At this point, something I had consumed started sending me sideways. I headed for the cheap plastic fire doors into the humidity to sit outside alone.

While I escaped the bad trance music, the kids inside found their own escape that is so crucial in Pakistan because the country is so damaged. There are drone strikes wiping out extremist groups and innocent civilians alike across the Federally Administered Tribal Region on a daily basis. The government is so corrupt, that during Prime Minister Gillani’s time in office between 2008 and 2012, over $94 billion was skimmed from government coffers through corruption, tax evasion and in some cases, outright theft. And then there’s the other stuff – 25% of the population is below the poverty line, 55% of the population cannot read or write, and the World Bank has recently called Pakistan one of the most socially and economically unequal countries in the world. When you add to this the permanent war with India over Kashmir, the recent harbouring of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad and the government-sponsored nuclear weapons program which proliferating WMDs to North Korea, Iran, Libya and beyond, you would probably agree. In this context, the escapism taking place inside the tent seemed both understandable and vital.

As a kid growing up in Manchester, I never found life particularly easy. Who does at 16? But the worst I had to deal with was random acts of drunken weekend violence in the center of town or the possibility that I would never be able to leave behind the dull prospects of that city. If you grew up in Islamabad however, you face a totally different set of problems. Not long after university you will probably find yourself working inside the broken government bureaucracy; experiencing bribery, pride-fueled tribalism and industrial-scale corruption every day. And in your lifetime, by current estimates at least, you face the very real possibility that the government will radicalise to suit creeping Islamism, that Pakistan becomes a failed state or that the world’s first nuclear-armed terrorist organisation will be born in the same country you were.

So surrounded by inequality and failure, these kids, themselves the very future of Pakistan, were that evening free in front of the lasers and trance music. Kids do this across the world, but amongst the chaos of Pakistani life, it was urgent, raw and necessary.

And with that, after considering the state of Pakistan’s next generation while staring out on an unwatered, pock-marked golf course, I went back into the wedding tent, gave a nod to my colleague and we started rounding up our motley crew of Pakistani ravers. We found our car in the sea of identicals and our driver, as drunk as Boris Jelzin himself, drove us home for the night.