Excerpt from Breaking the curfew by Emma Duncan
Page 6, paperback edition
More than anywhere I have been -- much more than India -- its people (Pakistani) worry about the state of their country. They wonder what went wrong; they fear for the future. They condemn it; they pray for it. They are involved in the nation's public life as passionately as their small private dilemmas. I did a small experiment with an English friend who does not believe that politics matters much to people.
A chatty hotel waiter sat down with us to share a bottle of local whisky. My friend asked him question about his family; I about the dead president. I won hands down. My friend got monosyllabic answers, and I got florid, threatening images of the vengeance which mistreated children wreak on a dictatorial father.
To a political journalist, a politicised country is thrilling. You begin to believe that what you are writing about matters not just to small coterie of heavy-lunching politicians and journalists but to everybody who lives there.
If the rest of the world didn't care, that would begin to be depressing. But Pakistan gets headlines because It is at the centre of some of the world's biggest uncertainties, involved in them as an actor and a potential victim.....
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