Odd as it sounds, my hand went viral last week. When I was a doe-eyed undergraduate who thought he could change the world, I wrote a story for one of my classes about the ‘special immigration’ process in the US. After 2003, the Americans instituted a ritual that required males from 24 Muslim counties (and North Korea) to go through additional screening rituals. It basically meant that every time I entered or left the country I was taken to a special room that looked like a holding cell and had to wait (sometimes hours) until a tired immigration officer reviewed all my documents. At the time I found the whole thing wildly racist and I was full of righteous anger but my professors just thought it was to be expected given the “current environment.” Anyway, to my delight the news wires eventually picked up my piece and they asked me to give a picture to go with it. I sent them a dramatically lit and poignantly colorful photograph of my hand holding the Pakistani passport (the old one that had bright shiny gold lettering on the cover, not the new one that’s the deep shade of Snot Green) and sent it off.
After the news wire ran that piece, my picture became a part of the public domain, and now whenever there is a story involving Pakistani travel or the Pakistani passport, they use the same picture. That’s why I saw my left thumb, my old passport and my former dorm room floor all over my Facebook last week: someone had done yet another story about how few countries we can travel to without a visa. You know the narrative by now, it’s come out half a dozen times and does the rounds whenever the rankings come out. But I found the familiarity of my own picture (with no credits given, obviously) deeply touching, and read all the accounts of how this year, like most any other year, only Afghanistan is below us. Though this is odd in a world where North Korea exists, it’s not surprising. The rankings say that we officially have the second worst travel document in the world, a fact that I’ve been suspicious of since childhood.
The latest rankings say that Pakistanis officially have the second worst travel document in the world
But there is a small but dedicated army of people that lurks on the desi cyberwebs which believes that a positive spin is really all we need to transform the fate of Pakistan, so almost immediately there was another story titled “Pakistanis can visit 32 countries without visas!”
Sweet, no? Sort of like saying, “Silly gurl! It’s not that you have cancer, it’s just that you don’t not have it! See?”
I’ve reviewed the list and let me just say that Africa is where the party is. Well, our party. There are a few caveats, in that most of these countries have easy on-arrival visas. Still, the places we can enter with just a flash of our Great Green passport includes Trinidad and Tobago, the formerly cannibal nation of Vanuatu, Dominica (which I had to look up), Micronesia, St Vincent and the Grenadines and finally, Haiti, ‘coz who ever needs a visa for Haiti! The countries that issue us a visa on arrival or that give easy e-Visas are slightly more appealing and include Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Bahrain and Kenya. I don’t know about you, but the Lion King soundtrack is already playing in my head with a vision of me holding up my passport aloft like baby Simba under dramatic lighting in front of adoring tribesmen.
Free at last, Shahbaz Taseer
Most of the other countries are Comoros, Djibouti, Guinea-Bassau, Madagascar, Maldives, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nepal, Palau, Samoa, the Seychelles, Rwanda and Tanzania.
Perhaps there is some sort of support group for the internationally shunned that we can join, someplace that won’t judge us and where fellow victims of image crises can come and speak safely, something like Alcoholics Anonymous and Mistaken for Terrorist Tuesdays. (“Hello, and welcome to Plastic Surgery Addicts Anonymous. I’m seeing a lot of new faces around and I must say, I’m disappointed.”)
But I agree with the sentiment that we should be grateful for the fact that there are still places in this world that we don’t have to go through pre-clearance to enter. Indeed, gratitude and image-preservation are something I was thinking a lot about this week, because we all heard the wonderful news that Shahbaz Taseer, son of the late Salmaan Taseer, abducted nearly five years ago and held in captivity ever since, has finally come home to his family. Yay! Honestly, one is used to so much bad news that I think people didn’t know quite how to process this happy development. In the pictures of him they’ve released he looks relieved and smiling, though of course he has seen a hell no one should have to see. His resolve and that of his family these many years, all of them, is a testament to grace under fire. The security forces initially claimed to have rescued Shahbaz in an operation (Mission Impossible style) but it may be that they didn’t have much to do with it. Alas, that our “boys” would claim credit for his rescue/discovery is as much of a surprise as the fact that we don’t need a visa for Rwanda.
