Ramadan is approaching and my local bootlegger is already running dry. It seems as if everyone has already stocked up their pantries for the holy month.
Parties sponsored by corporate brands or their media partners will be replaced by small GT’s (get togethers) of fifty odd people sipping wine, munching on samosas and bitching about eating restrictions. Until then, however, everyone is going all out with excessive ecstasy and coke cocktails making the rounds on the social circuit.
Returning from socialite Amina Khan’s “Ghetto Glamorous” themed Club Night party with a scary chemical cocktail racing through my veins, my gray ghost (my car) did 0 to 60 straight into a ditch.
Sceptical friends would later roll their eyes, but the crater in the concrete really did appear out of nowhere. So did my saviour: six feet tall, flowing white robes and an equally extensive beard to boot, my mullah emerged from the darkness.
Had he looked at me directly, my cheetah print halter would have elicited 99 tauba’s, but he addressed the ground when he gently ordered me, in a Brooklyn accent, to floor the accelerator. My car lifted out of the ditch, and my mullah walked on without a second look.
As protest against his popularity as the metrosexual poster boy for the rock band Co-ven, pretty boy and lead singer Hamza Jafri has adapted a new look: fundo chic.
Gone is his epicurean’s goatee and meticulously styled spikes. Hamza has shaved off all his hair and wears a strict uniform of kajal-lined eyes and a white kurta salwar, topped off with a kufi.
But he’ll be at the bar after the gig, just like everyone else, tipping back a few. Accused of selling out to shock value, Hamza insists that he has is not challenging perceptions but has merely come upon answers in his spiritual search.
The makeover has not, however, affected Co-ven’s unique brand of English rock or their incredibly energetic gigs or their relationship with their sponsor, Levi’s, a brand known for it’s over the top slutty fashion show.
(Umbreen works with a TV channel in Karachi)
