Book Review - The Nine Lives of Pakistan

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Divided Nation by Declan Walsh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This engrossing account, written in a chatty style, deals with the existential dilemma of Pakistan.

More concept than country, Pakistan strained under the centrifugal forces of history, identity, and faith. Could it hold?

As the British retreated to lick their wounds after WW II, the two J’s – Jinnah and Jawahar – in their vanity, eviscerated the sub-continent, Jinnah having a dubious triple honour, according to his biographer Stanley Wolpert

Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Muhammad Ali Jinnah did all three

The author loves the country – warts and all – yet offers a fairly unbiased narrative of the conundrum of what could have been a great country

Most knew Pakistan as a stage for lurid dramas on a grand scale, characterized by spectacular violence, villainous leaders and deluded messiahs with feverish dreams of global domination.

Here is a very first-hand and perspicacious view of the 'concept' of this country

It was certainly true that the trauma of partition, and the confusions of faith and identity it created, lurked behind the most enduring pathologies I encountered in the land of broken maps. Although Pakistan was built on faith, Islam offered an incomplete identity. Negation of India filled the void. Viewed through this lens, so much of what Pakistan did – the coddling of jihadis, the scheming in Afghanistan – seemed to stem from a gnawing insecurity. Pakistan had to be everything India was, and was not.

Immensely readable – at times providing a sense of schadenfreude to the Indian reader

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