Friday, 10 October 2025

a rough beast slouches towards Islamabad

Every so often, a rough beast slouches towards Islamabad to be reborn over and over again, seemingly undeterred by the containers and check posts , yearning for its rebirth at D-Chowk and usually dies somewhere near Faizabad.

See: Roads blocked mobile internet services suspended ahead of TLP protest in Islamabad in Dawn:

"The TLP has announced plans for a massive anti-Israel demonstration outside the US emb­as­sy in the federal capital today. In anticipation of the protest, the Islamabad administration had started placing shipping containers at Faizabad Interchange — the historic site of several TLP sit-ins."

I would love to commission a painting that depicts this phenomenon and, call it "Islamabad's Rough Beast". I'm also filing this Blog Post under Anecdotes.

And, here's the Second Coming by Yeats: 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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