"The Sensational Life & Death of Qandeel Baloch" is the biography of Qandeel Baloch by Pakistani journalist Sanam Maher. The book takes us through the life of Pakistan’s first social media star/sensation, Qandeel Baloch, who was murdered by her brother in the name of honor in July 2016 in her hometown in central Pakistan. She was murdered for choosing to live life on her own terms, which, unfortunately, was not in line with her brother's hardcore Muslim sensibilities.
Qandeel wants to get into the entertainment industry and make a name for herself and in the process of trying to do so, she does many controversial things to grab attention such as offer to striptease for the national cricket team if they won and mock a governmental warning not to celebrate Valentine's day. She posts provocative selfies of herself on her social media, some even with a well-known religious cleric Mufti Qavi. Qandeels has a following of 8 lakh followers on Facebook and 40k followers on Twitter at the time of her death - something which is unimaginable for a young Pakistani woman, especially one who was trying to escape a life of poverty and an abusive and loveless marriage in order to make something of her life.
Qandeel accumulates a lot of hate during her short life due to the way she chooses to live her life and how she expressed herself online. In a country as conservative as Pakistan, she is an anomaly and her choosing not to conform to society’s expectation of what an ideal Pakistani woman should be is what eventually got her killed. What is interesting to note is that despite garnering so much hate when she was alive, her death brought about a change in attitude in a lot of people there.
Author Sanam Maher says “We are more likely to be comfortable looking at a dead woman than an overtly sexual woman. Women are somehow given the responsibility of projecting an image of how we want the world to see us as a society. And therefore, there is anxiety when a woman transgresses societal notions of how she should dress, behave or think. A lot of it has to do with an entire culture built around policing and controlling women’s bodies and actions.”
“We are more likely to be comfortable looking at a dead woman than an overtly sexual woman"
What we see in cases of honor killings are comments like, why did she not study and take up a “respectable” job, why did she wear clothes like that, she was pretty much asking for it, why did she have to fall in love with someone and marry him instead of choosing to be with who her parents picked out for her etc,. What we tend to forget is how difficult it is for a woman, especially from a country like Pakistan where women have very little agency, to come from nothing at all and make a name for herself without being hated on.
“Women are somehow given the responsibility of projecting an image of how we want the world to see us as a society."
In fact, even though this book is about a Pakistani woman, the trials that she and many Pakistani women had to face (and still continue to do so) are common even in India. In fact, entwined in this book are stories of many other Pakistanis who lives are entwined with the internet - we learn about Nighat Dad, the founder of The Digital Rights Foundation (DRF), an organisation which launched Pakistan’s first cyber harassment helpline. Due to poor cyber security regulation, Pakistani women are extremely vulnerable to harassment through the internet, especially in the form of blackmailing. The unfortunate part is that these women are rarely supported by their families in the cases of cyberbullying as many families shun women even getting access to the internet or talking to men. Nighat travels across the country training women how to protect themselves and their identities online.
We also learn of the tragic death of Naila Rind, an academically brilliant woman who was completing her master's at the University of Sindh. She hangs herself in her hostel room because she was being blackmailed by a man with some compromising pictures of hers. Instead of penalizing him for having blackmailed a poor woman to the point of driving her to suicide, the college and the police turn against Naila, portraying her as a woman of bad character and making it appear as though she deserved dying. Here, we see police officers who believe curtailing the freedom of women is the way to prevent crimes against women as opposed to punishing the actual perpetrators of the crime. They believe that if a woman cannot show the messages or pictures she shares online to her family members, then they are a matter of shame and should not have been shared in the first place.
It is common knowledge that women with public accounts are constantly bombarded with unsolicited dick pictures, extremely disturbing sexual messages, and so on. We get a glimpse at the kind of comments and DMs Qandeel used to get on her social media accounts. Qandeel even addresses the messages from the online haters by asking why they choose to watch her videos if it disturbs them so much. She is a firey woman who is not bothered by such messages or media’s portrayal of her. She sternly talks down interviewers and religious leaders who try to moral police her and put her down for the way she lives.
Eventually, the media digs deep enough into her past and finds out Qandeel’s real name and where she is from and even goes to the extent of putting her passport number and national identity number on the news, with no concern for the moral implications of their actions. In fact, we still come across this rutheless and dirty journalism even now, wherein journalists invade into the lives of celebritites without even stopping to think about the breach of their privacy and safety. In Qandeel's case, no one pays heed to her when she voices concerns of her life being in danger, merely brushing it aside as a publicity stunt. Eventually, this is what gets her killed in the name of honor. In fact, the nonchalant way in which people of her village address the topic of honor killings and how common it is in Pakistan is downright frightening.
Even though it can be disturbing at places, this book is well researched with an engaging narrative that contains numerous voices including Qandeel, her family and friends and people who are completely unrelated to her and it makes for an excellent read and a true eye-opener.
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