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Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 IST 2008

Afghans are racing to catch up from a five-year time warp. The 
radical Islamic rulers banned everything from kite-flying to women 
walking too loudly. Listening to nonreligious music was forbidden as 
well. Taliban roadblocks across the country were festooned with 
tangled strands of shiny black magnetic tape, ripped from confiscated 
video and music cassettes.

Those who are providing the new window on the world can barely keep 
up with the public appetite for once-forbidden fruit.

Take Gholam Farouk, a TV and stereo salesman who has the smile of a 
born conspirator. In his shop today, there is standing room only as 
customers jostle to buy TVs, VCRs, and satellite dishes. Before 
Northern Alliance rebels took control of the city Nov. 13, his entire 
stock was hidden in a secret warehouse. Only simple radios lined the 
shelves.

Even those were enough to bring an agent of the Taliban's vice 
ministry to his narrow doorway earlier this year.

"You should burn everything in your shop," Mr. Farouk says he was 
told. "Then you should burn me with it," he retorted, initially 
denying the existence of his warehouse. The Taliban eventually forced 
him to divulge his stash: Inside they found 18 televisions, 22 video 
players, a video camera, and eight satellite dishes.

Farouk was held in jail for 15 days. After he got out, he replenished 
his stock. And the moment he learned that the Taliban had fled last 
week, he emptied the warehouse into the shop. The crush of people 
asking for prices all day, he says, made his head hurt.

"There were many Pakistanis and Arabs [with the Taliban], who wanted 
to keep us in the dark. They didn't want to show their faces," says 
Ismatollah Hairan, a customer in the shop. "TV is good for children 
and for everybody, because we can see what is happening in the world."

The cultural restrictions imposed by the Taliban - and the quiet 
opposition to it - were not limited to the airwaves. Mahboub Sharifi 
secretly collected 500 videocassettes which he rented to friends.

"We had shelves at home with secret places carved out behind, where 
we kept the tapes," Mr. Sharifi says. "It was a miracle that I was 
never caught."

Today, his inventory lines one wall of his shop. The latest James 
Bond film, "The World is Not Enough," and other Hollywood releases, 
are outnumbered by Indian titles with alluring women on the covers. 
They share space with sugary fruit-juice boxes, detergent, and cans 
of Pepsi Cola. His co-conspirators were a number of Pakistani travel 
agents who ferried videos, and even the Taliban themselves, whom he 
says he bribed at checkpoints.

Business is booming. Sharifi rents 40 to 50 tapes per night, he says, 
at about 50 cents each. But cash wasn't the only reason he began this 
line of work. "I was so bored, and there were so many like me - we 
couldn't do anything we wanted," Sharifi says, as customers outside 
his shop eyeball film posters. "I needed money, but it was against 
the Taliban. That's why we did it."

Change is evident almost everywhere in Kabul. Afghan TV began 
broadcasting again on Monday, with women newsreaders returning to the 
airwaves (the Taliban had banned women from work outside the home) 
wearing only headscarves, not the previously required head-to-toe 
burqas.

Not even a Harry Potter première in New York or London could match 
the enthusiasm of crowds outside the Bakhtar Cinema in downtown Kabul 
this week. Rioting broke out Monday when the theater opened. In the 
first three days, some 3,000 people have crammed the dusty hallways 
and big auditorium of the cinema - lending an odorous air of 
suffocation as Afghan and Indian films played scratchily on the big 
screen.

"People love the cinema very much, and we were very sad and depressed 
during these five years," says Hossein Ahmadi, the ticket taker who 
hid five of the movie "pie tins" in his own home. His eyes twinkle at 
the thought of the return of his celluloid heroes.

The building was one of 17 cinemas in the city that have been locked 
for half a decade. Now, a long string of bikes owned by moviegoers 
are lined up outside. Guards at the entrance frisk every 
ticketholder. Numbers are issued, and patrons must handover brass 
knuckles, switchblades, radios - even Kalashnikov assault rifles - at 
the door.

Upstairs, the projector clatters with the sound of the silver screen 
era; projectionist Mohamed Yassin - until days ago, selling trousers 
and shirts on the street - is back at his old job.

"Many people love to watch films; we don't have any other 
amusements," he says, rewinding the movies manually, "dusting" the 
film as it pulls through his fingers. "This is the place people come 
to have fun."

But as Afghans crowd into the dark cavern of the theater - eager to 
escape the harsh realities of their nation after two decades of war - 
what is it they choose to watch?

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