Lahore is a frontier of this space: a space that is a kind of regional hyper-culture that is post-national, crass, vibrant and full of promise, but which coexists with a national elite that is still defending its narrow chauvinistic and class interests and an older rural culture that is being slowly eroded.

I am back in Lahore. I am living, as I did 5 years ago, with Ifti and Munni (my uncle and aunt). They have moved on in the Lahori world, thanks to Munni's boutique, and now live in Defence (yes, there is also an upper upper middle class enclave by the same name in Karachi). The place is littered with flat roofed, distended, ugly pillared monster houses. That's not new. What is new are the monsters sitting on the backs of those monsters. "Dishes" upon dish antennae on every rooftop. Star, Zee, EL, BBC - some kind of Bombay production is in every Lahori living room, bedroom and restaurant (these three types of rooms account for every Lahori indoor space).

Channel flicks move me between Dilip Kumar, Raj & Shammi Kapoor making the sweetest doe eyes to the likes of Madhubhala and Nargis, and Oprah interviewing Whitney Houston, to the NBA and Michael Jordan, and cricket and cricket - inglorious IndoPak cricket -to Bombay video jockeys who speak an American stilted Hinglish, or a born-in-Britain English, who are gorgeous like the music videos they introduce. And the music videos: you see songs from Barsaat, Chaudhvein ka Chand, Howrah Bridge and Mr. and Mrs. 55 introduced by some video jockey who gives you nuggets on Sahir Ludhianvi and Guru Dutt, and can impersonate all of them, and ad lib the songs, and break out into a public school joke that is half English and half Urdu/Hindi and perfectly contemporary.

The songs from present day Bombay films are done in an MTV format - an MTV visual 'beat' that consists of a three minute song, very expensive costumes, and choreography. A fantastic melange of Bollywood funhouse images (like Delhi havelis and Jaipur palaces) form the backdrops. And the talk shows: I move between the game and talk shows that have guests like Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher and Shabana Azmi, cinema icons I have never seen appear on screen as 'themselves', to Zee TV news, and Newstrack (Madhu Treihan's hardhitting expose style camera-and-question-in-your-face-journalism).

These highs of pop gratification have Lahoris breathless these days.

Lahore is still Lahore. In Defence there is sparse public transportation. Everybody 'from' Defence has a car, and everybody who they know has a car, and nobody else lives or visits Defence. But what these monster homes are squatting on were formerly farmers' fields, and Defence is expanding into more of them. If you sit on the lawns of one of these houses, or on the verandahs at the back, where the clothes lines are strung between faux Greco-Roman pillars, and you close your eyes, you can hear the birds in the trees - you won't in Karachi - and a carpenter's hammering next door will sound like the ubiquitous pump at the well of a Punjabi village. You may even hear a rooster crowing, and you will smell the rich, lusty smell of Punjabi soil. Lahore is Lahore.