Yeh Woh (The News on Sunday, 20-11-11)
Pakistani newspapers are not known for their reading pleasure, perhaps because the writers and editors have never sought and found pleasure in reading and therefore consider good prose and news copy mutually exclusive. Or perhaps readers only care for information and not how it is presented.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that news copy, however bland and shabby, contains meaningful information for the reader. A vast majority of the stories appearing in print are done not to inform or educate the reader but to achieve the count of stories each reporter must file. And if at all there is a point to the story, it is lost to bad language.
Consider some of the oft repeated phrases in the leading newspapers: ‘democracy may be derailed’, ‘people will soon hear the good news’, ‘the disinformation is being spread by the agencies’ and the favourite of Urdu press: ‘there will be dama dum mast qalandar’. No one including the writer knows what these phrases mean or care about how they will be interpreted by the reader. Unless democracy is equated with Shalimar Express which is taken off tracks one fine day, is resumed a few days later, and is stopped again.
The vernacular press uses the analogy of ‘folding up of chess board’ which is just as mysterious because both use an active verb and no subject. Pray tell who will derail, and who will fold up? The ‘Subject that cannot be named’ is some times referred to as ‘agencies’. The last time I checked, the term was used in every newsroom for news wire agencies. Like, a story is attributed to agencies when contents of more than one news wires are used. The other use of ‘agencies’ was popularised by MQM when it wanted to point a finger at one or several military intelligence outfits but wasn’t sure which one(s).
In fact all these and many more ambiguous phrases are coined by politicians whose job it is not to inform and educate, and therefore can’t be held accountable. But when a journalist uses this nonsense in a news story, who is clamouring for accountability? When a politician promises good news soon, it is reported verbatim as if there is a precedent of politicians giving good news to the people. As far as I remember the only times we as a nation celebrate good news is when a government — any government — falls. And this news is almost always broken by a four-star general in crisp khaki uniform. So while we may get good news at the expense of politicians, there is no sense in politicians promising their own doom. As for the ‘mast qalandar’ line, I have no idea what it means, and can’t even guess if it is alright for a non-Sindhi politician to use it. But every Urdu paper worth its masthead continues to print it.
To be fair to the average reporter who describes MFN as most ‘favourite’ nation, and thereby ignites a nation-wide debate on how come our arch enemy has become our buddy overnight, the above phrases are too cryptic to handle and therefore they do the right thing by slipping in a useful ‘he said’ before or after the sentence, thereby washing their hands off whatever it does or doesn’t mean.
But even the experts available to our media do not add much to our understanding. A political analyst — and they are the largest tribe of experts owing to the fact that the job requires no qualification at all — builds his or her entire argument on the basis that a civilian government is a democratic government. The defence analyst can seldom make out that the singular form of Taliban is ‘talib’. The economist can blabber on endlessly about the micro and macro indicators but never a sentence a high school graduate can understand. And I don’t know a single Afghanistan expert who knows the difference between an Afghan and an afghani.
The most unfortunate English word, on account of its rampant abuse, is perhaps ‘alternative’. In fact chances are you won’t find the word if you ran a search of the online database of Pakistani newspapers. It is one of those ‘missing words’ like the ‘missing people’ our Supreme Court keeps searching in vain. Try this instead: type in ‘alternate’, and if you get 100 results, 95 of these were actually meant to use ‘alternative’.
