The Organic brew; London, pakistan, photography, travel, poetry & a general acerbic sentiment.

the irrelevant inches

// December 5th, 2005 // All

Amongst the eliteist fringe-media of English dailies in Pakistan, journalistic ability doesn’t seem to be a particular requirement to be a hack. For the run-of-the mill everyday pieces, the newspapers recycle old content, just changing the numbers to reflect whatever it was that transpired yesterday. The case of ‘Two unidentified bodies found in Defence’ tomorrow becomes the 3 unclaimed bodies in PECHS, there is no requirement of context, and none seems to be wanted. Removed and cold reporting in cataloguing in chronological order of the days events.
Even more disappointing then, to read the columns where, atleast, one would not be unreasonable to expect some analysis or introspection to balance out the sheer mundanity with which newspapers treat their bread and butter. But far from being lucid, galvanizing activists for social change, columnists here are content with relating anecdotes of their illustrious careers, or worse.
Perhaps almost the single exception is Cawasjee, who has seemingly spent the last eon bemoaning the slightly irrelevant (given the tail spin our society seems to be in) case of building control in Karachi; and despite it all he has had his successes.
As for the others, nothing illustrates more this puerile self-obsessed egotistical brand of writing more than Irfan Husain’s column in the Daily Times today. In the best of times, Irfan is out on a pretty obvious mission to astound his readers with the depth of his urbanity. These inanities usually take the face of decidedly under-developed Wodehouseian prose breathlessly relating tales of his pigeon hunting in England’s rolling countryside.
Sometimes even Irfan raises the bar for himself, today is just one such day when he outdoes himself, for today, after a ramble neither here or there about us going down the drain, he leaves us with the following:

Tailpiece: Although there is not much to be thankful for after October’s earthquake, we still celebrated Thanksgiving by cooking turkeys. I ordered two 10-kilo birds, and Sheila (my daughter-in-law) and I cooked one each. Mine took six hours of cooking and basting. They must have been good because Shakir’s and Sheila’s friends did not leave so much as a morsel…

Read the whole piece here (if you can trudge through it)

It really is pathetic.

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