اُردو میں بلاگ لکھنے کا مجھے تجربہ نہیں ہےلیکن محسوس ہوتا ہے کہ بعض باتیں
اُردو میں زیادہ دلچسپ معلوم ہوں گی۔ اس لیے "تاحکمِ ثانی" اس بلاگ کو اُردو کے لیے مختص کیا جاتا ہے۔
ایک وجہ یہ بھی ہے کہ پرائیویٹ چینلوں کی وجہ سے نئی نسل اُس اُردو سے بالکل دُور ہو رہی ہے جو ہماری نسل کو سرکاری ٹی وی اور ریڈیو وغیرہ کی بدولت مفت میسر تھی۔ یہ الفاظ "تاحکم ثانی" اور "٘مختص" اسی ورثے کا حصہ ہیں جو بچپن میں پی ٹی وی کے خبرنامے میں اتنی دفعہ سنے کہ یہ پوسٹ لکھتے ہوئے بلاوجہ استعمال کرنے کو دل چاہا۔ چنانچہ ایک خیال یہ بھی ہے کہ شاید اُردو میں بلاگ لکھ کر نوجوان پڑھنے والوں کو اُردو سے قریب لانے کی اُس کوشش میں حصہ لے سکوں جو بہت سے دل جلے اور دردمند آج کل کر رہے ہیں [ان میں سے
بعض اگر کرنا چھوڑ دیں تو اُردو دوبارہ مقبول ہو جائے گی]۔
بات کُھل گئی ہے تو کیوں نہ کُھل کر کی جائے۔ وہ تمام لوگ جو یہ بلاگ پڑھ رہے ہیں اُن میں سے جن کی عمر تیس برس سے کم ہے میں اُن سب سے یہ کہہنا چاہتا ہوں کہ آپ کو کالجوں اور یونیورسٹیوں میں جو کچھ بھی پڑھایا جاتا ہے اور پڑھایا گیا ہے وہ آپ کو ملک اور قوم کے کسی کام آنے میں مدد نہیں دے سکتا۔ خواہ آپ کا مضمون کوئی بھی رہا ہو، اساتذہ کوئی بھی رہے ہوں اور خواہ آپ نے کہیں سے بھی پڑھا ہو۔
مجھے اس بات میں شبہ نہیں کہ خدا کی مہربانی سے پاکستان میں ابھی ایسے بہت سے اساتذہ ہر سطح پر موجود ہیں جو صحیح رہنمائی کر سکتے ہیں۔ آپ کو بھی میسر آئے ہوں گے۔ لیکن اُن کی وہی باتیں آپ کے کسی کام آ سکی ہیں جن کا تعلق نصاب سے نہیں تھا۔
گزشتہ پچیس برسوں سے جو نصاب ہمارے تعلیمی اداروں میں رائج ہیں وہ نصاب نہیں، زہر ہیں۔ اگر آپ نے کسی اعلیٰ ادارے میں تعلیم حاصل کی تو اعلیٰ درجے کا زہر پیا ہے۔ ادنیٰ ادارے میں تعلیم پائی تو ادنیٰ زہر پیا ہے۔ اگر ملک سے باہر کے کسی ادارے سے ڈگری پانے کی توفیق ملی تو سمجھیے کہ درآمدشدہ زہر پیا۔ لیکن اگر آپ یہ سمجھتے ہیں کہ تعلیم ایک زہر نہیں ہے تو سب سے پہلے یہی غلط فہمی اپنے ذہن سے نکال دیجیے تاکہ آپ دوبارہ زندہ ہو جائیں۔
ممکن ہے آپ کو یہ بات کچھ عجیب لگے۔ بالخصوص جو لوگ میرے انگریزی بلاگ پڑھنے کے عادی ہیں انہیں شاید کافی فرق محسوس ہو۔ مجبوری ہے۔ زبان کے ساتھ لہجہ بھی بدل جاتا ہے۔
بہرحال آج مجھے اسی بات سے آغاز کرنا ہے کہ تعلیم ایک زہر ہے۔ اس کا یہ مطلب نہیں کہ آپ تعلیم حاصل نہ کریں۔ آخر سگریٹ بھی زہر ہے مگر لوگ پیتے ہیں۔ کچھ عرصہ پہلے ایک شخص سے ملاقات ہوئی تھی۔ اُس کی ملازمت یہی تھی کہ اونچی اونچی محفلوں میں جا کر لوگوں کو ایک مخصوص برانڈ کے سگریٹ پینے کی ترغیب دے۔ اُس برانڈ والے اُسے بڑی معقول رقم دیتے تھے۔ چنانچہ اُس شخص کے لیے تو سگریٹ کا زہر پینا اپنے پیشے کے لحاظ سے ایک مجبوری تھی جس کی بدولت اُسے کلفٹن میں گھر اور نئی گاڑی ملی ہوئی تھی۔ اسی طرح تعلیم بھی ضرور حاصل کرنی چاہیے جس طرح اُس شخص کو سگریٹ ضرور پینی چاہیے جس کی آمدنی کا انحصار ہی سگریٹ پینے اور پلانے پر ہے۔
لیکن وہ شخص بڑی غلطی کرے گا اگر سمجھنے لگے کہ سگریٹ پینے سے پھیپھڑے مضبوط ہوتے ہیں، دل کی بیماریاں دُور ہوتی ہیں اور کینسر کا علاج ہو جاتا ہے۔ بالکل ایسی ہی غلطی اُس بیچارے کی ہو گی جو سمجھے کہ تعلیم حاصل کرنے کی وجہ سے اُس کے علم میں اضافہ ہوا ہے یا سمجھ بڑھ گئی ہے۔
کل پرسوں مزید فرصت ملتے ہی اگلی قسط پیش کروں گا تاکہ بات واضح ہو جائے۔ فی الحال آپ ڈنٹونک کا اشتہار دیکھیے۔ کسی نے اپنے دل کی "ایک" مراد پوری کرنے کے لیے یُوٹیوب پر چڑھایا ہے۔ آمین۔
Dawn.com reports that the attack on Pakistan Navy's installment in Karachi, which started last night, has come to an end.
The 14-hour long siege of the Navy's sensitive installation raises some pertinent questions: most importantly about the role of media in Pakistan. Can we say that the way the media covered the event, and the spirit in which it was being analyzed, was up to the mark?
Personally, I felt that some of the analysts were insensitive and condescending. They were complaining that the Pakistan Navy did not offer complete information about what was going on inside its besieged complex. Some of the gurus complaining in this manner were the most sought-after media persons. Could they not realize that this was not a cricket match.
What about the need to remind the people to stay calm? The need to reinforce national unity? The need to reinforce discipline, herd-instinct and showing a good civil sense?
This was a small showdown. There can be a bigger event in the future. The question we may have to ask is whether our media is capable of playing the role the media of any country is required to play in the face of a national crisis?
The following is my article published in Dawn Images on Sunday, January 16, 2011.
How did the New Year arrive thirty years ago? It was 1981. The interest-free banking got introduced that day. The new Islamic century had also started a few weeks earlier, and the media was abuzz with relevant content. Since the state-controlled PTV was the only available television channel, the nation had no choice except to watch the faith-strengthening programs – along with some very entertaining ones, such as the hilarious Fifty Fifty (and Show-Sha, the debut stage show of the host Anwar Maqsood, starting a few days after the New Year).
Then, of course, there was form of diversion that would happen when a rented VCR – a prohibited item at that time – was sneaked into a household, and the entire neighborhood might gather around it for watching some illegally imported movie. The pious and the innocent had started turning their backs on the national film industry, in favor of Indian movies.
This winter of our discontent was warmed up a bit by the “summer of ’42”. Nahin Abhi Nahin, directed by the progressive Pakistani filmmaker Nazrul Islam, had been released a few weeks earlier. It had introduced newcomers Faisal Rehman (known by the screen-name “Armaan” at that time), Ayaz and Fauzia Ahmad (known by the screen-name “Aarzoo”). These kids were the talk of the town, and a tie-in advertisement of a certain paan masala had popularized them even among those who had not seen the movie. The movie itself was not perceived to be anything but a coming-of-age comedy at that time, but was it just that? Or did it have some political connotations that were missed by the suspecting censors and may only be discovered in retrospect?
The story begins with the Aligarh syndrome of a poor couple from a village wanting higher education for their son, Armaan (literally meaning aspiration, and apparently an allusion to the 1966 blockbuster movie of that title).
The son grows up, is sent to live in a hostel in the city and accompanies his street-smart roommate Bobby (Ayaz) to a park where the authorities have prohibited the plucking of flowers. “These excessive prohibitions are conspiracy hatched against us by a few fanatics," says Bobby. An old gentleman interrupts him compassionately, "No, my son. This is how we, who are your elders, are offering you guidance." When Armaan takes sides with the old man, Bobby responds by singing a song which, at least in retrospect, can be taken as the most poignant criticism of General Zia's version of "Islamization" to come out during that period: “Kuchh bhi karo yeh rokayn…” (“Whatever we do, they stop us; and object to each and everything; they have got nothing else to do; but they are from a time bygone, and this is a new age, so you better salute it!”). Armaan actually “salutes” the “new age” and is chastised by the memory of a beating from his father (perhaps reminiscent of the famous lashing of the rebels in the earlier days of the martial law regime?).
Armaan wears a burqa while Bobby dons a shirwani and false moustaches so that they may look older and be allowed entry to a theater where the famously tantalizing movie from the Hollywood, Summer of ’42, is being shown “for adults only”. Likewise, the innocent-looking schoolgirl Aarzoo, who develops a liking for Armaan, has very little appetite for the hardcover books handed down to her by her moralizing father, and prefers the thrillers written by James Hadley Chase (the Corgi editions published in those days used to come with notoriously revealing pictures on their covers). In her dream she sings to Armaan, “Bun jao tum filmstar…” (“Become a filmstar…”) but wakes up with a disturbed mind when, in the same dream, she envisions his later years filled with problems stereotypically related with showbiz fame: alcohol, women and loss of true love.
Did these confused fantasies not foreshadow what was actually going to happen soon after the end of the 11-year-long Islamization of General Zia? The schoolgirls of the early 1980s have grown up pretty much the way Aarzoo would have: they are the middle class women of today who patronize Indian soap serials and “permissive” reality shows, while complaining at the same time that the media is corrupting the morals.
Shabnam, the great legend of our silver screen, was presented as herself – in a manner of speaking. As the most popular living legend of our silver screen, she may well deserve to be remembered as the nearest female equivalent of Waheed Murad. In Nahin Abhi Nahin, she is given her own name – “Ms. Shabnam”. Her personal life is depicted, not necessarily as it was in reality, but almost certainly as the cine-goers of the period would have fantasized about it. She is shown to be living independently in a luxury apartment, painting pictures for a living and hanging out in posh restaurants with her female friends. She is easily moved, and has a kind heart, but also possesses a well-developed sense of moral responsibility.
This is the older woman whose gestures of kindness are misinterpreted by Armaan, apparently because the boy’s head is filled with fantasies borrowed from the Hollywood and he cannot help imagining Shabnam as “Dorothy” of Summer of ’42. Armaan’s quest after her – with haunting lyrics from Suroor Barabankvi and music from Robin Ghosh, ‘Saman who khwab sa saman’ – may well mirror the anxieties of the generation growing up under rigid laws and finding its personal space in permissive fantasies. The struggle of Armaan and Bobby to grow up “before their time” (a recurring motif in the film) was remarkably in sync with an era when unrest was boiling up in colleges and universities, mainly over political matters that were not usually seen as the legitimate concerns for students.
Regrettably, just as Armaan fails to realize that Shabnam is not Dorothy, we may have failed to see the difference between our filmmakers and their foreign counterparts. Despite its superb entertainment value and a liberal attitude towards life, Nahin Abhi Nahin is a moral agenda rooted in the vision of the founding fathers of the country. Rather than sounding out of place, Armaan seems to be truly presenting the essence of the whole movie when he speaks his last lines to Aarzoo: “Our elders are right. Flowers that bloom before their time also die premature. I shall eat this fruit but no, not just now (nahin abhi nahin).”
On the right you see the titles of two new publications that have just hit the stalls in Pakistan:
پاکستان کا قومی ترانہ از عقیل عباس جعفری
Secular Jinnah and Pakistan by Slaeena Karim
On the face value they may not seem to have anything in common, since one is just about the national anthem of Pakistan whereas the other seems to have a broader scope as it might be telling us all about Quaid-i-Azam’s vision of Pakistan. Personally, however, I see these two books as interconnected (but I am not suggesting in any way that the authors would also agree with this). This will be discussed in the next post.
Let’s daydream about the culture of reading in Pakistan: When I walk out of my house, I find a small library in every few lanes. People are so eager to read that they pay for borrowing books. These libraries lend books on daily rental fees.
Due to these trends, even general stores have started keeping books: the cold corner in my neighborhood makes more money selling books than it does on ice cream. The topics of books on these counters range from fiction and poetry to general history.
If this is just about shops which are not even book stores then you can imagine what proper book stores are like. There are at least three or four big ones (and a few book rentals) in every major market of the country.
Films and popular television serials spawn several unofficial tie-in books published by amateurs. These books also sell well, so nobody can say that the popularity of film or television is cutting down on people’s reading habits.
Publishers are growing like mushrooms, and there are more of them in low-income areas. In any such vicinity, you would easily find ten to thirty people who have published at least one small book in their lives.
Children read books because everybody is talking about them: if they don’t catch up on the latest fiction published for children in Urdu then they would have little to discuss with friends at school, most of whom are found comparing their favorite authors with others’.
Before you read the next paragraph, take a few moments and ask yourself: Would you like to see it happen? Would you like to be part of any effort to make it happen? How much time and resources would you be willing to spare, personally, if a serious effort was made to this end? But do you that this is possible in Pakistan any time in the future? Pause here and answer these questions before you read the next paragraph.
Now consider the irony. This is not a fantasy about the future of Pakistan but about its past. This is what our society used to be in the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s. Remember?
Why do you think this has changed? What went wrong?
Picture at top right shows the fiction-writer Ibne Safi (right) at Aziz Library, Nazimabad, in 1963. The thirtieth death anniversary of Ibne Safi passed yesterday, July 26, 2010.
Man wants to know the truth, the truth about himself, about the world, about everything. This is what they call the eternal quest for truth (Rashid Minhas, 29 October, 1969, Risalpur).
Educational Resource Development Centre (ERDC)
and
PAF KIET
cordially invite you to the book launch of
Rashid Minhas (Urdu)
the first full-length biography of Pilot Officer Rashid Minhas Shaheed, N.H.
by Khurram Ali Shafique
6:00 pm - Friday, July 23, 2010
At PAF Kiet (City Campus), 28-D, Block 6, P.E.C.H. Society, Shahrah-i-Faisal, Karachi
Kindly confirm ERDC for participation
at (021)36723454, 36051229
or info@erdconline.org
Samri the magician created a golden calf which could produce sounds. Many started worshipping it and Moses asked one of them, "If it was a miracle that you required in order to believe, then I showed you so many but you defied me. Samri showed you only one and you came to believe. Why is that?"
The conversation is perhaps imaginary but it serves a purpose and Mawlana Rumi spells that out in his Masnavi. Souls tend to get impressed by what is according to their own condition.
In Pakistan, we often say that our education system has given too much importance to Western literature at the cost of our own, but saying that is rather like missing the whole point. Whether it is Western literature or our own, the educational and academic institutions have shown a tendency towards falling for the worst rather than the best - just like the worshipper of the golden calf who defied the miracles of Moses but bowed down to the magic of Samri.
One of the greatest names of the West which we have ignored is Goethe. Iqbal said about him, "It is not until I had realised the infinitude of Goethe’s mind that I discovered the narrow breadth of my own." Consequently he modelled his second book of poetry, A Message from the East (1923) after Goethe's Divan. After this, if we exclude Goethe from our sylabbuses we shall be cutting ourselves away not from German heritage but our own.
Still, we find that Goethe is not included anywhere in our syllabuses. Instead, we find the syllabuses to be filled with those degenerate Western writers who were catalysts to the fall of their own societies rather that contributors to its rise. Western writers representing trends that were described by Iqbal as "poison" for societies breathe that poison into our classrooms while those Western writers who had been strongly recommended for us by Iqbal have been ignored! So, it's not about East or West after all. It is rather about choosing good instead of bad even when the good can be more useful.
Recently, through some comments from a respected American reader of these blogs, I realized that Goethe has not been marginalized in Pakistan only. Connie L. Nash writes, "I don't remember him ever coming up as a student anytime during my many many years of study - even when I took lots of humanities, literature, philosophy and international writers as optional studies for my own interest."
I am inclined to conclude that we have been living in an age when the seats of authority in humanities and literature came to be occupied by trends that were diamterically opposed to the sense of life represented by the likes of Goethe and Iqbal. In this age, some lip service was done to these geniuses, since they had become too legendary to be ignored. However, their life and work was not approached according to how they would have liked it to be approached but instead it was interpreted from a point of view against which these benefactors had been warning the humanity.
One result was that most biographies of Goethe and Iqbal do not corroborate their works. The other result is that a modern reader does not know why to study these writers, or how. I hope to touch upon these issues in subsequent posts but perhaps at least for Pakistan it is time to rediscover that great connection with the German thinker which our own national poet established on such strong foundations and left behind for us as a lasting legacy.
The following is part of an email I received from a young student on my post 'The Valley of Wonderment, 1987-2006'. I am sharing it here, and shall soon try to answer the two questions asked at the end of this excerpt:
As you say that the bookstores, libraries and cinema houses were fast vanishing when our collective life started to live in the Valley of Wonderment (1987-2006), which left the young minds of Pakistan in bewilderment. Their questions were left unanswered. Though if there had been some efficient means of bringing them closer to the literature Pakistan have produced, the films we have made and the messages our heroes have tried to convey through them, they certainly could have found the answers they were looking for. Also being in this ‘Valley’ the youngsters probably had little choice as to whom shall they make their role-models. Patriotism and positive thinking was there, but it had no direction to follow (as you quoted "they are in love but do not know with whom").
Yes, there was a time when all I knew about myself or the world was what others told me. My life was hollow and I had no solid reason to live, and consequently had no idea how shall a life be spent. Be it politics, philosophy, human behavior, arts or religion, my thoughts about life were quite superficial, dealing only with the surface, never looking for anything deeper inside. This was the time I stayed in the ‘Valley’ and although my efforts had no specific direction at that time, still it turned out to be fruitful as I was able to observe people and histories at that time which acted as a base for my future ideas and thoughts.
And now you have made me believe that every person has to pass through this stage. Perhaps it is some sort of a ‘grounding stage’ and sort of compulsory as well.
If yes, then that means that it had to be a part of our history, so that we can ask as much questions as we can, collect material which can help us fight our doubts and also in our future journey. I have always heard praises of the 20 years you have termed as the Valley of Wonderment, that there was peace all across the country, we had fewer problems and things were calm, and nowadays there is unrest everywhere, also in the heart of every Pakistani. From youngsters to their parents, from established businessmen to working class, everyone is in a strange quest. And now I feel that the ‘calmness’ of that time can be termed as ‘a collective slumber’ which ended to bring this ‘activity’ and ‘hustle and bustle’ of life. Today nearly all of us feel a need to change and revolve, although every single human being evolves in a different way, and we need to merge all the different frequencies of change in one wave of revolution.
Although I myself have not seen the James Bond film you are talking about, still I can notice the close link it has with the Pakistani public. And also ‘Living on the edge is the only way Pakistan lives’ is so true a statement! Living on the edge gives us strength and it prepares us for future, just like mechanism of immunity prepares antibodies for future use.
Now my questions to you are:
Am I right in saying that Valley of Wonderment provided a grounding stage for us as a nation, and no matter what, every great nation has to experience it?
Also, I have seen many people full of patriotism and good feelings for Pakistan but they hardly perceive depths regarding many issues faced by our country. So it can be said that they are on the right track but they still have to pass the ‘grounding stage’ and have to focus their energies more precisely?
These writings which I am collecting as Cinema and Society, Up to 2006, trace my journey through questions and explorations in film criticism theory from 1987 to 2006 (see “the Valley of Wonderment”):
Sometime in the mid-1980s, in the Urdu edition of UNESCO’s magazine for the youth, Payami, I saw a write-up that drew connections between the rise of cult heroes and social circumstances prevailing in their times. The figures studied there were Dilip Kumar, Waheed Murad, Amitabh Bachan and Michael Jackson.
A little later, around 1987, I came upon British Cinema and Society, 1930-1970 by Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate (1984), which showed that feature films represented an important and largely untapped source of evidence for understanding the history of the present century. The authors had tried to answer some simple questions about ten British movies:
What was the society's general attitude towards an issue that was picked up in a movie?
What did the movie say about it?
How was the movie received?
These ideas never left me completely as I went on exploring other dimensions (especially Auteur, feminist, psychoanalytical and anthropological approaches). Even material written about Indian cinema from these perspectives was rare to find in Pakistan, and absolutely very little was being written about Pakistani cinema that could be comparable with such studies. I had seen some old issues of Eastern Films, an exquisite magazine about Pakistani cinema published from Karachi in the 1960s and the early 1970s. Hence I knew that there had been a foundation that could be built upon. However, i
ndigenous parameters for evaluating our cinema were either non-existent or had been worn-out already. I had to do my best within frameworks acquired from elsewhere.
The advantage was that my writings were readily comparable with some credible stuff being written abroad because I was speaking in the same terms. They may still be of interested to a wider audience than some of my new ideas and be useful for universities interested in a Pakistani perspective on cinema and society within the widely known parameters of media studies.
The fifteenth film in James Bond series appeared in 1987. Unlike in the West, The Living Daylights became quite a sensation in Pakistan. We had participated in the Afghan War of Liberation for years and had felt the pinch too: drugs and guns smuggled through the open border were seen to be destroying the more sophisticated culture of Pakistan. James Bond in shalwar kameez, helping Afghan freedom fighters not because it was his war but because he was trying to save the world, blowing up a hyper billion shipment of heroine together with the C-130 military aircraft carrying it, rescuing the starry-eyed Russian girl from the clutches of bad communists and listening to Mozart in the music halls of Vienna: the allegory could not have been more complete for the urban Pakistani ("Living on the edge," the film poster was saying about the hero. "It's the only way he lives."). I watched the movie seven times in a cinema in the city center and invariably the crowds included diverse cross-section of the society from the most educated to the unschooled and the working class.
Ibne Safi was now dead for seven years and Waheed Murad for four. Bookstores, rental libraries and cinema houses were fast vanishing. Pakistan was soon going to depend on imported fantasies not only for its politics, religion and education but even daydreams. Welcome to the Valley of Wonderment.
I call the twenty years from 1987 to 2006 the Valley of Wonderment in the history of Pakistan because Sheikh Fariduddin Attar has described the valley in The Conference of the Birds as a place where the Unity previously written on the souls is gone. Travelers do not know whether they are dead or alive, awake or asleep, and all they can tell is that they are in love but do not know with whom. There cannot be a more apt description for this phase of our collective life.
Our intelligentsia had been working for it. Since 1936, they had not used any parameters that were our own and had redefined originality as an exercise of imitating "high literature" of the West in the vernacular. What was recognized as the best of our own had been defined by the West too, so it was only natural that the entire society should finally give in to foreign influence whole-heartedly. Hence we asked questions that wouldn’t have arisen if we had known ourselves better (questions about identity, for instance).
These questions gradually came to resonate in my writings too. At least for me it is ironic that this period was my most productive (I was nineteen in 1987, so the Valley of Wonderment was my prime time). I may not agree anymore with a lot of things I wrote then, not because they do not seem to be true anymore but because now I feel that it is possible to look deeper and find other realities beneath the surface. Since the Valley of Wonderment was to see things essentially through approaches that prevailed elsewhere, it meant to find and enjoy contradictions in personalities and to take the benefit of doubt in ideas. When looking at Pakistan, it appeared nobler to search for an identity rather than finding it.
I am still preserving my writings from this period on my website, as many as I may find and possibly upload, because many are good hard work (the Valley of Wonderment is also the phase of erudition). These were also the days when I was reading a lot, and diversely, and that reflects here too. Some pieces also present field research that could be useful in its own right. On the whole, these are my notes from the Valley of Wonderment, which I understand to be a state through which many have passed and many more are bound to pass, and that is yet another reason to preserve these writings as first hand account of the experience:
