Giving it a miss

NOVEMBER 1998 - One of the wisest things I do, and there are not many to grace that list, is giving public functions a big miss. Somehow, call it native cunning or a streak of light that showed the way, I have come to the conclusion that there are better ways to waste time than sit in an auditorium surrounded by people you have never seen before and never will again in all probability and spend hours hearing one speaker after another bore the living daylights out of the public that happily flocks to such punishing rituals.

It seems to me that this nation, flush with time as it is, has no compunction about traipsing off to wherever they are called and spend any amount of time attending functions whose main purpose seems to bore you to death. It doesn’t say much for the public, but I suppose for the vast majority that arrives at these dos, it is the preferable choice between attending that torture-lecture or standing on the street corner playing with your nose. In any case, most attend out of sheer boredom or for the most trivial reasons. This too is not hard to understand. Pakistanis have an in-bred system where they dislike doing things on their own. It is not unusual for them to tag along to functions where they are not invited or join in for wedding receptions simply because the pal they were visiting happened to be going to one. So given such easy going ways, it is not a surprise when three who are invited to another interminable seminar arrive with another three who happened to be within earshot. This may explain the large number who grace the various functions that are held with monotonous regularity where the bulk of the invitees wears a perpetual vacuous look together with glazed and rolling eyes, droopy eyelids and even more drooping jaws. Such inspiring sights are revealed to one and all at the 9 p.m. show every night when credibility is strained to an unbelievable level by the fiction writers hired on cheap rates in Islamabad. To that show is added the footage of the function-attendees and the parade of speakers who arrive and depart from the stage after saying more or less the same thing that half a dozen others have already said. Yawn. It makes for scintillating drama, one that keeps this nation on its toes all the time.

Actually the whole business of these boring functions has been going on ever since Mr. Jinnah (not the Akbar S. Ahmed variety I am afraid) bade a hasty farewell to this rather odd country he had helped create. From then on, we have been feeding off seminars, conferences and what many newspapers still call, moots. The drill is invariably the same. Any amount of people with free time and limited imagination organise a seminar. It doesn’t really matter what the subject is or who is being honoured. The more obtuse the issue and the less known the person, the better. The luminaries who set the ball rolling ensure that large cauliflowers are procured even before the agenda has been finalised. These vegetables are then pinned on their mostly stout frames and are displayed long before the spectacle is opened and long after the last bored guest has trudged off into the sunset seeking more capital punishment. Even in the vegetables there is a pecking order. The important organisers have larger vegetables and the smaller organisers, smaller veges. It is a sort of democratic tradition though I can’t for the life of me think what cauliflowers have to do with democracy. The rest is easy peasy. A stage with thirty six chairs to house the speakers for the event, with one ornate and larger chair for the chief jest. A banner proclaiming the event is stretched from one end to the other so that the television cameras have no choice but to film the banner when filming the event.

As the speakers take the mike and hold forth, they are heartily applauded, because this is essentially a scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours network. In any case, the speakers are thorough professionals who move around all day in search of opportunities to bore the public. These are usually, but not confined to, newspaper editors and owners, retired judges, bureaucrats, technocrats and generals, the last category born again democrats once out of uniform, intellectuals, the most over-rated species in town after the Iguanas and other fossils floating about in the city. Most of them make the same speech but because they do it one after another, the public end up hearing it all. What is truly amazing is that in Pakistan there is no topic that can be discussed in a public forum unless twenty four people expound on it. The topics cover every subject under the sun and beyond it, but for the most part these usually revolve round such ancient cliches as ‘the role of democracy,’ ‘indo-pak relations’ and ‘the meaning of Islam’. In between there are those interminable memorial wakes where tributes are heaped upon ancestors of limited ability but unlimited hype and other public figures being honoured on a particular day by those with well-established vested interests. Since this is a very large club that exists by feeding on one another and growing, no one is ever going to expose the whole rigmarole. For one thing, no one would believe it and the hocus pocus that has been going on ad nauseum will simply continue.

As and when PTV dutifully reports it, the news report is the last clowning glory of the whole farce because the cameraman on duty only shoots the speakers in mid speech and when he has done that two dozen times, he rushes back and edits the whole string of beans together. What the viewer ends up watching is a Charlie Chaplin footage with the speakers jerking as if currents of high voltage are pulsing through their systems. They are all raising angry fingers in the sky and shouting, but you can’t hear a thing because TV never records the real speech, just the voice over in the studios. In a way I suppose we all should be grateful for this unintentional act of mercy.