Mega Painful

MARCH 2002 - Putting together mega events needs mega organizational skills. This commodity, we don’t have. We have never had it and, from the looks of it, never will. There are a million details that need meticulous attention and demand the highest standards of professionalism. We have yet to understand how stages are constructed, how lighting is organized and how the entire show is choreographed. In fact, the hype of braggarts notwithstanding, we can’t manage to get a dozen people on stage or off stage without making a hash of it. Since we can’t even manage the basics, the rest can only be an unmitigated disaster. This was the precise distinction that the much-hyped Lux Awards achieved. If the original show was the equivalent of the Titanic going belly up, the TV version of it, both cut and uncut, was another epic disaster.

From all the reports emanating from a blustery and windy Karachi February evening, made more Heathcliffian by the cavernous stage where scooters to transport guests, comperes and winners from point to point would have helped, it seemed that even the elements lost their cool and blew away the amateur organisers. The stage encouraged and enticed the winds to howl from end to end, sending coiffures into seizures, dresses into disasters and threatening to blow away the assembly of Pakistan’s dull glitterati. As with most things where we have to manage three or more people, pandemonium reigned supreme – evening to night to next morning. The show began a cool four hours late. This is now a standard Pakistani feature, which keeps everyone in a vice hour after painful hour. No show can ever begin on time – it is against tradition, culture and probably law as well. There is no escape from this torture, unless aliens take over the planet. The chances of that happening are as remote as Nawaz Sharif developing brains.

Guests who were foolish enough to arrive at six pm died slowly from boredom and stiff bottoms as the hours rolled on – there was mayhem in supreme glory all around and it took a heavy toll of the brave and foolhardy folks who had wangled invitations using all their clout, only to gape at a stage that looked like the launching pad of a space probe. A show, which starts at ten pm and is still not over at 2 pm, has to be banned simply on the grounds of cruelty to guests. An exhausted Salima Hashmi escaped at 2 pm and was one of the lucky ones – two days later she was still lux-lagged from the experience. Perhaps the others weren’t so lucky. It is still not known precisely when the last awards were dished out – a task made a wee bit hard by a backstage explosion when a model not having been favoured with the tacky award, got into a rage that is often exhibited by starving grizzly bears, and proceeded to physically demolish as many awards as his hands could manage before being overpowered by on-lookers. Organisers, not very bright to begin with, then had the daunting task of snatching awards already given, from highly suspicious winners to present to the hordes of winners that were pacing like caged tigers waiting for their piece of meat. In a country where the next man will respond with undisguised hostility were you to ask him to share a piece of toilet paper with you, the winners developed into the armies of Attila the Hun and more mayhem ensued. How they managed – if managed is indeed a word one can use, will remain a mystery.

There was something of a record in disasters set that evening – or should one say morning? The nominees got all mixed up, chief guests ended up on the wrong side of the stage, cues were quite, quite absent, nobody really had any idea what they were supposed to do – or as was the case mostly, not do. The Chairperson of Lever Brothers had to climb, without the aid of climbing gear, a ramp designed for Land Cruisers and having reached the summit, saw a podium in the far distance towards which she bravely began her journey and reached it in a few weeks time only to stand in solitary suspense because the lady who was to give her the secret nomination paper, was at the other end of the planet Mars and that was a few light years away. In the end, somehow the two met and the mayhem was able to continue. Other epic events unfolded in a performance that must have had the gods in fits. Those that announced the awards, those that compered (or as we call it, compared) the show, those that got the awards and those that gave them, all were highly unaware of what they were supposed to do exactly – the result was uncertainty and mistakes galore – and it didn’t stop for a glorious minute.

There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that putting together such an event requires – well just about everything that mankind knows. It is not enough to have a few big names like Freiha Altaf – dubbed the maestro in organizing such dos, at the helm of affairs. One needs an army – isn’t that what we all need – of real, hard-as-nails pros, who know exactly what they are out there to do. A nation that thrives for its life on chaos can only create a disaster. In all the years that they have been doing these shows, they still haven’t figured a way out to bring people on stage and take them off it, without causing total confusion. This flow is critical and it doesn’t happen just because you have one and a half rehearsals and tell everybody, ‘let’s do it.’ Unlike their contemporaries in the west, our people – and that means everybody, walk as if they have already died. There is no bounce, no zip and no vibrancy. The same dead walk becomes a dead expression and the awards are given and received with the same enthusiasm as demonstrated by very wet blankets on rainy days. Everyone associated with such undertakings – which incidentally is not a bad way to explain it, seems comatose, so if the audience is not dead with exhaustion, it dies with boredom. And because the awards are not really deserved, they are received with bored faces and dull responses. Trust us also to launch another farce by awarding two awards together – who ever heard of two architects winning the first prize or two models? Don’t annoy anyone. Right? Right. They might as well have given three first prizes so that everyone could have gone home happy. No, the Lux thing was a lot of soap in your eyes and all that it did was leave you weeping. Admittedly, the sponsors must have blown away obscene amounts of money and Ms Catwalk must have made a packet – and worked her cute butt off, but if you are a pro, you cannot unleash such nonsense on the people who have little to cheer about all year round.

As for PTV, God bless their little black hearts – they are a blot on the face of this nation. It is – and for years has been, a bastion of do-gooders, holier-than-thou cows, Uriah Heeps, groveling sycophants and morally dead wood stumps. These men – mostly it’s men who have filthy minds, see sex in a log of wood and have as many standards as broken piss pots have edges, have perverted the nation for years seeing things no one else can. Their morality is ugly and yet they hold sway adding to the starvation and perversion that’s seeped into our daily lives. It was a mistake to hold the Awards; it was a bigger mistake to put them on PTV. Pity no one learns.