Zaheer Bhatti
WHILE increasingly possessed by nature’s warning to mankind in general but to Muslims in particular, one cannot help probing the conscience of the Pakistani Electronic Media over their failure to live up to the moral mission assigned to it as opinion-makers and not just as caterers. It is painful to see some in the media fold, asserting that their job was to cater to public taste and demand, because if that was so where was the efficacy of the mother’s lap, the role of the pulpit and the teacher’s guidance to cultivate the social instincts and beliefs of the child; media being the last in the chain reaching instantly out to individuals by choice in contrast to the managed home and the schooling environment and therefore responsible for the ultimate refinement of human faculties including those which differentiate between man and the animal.
Over half a century of media exposure had taught me that my role in the media was to guide, cultivate and refine public taste; particularly of those among them in the vulnerable and impressionable age, according to their inherited social and religious norms. My thinking was further crystallized and inspired by the words of my mentor Aslam Azhar which Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto rendered at the inauguration of PTV’s Lahore Centre in 1972 saying “You are the missionaries of this age;” words which stay inscribed in the lobby of PTV’s largest Centre.
Unfortunately as of a few decades since the mid-eighties or thereabout, the Pakistani media hitherto considered the beacon of light and inspiration, seem to have lost their way largely because of the absence of any inspiring leadership to guide the nation’s destiny as chartered by its founding fathers. Drama; the most effective platform for making conscience social statements, was at that time the hallmark of PTV and keenly sought after across the borders even though it was the lone TV outlet those days with a captive audience. But with the proliferation of electronic media channels with thoughtless unguided substance, drama has largely become pedestrian over the years and has not only vulgarized public taste but led the youth of the country astray, polluted their thinking and destroyed their inherent social values.
Any talk of religion in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan today, has unfortunately become a taboo, ridiculed and made fun of as a result of systematic inroads made into the Muslim society by the Imperial West presenting a distorted face of the Islamic faith to its vulnerable youth while offering a set of attractive looking but adulterated social values; planting in them revolt against established social norms in the name of fundamental human rights in general, and amongst the female segment in the name of gender equality and women’s empowerment in particular, breaking away from the time-tested centuries old family system, and weaning the youth away from the teachings of the Holy Quran which has provided a complete code of life for all mankind and not just Muslims.
Bankruptcy of themes and subjects for plays and features is evident from the fact that every second one either revolves around young boys and girls freely trampling their inherent values and breaking away from their families; often making emotional decisions only to end up being exploited and abused. Most Pakistani entertainment channels in their plays either show girls lured away into an imaginary world, threatening parents to ‘Run away’ from their home (obviously with their paramour) if they would not consent to marry them, girls and boys in campuses flirting and married couples cheating on each other or mismatched marriages and misunderstandings and hick-ups with the In-laws; all ending up in smoke and invariably in divorce. Exceptions apart, none of these was an issue in Pakistan until this media distortion made them into one.
The 8th of April this year left an indelible blot on my social ethos as it was the revered evening of ‘Shab-e-Baraat’ during which followers of the Faith of Islam are supposed to pray, make confessions and seek atonement and divine forgiveness for human failings, but a TV Channel in Pakistan was running a Drama-Serial at that very moment around 9-30 pm, showing a married Muslim female cheating on her lowly paid but extremely loving husband working elsewhere, eloping with her affluent boss who had succeeded in luring her with his riches and employed her for doing no job but to tender him with her personal charms. He one day makes her fly with him to another town on the pretext of assisting him in a Company Conference but actually dates her without the knowledge of her husband, to which she gladly acquiesces; shown sharing his hotel bedroom in her nighties which symbolically says the rest. And why not! Since the more emancipated among Pakistani women proudly declare that their bodies were their choice, against the edicts of God who alone reserves the right of choice over His creation.
Stories are generated in the Pakistani society also of the ostensibly more orthodox, breaking away for what they term as impracticable and suffocating family traditions in the modern day world where social honour when betrayed must not be protested, and that is where the Muslim Ummah has gone so abysmally astray; totally devoid of any grooming and clearly showing the apathy of the home environment and what it had offered to them, instead of raising them in the light of the inspiring examples of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), his family relations and his chosen disciples. In this backdrop where we are reduced to being Muslims only in name and sunk into the pit of moral degradation to such an extent that cheating on each other politically, socially, morally and economically does not bother our conscience, leave alone even a remote thought crossing our minds for introspection. Curses like the Corona pandemic descending upon mankind as Nature’s warning is but only a mild retribution; the worse being in store sooner if we fail to comprehend.
—The writer is a media professional, member of Pioneering team of PTV and a veteran ex Director Programmes.
