THE HUMAN FACE OF FATA

“When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute,” Walter Lippmann
This naturally seems a familiar statement. In Pakistan we have places made distant and unfamiliar through the unwillingness of the mainstream to try to get familiar with. The mainstream means the socio-political elite, the predominant majority of masses, and also the media. Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Fata, is an example of this “radical distortion,” both nationally and globally.
The image of Fata is more or less mythical. It has the mercurial disadvantage of ranging from bravery to savagery. Changing times have changed the meanings and then the very words changed. Traditional hospitality, once the greatest virtue of being a Pakhtoon, is now translated into tendency of harboring terrorists, while bravery is easily translatable into violence that could easily be generalized into the term in vogue, terrorism.
Now the strength (and, at the same time, weakness) of human mind is that “we are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists,” as Lippmann points out again. These pictures in our heads get transmitted through interaction with other human beings, communication, and also happenings in our individual and collective life. Our experience to distant lands was earlier restricted to verbal narratives that transformed into stories and then into books. The new world gets this through the power of the mass media.
The media is the storyteller of our times, the revealer and image-maker of distant and complex human denominations. It also decides what is far and what is near. A musical competition or comedy show in India is near, while a school in Khyber Agency is far and away. How could it happen? All the controversies involved in the former are brushed under the carpet, while all the familiarities and commonalities are taken as non-existent in case of the latter. This is distortion, plain and simple. But how does it happen? The answer is simple and complex at the same time. To keep it simple the bad sells best in the case of Fata, while the best sells the best in case of India. People are fed up with India bashing and the world also wants us to be friends. The package naturally includes a public image of steadily rising harmony through the mass media. But media is a theater of conflict; motley of changing patterns. There is an inbuilt need to strike a balance by transferring demons to another convenient location. Fata is convenient, it is globally accepted as the home to all bogeymen on the planet.
Now the challenge at hand is to sift the true from the false, the accident from the incident, and the human from the brutal. Pakistani media is unable to do this in case of Fata. Reasons are many. Being rural, which makes them a victim of urban bias of journalists, is one natural drawback Fata shares with the rest of the rural backwaters in Pakistan. Journalists are not able to overcome their urban/civilized bias, while talking about this region in Pakistan. There are also historical reasons that add preconceptions to misconceptions. Fata is seen till date through colonial glasses. This is true for all of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa, but even more for the tribal areas. The Great Game between Tsarist Russia and the British Crown preconditioned a buffer zone. The British were not in a mood to venture into Afghanistan, but they were also not very enthusiastic about anything on the other side of the Indus. To cut the long story short this part of the empire was kept as the lawless frontier. But this lawlessness was not the people’s choice. It was thrust upon an innocent people under a system of governance that still exists. But the propaganda, the mainstream propaganda at that time, declared this place Yaghistan, the land of the unruly.
Now this is the image Pakistani media carries further till date. After 9/11 this has become a global nomenclature, never overtly uttered, but always implied. There are many slips of tongue that affirm the existence of this mindset. “Name them, kill them” has worked really well. All this is propped up on the idea of “distant and unfamiliar.” The third element is “complexity.” In case of Fata complexity stems from the preceding standpoints. Perceptions are kept and then further molded through keeping the image of far and away in tact. Why do the journalists and media organizations do this? Why don’t they strive to know the human reality of the people living in this part of the country? First, “blood sells best in the media.” The owners have vested interest in keeping the devil alive. Journalists covering Fata always complain that even if they try to give the human aspect of their hometowns, it is never entertained. This, despite the fact, that every news organization has a Fata desk. The editors’ answer to it is that such news either represents vested interests or are very poorly presented. This might be true, but it is a partial truth. There are many other areas where correspondents are not unto the mark, but since these sensations sell, nobody cares. These are accommodated.
The other more dangerous aspect of this commission and omission is being part of the global media. This is the very basic fact behind keeping the human face of Fata hidden. The veil is kept tight, both by local correspondents and their comrades in main offices for the sake of their own convenience. It is true that media men in Pakistan really need rigorous training to understand and interpret the present reality. But their deliberate attempt to keep the situation complex and murky is not simply unprofessional, but criminal. Media and media men must understand the fact that by neglecting the human dimension of Fata they are actively participating in the plight of innocent women, children, young and old, people who are victims of a vicious cobweb of crimes against humanity. The children of Fata need a better world than their fathers and forefathers. Media has the power to represent them as human beings. This responsibility should be met. The child singing in India is our own, no question about it. But the child reeling under misery in Fata is also no alien.

Turning the Idiot Box into a Useful Audiovisual Experience

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads," George Bernard Shaw.
These words seem familiar. Aren't we living in a society where every word we read has a background? It is always essential reading, the most important thing. The audacity of expression is long lost, but we have also lost the courage to read what we wish, what is not essential reading, not a ‘must read’ in order to float easily in the sea of absurdity. Do we need to change? Yes we do. Reading the book nobody reads leads to indulgence in discourse nobody understands, though everybody approves. This brings the society at large into a circular discourse. The argument revolving around the news of the day. Thus, terrorism, power-tariff, corrupt politicians, and so on. This is the taste of our times. We have become men "of great common sense and good taste", social robots. We talk the talk most of the time. This makes us socially acceptable, but the cost is "originality and moral courage", as Shaw puts it.
Who leads this circle of anomalies? The media. The media is the book of our times. Every anchor is running a chapter.
We have become spectators of our own happenings. The lead role of the media is nothing new in sub-continent. This country has emerged and lived through confusing times. From the very onset there was a lot of external and unknown elements in the national discourse. The division of India, which became the Independence of India and Pakistan, entailed one of the biggest migrations in human history. Both of the new nations, Pakistan being newer than the counterpart, needed information about these deadly travels. The need was satisfied through the media and also literature, which until recently had the tragedy of the Partition as its most dominant theme. Even earlier the unification of Muslims across the globe remained one important theme for major Muslim thinkers/politicians, whose one important vehicle was the newspaper.
This defined the taste of the new nation as well as the role of its media. Current columns in Urdu newspapers are a continuation of this lead role. These roles are in dire need of change with the growth of private television, armed with live talk shows. The dominant discourse has also changed a lot. We are living in a state of war, with no definite enemy in sight. The common man doesn’t really know why his child can’t play around the way he did? What has changed? The structure of television gives us a great advantage to answer this and similar vital questions posed by the traumatised audience looking for guidance and fellow feeling.
The limitations of private TV are not difficult to understand. Private TV does know that it is the new book we all are supposed to read. What it doesn’t understand though is that due to a decade of training in self-censorship the very fabric of our self-proclaimed independent media is not fit to become the book we need to read. Private TV is new. It is not a time factor, but rather one of capacity. The workforce this medium is getting is mainly from print. Current lead TV anchors are people from print. They deal with audiovisual as they used to deal with print in the good old days. But their problem gets deeper when they are asked to do what they have never done in print, in their self-designed columns. It is live interviewing. Interview is the most difficult art for a media professional. Its scale gets even higher when it is audiovisual, reaching the highest when it comes to live interviews, and especially group interviews. This is what talk shows affecting many lives are all about. A fashion talk show is different from the ones that are based upon the day’s happenings and these are also being tragic, frustrating most of the time.
The first and foremost requirement for a TV show that provides its audience with content worth watching, is orientation training for the hot shots, known as prime time TV anchors. The men and women who have either a useless narrative, sarcastic style, or who imitate US talk shows. The aggressive style of many female anchors is nothing but an imitation of other countries. This is an ethical issue. These guys need to know the ethics of their job. This ethics is based upon social responsibility towards the audience; of not taking the audience as wet clay waiting to be moulded by the magic wands they carry in their words. They must understand the reason behind the whole media structure and specifically the needs of the Pakistani audience.
No matter how big the egos of the famous anchors, they still need training. They need an introduction to TV journalism, to the art of concept building for programs and then the selection of topics. This effort should be supported by intense audience research. This is something the whole world is doing except Pakistan. Audience research is an integral element of modern TV. It becomes an imperative when live talk shows aiming at day-to-day life affecting issues are aired.
Once they get this conceptual training they need to learn how to behave on this cool medium as Marshal McLuhan defined it quite early. It is harmful to shout on TV. It is counter productive for the participants, but fatal for the host. If the host remains aggressive all the time or tries to be sly, it won’t bring any good. There is one last genre that needs to be simply supplanted on the TV screen, no matter how useful he seems to be. This is the insipid narrator who poses as a historian, politician, philosopher, academician, reporter, philanthropist, human rights activist, and defender of national and religious ideology; the all in one package guy.
To cut the long story short it is high time to give the people their medium back. To make a serious effort in getting a TV for the audience. To give them a book to read that is everybody reads and understands.

The Media We Live In

"Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper," Khalil Gibran. We live in a world of exaggeration. A world blinded by megalomania. We are getting blind every passing day. Collective schizophrenia. It is one of the most dangerous ailments of all. But are we the only ones that are blind. We are surely the damned ones. Whatever goes wrong in the world we become the scapegoats. The world media paints a picture of Pakistanis like a people devoid of any moral obligations. Pakistani media borrows the pictures to strengthen the bias, giving a testimony against their own very people. It is true that "a good government with an adversary press becomes a great government." But the adversarial role doesn't mean borrowed spectacles. Adversary press is a press that confronts the powerful for the sake of the downtrodden; the wretched of the earth. Does Pakistani media play this role? Nowhere in sight. It doesn't own the audience, the very basic rule for mass communication.
Mass media in Pakistan mushroomed at the turn of the millennium. Idiot boxes multiplied through proliferation of private TV channels. 24/7 television is a beast that devours the existing and creates anew. Roots of Pakistani media are in the printed word, the newspaper. Newspaper industry got its vigor from anti-colonial movement, the struggle for Independence. Whenever we look back into history the stalwarts of solo journalism were all political activists. They were all using the only available media, newspaper, to further their political agenda, ideology. This made them watchdogs of political ideology, a befitting role for the times they were in.
It is also very natural to carry on this role after the establishment of the new democracy. Pakistani media remained political in nature after Independence from the British. It had to face the wrath of its new rulers, the custodians of faith and sovereignty. Muzzling the media remained the first priority of every government till date. Post-colonial Pakistan remained a pseudo democratic structure where the rich and the mighty entered the echelons of power through their might over the common man, though the facade of infrastructure conveyed government by the people image to the outside world. Media had to toe the line or perish. This lesson was repeatedly inculcated into the minds of the media by democrats and dictators alike. From beaming noise into radio speeches of the founders of the nation to nationalizing the vocal newspapers under the National Press Trust to the Printing and Publication Ordinance happened within less than 15 years of this nascent country.
Most of the mainstream got the message. The few defiant loners never mattered. State controlled electronic media, a very cautious press, and a lot of journalists forced to self-censorship are the products of the system.
Mushrooming of private electronic media brought a new power player into the game, namely PEMRA. Mainstream television has been seen as a larger than life phenomenon, capable of doing miracles to restore the democratic pride of not only the media but also the people. This is not going to happen. Big media is big business and big business is big money, needing more and more attention span of a viewer, baffled by the variety of audio-visual messages beamed into the bed rooms. Attention seeking turned the much lauded talk-shows into cockfights, sooner to become voices of the unknown by choosing trivia as topics of the day. Every TV channel set a stage for one or more cockfights, marketing the hosts and their discourse in a larger than life manner to overawe the idle recipients of the new audible-color.
Exaggerated accounts of distant happenings are systematically being beamed to people, packaged as idea of the day. As Nietzsche prophetically said more than a century earlier "Big lies are hung to small truths." This is very true for Pakistani TV. Though every debate begins with the people, it progresses and ends in abstraction. The anchor-host has the last word. And more than often this opportunity is used to give a personal message, which is either a sum total of the hour long cockfight, or something altogether out of tune with the debate. No matter which way it goes, it is never the people's way. True, it is packaged into a people's parlance, but the viewer always tries to find her/himself after the awe-inspiring demagogy.
The argument of "a new media learning the art of the possible" is no more valid. I think it is high time for soul searching, if there is any left in the so-called marketplace of ideas. Like the Pakistani nation, its TV audience is the source of all money getting into the journalist-businessmen-owner coffers. The audience should have their day. Media and media-men should learn to respect this truth. The only way to know the needs of the audience is to go through rigorous audience research, knowing what the people want to know. This is the first and most important step to avoid exaggeration that leads to loss of temper. There is a long way ahead to reach the point of knowing the art of doing a democratic, representative media. Playing the adversary to serve vested interests won't last long. It might, but it is not worth. Doing the right thing is nothing patriotic; it is professional. Experiments with exaggerations should give way to practicing the truth. This is the eternal norm of credible communication.

Small Voices for a Great Future

“There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow”, Victor Hugo
The definition of future in our land has always been enormous. Enormous in the sense of doing something big. Creating a future for a nation. A nation very abstractly defined. We have always remained a people who think big. Thinking big is good, but only if it serves higher interests and also remains beneficial to larger sections of humanity. Here thinking big never had this aim. This is the top to bottom, vertical thinking process that we persistently follow. We always wanted to build a Pakistani nation, the future of our dearly won freedom. This is a great thought. But how did we decide to realize it? We decided to follow dreams of rich and mindless who grafted ideas in isolation. Our education system, so vertically designed, indoctrinated generation after generation that we no more know how to think to get a future for a nation.
Lets think for a moment what a nation really means? It is made of individuals who could be best understood in their small interactive contexts. Contexts we know as communities. Now defining a community is another issue. If we try to get a perfect definition for every human denomination, we shall reach nowhere. Thus the famous saying: "definitions are abstractions and are never comprehensive." The easiest way to define a community is an interactive human entity that shares the joys and sorrows of everyday life in a very direct manner. There is nothing imaginary about knowing each other. If one doesn't have access to water the other doesn't have it either. Availability or non-availability of basic amenities (or luxuries) is a shared issue for a given community. Right now we are not talking about luxuries. We can't afford the luxury of thinking about a community sharing luxuries where basic amenities of life become luxuries.
What could be the definition of a future if we look at the world from the bottom upwards. It would simply be a sum total of most (preferably all) communities getting a better future. It is simple, the greatest good for the greatest number of people. How can we achieve it? Through allowing the greatest number of people get their voice to the greatest number of people. To give a platform to all and sundry (the not too positive term) say whatever the world is in their eyes. To respect this world view. To overcome the prejudice of prejudgement. To allow unsophisticated voices come to the fore. To let people evaluate their immediate environment and respect it with open hearts.
True, this is the death of the mainstream, but what is mainstream. If mainstream doesn't accept the parts that create the whole, it becomes an abstraction. And this is what is happening right now. Even when we send cub reporters to their own small villages, the very villages they left in the morning to come to the university, they get into their parent communities, their mothers and fathers, with a mainstream bias. The psychology of status at work. The "I am better than these simpletons, because I am going to give them a voice." And it is at this point that our community project fails. Our young men and women fail to recognize their own kith and kin.
Overcoming this natural bias is the art of community journalism. This is a typical outcome of backwardness, of predominant illiteracy, of education becoming a privilege. True, the few getting the chance to higher education are privileged, but this also posts a responsibility on the shoulders of the privileged. They are also ambassadors of the underdog. If they fail to recognize their responsibility and act as celebrities in the very courtyards they breathe in day and night, they are doomed. Their communities don't have a future. And if communities don't have a future, there is no nation to think about. We do need dreams to create our future, but we also need to know how to dream.
Community media is one such enterprise that needs technology and humanity at the same time. You can’t feel, you can’t film; you can’t make sense of the simple world around you. A world that is telling its story in thousands of different ways. One has to get rid of preconceptions to listen to the music of the heart. Getting into ones own parent community with a sense of superiority is the worst moral crime of all. It becomes even worse when the visit is meant to bring the reality about the life of a people. State of the art technology is excellent, trainings are a must, but a good heart is a precondition. Journalism for the voiceless is still a mission. It always will remain one. This is one reality never going to change until all ills of human survival on this planet are defeated. Until then we have to keep the torch burning high and bright.

Of Knowing Men to Remain Human

“Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor - all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked - who is good? Not that men are ignorant - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.” W.E.B.Du Bois, Souls of the Black Folk
The idea of know thyself as the highest good offered by Socrates and immortalized by its inscription at the Delphic oracle has always been an easier said than done axiom of human existence. How do we know ourselves? How do we know others? Do we meet the other beyond good and evil or we always compartmentalize human capacities into ostensible yardsticks developed by time-ridden ideas born to be transitory? Compartmentalization of other individuals and groups into black and white, into true and false, into good and evil, making it easy to issue verdicts but very difficult to do justice. In such quests for righteousness we always forget that all the ideals human beings follow are destined to decay. Ours will have the same fate. It is humanity alone that survives.
Humanity is the most oft- and yet ill-defined precondition of our existence on this planet. Now how do we define humanity? Is there a certain way, a method? For many there is, but for a few there isn’t. Let us talk about those who defy the orderly definition of humanity. Who think being human is the greatest good unto itself. Living human and letting others live a human life as the ultimate act of humanity. This very emotion gives birth to the noble human capacity to do good to the point of sublimation, of achieving the greatness to forgive and forego. To forgive the mistakes of others, mistakes that might be a simple difference of perception, or even something not easy to digest within a given time and space dispensation, the environment in which we are born and brought up, the culture, our heritage and our identity.
From this point onwards the journey of sublimation enters the phase of foregoing. Of unlearning what we cherish as heritage, as culture. Every humane movement in the history of mankind has this distinct feature as the cornerstone of its development. Those who cannot unlearn are incapable of innovation. And those who can’t innovate perish. They cling to worn out ideas till the ideas have worn them out. Iqbal prophetically said in his lectures “worn out ideas are never risen to power in a society that has worn them out.”
Now the dilemma of our nation also lies partially in this crisis of identity. Though no single factor could be cited as an ultimate reason for good or evil even for a single individual, let alone for a society. Each reason constitutes the fabric of the whole. From the very onset Pakistan has been a battle-place of ideas. Vertically grafted ideas, ideas developed by a small elite from the figments of their imaginations, have become the test of loyalty for the nation. Every individual or group, no matter how original or large it might have been, has had to fit into the frame. People with distinct cultural identities and histories were declared enemies of the state, because they were not able to remake themselves into the imaginary national identity. The irony is that this class never believed or practiced it, but still vigorously imposed it upon the masses through the media and education. They did this is a soft manner while the writ of the state was often used to decide such conflicts of identity. The ones who dared to differ with the mainstream being the ones in conflict.
Preconceived notions of national identity damaged the organic growth of the state and society. Thus, the absence of leadership and grassroots democracy. Democracy cannot flourish under preconditions. Indeed, the greatest precondition for democracy is the absence of preconditions. As Bernard Shaw aptly put it: “There is only one golden, rule that there is no golden rule.” Looking for golden rules drives a society into ideas of utopia and utopias are never human. The common good cannot be predefined, because the common man acts most, thinks least. This is why Freud once said,” Civilization is best served by people who don’t even know the meaning of the word.”
If we start talking about the mistake we, as a nation, made and continue to make, it will become an unending tale of woes. Let us not talk about it. It will bring nothing but leave a bad taste in our mouths. Let us be positive and talk about what we can do. We need to reorient ourselves. First and foremost we need to unlearn the compartmentalization of others into boxesof ethnicity, sects, creeds, and language. A multi-threaded social fabric like Pakistan’s cannot exist with such pretentions. Tolerance is not a natural, inherent human capacity. It is developed through the use of the faculty of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not offered as a favor to anyone; it is respected as the right of other not to be harmed by our prejudices. When we forgive someone we should always keep in mind the fact that we are sublimating our own beings to a higher level. Not simply letting a culprit lose.
Our society needs this soul searching immediately. It is already late in the day, but it is never too late to do good. This is the only way we can save ourselves from the “tragedy of our age…of knowing too little of men”

Media For the Commoners

"It was that simple. Chou En-lai knew that he was addressing lonely men, men whose mentalities had been branded with a sense of being outcasts. It cost him nothing to make such a gesture, to speak words of compassion. He offered no programs of industrialization, no long term loans, no mutual defense pacts. To the nations smarting under a sense of inferiority, he tried to cement ties of kinship." Richard Wright, The Color Curtain.
This is the voice of compassion we direly need from all quarters. The have-nots of this country have become a city within the city, the city of the poor. Marx’ words about being two cities within a single city, one of rich and one of poor, can easily be generalized for the whole Land of the Pure. What does the city of the poor, that part of the nation that is the dominant, silent majority, reeling under abject poverty or a minority among them (the so called middle class) ready to go down the spiral to be devoured by it, need to become part of the scenery rather than being the spectator?
What can we offer and how can we do it? The how becomes more important than the what because we have to look for venues of compassion. The only compassionate partner of modern men and women, no matter how backward he/she is, is the media. What type of media might bear the word “compassion”? It is community media. What is community media? Even the present day mass idiot boxes pose to be community spokespersons through giving local tickers and making a mockery of people's miseries by claiming to be “the first on the scene”. They don't qualify to do it. There is no question about it.
Community media is a media that develops out of the needs of a smaller human denomination and responds to its needs, answers its questions, and advocates for its needs. Corporate media, the media running on fear and favor, to be precise, do not qualify to do it at all. The needs of the impoverished and those "smarting under the sense of inferiority" can only be met by something more altruistic. Here again many will object that such an arrangement is impossible in the world of cut throat competition. This is also what we call mediated reality. If good schools are possible, and good hospitals are possible, than why not an altruistic community media? The need of the hour is to understand the meaning of this important phenomenon. To understand how it operates.
First, community media is a patient, audience-based enterprise. One should have the patience to listen to stories and also the acumen to tell stories. One can never tell a story if one is not positive enough to listen to one.. Our mainstream media malaise of stuffing people with preconceived questions is not of any use. Questions must arise from the very soil and souls that are being presented. It is their version of reality that is important, not what we decide is important in our cozy (and not too cozy) drawing rooms. Our being "knowledgeable" is the worst qualification for the job. We need to "come to" them "with the trust of a child," borrowing the words from Peter Gabriel's famous song “Red Rain”.
The very word community media means it is their media, not someone else's. The second most important step is to give the people their voices back. It should not transmit messages in "packages", giving the name of the reporter and the channel that streams it. The person and the community should get their name acknowledged. It is important to build confidence and develop a horizontal system of communication. People should get their views back in a form where they can see themselves; individuals as well as communities should be able to identify themselves. It is the same with movies and drama all over. And those with the tall talk about objectivity know well that there is none. The most objective is what helps the people who lay claim to it the most. That doesn't succumb to narrow, vested interests. If we make this the yardstick there don't exist many. So, enough of the objectivity chirping. And still it is objective. It is never based on fables. It is the truth of a people. Let it be in the open, let it see the light of day.
There is need to develop a network based upon community radio (the most effective), newspapers, or even TV that uses reporting methods in a humane manner. The above picture is one such example. The little guy is feeling comfortable with the camera. He is interacting. The kids are not afraid. They are enjoying being part of the process. All this comes after a patient hour or two. The reporters roam in the area with their elders, listening to their stories, the little ones watching the whole process. Then comes the moment that they let themselves play around in front of the camera. And all this ends up in a photo (also a video clip) where the media is no more an outsider.
The need of the hour is thus to develop a network that lifts images, without bias and prejudice, from the simplest level of human existence (and these shouldn't be social outcasts, exceptional problems), to the mainstream. Every part of the country should get its share of presence on the national mainstream. This can only be done if we learn the art of reporting for the poor, understand the need of "cementing ties of kinship", to give the silent, dominant, unrepresented, but never honored majority of this country, a voice.

Empathy Design for the Water Struck

"Nothing can describe the Confusion of Thought which I felt when I sunk in water; for tho' I swam very well, yet I could not deliver my self from Waves so as to draw Breath, till that wave having driven me, or rather carried me a vast Way on towards the Shore, and having spent itself, went back, and left me upon Land almost dry, but half-dead with the Water I took in."
Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe defines a very pertinent human condition. A condition we can sympathize with, but can not fathom. We need not to fathom it. Our responsibility is not to analyze how much pain one (or all) felt when they suffered at the hands of water. This is done. People are left "half-dead." Don't need our analysis. They need our understanding. The question is how to understand. The instrument of understanding is naturally our heart and mind. It is being fed through information. Information that comes through different sources. One being the modern mass media. Media brings sorrows and pleasures from distant, and also not so distant, lands into our immediate presence. But media always brings in bias with it. It prioritizes one happening over the other. It helps and blurs our vision of reality at the same moment.
There are but other human faculties that help us understand the sorrows of the ones who are "left upon the land almost dry." The best instrument is identification. Identification is the human faculty of putting ones being in other's position. We cease to remain human once we are unable to empathize ourselves with the ones whom we consider our own.
The people who are left in the lurch by the existing disaster are a resilient genre, since "Pakistani society is a pain absorbing society", a German TV channel commented at the very beginning of the disaster. The aids to our perception, namely the media of mass communication, are but an important instruments in this struggle against the inevitable. Natural disasters can not be stopped. These are the testimony of power of nature over the struggle of man to survive. But disasters could be managed. This could be done through preemptive training or post disaster management efforts. The time to preemption is no more. It has already been lost. reasons are numerous: inability of state and society to understand the meaning of interactive, community based, responsible, humane structures could be cited as the main reason. All the talk about corruption, inefficiency, and many many other ills could be brought to one point: non-participatory, vertical system of social interaction, in simpler but more elusive terms absence of grass root democracy; democracy whose natural outcome is responsible attitudes, not only in the political sphere, but more importantly at the social level, down the very grassroots.
This is the problem lying at the heart of all problems of relief and reluctance of the world to come forward with hearts and minds to help a disaster clearly accepted by the world as one of the worst in recent history.
Media could be used in two ways in the present crises. One is the mainstream media. This could be used in a proper manner to cover the disaster. Here, despite the intensive debate on the issue, a coherent understanding of the issue is absent. Anchors with urban bias reaching a devastated site, camera focussed on them most of the time, their will be done all the time, people shown as third world miseries, while the guy sympathizes with them, isn't any service to the people at all. Now if we turn to the other side of the equation, we see the same overdressed, unpreparedness in the newsroom. Guys this is no Eid transmission. Be human. Try to empathize. Your images are being floated for years and all the viewers appreciate your appearance and mannerisms. This is ensured. Now let humanity flow through your body, your word and your body language. No training can teach it. It is you who can unlearn pretensions, harmony with the hapless will naturally flow through you and become an integral part of the image world. And believe me you all will look much prettier, once you become more humane.
The other important media is altogether missing in the present episode. Not that it has been snatched away or swept away by floods. It never existed. This is community media. We do have FM channels, FM radio. The anomaly between cheap and handy broadcasting and community service has shown itself at the worst moment of our history. The times when this country needed this mouthpiece of the poor it doesn't have it. FM community radio stations went through many phases in Pakistan, but never reached the destination. From hobbyists, to militants, to the money mongers, to aid aspirants; but never to community journalism.There is a dire need to instal FM radios in the camps or in the immediate vicinity. Many would think of this idea as a mad man's dream amid such a situation where people are suffering in all possible ways.
I can understand this and also empathize with the feeling. But at this moment of dearth of resources we should not underestimate the role of this cheap and handy instrument of communication, this voice in the neighborhood, the voice next door. At a moment when we have least resources, this handy media could help managing them through bringing awareness among the affected people. Health and hygiene, helping the people through trauma, information about what is available and what is not, and why, wether updates, and update on conditions at the homes they left. All this could be done most easily through interactive broadcasts on community channels. How will people listen to them, how will they respond? Mobile phones helped people to keep in contact with their near and dear. Every villager buys a phone that could catch FM radio. This job has already been don. What is left is the government's (PEMRA's, to be precise) earliest decision to draft a contract structure for issuing community radio licenses. PEMRA can do this, They are neither struck by the disaster nor are busy in relief. Their bit would be to make it possible for the ones left high and dry to get a taste of grassroots democracy. To get the best gift in the worst times.

The Pashtoon Problem

"How does it feel to be a problem? they say I know an excellent colored man in my town; or I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word."

W.E.B.DuBios' words about African Americans could easily be used for Pashtoons in Pakistan. I am born and brought up listening to the question by our countrymen. The word problem is easily interchangeable with Pashtoon. "How is it in Peshawar. They say it is too dangerous out there", a young Karachite asks on phone the other night after telling me that 12 buses were burned that evening, there was no electricity, and that he was scared to death after seeing these horrors. "This is routine here and I am sick of it. I was so stressed I thought I would get some peace after talking to you." Like DuBios puts it, I didn't answer a word. I didn't say how can he ask about the wild Frontier with such fear, if he is feeling unsafe in the megapolis. I couldn't dare say, out of courtesy, that the whole house is on fire. The problem is not only being born as Pashtoon, but we are all living and intensifying the problem. We have become the problem.

But the child in the image doesn't know how we are being depicted. She doesn't even know she is born a problem, she is Pashtoon. She even doesn't know her home is no more, her parents might be drowned, everything lost, nothing left. She is just looking out for someone to come and help her out. She exactly doesn't know what she needs; might be feeling hungry, having a temperature, or feeling damp and cold.

The catastrophe that struck KP is enormous. It has swept away the whole region from Gilgit Baltistan to Nowshehra in one day. The steep terrain didn't give anybody time to settle or even grasp the real intensity before it destroyed everything. UN lost one of its biggest warehouses in Asia. Fifty thousand tons of food commodities washed away in a day, only a couple of thousand left. Immediate relief became impossible. Relief agencies are still grappling with the situation.

But the important question is how our countrymen see the problem. "Experts" are weighing the veracity of statements issued from KP. "Saying Northwestern Pakistan is the most impoverished region in Pakistan is statistically incorrect. Baluchistan is poorer." "And this street talk about KP being neglected has not been proven."

Look at the child in the picture and tell her she does not deserve food or shelter, because "statistics" don't support her need. The problem is not whether there is enough to satisfy the needs of all that have been affected by this catastrophe and that not everybody's needs could be met immediately. Some will get relief soon while others might have to wait. Waiting might cost some their lives. All this understandable, though not easy to live through.

The problem lies in not being able to raise above the narrow parochial thinking. Of not being able to get out of the divisive mode of US and THEM. Of seeing the Pashtoon as a problem. Of not seeing these impoverished people as worthy of our national sympathy, of being mainstream Pakistan. Where will all this lead the nation, if there is any left after all this narrowness. Isn't it high time to come out of our shells, see reality in the face, and understand our inner problem of seeing the other as a problem, of making a problem out of our own very national organism.

People of KP are in trouble. There are more dead in a few days than the toll countrywide during continuing disaster, the "slowly approaching Tsunami." The swiftness of destruction caused enormous damage to this already battered part of the country. Let this smaller time window not add to the miseries of these people. Let neglect not add fuel to the fire of annihilation. let not innocent linger and die because they can't statistically prove their haplessness. lets be human once in our national lifetime. This might be beginning of the long awaited nation building, something that we only witness on TV shows on Independence Day festivities, festivities that went on even amidst the cries and shrieks of the God forsaken problems.