The Reluctant Gunner

In my younger days, 1970s and 80s, it was a common sight to see men, young and old, carrying guns everywhere in Hashtnagar, literally meaning eight cities, the area that includes Charsadda and 7 other towns in the area. Guns were carried while travelling in bus or walking around, being on a bicycle or riding the newly introduced motorcycles. Even the Imam of our mosque, who used to visit only for Friday prayers from Shabqadar, used to carry a German C96 Mauser, a big pistol with a wooden holster. As kids we used to fancy the gun more than the sermon and looking at the firebrand while he used to deliver his Friday sermon; and then shaking his hands after the prayers was a rare pleasure. He was a very kind man, soft spoken, gentle, and always delighted to see the kids coming to the mosque. These were the days when guns in Pashtoon society had nothing to do with violence. Violence was there, but every person carrying a gun weren't trigger happy. True, there were family feuds and other issues that ended in violent encounters, but it was nothing compared to the state of affairs we are in at the present.
The tragedy in Charsadda has brought the brave side of Pashtoons to the fore. The professors sacrificing their lives to save their students and students and local staff defending the university are acts of bravery that have been lauded nationally as well as globally. In the mixed expression of grief and frustration we have seen outcries like "we don't need laptops, give us guns", and many similar slogans. These are very natural emotional expressions after the loss of so many lives and the emerging sense of mistrust in the state institutions to protect educational institutions, especially those of higher education. But all this fury and anger should't make us blind to the very purpose of having educational institutions, higher education in particular.
The emerging debate of carrying guns for the sake of personal security and collective good on campuses is not an easy question to answer. This has nothing to do with the Pashtoon traditions, the sacrifice of teachers and students, the bravery of these young men as well as the local staff. There is a deeper moral question involved. A question that could not be brushed aside in the sentimental remembrance of a past that looks pretty through the lens of nostalgia.  The last few decades were the years of the rise of education and that of the importance of the child in a family in this region. These were also years of the rise of nucleus family due to increasing number of working class Pashtoons. The youth got educated and started looking for jobs. A working class mind always thinks about getting a better career, looks for better schools for his/her child, and, naturally, likes to avoid anything that threatens their job security. And what could be more fatal to job security than a family feud, an old enmity, or a new one. Had there been any older scores to settle, the Pashtoon working class avoided getting into new ones.
Marx was right while saying that cultural change happened best through the change in the instruments of production. The land tillers got into 9 to 5 office routines. Sons (and also daughters) bringing cash on a given date was a great help to support the farming family. Slowly but gradually everyone wanted to have more and more of their family members into jobs, preferably government jobs. The change in the instruments of production also brought change in the family structure. Nucleus families emerged out of the ages old joint family system. The nucleus family brought one necessary change with it: the rise of the importance of the child. The little guys became the centre of attention of the parent. The bread winning father and the house-holding mother's focus of attention is now the child. And what is the most important thing for a child after a healthy meal, clothing, and health? It is education. Look at the network of private schools in every nook and corner of KP. Look at the rise of universities in every corner of the province. And not only are there universities, there is competition among young men and women to get admitted into these universities.
What does it signify? It signifies the emergence of a new paradigm. It is not simply a paradigm shift. Pashtoons have reinvented themselves in one of the darkest hours of their history. They have decided to transform the tribal tradition of gun loving folk to that of book loving, education thirsty nation. This is the new national identity of the Pashtoons. Our decision to work at universities and the youth's to get educated there is a cultural change, made through a moral decision of a people who see life differently. This is the social role this new Pashotoon society has assigned to teachers and students. In the same way we have abdicated the gun loving and carrying role in favour of the security apparatus of this country. Asking us to perform a social role we no longer own is too naive. It is not possible to go back to my childhood days and watch "Tamache Mullah (The Religious Scholar with a Pistol)" in the Friday sermon. He is no more there, nor is anyone with any semblance to him. In the words of Iqbal, "Worn out ideas could never rise to power in a people who had worn them out".
The right thing to do is to support and sustain universities and all teaching institutions perform their social role and make it possible for the institutions responsible for security to perform theirs. It is never about expediency and ad-hocism. It is about firm decisions keeping in mind the right roles each and everyone among us are destined to perform. Pashtoons are courageously going through the worst of all times. The national leadership should recognise it and make sure that this cultural progress is respected and defended. This is the basis of a true national unity. A nation failing to achieve this doesn't stand a chance in the comity of nations.      

Portraits of Grief: Helping the traumatised through story telling

Men die but dreams survive. Each of us will die with a dream, a longing for tomorrow. The same happened to the young who died in Charsadda. Every death leaves some dreams behind. But the sudden, unexpected departure of any youth leaves a lot of unfulfilled desires. In places like Charsadda it is not only the dream of a person, but that of a family, a village, a small town, a group of humans that die an untimely death. It is more the death, than the way it happened, that matters. The manner of death is a transitory story. It is important, no doubt! But life has to go beyond it, no matter what. Media is the conveyer of information about such heartbreaking happenings. It is but also the image factory that represents a people, happening, the aftermath, and the followups. The first function, naturally, is to inform a larger public about what happened. But then begins the phase of understanding the cultural context of the tragedy. Spot coverage and answering the immediate questions is important and there is no journalism without the spot coverage. But there are limits to continue with the same basics. Professionally and ethically there is need to build the capacity to switch from the news narrative to the human context. Following up on the same news spiral brings audience and media fatigue, which kills the story too early. It never helps understand the human problem a tragedy creates and leaves behind. It just keeps it a gory memory. The inability to follow tragedies from a human perspective is one great weakness Pakistani media has to learn to overcome.
How to do justice to this human function of the media? This is possible through opening the canvas of media representation beyond the spot coverage. People live and die in communities. They have lives that stretch far beyond the happening that brings their lives to an end. They live in the real human habitat, the human environment. Once the immediate fact finding and representation is over, the media has to follow up into the real life circles of the victims. Journalism has a responsibility to represent the community the victims belonged to. And this effort should not be focussed on finding clues about the happening. Not at all! The very reason for this is that communities under trauma need to be represented in the media. This is an ethical burden media should be readily able to shoulder, whenever the need arises. This need visits us too very often nowadays in KP and FATA, but the media, unfortunately, fails to respond each time. When tragedies strike a human denomination, journalistic responsibility goes beyond the narration of happenings. It stretches into the realms of integrating the community, keeping the collective psyche together, healing the wounds of the bereaved, and giving the sense of togetherness at moments of collective alienation.
How is it possible? Story telling, simple story telling! Don't let numbers make humans disappear. Always keep the human alive. In the present case, the number 21 or 22 has simply impersonalised the young souls. Weren't they young individuals with living lives, families, loved ones, loves, and places to go and likes to like? They surely were. But why to quantify them beyond recognition? I think none ever gave any serious thought to the fact that we have eliminated the very human aspect of the tragedy through a routine ritual, the counting game.
Don't universalise! Making larger than life characters out of human beings is no tribute. It doesn't help. Keep them human that ordinary mortals, their community and many other similar human beings, could identify themselves with. The misplaced idea of heroism being something abnormal, larger than life, is primitive. Death already reveals a lot about a human being. There is nothing more than the loss of a human life for a people who love the person. They need support, identity, and fellow feelings to overcome the grief. They need to see how their loved one is being portrayed. And what could be the best portrayal than the way the person lived? Just do that, if you want to help and put your bit into helping a people out of trauma. The person has family: a mother. Did they speak with their mother? What were the dreams they used to discuss? And please, don't bank upon misery. Don't use the wailing of a mother to develop a story. Get information from sources that are in a position to talk normally. Everything could wait, literally everything! A friend might be a good source to talk. A village elder might tell you about the young man who used to have a chat with him whenever he was home on the weekends. Don't go for extremes. Try to keep it normal. Keep in mind that the aim of such portraits is to help a people, not to make them a spectre of helplessness.
It is always about life, about the next day after the tragedy, about the stream of life. The human function after the tragedies is giving the survivors and relatives of the victims a closure that help them live through hard times. Another aspect is to make a larger audience understand how tragedy affects lives in general. This helps in developing a lager community, a partnership in grief. The sharing of grief is always soothing and it helps a lot. A people who know that others are also feeling their pain could overcome the trauma easily. They can easily defeat alienation, individual and collective. It is also vital to understand the difference between misery and grief. Journalists too very often think that a wailing female (mother, sister, victim) projects a tragedy best. This is untrue, and extremely unethical too! Being miserable doesn't create a bond. It simply attracts the audience for a moment and then shy them away. Nobody wants to see miseries all the time. People have their own baggages to carry too. It causes depressions, traumatises the audience. This doesn't mean that the audience is not interested. They are, more than anything else. But one has to give them something to relate to. One has to give a context to which they could relate. They are ready to understand life beyond the immediate happening. To know the life cycle of the victims, the normal selves before the last breath. Why do they take such interest in it, or why should they? Because they could identify with the stream of life. If none could identify with a happening, the marathon transmissions, and all the air and space dedicated to the coverage of a tragedy is in vain. Catching traumatised people and asking nasty questions to make them cry is not journalism at all. It is the rating race. Grief doesn't necessarily mean the weaker side of a human being. It is the total reaction of a person or a community to the loss of a person (or persons) who are important in the life cycle of the people. Portraits of grief are showing this place of a person in the community. And the portraits are nothing but a holistic image of the life of a community with the understanding that a community is the basic unit of human interaction. A journalist representing this unit properly is doing his/her job properly. If not, there is a lot to rethink!

The Academic's Burden: Offering the Thematic of Development in Everyday Journalism

Universities are based on the idea of giving fresh concepts to the societies that constitute them. Educating the students through granting degrees is one visible output. But this is not the core function. The modern market driven function of supporting the market falls too short of the very essence of having a university at all. Universities are not there to stuff the markets with whatever the market demands. It is not a supply system for a demand driven elite. Universities have a higher human function. Market might not be human. It, in fact, never is. A university exists for the very purpose of making things right and not simply "make things run". The question of what a university discipline should offer differs from discipline to discipline and from one time and space to another. Journalism, mass communication, media studies, and similar mushrooming nomenclatures are testament to the existence of a rapidly changing discipline, possibly a discipline that yet has to coin its very definition. One thing is but for sure: journalism exists because there is media! What should it do then? Serve the media, fulfill the market demand? This seems an obvious answer. But here we are confronted with another question: why does media exist? Because of the audience? Again, a simple and straightforward answer. But this makes things complicated for media education. The role of media educating institutions is not to serve the media market. It is, in fact, to serve the society that is constituted of human interactions and not institutional elitism. University education in the discipline of journalism, the business of reporting in all forms, is to make sure that this function is performed properly by the media (or whatever form of mass communication exists in a given society). Thus, the watchdog function over the very watchdog (the media). KP and FATA are one of the biggest sources of news in our modern world. The occasional rise of other centers never diminished the importance of this part of the world. The biggest problem with all this fame is just notoriety, not popularity in any positive sense. The world has known this part of the planet through the Afghan War, beginning in the late 1970s. The war never left this part of the world. 9/11, terrorism, drones, the war within Pakistan, and all that could go wrong here as well as its "consequences for the world", remains a topic of global interest. The local in Pakistan is also shaped by the global. So is the power of hegemony!

Since the world media attention became the reason for the very introduction of this part of the world in news, it, naturally, gave the global interest ascendency over the local. There were no skill sets for the local or national in this part of the globe at that time, and this remained the case for years to come. War sells best. It's true for any news media. It sold the best here too. Young or experienced, all journalists aspired to cover war and conflict. The coverage was, however, never controlled by the local journalist. The local journalists are almost always at the supply end of the news material needed by the international (sometimes the national) journalists that the local journalists cater to. This stringer function has not allowed the local media or system of journalism to develop its own shape. There is a rising sense of loss among the journalist community in KP and FATA that their contributions to the media networks around the globe is not helping their own life cycles as professionals. Unfortunately, it is adding to the notoriety perpetuated through the global media complex, highlighting a moneymaking cobweb to exploit the weak local media structure and a feeble capacity base of journalism professionals. The way out of the routine is not easy to find and the measures resorted to by individuals and institutions, remain "desperate" at their best and pathetic at their worst!

This is the point where academic responsibility comes into play – the urgency to offer something that could solve the social conundrum. We face a problem whose manifest results are known, along with the root cause, but there is no indication of the way out! The way out, the alternative, is a different skill set that could be used to work a new narrative that is positive, but newsworthy at the same time.  Offering a positive alternative in the midst of sea of negativity is not an easy task to accomplish. Market shows its real colors by resisting any effort to change the status quo. Any remote effort to make a dent in the moneymaking process is not welcome. Surely, developing a positive alternative in our case is destined to change the very status quo and affect vested interests within the global media complex. It will also affect the global image factory that runs on the very idea of keeping the bad boys bad and the good ones good.

For the media complex, it is not easy to adjust to newer positive images, after trading negativity and selling it profitably for almost four decades. The national and global political interests are also closely tied to the media hegemony and imperialism. The development of new themes thus becomes the responsibility of an institution that is not part of the media routine, but it is still too close to understand the dynamics, the needs, the problems, and the potential of the media. This is what an academic institution is about. It is not giving daily laborers for the routines, but innovative ideas and spaces that could help media perform the social service it might be failing to render.

The need of the hour seems to be giving this faceless part of the earth a face: a Human Face. We need the Human Face of KP and FATA in the media. The routine only keeps the negative one for its daily consumption, both at the national and global level. The space for development journalism is limited, if at all. It doesn't even exist for the whole of the country, let alone for a part of it that is viewed by many as wretched. Trading misery has become the trend in Pakistan. Most of our so-called development content is about oddities or miseries. Emphasis, workload, agenda, routines, and many other reasons deter the individual journalist as well as the institutions from doing anything innovative. In desperate efforts to make a difference, journalists and their respective media institutions resort to different stories. Even senior practitioners are not able to differentiate between investigative journalism and development. Many take infotainment, entertainment, and other soft themes as development. Some go the length of taking the pain of doing documentary content with a touch of misery or novelty to satisfy their urge to do a different job beyond routine. All this points to the simple need to develop an independent space where the themes are not simply developed, but also practiced. Such a space where high-quality and creative content is presented for sharing. Free of cost, no strings attached! Such a space can be offered only by a university whose primary purpose of being is the pursuit and propagation of knowledge.

JMC, UoP is ready to develop and share this space through its website for development journalism. The very local concept of development journalism has been devised according to the local needs. But these needs have been measured through a global lens, glocalised over the past five years. It is time to present the product that fit into this frame in keeping with the market needs. The development of a good concept is not difficult. Every academic could do it. It is the marketability of the concept of development that is the challenge. A product based in a definite concept of social service but complying to the needs of the market is the task. The website exactly aims at doing this. Development is an inclusive concept. Here, we have an aim. Development journalism is doing journalism with a sense of purpose. At present the underlying concept is to give the Human Face of People of this part of the globe. This is an ever-evolving paradigm. It is a process of social change with a dual function: transforming the narrative within the media as an institution on the one hand and serving the society that provides the base for both the media and the educational institutions, on the other. None could predict the time frame for change, but at the same time, no one could argue the fact that it is high time to make a sincere, full-blooded effort, here and now!