A Sign of Things To Come?

Watching PTV recently on a Sunday night, one happened to come across something quite extraordinary, perhaps a sign of things to come. The much-talked about show featuring pop group Fuzon’s catchy tune Deewaney was aired with Resham and Bollywood heroine Urmila Matondkar featured in it. Actually, it was quite a long programme, which began at 9:40pm and went on for an hour. The Fuzon video was shown right at the end, with the rest of the show basically being a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the video.
Called Moving Closer, the programme was funded by the United Nations Development Programme, trying to capitalize on the great thaw in relations between Pakistan and India these days. Urmila was the star and focus of the programme -- Resham was really only seen in the actual video of the song – as the camera followed her all over Lahore. She was shown travelling along the mall in a silver car, followed by a police mobile, but several times she would get out of the car, her head covered by a dupatta, and walk about the street, including one time when she hopped on to a tonga.

The video showed Urmila being received at the Wagah border crossing by an over-dressed and over made-up Resham. It then had clips of her three-day visit to Lahore and ended with her departure at Wagah. The last scene has the camera -- from the Pakistani side -- looking to the other side, through the white grilled gate with Urmila visible in the far distance, and waving at it. Before the segment showing the music video begins, Urmila is shown at the Wagah border post. She is standing in the garden in front of the building used by the Pakistan Rangers and is seen crying. She is crying apparently because she is about to go back to India, and she doesn’t want to go back. Urmila is shown hugging the producer of Moving Closer, Huma Beg, but before she does that she addresses the camera in a very shaken voice.

“We have had enough now. It’s been so long and after all these years it is time that we became friends,” Urmila tells the camera.

What is perhaps extraordinary is that this programme, presented by Serendip Productions, was shown on PTV (not PTV World) -- the terrestrial channel seen by Pakistanis who do not live in the cities. A few years ago something like this would have been unimaginable. In fact, in the late 1990s, Junoon was rapped by the Ministry of Culture when Ali Azmat and Salman Ahmed said similar things to the Indian media while touring that country. Surely, the decision to broadcast the whole programme, including Urmila’s well-timed remarks at the end, could not have come without approval from the highest level. Maybe it is a sign of better things to come.

Perhaps it is for the better that PTV is finally showing such programmes, especially since many people in Pakistan, particularly the younger generation, would probably identify with what Urmila said about the ‘we have had enough’ bit. The question is, when will this change show up on the rest of the channel’s programming, especially in its main news bulletin? Is that going to change too, or will we continue to have more contradictions like this? Perhaps, the answer to that will be seen as the future unfolds.


First published in Dawn on April 25, 2004.