Should I stay or should I go?

So they say

Misconceptions, misrepresentation, misuse. These are the three words that jump to mind every time I gather the stamina to click through the many local music channels on the tele.

Many believe them to be good for the “Pakistani pop industry.” They say channels like Indus Music and Musik are the two leading reasons behind the quantum growth of pop artists and bands seen in the last two years or so. Is this also why GEO is now planning to come up with its own music channel, AAG?

To keep the momentum going and to help the local scene to grow further?
If your answer is yes then you better think again. In fact, look at these channels a lot more analytically. Without the rose-coloured glasses manufactured just for you by the roaring partnership of the seth-owners of these networks and the multinationals.

In other words, these channels have little or nothing to do with any of that “idealistic” hogwash about wanting to see the scene using artistic, aesthetic and social development as fodder for growth instead of the usual multinational patronage and network favoritism.

In the name of “professional survival” and “business,” these channels have opened their doors to the most ubiquitous and amoral forms of commercialism, using music/videos and related programming that are absolutely nothing more than glossy vehicles to carry loud TV commercials, crass animated flashes of various brands and scripts (for VJs) who talk more about the wonders of these brands than the music.

And when they do talk, it’s usually utter nonsense! These kids masquerading as VJs know extremely little about pop music as an art-form, even when talking about the one “thriving” in this country. It seems to them the world and its history started sometime in 1998 AD and everything before it is useless and thus not to be bothered with. They like their history to develop in a vacuum. No wonder I once heard an IM VJ actually calling an old Vital Signs song (Hum Tum) “a classic Juniad Jamshed song.”

Such glaring mistakes on these channels are a commonplace. There’s absolutely no accountability in this respect. Fine, most of them were toddlers in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, but hey, their bosses are now as old as my tahya!

But why should the tahyas care? Their buck stops at the amount of sponsors there channels and their pretty lil’ VJs are drawing. As long as they can convince a cola company or a biscuit brand or a challia maker that their channels are the place to unload tons and tons of their self-glorifying chants and images and where the VJs are dumb enough to equate “progressivism” with outright amoral commercialism. Their salaries depend on it. The truth is they should be paying sensitive viewers like me to watch them!

Nothing wrong in the whole idea of trying to run a channel with the help of the sponsors. Most (if not all) private and as well as state-owned networks do this. But there’s a way to go about it. A way to throw in the sponsors’ messages and commercials without ending up ridiculing the content of the sponsored program or video.

For example, in no other country (including India, mind you), have I seen 20-minute plays abruptly (and continuously) interrupted by 50 minutes of mind numbing commercials and even during the programs one can always expect being bombarded with blinking flashes and irritating scrolls carrying advertising messages and images. One can also see serious talk shows and news bulletins suffering the same fate.

Do all these musicians and actors know that once their faces come on the screens they can expect animated oranges, cola bottles or Tatra packs come out of their ears and noses or hover irritatingly over their heads?
What does this do to art-forms like music, video making, or tele plays? Never mind the creative merits of the usual executions of these art-forms. The fact that most of them are as mindless and amorally done as these commercials and snippets, the point is, the art-form they are pretending to emulate get mocked, insulted and ridiculed by such no-holds-barred commercialism.

When the doves cry

Indus Vision’s Chairman, Ghazanfar Ali, is a strange man. Strange not in an interesting way, but in a scary sense of the word!

His network of channels is way up-front in catering to the jumbled tastes of the post-‘90s “ABCD\Burger\Mommy-Daddy\etc.” generation, but quite like ARY-Gold and GEO, it tries to “balance” its batch of gaudy commercial mess with frequent episodes of religious programs.

It is quite like kicking off a fashion show with talawat and, of course, a naat. This allegory should (and must!), seem surrealistically awkward to a secular minded person, but in Pakistan it is tolerated as a rational matter-of-fact happening, no questions asked.

About seventy percent more glitter is all that separates Indus, GEO and ARY from the state-owned PTV. Because the truth is, PTV - as it continues to try ridding itself from the flaws it mostly inherited from the reactionary and myopic policies of the Zia tyranny in the ‘80s manages to pull more intellectual punches and “quality entertainment” than its “independent” and more “liberal” privately-owned counterparts.

But as these privately owned networks go on exhibiting their unabashed and consciously amoral desperation for quick corporate bucks, they have found great moral convenience in airing some of the scariest and most warped “religious affairs” programs this side of the Zia-era-PTV! And interestingly, these programs are put forward as religious dialogues supposedly conceived, conducted and produced by “Islamic scholars” and “intellectuals” instead of the politico-religious propagandists who had a field day on PTV during the Zia regime.

Of course, this is utter bullshit, really. All this is no more than a clever but clear practice in sheer business-related cynicism. A cynicism first given social and political currency by the Zia regime. A practice that almost sees the beginning of an “immoral” act being started with a “Bismillah.” And as the years went by this practice has devolved into a pathetic apologetic stance embedded in the mind-sets of all those wanting to do anything which would qualify as art or entertainment. Thus, the talawats and naats at various social functions and also the mandatory ode to God and country by pop stars. But how does this make Ghazanfar’s Indus Vision the scariest of them all?
As GEO and ARY parade a mixture of new and old “scholars” basically trying to justify the whole idea of the “wise” clergy guided Islam in the amoral, over-informed (but not necessarily knowledgeable) post-Cold-War world, strangely, Indus Vision continues to air Saudi-made documentaries that “scientifically” pitch the Quran against secular matters like Darwinism\Theory Of Evolution, Dialectic Materialism and Marxism. Did anyone tell Ghazanfer Ali that the Cold War was long over and that atheistic
Communism was no more Islam’s greatest enemy?

These documentaries are quite like the nice, polite propaganda films and books that are so friendlily distributed by born-again Christian groups to “souls corrupted by Satanic messages in music and the arts.” And they would have been an apt ploy had this been Zia’s paranoid, anti-Soviet Pakistan and had the youth of the day been singing praises for Chairman Mao and Lenin and Che Gurevara.

But what the hell can such “the Quran said so” brainwashing achieve in a world where the majority conveniently juxtapose the glitter of Calvin Klein with the charisma of Hazrat Ali and where if one wraps hijab and burqua around the publicity-hungry and ambitious Britney Spears she would become a raving Ferhat Hashmi, dig?

This is like creating more confusion out of confusion. Or worse: Ready another generation of “Islamic scientists,” no, not the kind that gave Islam its Golden Age and played a huge role in influencing the Western Renaissance, but the sort so well blasted by Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy in his book “Islam & Rationality.” Men (yes, just men), who were given millions of rupees by the Zia regime to conduct ingenious and awesome experiments such as trying to derive electricity from the jinns or calculating the speed of the heaven.
This makes Ghazanfer Ali’s idea of Islam (or for that matter liberalism), a far worse and dangerous (and idiotic!) presence compared to an irrational, rabid mullah who at least has a singular, self-defined position and doesn’t mind being called a crack pot. He does not quote and interpret the Quran to call his actions rational and scientific. In fact he does not give a shit about rationalizing his obviously irrational, crude and sometimes violent actions and ideas. He’s a fanatic. Period.

Actually, come to think of it, Ghazanfer Ali’s Indus Vision, (or for that matter, GEO and ARY), are vivid examples of a new breed of guilt-ridden bourgeoisie “liberals” who are either unconsciously ashamed of embracing and exhibiting modern means and methods of commercial entertainment, and/or are always trying to apologize (cynically though), by offering naats, milads, azaans and scenes of, say, wise old men scholarly discussing the moral implications of contraceptives!