Going through Urdu columns published in various newspapers and websites feels like paying a visit to a graveyard where you see only the end of the world. Soothsayers from journalism, especially from Urdu media, take pride in painting a picture which is full of doom and gloom. Shades of an aura of pessimism which starts from their headlines, lay you to the rest by the time you finish reading.

I understand that individual failures as politicians have hypnotized us into arriving at a conclusion of a collective failure as a society where rays of hopes are strangled to death and shadows of gloom are magnified to Titanic proportions.

That ours is a leadership the most pathetic and that we are a society the most miserable are the themes most of our columnists wave their write-ups around. Totally bankrupt of optimism, these so-called intellectuals take their readers towards a feeling of yet more helplessness and while they very knowledgeably quote figures of suicides happening due to social injustice, they never count their own contribution in indoctrinating people with a feeling that only destitution is their destination.

I always feel that commentary on cricket matches is the most easiest job. When a batsman gets out, you say that he played a wrong shot and when he dispatches a ball towards the boundary, you say that this was the shot of the day. A similarly easiest job, if not more, is to be a columnist for our Urdu press. Like Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan who always works hard to restore democracy only to make a grand alliance against the same government he helped establish, the best part of our corps of columnists happen to have the best night vision for they see only darkness everywhere. Anyone in the power is an evil, that’s it!

I have nothing against being pessimistic but reporting a bicyclist as a symbol of poverty and leaving out a motorist who is a sign of improving buying power of people is a crime to me. I see it that one day the bicyclist will also be driving a motor car while a columnist will outrightly announce it that only the bicyclist is the true face of Pakistanis while the motorist is a born corrupt.

With the passage of time, journalism has gone through tremendous changes right from newsrooms to newspapers’ stand. Today’s newspaper not only carries top stories happening all around the world, but will also tells how good or bad the latest movie near your cinema is. Reporters have acquired latest communication equipment like satellite telephones and laptops and the fashion of table stories has been replaced with investigative reporting. Still our columnists continue to sit in their cabin to write about a person or a situation which is full of haplessness. They have found in writing ’obituaries’ easiest way for their livelihood.

Light at the end of the tunnel is always a train for them and thus, they never dare to step in the tunnel and see what that ray of light is all about. With their pens full of sadism instead of ink, their columns give a window to their pathetic mindsets where you see their expertise of producing heartrending write-ups and distributing sadness all around.

I do not say that one should not talk about problems being faced by ordinary people, I just want that concrete steps should also be proposed to improve the lot of the poor people. Opening a column with the plight of a family which suffers from poverty and hunger and ending the column on condemnation of government will certainly earn a columnist his fee for his piece, but it will not serve his purpose of being a columnist. I can write ten article on daily basis shedding light on problems a poor man faces in our society, but I will not write this article for the sake of my fee alone. If I have a slightest sense of responsibility towards professionalism, I will certainly not do it!

I acknowledge wholeheartedly that ordinary people in our society are up against some very tough situations, but for how relentlessly I should continue to report that single fact so that anyone who reads me, always folds up his paper in a gloomy mood, mars his own inner atmospher and I have the pride of providing my society with another downhearted person.

Making increasing poverty and corrupt politics a topic is not going to bring about a revolution and solve every problem we face today. We need to discharge our own duty towards our society honestly. Terming a cyclist the only true face of society and branding a motorist a symbol of corruption shows our tendency towards sadism and our incapacity towards nurturing rays of hopes. Never in anywhere in the world a whole society is prosperous, a society is always a combination!

Changing a word in a famous quote of Dr. Gary V. Carter, "It’s not that I’m a an optimist — I just see things clearly!"