| September 7, 2002 | Saturday | Jamadi-us-Saani28,1423 |
A nothing kind of degree
THE passing away of Ahmad Rahi was the most significant event of the week gone by. Enough has been written about Rahi and I do not have anything fresh to add. Yes, there were appeals for prayers for his recovery, and many accepted them seriously, but who could stop the angel of death from claiming yet another victim?
That Ahmad Rahi was going became fully evident but there was hope against hope. He had lost all interest in life after he had to abandon his home after it had been consumed by fire but he kept breathing for a few days more.
Azhar Javed and Aizaz Ahmad Azar arranged a function in his honour hardly a few days before his death. He made bold to attend it but he was not the man I had seen earlier. He reminded me of Ustad Daman at the funeral of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Just as the Ustad had given a clear indication at the time that his days were over, so did Ahmad Rahi at the function presided over by Malik Meraj Khalid.
Starting off as a poet of Urdu and editing such a prestigious magazine as Savera, he switched over to Punjabi mainly because of the financial benefits accruing from the film world. But then he was a highly sentimental person. The holocaust of partition affected him greatly and he wrote a series of poems on the human tragedy. It was only at the insistence of friends like Saadat Hasan Manto and Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi that he agreed to get the poems published. They appeared in 1952 under the title, Trinjan. The pathos in the poems stunned the readers and the book proved to be a trend-setter in Punjabi poetry. His moving poems about the tragic happenings in Punjab during partition have reached the villages as well and, I understand, girls sing them to beat of the dholki but break down in sobs:
Na koi sehrianwala aya tey na veeran doli tori
Jis dey hath jidi banh aaee ley gaya zoro zoree
IT IS said that the Punjabi language has been neglected by the Punjabis themselves. In fact, Munir Niazi once told me that the late Sindhi poet, Shaikh Ayaz, made a very disparaging remark in this regard. During a visit to the then East Pakistan with a writer’s delegation, Shaikh Ayaz praised the Bengalis for the love of their language, and said they were just like the Sindhis. He then pointed towards Munir Niazi and added: “Not like these people who have done nothing for their language.”
That may be true to some extent, yet there are people truly devoted to the cause of Punjabi. Dr Shahbaz Malik is one of them. He has spent almost half a century in the service of his mother tongue. The first ever in Pakistan to get a doctorate in Punjabi, he has been chairman of the Punjabi Department of the Punjab University. Starting in 1961 with his first book, Padhrey Rah, he has so far written about three dozen books and numerous critical notes and research papers. He has also written short stories and poems.
I rang up to congratulate him on the Pride of Performance award announced last month, and he told me about his present engagements. Even after retirement from the university, he is these days guiding half a dozen students striving for doctorates in Punjabi. His own doctorate was the result of a massive bibliography compiled by him of Punjabi books printed in the Persian script. He listed 18,000 titles in it. He is now compiling its second part. A revised and enlarged edition of another of his books published in 1978 is already in the press. It is a collection of Punjabi proverbs.
Dr Shahbaz Malik is also teaching Punjabi to DMG probationers at the Civil Services Academy.
THE latest issue of the monthly Adab-i-Latif this time provides a lot of choice reading material. The opening article about my late senior friend, Shafique Rahman, the humorist, has been of special interest to me. The author, some Yousuf Imtiaz, living in Canada, has pointed to one ‘defect’ in Shafiq’s stories in that they are a bundle of jokes. I don’t think any one is justified in saying that. He also points to the use of some far fetched words and sayings which do not go well with the reader. However, the overall tone of the article is that of eulogy. The writer rightly points out that Shafiq himself is the hero of the most of this stories. Since I know Shafiq intimately, I know that some of his stories are autobiographical.
The writer has also mentioned that Shafiq was greatly influenced by Stephen Leacock and quotes Muhammad Khalid Akhtar to prove it. There is no doubt that Shafiq read him as he did all the other humorists. It is probably not commonly known that Shafiq had the best collection of books on humour. That is why a friend who knew about it made a nasty remark when I told him that I would be translating one of his stories into English. “Oh,” he said, “so you are going to put it back in the original”. I think such thoughts about Shafiqur Rahman are most unfair. He has produced healthy literature, and there is nothing ‘Western’ about his stories. His heroes and heroines are all from our own middle class society, and they almost appear to be moving among us. English happens to be an easier medium for humour than Urdu. In Urdu, all the tricks of the trade have to be employed to make a reader smile. That is why we have a dearth of true humorists in the language.
Another noteworthy feature in the current issue of Adab-i-Latif is the Urdu translation of a Chinese story of the 17th century writer, Po Song Ling. The translator, Shagufta Husain, has made a good job of it.
The short/long story, Kanch ki Muhabbat, by Parvin Atif, also makes interesting reading. I could almost hear the glass bangles breaking. The poetry section is loaded with prominent names, including Dr Khurshid Rizvi, Javed Shaheen and Shahzad Ahmad. — Ashfaque Naqvi
DO YOU really need a degree in mass communications to join the media, to become a reporter in a newspaper, or to become an anchor at any of the new private TV channels? Well, you are bound to get perhaps a lot of divergent answers to this question, depending probably on who you ask.
The faculties at colleges and universities which teach mass communications, especially those at government-run places like the University of Punjab or the University of Karachi, are quite likely to respond to this by saying that such a degree is essential. Students will probably not really know for sure, and it would be fair to presume that the degree of their enthusiasm for mass communications as a viable specialization would have to depend on whether they are actually enrolled in that degree programme.
However, the answer that should probably be paid the greater attention to is the one that comes from employers, since they are the ones who do the hiring. And here one will find that most credible news organizations say that you don’t really need a specialized degree in mass communications. Sorry to say, but that really is the truth — not from a local university or institutions, any how. In fact, even venerable institutions like the Columbia University’s School of Journalism — the one that awards the Pulitzer prizes — have been doing a rethink on this of late, with its new president ordering a review of the curriculum taught in the one-year MA degree.
There are many reasons why you don’t really need to have a specialized degree to enter the media, at least in Pakistan. This lack of a specialized degree can be a double-edged sword because it is often used by critics to say that since one doesn’t need a precise academic qualification to become a journalist, the profession can’t be all that demanding. In any case, the most obvious answer to why you don’t need to have a mass communications degree can be found by looking at the syllabus of any public university and the fact that being enrolled in such a programme doesn’t necessarily mean that you can write coherently. In most cases, they haven’t been updated in years, and the teaching methods employed by most instructors are extremely outdated. For example, for some reason, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on content analysis — which basically means that students are asked to analyze the content of various news sources and then draw conclusion. Unfortunately, other than the fact that in most cases the conclusions are vague and generalized, what sort of possible practical benefit do students gain out of such an exercise?
The other problem, and this, too, is a major one, is that the teaching methods are outdated since most, if not all teachers have never been journalists themselves. Teaching mass communications or reporting, or even editorial writing doesn’t make you a reporter, or an editorial writer for that matter — no matter how many thousands of classes you might have taught. In fact, if anything, it works the other way round — as in it would be a much better idea if a reporter from the local newspaper was, say, asked to come in and teach or lecture a bit on reporting, or a sub-editor called in and teach editing.
The one place — at least to my knowledge — that has thankfully been doing this is Kinnaird College but quite ironically the Punjab government has yet to give its master’s programme in mass communications the authority to award degrees. In any case, most of the teachers and professors are much too old to provide any useful knowledge to the students. And then there is the other aspect, which perhaps is probably more applicable to the field of journalism than to any other. And that relates to experience and learning by doing. The point is that no matter how many times you might be taught to edit an article or write a news report, there is nothing like actual experience. And that is why many newspapers, and now even some of the new TV channels, rather pick up raw BA graduates, sometimes even A-level students, and throw them into the deep end, as it were, in the hope that they will learn as they go along and become worthy journalists. This is something that unfortunately most books on journalism can never teach, and I’m not sure if mass com.students are really aware of this point, or if their teachers (who have never been working journalists themselves) ever talk about it.
The University of Punjab’s decision to change its department’s name to the high-sounding Institute of Journalism and Mass Communications makes little sense unless these deficiencies are at least acknowledged. Till that is done — and this doesn’t apply to just this institution but to others all over the country — news organizations will continue to be better off hiring people with backgrounds in the liberal arts and the humanities.—OMAR R. QURAISHI
(email: omarq@cyber.net.pk)