Poverty and liquor make a potent cocktail. A few swigs a day, and destitution hurts less. Last month, 55 people were rushed to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre as they had consumed ‘katchi’ booze and the death toll now stands at 50. The victims belonged to underprivileged localities such as Lines Area, Saddar, and Lyari amongst others and many were Hindus or Christians. This was followed by another incident in Multan, which killed more than 12 people. However, these calamities have done little to instil any fear in these areas as people continue to consume with abandon, blaming their habit on illiteracy and redundancy. Take Vijay, who has given up his dreams of opening a computer shop and hit the bottle. “I did computer courses and also have knowledge of hardware but was sacked by my boss because another employee’s petty theft was blamed on me. Probably because I am poor and a Hindu,” he says. His mother works as a house cleaner to support her family of six children and an alcoholic husband.

The alcohol expenditure in an impoverished home such as Vijay’s soaks up a large chunk of the family income and precious little is left for the nourishment, education, and wellbeing of his siblings. But nothing makes sense to Vijay, his father and their companions who want to hang on to their fix of escape. “We are marginalised by our poverty and religion and our families hate us too,” screams Vijay and his coterie nods in agreement.

Rarely for pleasure and usually an antidote to dejection, homemade liquor is both a significant past time as well as a business of poverty. However, a remote Indian village of Satnur where liquor addiction was once rampant is an interesting case study. Here, remedy came with NGO initiatives, which promoted alternative livelihoods such as goat rearing with small loans and empowered the womenfolk through counselling and self-help groups to take charge of their lives, homes, and the village. They formed an 11-member team to ban alcohol in the area, any home peddling the juice was ransacked with the cooperation of local police, and addicts were forced to look for their dose outside the village. Indeed Satnur is an exception but cost-effective strategies, medical guidance, employer and employment initiatives, and free counselling with monitoring to prevent relapses in destitute localities such as Vijay’s can perhaps narrow the survival gap between the poor and the privileged.

An international study conducted in America corroborates Vijay’s claims. It shows that low-income neighbourhoods were more likely to have cheap, homemade liquor outlets and more addicts than the more upscale quarters. While another survey in 2006 reveals that alcohol is responsible for four per cent of global disease, which puts it on a par with hypertension and tobacco.

However, in another part of town, prohibition is the surprise culprit. The demand for alcohol rises in the month of Ramazan and manufacturers churn out low-standard fare to meet the demand, increasing the risk of poisoning. Drinking in Pakisan is punishable by caning and up to three years in jail but that does not prevent people from having a drink regardless of how holy the month may be. Some also debate that as liquor is only made available for foreigners and non-Muslims, a ban does defeat the purpose. Incidentally, the cure for alcohol poisoning lies in its finer variety as the former contains methyl alcohol and the latter has ethyl alcohol that acts as an antidote. But, be it pleasure or pain, alcohol is a double-edged sword that does substitute as anaesthesia of choice.

reema.abbasi@dawn.com

KARACHI: On a recent Saturday, a reporter informed us deskmen, or subeditors, that she had filed a report on a healthcare facility and there was a picture to go with it. Asked what the photograph was about, she said: “There is a table in the middle of a room … you’ll see it. It’s very interesting.” She waved and hurried away.

The next day, Sunday, the office assistant gave me a picture and said the lady reporter had given that to be printed with her feature.

Looking at the photograph, I could not help exclaiming, “Wow! That is really interesting.” It depicted a large table in the middle of a room, as the reporter had said, upon which was sprawled menacingly an enormous stuffed crocodile. An equally big alligator sat underneath. We put the picture on the page next to the article but it continued to perplex us. The article concerned maternal health. So what were these monsters doing in a labour room?

Just before the page was dropped, I decided to confirm with the reporter and rang her up late at night. “Oh, no,” she said. “That’s not for the article on the maternity home. That’s for the piece [which she planned to file later] on a wildlife museum.”

In the nick of time, we were saved from being ridiculed the next day and possibly admonished by our superiors.

But we are not always so lucky. Like other newsmen across the world, we sometimes fail to notice our blunders in time. When we discover our mistakes the next morning, the whole day is spoiled since we expect to face the music upon arriving in office.

Naturally, we do not like to publicise our mistakes and hope that nobody else will see them either. Yet if a colleague in another section commits an error, we are capable of relentlessly whispering lethal comments about his or her proficiency and efficiency. If we consider someone else’s mistake silly, it elicits a guffaw.

The mistakes we are capable of committing off and on are of various kinds: a spelling error in the headline, an incorrectly captioned picture, a poorly- or wrongly-worded sentence, etc. The blame for errors such as incorrect facts and figures is usually apportioned between the reporter and the subeditor responsible, which may necessitate the publication of a correction.

This reminds one of an joke that when an editor admonished a female reporter that correct reporting was like a woman’s ‘honour’, she snapped back that at least the newspaper could publish a retraction!

The most famous and tragically amusing blunder was that concerning the passing away of an English queen, with a leading London daily printing a super headline that misspelt the word as ‘pissing’. Another nasty headline omitted the ‘l’ from the word ‘public’. Because of the similarity between the letter q and g, Haque became Hague, as an Islamabad correspondent may recall with disgust.

To admit personal mistakes, I once wrote a headline which spelled ‘neighbour’ as ‘neighbourer’. In a picture caption, I once wrote ‘the PIDC roundabout’. The next day, the editor remarked with a smile, “I could not find a ‘roundabout’ at the PIDC” — which should have been described as an ‘intersection’.

Ridicule comes easy

Most newsroom people have learned to be wary while making fun of someone else’s poor knowledge of the English language. In many a case, the person accused of committing an inexcusable blunder is acquitted honourably, often after the sentence has been pronounced. For instance, decades ago a subeditor was fired because the editor of a daily insisted that “there is no such word as ‘pick-pocketing’ in English.”

The Shorter English Dictionary proved that the subeditor was not totally off the mark. But that proof, alas, came very late, when another sub was caught using the same word.

A BBC writer recently ridiculed the Pakistani zest for English. In a website article titled ‘Pakistan and the battle for English’, he jibes at our mispronunciations and poor English vocabulary and says arrogantly “They’ve learnt to speak bad Urdu but constructing a grammatically correct sentence in English remains a challenge.”

But most of his arguments are flimsy, to say the least. For example, he derides an attendant at an English-medium school for pronouncing ‘oil’ as ‘isle’. The writer needs to be told that attendants who perform menial tasks do not pass proficiency tests at the institution where they work. Most illiterate people here, however, mispronounce ‘oil’ as ‘ale’, not ‘isle’. And their counterparts in English-speaking countries are no different. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and many other books testify that all the people in America and Britain are not equally good at English. The language, cherished by many people here as it is elsewhere in the world, has several varieties, dialects, colloquial, informal or non-standard forms.

The writer in question, however, reserves his most scathing attack for the government’s use of the word ‘dualisation’.

“The Capital Development Authority is on a binge of road-making these days. One such project is the upgrading of a two-lane road into a dual carriageway. It is labelled “dualisation” – a word three online dictionaries I consulted have yet to recognise,” he writes.

Really? Did he consult Dictionary.com, or the Merriam-Webster dictionary, or even just Google the word to find several hundred entries worldwide where ‘dualisation/dualization’ is used in the same sense as the CDA did? Ridicule comes easy, doesn’t it?

With computers, we can easily blame our spelling mistakes on the machine’s ‘erratic’ working. I try to be particularly cautious about not punching ‘o’ in place of ‘a’. There are many other technical faults that we try to put on the computer’s account. But unfortunately, our superiors and many readers have learned to distinguish between what can be blamed on computers and what is purely human error.

People working in newsrooms know that every day is a race against time. If a computer spell-check replaces ‘Benazir’ with ‘Bouncer’, as a Wordstar software was prone to do, the sub should be excused — as long as it happens once in a lifetime.