TO err is human, the saying goes. But sometimes one has to pay heavily for the error, as I did recently. To switch on the TV set was an error and being agonised and tortured was the penalty I paid for it. It was our beloved PTV, of all channels under the sun, which I regret to have tuned in to.

In addition to the usual nonsense, they had made special arrangements to show how to kill a national language on a state channel. Not that I happened to watch the ‘stately’ channel for the first time and was, therefore, dumbstruck to hear the ‘modernistic’ (read mimic) and ‘creative’ (read ridiculous) use of the Urdu language, but the deviant dialect of a standard language they were blaring was an ugly hybrid of Urdu and English that I had never heard before, at least not on PTV.

I have been watching PTV since its good old days when the viewers were called ‘naazreen’ in Urdu. Now it has been replaced by ‘viewers’ in the new and ugly ‘Urdu’ that PTV is promoting. I am sure that in those cracking good times our national language must have had a word for weather and, if my memory does not fail me, that used to be ‘mausam’ (or ‘mausim’, for those who prefer the original Arabic pronunciation). I am not too old to recall that there used to be a ‘mausam ka haal’ on PTV that has now been consigned to oblivion by the modern (read funny) ‘Urdu’ phrase ‘weather report’.

It had dawned on me long ago that a ‘break’ was ‘waqfa’ in Urdu. I knew in the primary school that in Urdu the English word temperature meant ‘darja-i-hararat’. But never did I realise that the editors at PTV did not know as much Urdu as a fifth grader does. Or, perhaps, they have decided to anglicise Urdu for and on behalf of the masses that, due to their lacking in literacy, are unable to do so.

The Anglicisation of Urdu at PTV and other Urdu channels has gone to such an extent that virtually every newsreader and anchorperson speaks an alien lingo that is purportedly Urdu. Some comperes or speakers do not utter Urdu in Urdu programmes unless they are at a loss for words. Some time back I had to go through the agony of watching a few documentaries on PTV, promoting tourism. Those were a real mess. The young man doing the commentary was ever so careful as not to utter a single word in Urdu except when it was necessitated by Urdu’s ‘poor’ grammatical structure that needs words like ka (of) hai (is), tha (was) and ho ga (will be) etc to complete a sentence. While introducing a place, for instance, he would say, “Viewers! yeh aik splendidly beautiful place hai aur big tourist attraction bhi hai.”

Maybe the big bosses at PTV view it as something that helps increase the channel’s viewership. But a layman like me would dare inform the sages enjoying positions in the ivory towers of PTV, and other Urdu channels for that matter, that poor, illiterate people do not understand the ‘Anglo-Pakistani’ Urdu that you are trying to pour into their ears.

It has now become a norm these days at PTV and other Urdu TV channels to name their programmes in English and if they are in Urdu at all, it is written mostly in Roman script. The credits shown after the programmes are in English. The commercials are in a half-baked, half-bred Urdu. Even the tickers showing the days and timings of the programmes to be telecast are in English. What a humble student like me fails to understand is that how the common people are going to understand these messages. The majority of our teeming millions cannot read English.

The approach of polluting the national language is based on the assumption that the channel’s viewership would increase internationally if the vocabulary used has an appeal for the alien viewers; hence, use a version of Urdu that is sprinkled with English words and use a script for tickers that is not local. One wonders why the top brass at the BBC and other truly international channels did not come up with this brilliant idea. The BBC would have saved a lot of effort and money over the decades by broadcasting programmes in English tainted with Urdu words instead of running a special Urdu service.

We can see all over the world cultural centres, special language programmes and special telecasts and broadcasts to introduce and popularise a specific language or culture. Were it that easy to capture the international audience by using a hybrid language, the theories of education and learning a second language would have undergone a sea change. But as every sane, educated person knows it, teaching a foreign language or capturing a global viewership or spreading a culture takes much more than a polluted vocabulary and a pseudo-intellectual approach. As a result of this faulty assumption the locals cannot fully comprehend what is being telecast and capturing an international audience too remains a fantasy. It is easy to arrive at the conclusion that there is a big communication gap and only a tiny percentage of viewers fully get what is being said on vernacular TV channels. Slaughtering the national language cannot be allowed even if this assumption was true. In fact this kind of mixture dangerously borders on pidgins and creoles. One hopes that after anglicising Urdu, PTV would not like to take part in pidginisation and creolization of Urdu because Urdu as a language is too beautiful to be left at the mercy of idiosyncrasies of those who know nothing about it.

So popularising Urdu and introducing PTV overseas is in for some serious brainstorming, so is the policy-making that is aimed at ruining the national language.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com