WHILE the focus had to be on the usage — or abusage — of language by the national media, it was perhaps a sign of the times that a good part of the session titled ‘Mass Communication and New Linguistic Linkages’ got hijacked by the debate on media ethics and what some speakers called “the social disconnect.” The discussion was sort of limping its way forward when Tahir Masood grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and gave it a real jolt.

While he was off-track as far as the context was concerned, a few minutes into his speech he had established a rapport with the audience which found itself clapping at almost every point Masood raised to highlight the “disconnect” between the media and the public.

Some of the arguments Masood used would surely fall in the realm of serious debate and he would risk losing them on factual grounds. For instance, his roar about the media being a “proponent of alien cultural influences” in a society which, in his words, is “the custodian of the cherished values of the East,” would find it hard to stand under scrutiny. But the audience liked it and liked even more his assertion that the national media was in the “iron grip of corporate and commercial barons” whose interests are being served by journalists “interested in their own millions.” Had the “barons” and “journalists worth millions” been there, the discussion would have been an eye-opener for them as far as the popular sentiment about what they dish out on the idiot box goes.

The session could not quite recover from this mood. Though the speakers who followed did try to bring it back on the linguistic trail, most of them had to refer, directly or indirectly, to the points raised by Tahir Masood.

Journalist Mazhar Abbas, who was moderating the session, did try to argue the case, and got for himself some enthusiastic response, from the audience when he talked of the courage of journalists to name names and himself took at least one. But his reluctance to talk about other criticisms against journalists didn’t go unnoticed either.

Asghar Nadeem Syed, who took the stage immediately after Masood, had to bear the brunt of the changed — and charged — atmosphere. He stood for a moment and then remarked: “The narrative stands scattered … let’s see how it goes!”

To his credit, Syed, the dramatist, delivered a performance that was as dramatic as it was thoughtful, insisting that the media “should not have been the sole custodian of public debate, but it is.” He added that it is a “massive question we all need to ask ourselves.”

Lamenting the fact that television channels are competing with each other in “marketing terms and not in the context of content,” he somewhat unwittingly agreed with Masood, concluding that the public was taken hostage by the media.

Those who were lucky to speak before Masood — Ameena Saiyid and Anwar Sen Roy — enjoyed the luxury of focusing on the linguistic aspects of the debate. Both of them stressed the need for simplifying the language and to let it move with the global flow.

Quoting his BBC experience, Roy quoted a senior broadcaster-turned-novelist as having stressed that it was not the task of media houses to “protect and promote a language,” arguing that it must use language as spoken and written by the public. To this he added his own argument that when we talk of “standards” it actually means “an attempt to justify the present on the basis of the past, which adds to a society’s general pace of degeneration.”

Using the example of Hindi film songs, which, in her view, have been helpful in the spread of the Urdu language, Saiyid talked of the need to engage the young by making the language easy for them to read and write instead of using what she called “archaic vocabulary.”

Ironically, both Roy and Saiyid quoted examples from English about the ways in which a modern language adopts and adapts, but they never thought of the various university entrance examinations undertaken by thousands of children worldwide, Pakistan included, that require the knowledge of archaic words along with their usage.

Most of these happen to be words that are not used in conversation and not used even in literary writings. And yet those minding the English language use it as an essential and integral component of overall assessment. And hence we make the students rote-learn these words. But we tend to talk about salvaging Urdu by limiting its word treasure. The dichotomy of approach was, and is, as telling as it is killing.

The writer is a Dawn staffer