November 2, 2003

Mashhood is a thinker. He says, “I normally read stuff that is often tagged as either intense or radical.” His elder brother has been his main intellectual driving force. “He is the one who has been the greatest influence on my thoughts and ideas, as well as my biggest supporter.” When Mashhood reads, his aim is to gain insight into critical issues related to education, social development and world order. “I read with the purpose of getting engaged in intellectual discourse with my friends, colleagues and people we have access to as a result of our educational initiatives. I think people will have to be empowered with information and analysis about how social oppression is a direct outcome of well thought out developmental practices — how more and more development efforts have resulted in societal destruction.”

His favourite authors include Noam Chomsky, Michael Albert, Edward Said, David Korten and Arundhati Roy. Of course, all these are not just authors but social activists or development workers. “They are powerful intellectuals with a supreme sense of public responsibility. They are the people who have had the courage to keep the fight for social justice alive in these very dark times.”

But Chomsky is the one closest to Mashhood’s heart. He even has a photograph on his office wall of himself and Chomsky. The picture was taken on the writer’s recent visit to Islamabad. He admits, “I am influenced by Chomsky more than any other political philosopher. I’ve studied him on and off for the past five years and I find it harder and harder to rely on mass media for any information.” Mashhood has recently read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. The book talks about the media and whether it is ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’. The answer to this is neither. Chomsky and Herman shock readers by proving that it is neither ‘left’ nor ‘right’. The media, in fact, adheres to the opinion of the elite, which controls power.

“It’s like lost innocence! One’s perception of things is never the same after reading Chomsky. This book weeds out the important details of such media corruption from the gargantuan pile of news surrounding the Indochina, San Salvador and Guatamala conflicts, circa 1960s-80s. It gives you an idea of the challenge anyone faces in unearthing the truth behind world events. You don’t get honest news from CNN, BBC or even many so-called alternative news sources.”

The other book he has read recently is When Corporations Rule the World by David Korten. This is the book which, “allowed me to develop a profound understanding of how economic globalization has concentrated the power to govern in global corporations and financial markets and detached them from accountability to the human interest. It documents the devastating human and environmental consequences of the successful efforts of these corporations to reconstruct values and institutions everywhere on the planet to serve their own narrow ends.

“It also reveals why and how millions of people are acting to reclaim their political and economic power from these elitist forces and presents a policy agenda for restoring democracy and rooting economic power in the people and communities. All in all, this is a fantastic book for anyone who knows deep down that something is wrong with the current world order but lacks the information or the economic tools to really uncover what it is. Korten lays it out, but it’s up to us to change it.”

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