Pakistan is being held hostage, by its own people who are willing to sell everything
TILL this age in the history of the world, harsh lines have gotten demarcated between different nationalities, races and religions, yet not between cultures. Development has reduced indigenous cultures of the world to a globalized science of more, more and more. The repercussions of the earlier empire, that of the British, hasn’t eased its impact on our minds yet when the prospects of a new empire, that of stripes and stars, has descended on us. We may be considered geographically free as a nation, yet we are still slaves to western imperialism. As a nation, after the division of the subcontinent we could never ascertain the identity of a nation with a mixed cultural background. We are still confused; we are still under the awe of the material culture injected into our anesthetized existence by the British a long time back.
The question of emulation arises, are we repeating the history of the West in the East under the supervision of the western imperialism? East is much different from the West; in the course of history of the modern West, generations have raised slogans against radical social, economic, religious and political movements. On the other hand we have still never gotten over the fact that we ‘were’ once ruled by the West and that we don’t have to emulate them to be better than them. This lack of self-esteem induced in us a long time back hasn’t left our psyche even after decades of the so-called “free-lives”. We are still not happy being what we are. This over load of Western emulation has muted us to such an extent that we have become spectators to a game which is played by the West. Our senses have purged to an isolated sense of sight, we see but we can’t hear, speak, smell and touch, making us morons with a good sense of sight.
After the advent of MTV in the West which introduced the culture of sponsored video making in the music-industry, many slogans were raised by the audience of different tastes. A counter movement of punk rockers united to oppose corporatization of free expression. Ironically the first video to be aired on MTV complained subtly Video Killed the Radio Star. When the same video-culture made its way in our region, we heard a patriotic acknowledgement in Dil Dil Pakistan only to be changed into a corporate banner Pepsi Pepsi Pakistan. The artists of the song, Vital Signs, sold our pop-national-anthem to a foreign company in exchange of lots of money and made Pakistan subservient to a beverage company! Both the concept of Popular-Fast-Food and Popular-Fast-Music is in no-content and nutrition, yet lots of form and taste, which was religiously accepted by Vital Signs, when they brutally altered the content of the song only to alleviate their own image as the first multi-national sponsored desi-band in the history of Pakistani music-industry.
It could never have been imagined that this self-immolating act from a young pop-music band would prove to be prophetic for a whole generation of corporatized souls of an entire nation. Twenty-years after the raising of the slogan, sponsorship has not only bought the pop-musicians and boosted the so called ‘art’, expression and commerce but it has bought the entire nation very conveniently too.
To date our local singers have started singing jingles in their sponsored albums as featured tracks! Najam the reinvented Naat-Khwan signs the tag line of Tapal tea Jaisay Chaho Jiyo; Strings sing Hae Koiee Hum Jaisa and so on. Sponsors sell junk food/drinks with no content (nutrition), yet lots of taste and form (visual appeals), so they sponsor such music also with lots of taste (instruments and sound) and lots of form (skinheads, French-cuts, pony-tails and painted guitars), yet no content (no lyrics), just jingles to sell daily commodities such as tea, cold-drinks, shampoos and soaps.
This is not only the case with the musicians, in the field of TV or cinema productions also as well, lack of content is predominant. Productions are more concerned about lavishness which would give them more business in the form of lavish sponsorship as well. What happens next? Audience doesn’t matter anymore! When all they earn is from the sponsored production why would the audience matter anymore? Focus has shifted from life and people to commerce and business community; selling more is the focus rather than artistic supremacy. Target market is that of people of business community tired from daily routine which calls for happy, fake-commercial art. Who wants to watch a movie based on socio-economic/political issues in this already hectic than mad life? TV anchors become models on display rather than programme hosts, leaders and moderators. Actors become models, cat-walking on out-of-the-ordinary, pseudo-realistically post-modernist, sponsored sets claiming to represent the contemporary life of an everyday-man! Lie has become the biggest truth of our time.
Stadium walls are sponsored so why can’t the walls of most important buildings be plastered with sign-age too? We see high-rises on Sharah-e-Faisal painted with larger than life ads; we see billboards mounted on top of private residences, so what next? Quaid’s Mazar? Not long ahead will we see a cold-drink campaign on the Mazar dome, another cold-drink campaign on the main body and a tea ad draped around the podium!
We sold art, we sold national anthems and we sold our houses and mausoleums to sponsors, what about God? The famous Allah-wala Chowk, at the termination of Tariq Road was sold to the sponsors too: the same name of Allah stands clothed in the branded blue now! Bravo! And to match the mid-street sponsored monuments we now have sponsored roads too. Billboards were not enough; car sponsors bought the roads as well. In the near future zebra crossings will be replaced by these road sponsors, first lane would be the cheapest and third the most expensive; slowest traffic will have the most time to watch the sign-age on the road!
In this age of FMCGs (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) all that was needed was communication media that would move with the pace of these consumer goods as well; in come the FM Channels, fast moving radio channels! Their speed is so fast that you can’t hear anything on them but brand commercials, sponsoring the airwaves for entire rows of days in a month! You tune into both the pioneering FM channels and you hear programmes sponsored by the same tea brand! Different stations same shows, different singers same songs, just because of yellow, red and black brands! Average speed of songs per hour comes to around, a song and a half per hour; half the song is played after the hourly sponsored time check which always has to interrupt the song bang in the middle. After so many years of unchanged attitude of these stations, they should boast about quality commercials rather than quality music! But what can they do, even when they put on a song it happens to be a commercial, or that all songs have started sounding like three-minute long commercials! What can the singers do? Why they make more money singing the jingles, and is life not about money, money and more money!
We have succeeded in setting up an urban scenario in which even the police check-posts see a facelift only because of the sponsors; our only solution to all the problems lies in calling the sponsors! So easy, roadsides are not enough, take the buildings and the roads themselves. TV is not enough, take the TV screen itself, split it into as many screens and sponsor them all! What more, pick up a newspaper, the whole page littered with news and photographs of killings and suicides and the page happens to be sponsored happily by a multinational home appliance brand! What next? The rulers of our nation will turn into cricket players in the field, wearing uniforms (they are so fond of) with badges, ‘Sponsored by IMF and USA!’
The world is what you see on TV, what you don’t see doesn’t exist at all. You pray while watching a match on TV, you cry while watching a Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan romantic flick; you laugh to shagadelic time-travellers, you fall in love with a movie character, and if you are more crazed you fall in love with the movie star her/himself! TV is Truth, rest is all rubbish deceit. TV says Iraq is ‘bad’, we all spit on it. TV says all Muslims are fundos, we wake up and start finding out the roots to our religion. We are all morons waiting to be woken up from a deep slumber by the TV and the prophets on it! And so what can the kid on the road do, he sees the prophets singing jingles on the same TV!
Primitive man lived on god, religion, and rituals as much as today’s man lives on TV, computer, and mobile phone. In the past god was the source of inspiration now communication is IT! Not too long before, prayer had its significance in specific rituals; for Muslims, Namaz and various Wazaif had their due place in our lives, it took some time and energy to be heard and fulfilled. Now for the newer generations, prayers can be heard as a result of forwarding chain-e-mails. Talk about life getting faster, in a course of a year even that has further reduced to happening as a consequence of forwarding chain-SMS on mobile phones!
A few blessed of our more than blessed Politico-Islamic parties know the right drive for the religion that is Islam! The moulvi sahibaan climb up a billboard, tear the Zara Sheikh poster down, leave Aijaz up there, admire the beauty and scream on top of their lungs “Nazim, Nazim, Pakistan”, (Read “Darhi, Burqae, Pakistan”). Yes we do follow material culture, so how would our religion contemporize? Material culture, Material Islam! They talk about money and cars, we will talk about darhi, painchae and burqas! They call us extremists we will call them infidels. They erect telecommunication towers seventy feet height, we will build our Mosque Minars a few feet higher! In this blind conflict of equal proportions from both sides, we have forgotten the real essence of what Islam originally is about! In this over-dominance of material culture our moulvis have also taken the material drive? They talk about language (Urdu, English, Arabic or Persian) not of etiquettes, of ink, red or blue and not the text (content) written. They talk about burqae and painchay, forget about sharam aur haya completely! Talk about sharam, burqay will follow without force, talk about the content, language will abide. Talk about the spirit, material will dissolve. No money, no cars, no bombs and no ammunition will stand in the way of a spiritually enlightened Muslim. However, ignorant we get towards our soul it won’t die when it’s in a deep slumber. Why can’t we get up and think about the spirit more than the material which deludes our perceptions!
It’s time to realize selling our souls won’t buy us freedom. Our nation’s deposit has crossed a record breaking mark, but our roads were never dirtier, our buildings were never selling third-grade cigarette packs, our singers were never singing from their pockets, our performers were never miming for the ecstatically blind, our politicians were never this dishonest. We were never this lame as a nation but our slogans are still high, clear and loud, Pakistan Zindabad, Sub Sae Pehlay Pakistan!
Pakistan is being held hostage, by its own people who are willing to sell everything 
