IN its move to ban obscene words appearing in text messages on cellular phones, it seems the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) is in a race to outdo the Sindh government — which one day abruptly decided that Mandarin should be taught in public schools — in bizarreness. The PTA has reportedly come up with a list comprising some 1,100 obscene words (why just so many and no more?) that cannot be transmitted via SMS. Does the PTA have nothing better to do with its regulatory authority that it otherwise barely exercises when it comes to the invasion of privacy of subscribers? It is almost obscene, for instance, to wake up to a message at three in the morning that's trying to sell one a plot in Dubai or announcing a circus near a village somewhere deep in the hinterland. That the purported list of banned words should include innocuous exclamations and commands like 'Jesus Christ' and 'do me' (a favour, for example) makes just as little sense as the move itself. Were this farce to be implemented, no more could a parent text his or her offspring waiting to be 'picked up' from college that he or she was indeed 'coming' to get the child.

Little wonder, then, that cellular phone service providers are confused regarding the implementation of the ban on the negative words; nor do they know where the list would stop as PTA would keep adding to it because most Pakistanis are at least bilingual. The ill-advised move could well be the brainchild of some self-righteous individual occupying a high seat in the PTA. While one may feel over-communicated with today because of modern technology, it does not give one or the other regulatory authority the right to monitor, much less resort to censoring, individual communications.