With two decades in the thick of making headline content, I have a confession to make: I am running out of words. Sometimes it is down to the frenzy of one event overtaking another before one has had a chance to absorb the bad, the ugly, and the downright hideous and, on other occasions, simply disbelief.
Pakistan may be a media person’s delight in that it is like a gravy train of headline-grabbing content but also potentially, a nightmare considering you don’t know when it will find you at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even removed from matters of life and death — as Syed Saleem Shahzad found out in a grotesque manifestation of what it means to expose the underbelly of Pakistan’s godfathers — there is another dimension pertaining to the frequency of breaking news: the breaking spirit.
Yes, make no mistake, the Pakistani spirit is breaking. It’s a feeling that visited us once in a while in the past but has now become a resident evil, gnawing away at our insides.
It is rare for one image to be so powerful as to encapsulate a country’s status. The shocking-beyond-belief footage of Sarfaraz Shah, a 17-year-old student, being barbarically shot dead near Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Park in Karachi last week defines what Pakistan has become — a horror movie without an end.
No parent should have to endure this. It is an image that has — and will continue to — disturb the deep recesses of the mind. It says something for the barbaric act that any number of people who watched the footage swore they could not sleep because of the trauma, what to speak of deceased’s devastated family.
The memory of an unarmed young man begging for his life surrounded by a clutch of fully armed Rangers before one of them shot him dead in broad daylight will haunt Pakistan for some time to come. Unless of course, a bigger tragedy strikes.
One of the refrains of being in the hot seat (in my case slightly more than a lifer) is that you get asked, endlessly, where we are headed as a nation.
I wish I knew. For now, we’re consigned to living day-to-day but who cares — certainly, not those fantasising “strategic depth”.
Have lost count of how many times even we have asked the
same question of others and also ourselves. The fevered pitch has
hit through the roof, particularly, after the cataclysmic descent post-OBL kill
in Abbottabad.
You think you have reached the abyss and then, there’s another bolt from the blue. Quite like Rahat, my friend in Tokyo, says of the frequency of quakes in the life of Japanese. But there’s a difference: while the elements conspire in the Land of The Rising Sun, we have a fetish for wounding ourselves. For sure, ours has become the Land of The Dead Soul.
Javed Hashmi, once a rebel without a pause but now a mellowed and compassionate soul without parallel in Pakistan’s less-than-hallowed parliament, broke down — in a symbolic manifestation — the morning after the Karachi episode at how Pakistan as we once knew it was disappearing right before our eyes.
Personally, I felt Saleem Shahzad’s murder was the last straw and that we had reached a dead end. But the barbarity in Karachi has killed my spirit, too as I’m sure it has every thinking Pakistani’s. All the tears seem to have dried up. Newsroom is not the only place where we are lost for words. Again, many of us would be inclined to think the Kharotabad daylight murder was sad enough. Once again the powerful image of a dying young woman — one of the three slain including a seven-month pregnant one at a checkpost — pulling her hand up and motioning for the trigger-happy security personnel to stop. Did it move the barbarians? You can bet no. Such is the stuff heartrending stories are made of.
But it takes some beating that they began to swear by blurred vision and deafness (more like crooked tongue really) once their doing was revealed on tape for the world to see — and called into question by the Supreme Court. In short, another chapter from Denialistan, our country’s drop dead moniker makeover.
As if being at the receiving end of a self-styled US war on terror in its multifarious hues was not enough, we are now chillingly witnessing — and I dare say even getting used to — our men-in-uniform unleashing their own terror to settle scores with those they don’t like.
In a classic depiction, even the messengers are also in the line of fire. The daring cameramen who caught the brutality of security personnel in Kharotabad and Karachi are both receiving death threats with their families in perpetual fear of their lives. Well, what else can you expect from and in a police state?
The writer is a newspaper editor based in Islamabad and can be reached at [email protected]
