To test their level of English reading and comprehension, ten girls were asked to read an extract from ‘Alice in Wonderland’, taken from a Grade Four English textbook. These girls were ‘Inter pass,’ and not from homes where English is normally spoken. One and all mispronounced the name ‘Alice’, which was expected. What really stumped them though was the concept of a girl jumping down a rabbit hole after a white rabbit that could speak. Alice rendered them speechless.
It is hard to understand why. We’re exposed to a great deal of nonsense in desi magazines starting from their lurid covers to the sentimental tosh within. Television, a major source of entertainment for the public, is also replete with nonsense, not much of which is intelligent. Intelligent nonsense would be programmes such as Hasb-e-Haal with the talented Sohail Ahmed, but sans the cackling hostess on the side, please.
What could be bigger nonsense for example, than the drama serial ‘Uttaran’ on a private television channel that claims to offer ‘pure entertainment’? An Indian soap, Uttaran incredibly shot up to the top twenty in India and is extremely popular here.
If viewers can stomach men and women behaving the way they do in this series, why do they find the white rabbit, the Mad Hatter or the hookah smoking Caterpillar so unsettling?
The tears, the obsessive focus on marriage, the excessive makeup and jewelry, the soppy idiom, the dreadful, dreadful music …why did Alice resonate like such an unidentifiably frightful object to girls reared on the doings of the likes of Ichcha and Tapasya?
Pakistani plays, although better, still have much the same focus: marriage, unreasonable filial obedience, marriage, tears, marriage…and have I mentioned marriage?
Flipping through the channels on television, you see programmes about space flights, or animal habitats, or people who invented something mad but brilliant, sports programmes or a funny sitcom or two. Interspersed with these are the Indian and Pakistan shows predominantly featuring groups of curiously dressed persons performing synchronous stomping contortions; strongly reminiscent of the PT once popular in schools.
Of course there are other desi channels, talk shows where everyone talks/shouts in synch or other shows compered by women with sunflowers tucked behind their ears.
In recent days Lahore witnessed further deaths as a result of dengue, a whole family was shot dead by a brother frustrated at being unemployed, and another man set himself on fire for the same reason.
The Chief Minister of the Punjab and his brother have been taking swipes at the President of the country, and a man died after queuing all night at the bank to receive his pension from Pakistan Railways. The President of Pakistan ‘noticed’ this occurrence, and ordered an enquiry into the matter, another expensive exercise which will obediently not produce any useful conclusions.
The BBC claimed that Pakistan’s Intelligence Service is training and protecting Taliban in this country.
Meantime, Maulana Edhi in a completely senior moment declared that General Kayani should take over at the helm of government for six months in a bid to control poverty and corruption, and the long suffering Nusrat Bhutto heaved a sigh of relief and turned up her toes. To its bewilderment, the entire country was asked to close shop for the day as a result.
The crown prince of Saudi Arabia died, and another stepped into his expensive shoes, and in Turkey hundreds of people died in an earthquake.
Qaddafi the leader of Libya for more than forty years was dragged through the streets and killed, and people fled the capital of Bangkok as the city became inundated with flood waters.
Shouting “We are the 99%” protestors demonstrated in New York City’s Zuccotti Park against unfair distribution of wealth and financial greed within capitalist societies. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ quickly became the prototype for other ‘Occupy’ protests, including ‘Occupy Bilawal House’ (okay, okay, I’m kidding, but it may well come true).
All this while, on television in Pakistan, people continue dancing, shouting, and wearing sunflowers, while fluorescent women continue to grace the covers of various magazines and digests. As Alice said, “it would be so nice if something would make sense for a change.’
We could do without with much of this entertainment, only some of it interesting, very little of it intelligent. We need the kind of nonsense that makes people smile.
True nonsense is a valuable exercise in lateral thinking that teases the brain into questioning one’s surroundings and arriving at conclusions that would not occur in the routine and mundane.
“I like nonsense,” said Dr. Seuss. “It wakes up the brain cells.”
