The puritan’s job

It gets – pardon the language – harder and harder

If, perchance, the reader wanted to send the line above as an SMS text on one of Pakistan’s five cellular networks, she would not be able to. The PTA, our telecom watchdog, has banned the word “harder.” Other innocuous entries in the now famous list of banned words include “deeper” and – hold on to your hats, those of you visiting from the 1830s – “breast.”
The banned-words list is a prime example of how to do the wrong thing the wrong way. The wrong way, because the effort reeks of bureaucratic mechanisation, with some PTA section officer having copy-pasted the English list off from some US religious right website. On the one hand it contains words that only a Victorian grandmother would find offence at and on the other, esoteric words that were probably not used to begin with.
It is the wrong thing to do because of the perverse idea. As opposed to broadcast content, the sms message is a form of conversation between two individuals. Seeking to regulate that is the province of none but the most totalitarian of regimes. How much of the airwaves or even the internet should (or can) be regulated is a subject that can be debated endlessly. But to even begin to think along these lines about casual conversation is a slippery slope. One cannot be accused of blowing decisions like these out of proportion when one argues that the state will eventually move on to ban other words as well.
As a colleague of the protagonist in the classic 1984 (predictable but unavoidable reference) said, newspeak – the language the state was working on – will make thought itself impossible.
Hope is found, however, when one looks at the list of banned words in the native tongue – “tongue”, by the way is banned English word number 1043. The sheer creativity of some of the slurs in the regional languages implies an eventual ability to get around the thickest wall of red-tape.
As anyone who has put in enough time in a boys’ – or, for that matter, girls’ – hostel will tell the reader, there is no stopping the deep, intrinsic and indeed primal need of our species to be guttermouthed. An exercise in futility, PTA.