“Fool me once, strike one. Fool me twice…….strike…umm…three…”
– The Office
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, then you should go ahead and call it a duck. The duck in question here is serial talk show boor Fayyaz-ul-Hassan Chauhan. The fellow’s acerbic style and inability to talk about the issue at hand has been essayed in this very column more than once in the past.
So plain-to-see was this ‘Pindi politician’s crassness, that even his own party, the PTI, never one for manners itself, first removed him from his party PR post and then even suspended his basic membership.
The talk show circuit, however, keeps calling the fellow over. For any anchor or program producer to call him on their show, and then pretend to be baffled by his roguish demeanour is beyond silly. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck… what more evidence does the hive-mind of the talk-shows collective need? How many more chances will the fellow get?
It is for that reason, I would not place the blame of the scuffle of 92’s program Hum Dekhenge on him, but on host Asma Sherazi and her producer. They should have known better.
The program started on the sad case of violence against a member of the transgendered community in Peshawar and, in the second half, had to progress towards the women protection bills. But a little into the program, it became a bit of a malleable mix between the two, even though the topics were rather distinct. Women and the transgendered were being slotted in the same category, somehow.
Being that the case, since the incident in question had taken place in KP and Chauhan had to defend himself (in what capacity, one still doesn’t know) he started talking about the case of Ayesha Ahad (Hamza Shahbaz Sharif’s estranged former wife.) That had nothing to do with the issue at hand, and naturally, Ms Sherazi asked him to stop making personal attacks, but the League’s Uzma Bukhari still let it get to her and she started name-dropping Sita White and Imran Khan’s daughter.
Most interesting is what happens in the clip (online readers only) where he starts reciting a poem at 35:40, and continues reciting it all through Ms Sherazi’s pleas for him to let others speak.
Women’s issues, health, education, the environment, these are all extremely important issues and require reasoned debates. Yes, we know it won’t be a mild-mannered professors’ disagreement; since politics is adversarial in nature and there are going to be proponents and opponents, there is always going to be a conflict, some tempers (and voices) raised.
But the likes of Chauhan will make all debates devolve into asinine shouting matches, where he is doing most of the shouting. And poetry recitation. Shame on the producers’ network that keeps on inviting him to shows. This is not merely dumbing down our debate, it is turning it into a boys’ school playground scuffle, cuss words and all.
Post-script: the only reasonable thing he said on the show was how making laws was easy and enforcing them was difficult. But, to illustrate this, he said: birthing children and making laws is easy; raising children and enforcing laws is difficult.
Though one understands the conceptual symmetry he was trying to achieve with this rhetorical device, but, to my knowledge, Fayyaz-ul-Hassan Chauhan hasn’t (yet) given birth to a child, so he isn’t well-placed to know. One has been informed by several women who have born children that it isn’t, in fact, easy. Even host Asma Sherazi corrected him.