Even those living under a rock would know the Arshad Khan story. It went viral within the country and without, specially across the border (the Radcliffe, of course, not the Durand, where it would have been met with indifference.)
A photographer was just walking about the itwaar bazaar in Islamabad and she took his photograph, uploaded it on her Instagram account and, five days later, it became viral, with legions of females swooning over him online. You would have seen at least one TV package on him. Not going to elaborate on that.
The virality of the picture has led to a lot of national soul searching and, I daresay, over intellectualising on the issue. Though it could be said that this very piece is guilty of the same.
I won’t get into the issues of consent of the subject of the photograph; the issue of “reverse sexism”, whatever that means; the issue of the “colonial baggage” implied by the fascination with blue eyes and light skin or even the more serious issue of the relation of the status of the Pashtun, specially the working class Pashtun, with the state at large.
Many others have elaborated on the issues mentioned above; a smattering had something to say, the others just wanted to pontificate.
My interests are admittedly dumb. I am just speaking from a mediaman’s point of view. The world at large is an assembly line of news items to us in the media; I have, therefore, more practical concerns.
My issue: remember those videos that had gone viral of policemen beating up suspects and that had subsequently started being covered by the TV channels around five years ago? Well, when the first one had appeared, the public living in the boondocks – and even the major cities – was surprised that there was a demand for such content. Armed with the new, cheap camera-phones from China, they started taking these videos and sending them to the channels, resulting in a flurry of grainy videos of policemen beating up the public. The news directors of the channels then realised that if they were to cover all of them, they won’t have time to show anything else.
The coverage of police brutality stopped, not because the content stopped coming.
We’re in a similar situation with good-looking working class Pashtun males. They won’t stop coming. Their images have already started being posted, like the one you can see here of the mochi outside Quaid-e-Azam University. Would he be getting the same coverage? Would they all be getting the same coverage? Like those surprised by the fact that videos of policemen beating up people have a market, maybe people from all over KP, Baluchistan, Fata or even Gilgit-Baltistan are going to start taking photographs and flooding the airwaves. “Mardan ke Arshad Khan ke ba’ad ab dekhiye Kurram Agency ke Hassan.”
And don’t take this to be a race-obsessed issue. Forget the colonial baggage, the media problem will remain the same if it were the dark-skinned Pashtuns under the spotlight or strikingly handsome individuals from the Punjab or Sindh. The assembly line won’t stop. The media is to cover all of them? “Breaking News: Naazireen, Kasur ki aik chamrrey ke kaarkhaney mein aik aur khoobsurat naujawan paaya gaya hai! Dekhtein hain, Qayyum Haider ki ye report…”
Ending with an excerpt from E M Forster’s A Passage to India. The scene is the famous court case of the novel.
“The Court was crowded and of course very hot, and the first person Adela noticed in it was the humblest of all who were present, a person who had no bearing officially upon the trial: the man who pulled the punkah. Almost naked, and splendidly formed, he sat on a raised platform near the back….He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god – not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.”
Post-script: One hopes things work out well for sweet, humble Arshad Khan and he makes some money off the modelling contracts he is said to have gotten. Not exploited by getting a fraction of a fraction of what another, less attractive model would have gotten.
“Reporter: Why do think you are famous?
Arshad Khan: I don’t know.”