Media Watch: The last refuge of the scoundrel

Patriotism is, according to Dr Johnson. Now Sahir Lodhi is no scoundrel. He might be a self-indulgent ultimately talentless dolt whose affected performances on his shows fall squarely in the so-bad-that-it’s-good category. But a scoundrel he is not.

His could be a case of patriotism turning him into a scoundrel in the first place.

His now viral performance on a Ramzan show – where he interrupted a young woman who was participating in a declamation contest and launched off into an absurd polemic – has thankfully been received with much criticism. Including the obligatory, and in this case, inherently wrong, petition on change.org to ban the fellow from TV.

But the problem here is not the fact that he got angry at this young guest on his show, or that it was an attack on freedom of speech. To those very important and valid points we shall return later below, but the problem here is that nothing, absolutely nothing offensive – even from a state-sanctioned Pakistan Studies textbook vantage point – was said.

Much like Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where the threshold for blasphemy was ridiculously low (as it increasingly is in Pakistan) the threshold for whatever is deemed disrespectful to the Quaid and Allama Iqbal has also dropped to the ground with a loud clank.

The young woman making that speech was not in the slightest sense critical of the founder of the nation but was actually adulatory. In the middle of a passionate speech on the bleak state of women’s rights in the country, to drive the point home, she asked the spirit of the Quaid to return to the country and see for himself. This is the point where our man stops the music and lets it rip.

Don’t take my word for it. See the video below (online readers only.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnmOIJoCz3s

The ideal that we should aspire to: the Quaid-e-Azam should be criticised by those who want to. The same for Allama Iqbal. Far from reaching such an ideal, even their praise can get you in trouble.

Right next door in India, the Mahatma has been criticised again and again. The freethinking Left dig up what they allege is his racist and misogynistic aspects. And the Right (whom, it must not be forgotten, assassinated him) also dig up their share of criticism in how he let partition happen. Though this latter lot (BJP and from there on, the RSS, VHP, SS MNS, Sangh Parivar et al) are not exactly poster boys for free speech and latch onto it only when it comes to bashing the Mahatma.

There has been much soul searching in the United States over Thomas Jefferson, perhaps their second most notable founding father and the principal author of the constitution. This brilliant advocate of democracy was not just a slave owner but also sired at least one of her children.

They Americans can, with a very heavy heart, say that no one is just one thing and that great individuals are capable of having some deplorable traits. But the American angst on this front goes much farther than this. You see, of the two sides fighting in the American war of independence, one side had long since banned the practice of slavery, deeming it to be immoral. Spoiler: it wasn’t the side that had wanted “liberty.”

But far from that, much like the Monty Python farce mentioned above, we are in a situation where we can’t even praise revered fathers of the nation.

It is quite plausible, however, that Lodhi’s antics were borne, not out of patriotism, but out of a predisposition to treat everything as an audition to showcase his histrionics. The film “hero” in our neck of the woods is given to screaming soliloquies, where he delivers the villain one armour piercing question after the other. He employed a similar tirade, then not of a patriotic but a man-of-the-masses flavour, when his film had gotten bad reviews.

Postscript: in the neurotic, almost comical standards of irreverence that the man has constructed, he could also be accused of the same, when, in the flow of his platitudes for the Quaid, he also said, “woh shakhs jiss ne lakhon loge shaheed karwaae!”