The O Scar Awards 2012

Let’s hand them out on April 1st, not March 23rd

Any national award typically carries with it a certain amount of significance both for the recipient and for the country. It accords a well-deserved recognition to the former for services rendered to the state (not to an individual, please note the delicate difference) or for excellence in some field of study, excluding sycophancy. It bestows a merited prestige on a person for some tangible achievement that is widely acknowledged.

As for the nation, the names figuring on the awards list may also obliquely reflect its national and international status (last year, a Chinese general reportedly sent a lowly colonel to collect his award in an event arranged at Beijing’s most expensive hotel by our embassy) as well as lighting up the reality of its internal conditions and circumstances. The mindset and outlook of its leadership, warped or otherwise, is also on display. Therefore, the concerned bureaucrats in any normal civilised country take great pains to make the exercise of the Honours List a credible and fair one.

From the above opening salvo, it is quite clear that one is not talking about our beloved country, as is easily confirmed from the foul play in the highest civilian categories of the 2012 Pakistan Day awards, or rather rewards. At the outset one must also swear on scout’s honour that there is no intention of playing politics or desecrating anyone’s grave (God forbid), and as a general confession of good faith, one may add that one is not being anti-Semitic about the Hollywood hullabaloo at all!

When the annual fun and frolic of the Oscars takes place in Los Angeles, the disappointment comes after a sure shot winner in the popular perception, whether a particular movie, an actor or a director is overlooked in the final dramatic announcement. In the case of our very own O Scars, it is the mostly infuriating names actually appearing in the final recipients list that cause all the anguish. For they sear the psyche, leaving a lasting (until the next awards) imprint.

Apart from causing a spontaneous chain reaction of the ‘expletive deleted’ type, the physical symptoms may include a glazed look, a bad taste in the mouth and a queasy stomach.

The O Scar Awards, now also known as the big, bigger, biggest razzies in any category or the ultimate charade ditto, are held in Islamabad every year on March 23. This year was no exception, with the disconcerting difference that the award-winners on the civilian side in the top category awards were so blatantly (barring a few, and those too on emotional, patriotic and diplomatic grounds) fishy, that it would have been much more appropriate if the investiture ceremony were held on April 1. But, then, here every day is an April Fool’s Day for the ordinary man, who is taken for a daily ride on a crazy witches broom by the widely grinning master of ceremonies presiding over the whole sham business of state.

As with everything else in the present epic era of ‘elected for a full term of five years and will complete it’ leadership, two things stand out starkly in the O Scar Awards 2012: a shameless cronyism of the most brazen kind, with all the usual suspects figuring prominently, and second, denigrating an event of national importance to the extent of turning it into a joke, as in the case of institutions.

Among the citizens there is, or rather was, but one individual who deserved to be given the award in her lifetime, or rather in her long drawn out illness of many years. All right, there is also the ex-governor of the biggest province who was heartlessly used as a political pawn in a game of personal vendetta, and overreached himself on what was verbally passé and taboo in certain enlightened local circles. But that is about it of the truly deserving in the category of the highest civilian awards. Otherwise, a sprinkling of the ‘Al-Faeda’ brigade of sycophants has had another day to remember! And all roads lead to the door of the ruling party with the minuscule majority.

In the dilapidated department, there is one gentlemanly fossil, of a seriously advanced age, whose appearance is a ‘tribute to the embalmers art’, or it might be the make-up artist’s craft. But he enjoys the ultimate merit: he is one of the oldest comrades-in-cahoots. A doctor, also of the Monticello variety, he has been a miserable flop in his, it would seem, dynastically inherited ministry, but no matter. And, in the Pride of Performance category one notorious name in the list alone makes a mockery of the whole, as the lady in question is renowned more for her overweening vanity, her dubious activities, and alleged spouses, not to mention her stubborn insistence on conversing in a totally innocent foreign tongue.

But the real ‘three pipe’ mystery, as Sherlock Holmes might put it, is the inexplicable absence from the self-rewarding list of the two political figures (one actually, in the final analysis) who actually count in our poor land. Why this coy bashfulness, this demure diffidence? After all, the more, the merrier is the motto in such matters, that is, when pulling rabbits out of the hat.

The writer is a freelance columnist.