A journalist?

News from home, in London

The other day in London a friend first introduced me as a journalist and then said, “No, sorry, he’s a writer and publisher and editor – columnist too.” She turned to me and asked in exasperation, “How can one best describe you? You are also a businessman, a restaurateur, a chef and an educator. And dog breeder to boot.”

“Gentleman at large,” I suggested unhelpfully. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that, whatever grabs my fancy. Everything I do is my hobby. I really enjoy life, despite its tribulations. I love to see history in the making and don’t get diverted by emotion or how it affects me personally. I’m like a spectator of a drama on a global scale. Some would call it a waste of time.”

I got thinking about the word ‘journalist’. Oftentimes the obvious stares one in the face but one doesn’t see it. Obviously the word journalist comes from the word ‘journal’ – someone who writes a regular journal or diary of events and what one makes of them and what one witnesses and hears. Nothing more fancy. In that sense we are all journalists, whether we keep a formal diary or just talk about things. So I’ll write a journal this time about my visit to London to have my eyes checked at the Moorfields Eye Hospital. I don’t want to bore you with the details, but in a nutshell they said that whatever Dr Zeba was doing in Islamabad is perfect and they couldn’t add to or subtract from it in any way. So there: our doctors are as good as any and better than many. We often go running to London not just because sometimes up-to-date treatment for an ailment is not available in Pakistan but also because of our mental colonization, though getting a second opinion from an expert is no bad thing for it reinforces your confidence.

In many ways, what’s happening in the UK is much like what’s happening in Pakistan: a woefully declining economy, a flat economic growth rate, acute joblessness, people being thrown out of work, prices sky high and ascending, gas prices going up and making people even more unhappy and a general air of doom and gloom.

They are very disappointed that a television entertainer, general do-gooder and bleeding heart, Jimmy Seville, now dead for a year, has turned out to be a pedophile. Women are emerging by the day to allege that Seville molested them when they were children. Worse, the BBC, that supposed epitome of journalistic norms and standards, apparently knew about it but said nothing for Seville was such a big money making star. Talk of standards in journalism that we try and copy. Our standards have deteriorated over the years too, but British standards in journalism is what one should try and avoid, not emulate. The scandals of the Murdoch papers, how they bugged people’s phones and their cheque book journalism are still ongoing. Actually, print journalism is changing and daily newspapers are fast becoming a thing of the past with television not far behind, what with news getting to people on their phones and tablet computers and what have you. Soon one won’t need a license to start a TV channel but just do programming on YouTube and the like. This is exactly what the maker of the blasphemous video did. God help us. I fear that like currency, the media too might turn out to be another tool of the devil spreading discord and disharmony.

Then there’s the news that Lance Armstrong, the greatest ever cyclist, took performance enhancing drugs. Problem is that many others – some say everyone – also took performance enhancing drugs, so why single out just Armstrong? Why, because Armstrong got caught. Why, because just as failure has no friends too much success makes many enemies.

The news from Pakistan that caught everyone’s attention was the shooting of the 14-year-old girl Malala Yousufzai by religious terrorists because she started a blog to inform girls when she was only eleven. She is still alive, but only just. It has become axiomatic to say that such people can’t be Muslims, but I’m afraid this is exactly what they are, Muslims by accident of birth, semi-literate but totally uneducated, their minds in the control of bigoted clerics. They know nothing about their faith and follow the dogma, rituals and self-serving interpretations of mullahs masquerading as scholars. Such people are Islam’s greatest enemies and Islam’s enemies are humanity’s enemies because they are enemies of God. When they go about killing and maiming in the name of God they commit blasphemy against God. The good news is that large chunks of Pakistani society has condemned this savagery, so one clutches on to straws and feels that there might be hope yet, just as one feels the same with society wondering about the riots against the blasphemous video a few weeks ago.

The big news is the European Union getting the Nobel Peace Prize. It surprised many, not least for lack of imagination. However, if it can go to the likes to the Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat and lately the ridiculous Obama, why not the EU? It is a good project for it has kept the naturally warring Europeans from one another’s throats and prevented horrendous wars, as happened twice last century and many times earlier. There is a lot of concern about the Euro that seems terminal: its demise would badly impact the UK and US economies that already seem beyond good and evil anyway given that their respective indebtedness has gone beyond their GDPs. A fatherless common currency without a proper regulator (not that ‘proper’ regulators have been able to do much to prevent the criminality of banks) for such disparate economies that got even more disparate after the collapse of the USSR and its east European satellites was an enterprise in madness that had to go awry.

Or perhaps it wasn’t such madness after all on the part of Germany at least for it has helped it establish a high degree of hegemony over the rest of Europe, especially those economies in trouble like Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and growing. Hegemony over Europe is something Germany tried but couldn’t do in two military enterprises last century. This time it tried economically – on the axiom that he who pays the piper calls the tune – but this is failing too and causing Germany grief as well. The most intelligent thing Britain did in a long while was not to join the Euro, but its imperial hangover is keeping the sterling prohibitively over-rated, which has caused it to lose exports and thus its manufacturing base. It is financial services, tourism and shop keeping, as Napoleon said, that keeps the British economy going on the face of it, but for how long?

However, if you move around in the circles of the rich and famous you wouldn’t see the decline. High priced restaurants are full and tables are hard to come by. Going to such places makes you feel that nothing has changed; just as the lifestyles of the Pakistani rich with their Birkin bags and third-hand private planes makes one feel that all’s well with the world. “What is everyone bellyaching about?” you wonder. But ask the ordinary middle class Briton and like any middle class Pakistani he will have a litany of woes, the list increasing. Rich people go to private doctors or have medical insurance, but the majority depends on the National Health Service. The NHS is now a shadow of its former self. Food in the supermarkets is genetically modified and stuffed with chemicals and preservatives. Our children don’t know what real chicken tastes like. They stop you from smoking everywhere and a very good thing it is too, but the pollution in London or New York is like smoking a pack a day. If you jog it is more like smoking a carton.

Everything said and done, London is the greatest place in the world after home, especially for young people, and may it remain so. One thing London has that home doesn’t – London is not an intellectual wasteland.