Oh blimey!

Poets, more fortunately situated, can sing of and invoke the Heavenly Muse. Not so with journalists. The trade has its absurdities and of course its deadlines. It is about working one’s fingers to the bone, literally, even on that odd day when one doesn’t want to write despite having outgrown the routine through sheer practice, almost like the bored sex witnessed by Tiresias. It is on such occasions that a tweet can come to one’s rescue, the modern equivalent perhaps of the muse that sat “on the secret top of Oreb, or of Sinai” but has since been reduced to 140 characters.

The triteness of modernity, or is it post-modernity since we are in the age of post-everything? This tweet was by an Indian. This is how he remarked on an article I had written: “Those Indians who sit around hoping for peace should read the naked aggression implicit in @ejazhaider’s FP article.” But before I proceed further, let me say that Indians I generally like. They provide much amusement when they are talking Pakistan and can be quite adorable when they are not, which is about one full day in a year. My intention is not to rebut what this gent wrote, because given the amusement his tweet provided me that would be an ungenerous act. My concern is different.

In these parts, we like to write in a certain way, adjectivising (don’t look it up, the word doesn’t exist but is much better than saying qualifying nouns or using adjectives) nouns for the right stresses. Which is why, he would not be content to say “read the aggression”. It had to be “naked aggression”. But the problem with depriving aggression of clothes and I am assuming making it front-loaded, has its problems.

One such is his use of “implicit” immediately after he qualifies aggression as being quite naked on this occasion. It stretches credulity to breaking point to visualise aggression in all its naked glory and running towards someone, perhaps “over-speeding” in this case and still be implicit. But India being where she is and we being where we are, I must shut up.

In any case I wouldn’t have had anything to write about if aggression had not been so imprudent. I have now no reason to stamp my foot on him with a heavy hand given that the Pakistani ship of state is already faced with an uphill task, thank you.

It reminded me of the late Khalid Hasan, one of the most careful writers I have had the pleasure of reading.

Khalid was convinced that “What we write gives no delight and springs no surprises”. He would often note that when one of us is “doing his best, he will be doing not just his best but his ‘level best’. If someone is saying something of which he is utterly certain, he has to precede it with ‘without fear of contradiction’. It is as if the entire world was waiting to contradict this person the moment certain words left his mouth. A crime is not a crime unless it is ‘dastardly’ or ‘heinous’ and, preferably both. Commitment by itself is not enough. It has to be ‘selfless’ as well. Simple duty won’t do, unless it was turned into ‘bounden duty’, nor can a tribute be paid without it being ‘warm’. And, yes, it always has to be paid in the plural, not singular, which would be the correct form. An honour has to be ‘coveted’ and a privilege must be qualified by ‘great’. Designs always have to be ‘nefarious’ and no matter what time of the year it is, one of the ugliest-sounding words in the English language – ‘eschew’ – is in season. A simpler word, easy on the tongue and understood by everyone, won’t be used”.

Check the crime stories, for instance. Quite often we have six armed men slaughtering people with automatic weapons or mowing them down with knives and then always “making their escape good” before the cops can arrive on the gory scene.

Until some months ago, a friend, a sub in a newspaper, used to share reporters’ unedited copies on Facebook. Here’s one sample: “Faisalabad; May 20: A poor lady and her innocently poor daughter of Tandalanwala became victimised in the wrath of two of their close relatives who nurtured a strange grudge type feeling against them that they used to work as mid servant at the houses of their rivals.” Indeed!

This is bad but I have often wondered if such a copy is not better than “hearkening back” to a “glorious past” or “delivering a yeoman’s service” about which Khalid wrote that we use this phrase despite the fact that “yeomen disappeared a couple of hundred years before the British departed these shores. They only now exist in the Tower of London or in the Royal Navy, assigned in the latter to perform visual signalling”.

Khalid had a list of nouns and adjectives. And while he thought they were “alive and well from Landi Kotal to Karachi”, I am happy to note that they are doing equally well in India. Here are some gems: utmost importance, strict adherence, crucial need, exemplary courage, gallant struggle, diabolical designs/machinations (the latter word another monstrosity we love), Spartan spirit, dedicated service, inspiring example, tireless efforts” etcetera.

Time to sign off and say RIP to George Orwell but not before this final gem by Khalid Hasan:

“Friend Ahsan Khwaja had a most colourful uncle who served the better part of his life as a railway guard during the Raj. Once a memsahib gave him a cake for safekeeping in the brake, to be collected when she left the train. Old Khwaja, a big man who always went around in khakis and a solar hat, narrated this story in the following words. ‘My mouth watered and taking my courage in both hands and girding up my loins, I took the lion’s share out of that cake.’ Once when he was sick, he told the doctor who had come to take a look at him, ‘Doctor, mend me or end me.’”

The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.