Sorry Owais , We Messed Up

My following blog also appeared on Express Tribune Blogs : http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/15039/we-are-sorry-owais-baig/

I was viewing the Facebook profile of a young man from Karachi. Looking at the publically shared pictures, I came under the impression that he loved his nieces and a nephew. His name was Owais Baig.

He appeared to be a typical Karachiite with swarthy, intelligent facial features- looks that gave away small details of his life. You could tell that he was a young man, still studying, working alongside and looking for a better career and just trying to make it in a city of 20 million.

Then I looked at the video of him dangling from a burning building, which ironically belongs to a company that sells life insurance. I looked at the crowd below, entranced by the dance of death. I saw this same man looking down helplessly; to me it was becoming unbearable. I looked away and a few minutes after wards, I heard grown men scream. I knew the whole story, we all know it.

As much as I want to talk about why the people did not help him, why the fire brigade failed for the umpteenth time, I won’t. But I do want to talk about the role that our media played in this whole situation.

To broadcast the clips of a man dangling from a burning building until he falls to his death shows the level of empathy and social awareness that our media lacks. Now, I won’t the blame the whole media, but those involved in this game would get an idea. When we say “O kuch nahin yaar, bus aik do hee marray hain” (Oh man, its not a big deal, just one or two have died), we know that we have been desensitised by the media.

We were glued to our screens when Owais fell to his death.

His death was plastered on thousands of TV screens nationwide. A couple of apologetic TV programs, wailing and mourning and we are back to our daily routine, thinking little about the trauma that Owais’s family went through during the coverage.

They have been scarred for life.

Owais’s parents, brother, his beloved nieces; they have gone through a trauma that few of us would ever face. And unsurprisingly, our media bigwigs remain unapologetic.

In a program by Matiullah Jan called Apna Apna Gareban, the director of a local news channel unapologetically defended his newschannel’s decision to air Owais’s video clip. And the atrocity doesn’t stop here. Right up to the time of writing, not a single statement by any media house has been broadcasted, seeking apology for airing disturbing visuals.

Somehow, the image of Nero fiddling away while Rome burns flashes across my mind.

It’s not as if we lack laws and regulations, it’s just that our TV channels show blatant disrespect towards implementing them. It is specifically stated in PEMRA (Amendment) Act 2007, article 20, clause C that the person who is issued a license by PEMRA must ensure that:

“All programmes and advertisements do not contain or encourage violence, terrorism, racial, ethnic or religious discrimination, sectarianism, extremism, militancy, hatred, pornography, obscenity, vulgarity or other material offensive to commonly accepted standards of decency”

Forgive me, but I assume that our TV channels do not think that the live broadcasting of a young man’s death nationwide constitutes something ‘offensive’.

This September a Fox News presenter’s YouTube clip went viral. It showed a driver being chased by US police in Arizona when suddenly the driver stops the car, gets out, runs a few yards and then shoots himself in the head.

As soon as the presenter realises what the man is about to do he screams,

“Get off. Get off. Get off it. Get off it. Get off it. Get off it!”

And when his channel accidently shows the video he comes on air and responsibly issuing an apology on live television,

“… we really messed up. And we’re all very sorry. That didn’t belong on TV. We took every precaution we knew how to take to keep that from being on TV. I personally apologise to you that that happened. Sometimes we see a lot of things that we don’t let get to you because it is not time appropriate, it is insensitive, it is just wrong. And that was wrong and that won’t happen on my watch…”

Dear TV channels,

If Fox News - which we all know is famous for its biased and right wing stance against Muslims- is capable of such professionalism then I believe you have got a big ethical dilemma on your hands.

Let us therefore not talk about enacting new laws and regulations, as they already exist, but let us enforce them. Let us force our media houses to publicly apologise for this particular error so that they recognise their professional code of conduct and never indulge in such indecency again.

It is time to apologise to Owais Baig and his family.

I do apologise- sincerely, from the bottom of my heart – to Owais Baig and his family.

May his soul rest in peace. Ameen.

Reflections in a waiting queue

I am sitting on a conservatively designed computer terminal in the university, waiting for my transcript and completion letter. There is one trait that almost all education institutions around the world share, and that is their laziness to issue transcripts, I mean I have faced this issue in matric, then college, then the university ( in Pakistan) and now here all the way in Australia. The only improvement in this whole situation was the presence of a pretty looking damsel on the counter, otherwise in my experience it was either a man with a beard chewing pan, a grumpy looking pregnant woman or some bespectacled unshaven moron who had given up hope on living a life.

So now here I am nothing to do, and to while away the waiting hours I decided to write something. Actually it was the Coldplay song "The Scientist" that triggered some hitherto lost memory and made me reflect on the finite nature of everything. I am not a religious person at all, but that doesn’t mean I do not reflect on life and death and what happens afterwards. I like to believe that there is an afterlife but I don’t know if there is one. Maybe there is one, but our human mind is unable to grasp it. What if science can’t prove it in my lifetime, then what? Would I die as an unbeliever? Condemned to live in Hell? Or maybe I would just die and become the constituent matter of the soil on which barley would grow and a grain would just fall due to the wind and be pecked by a hen which in turn would be collected by its owner who would sell it in the market and where it would be cut, skinned and reduced to cutlets and end up on the table of a local politician who would, when filled up, would proceed to plot the death of some rival and the circle of life would carry on. How would my skeleton rise out of the grave on the day of judgement I don’t know. Looks like a zombie apocalypse to me. All I know is that earliest traces of this concept lie in the Egyptian concept of the Kingdom of the Dead. But some people are dead before they even die, their souls or their amygdala part of the brain is dead, for if it was not, then what induces them to kill other humans- Extinguish a Life. They don’t only extinguish a life but they also kill a story. The story of a person who might have had the opportunity to live right up to a ripe old age and relate the story of his life to his grandchildren, lessons that they would retain in their minds for the rest of their lives but who wouldn’t be able to do that now just because there is a soul-less zombie who killed that person in the name of a deity whose nature has been changing from the Mesopotamian Marduk to Yahweh and then Allah. May be that deity is there. Up there somewhere looking down upon the petty conglomeration of cells and molecules we call humans, who kill in the name of His when they have not even seen, heard or even felt Him. May be He was there, back in the good old days, but maybe He has left, He has left this planet and gone over to experiment on some other civilization residing on a planet millions of light years away. Who knows? That's the statement that I KNOW has and will be forever echoing in the story of human civilization. Anyways, I should go over to check whether the documents have arrived or not. Feels good to write, doesn’t it :)