eh!

If the purple dragon ensconced in my bed could actually breathe fire, I’d stick my head in its mouth.  Come to think of it, unworked-for fatigue and precariously hinged frustration tolerance would probably follow me there too!

Another English language channel

So I was thinking the other day, why don’t I watch Dawn News?  From Convent School where speaking in Urdu was largely forbidden except during the Urdu class to a home where my American-University-educated mother encouraged speaking and thinking in English, Urdu has been my second language despite my Pakistani nationality.  Now I am not about to take the post colonial lens on this and lament the inadequacy of my Urdu because of some latent, inbred cultural complex.  I honestly don’t think that the limitations of language have ever made me less patriotic than the next person.  What I do find curious though is that despite being a Pakistani who routinely reads an English newspaper, I am not at all drawn to a channel that spews news in English and just while I am contemplating this indifference, Express launches a competitor.

I think a good chunk of my antipathy has to do with all the pseudo British and American accents that go across the board.  If the English language channel caters to the English speaking Pakistani then why does it not talk in the native dialect of English?  If however it is operating as do outsourced call centers and requires to really communicate with the Western world then why is its programming directed at a niche Pakistani market where all the men and women pointedly exude their affluence?  For example, why is it not possible for the women anchors to be wearing shalwars instead of capris and still be talking in English?  It appears as though only the super affluent in this city prefer communicating in English when in reality there is a good section of middle class Karachiites who do too but neither are they represented and nor are they targeted.  Documentaries too take on a very sanitized, outsider look at local happenings.  This is clearly not akin to al-Jazeera’s philosophy which seeks to speak to the West in its own language and debunk its hegemony through counteractive devices.  This is more a case of ’sell to the market which will yield the more profitable returns’: use the sweatshop base and generate income in foreign currency.

So if one of these was not enough, we now have another one to grace the idiot box.