Essentially, I don’t have an issue with naming and shaming. Whether it's my ongoing war again the affected inanities of FM89's perennially effected pseudo-americans, or its this rant- i say we should all stop wallowing in herded hero-worshipping.
That said, i bring your attention to a particularly trite article that appeared in Dawn recently. '
To see or not to see' by Salma Jafri, explains in excruciating detail, and in a flurry of clichés how she didn’t enjoy a trip to a cinema.
Or as she concludes
So when I tried to have some fun, I received a lot of anxious moments.
The fact that Dawn published it is a none-too-nuanced indicator of where journalism is in Pakistan. Perhaps the clichés, the gratuitous (and in the era of
pak-positive, frankly boring) superficial cynicism, as unoriginal as they were- were not half as disturbing as the meaninglessness of it all.
It was hard not to miss the fact that it was, essentially utterly pointless and meaningless.
Ayaz amir, who I regard as one of our best columnists once wrote a very interesting piece on our unoriginality in prose. He talked about how clichés and over-used expressions form the bulk of our literature, atleast in English.
This is all too apparent if you take a look at some of the adverts that we see around us.
Case in point- ' truly' and the following are just two examples amongst the unimaginable scale of permutations of this sentence..
Tapal
PICIC