Making life a bit easier

Islamabad diary

Without any fuss, with no clamour of any announcement, one of the patent stupidities we had inflicted on ourselves has gone. You can now access YouTube in the Fortress of Islam without a proxy server. A click and there you are.

This sense of celebration would sound quaint to outsiders. But then not having experienced the deprivation, how could they savour the joy of restoration? The ban was a headache. You could still go to YouTube via proxies but it took time and the connection would fail and you would have to go through the exercise again. It has taken two and a half years for this government to summon up the courage to lift the ban but better late than never.

Mercifully, it has all been quiet on the fire-and-brimstone front. No holy father, no learned man of the cloth, no distinguished doctor of the faith, has taken to the pulpit, no fiery mob of the zealous has taken to the streets. The Defence of Pakistan Council has not spoken. The Council of Islamic Ideology is silent. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, quick to speak in matters affecting the glory of the faith, has uttered no word of denunciation. And the heavens have not fallen.

So what exactly was the purpose of imposing the ban in the first place? Granted, engineered mobs had taken to the streets in Islamabad in protest against that downright stupid film made by a crank in California – a film with offensive material in it regarding the Holy Prophet (pbuh) – but who had forced anyone to see that film on the internet?

I’ve never seen it and was never tempted to see it. There is so much that is offensive on the net, pornography, unimaginable filth, hate material and incitement to violence and killing. But is anyone obliged to watch any of this? You only go where your inclination takes you. So where does the fault lie? With the makers of porn or with those who are tempted by it?

There are sites like Craigslist – and what it is about you’ll have to see for yourself – you can’t access in China and Dubai, and I am sure in other places. But we must throw out the baby with the bathwater. If there is something that upsets us we should go for that instead of closing the whole thing down as we have done for the past three years – the ban first imposed by Raja Pervaiz Ashraf when he was prime minister and the PML-N government when it came to office after the elections not finding the courage to lift it.

And here’s something for the media to mull over. The ban was briefly lifted by the PPP government but as soon as this was done a major TV channel – no names please, we must be careful – announced in its news headlines that the offensive film could still be seen. Unable to deliver, unable to govern and hit from all sides, the government was left with no option but to re-impose the ban. Is there a shortage of stupidity and narrow-mindedness in our society that the media should act irresponsibly and go about adding to this surplus store?

I get worked up about YouTube because most of my music I get from there…stuff that I could never have heard or watched otherwise. I remember all too vividly the days of our youth when there was no way to get hold of western classical music in this country. It just wasn’t available. You went abroad – and travelling abroad in those days was a strictly limited affair – and you bought a few records and if you were lucky enough to have a Grundig or some other record player you played it on them. And who had heard of ballet and opera?

Today, thanks to the inventiveness of the human mind, an unimaginable storehouse of knowledge and books and music is available at the click of a button. All this has happened just in the last decade or so. Today you get fast internet connections even in remote villages…wherever broadband services are available.

There was a time, and not too long ago either, when to be a journalist you had to be in a big city because only from there could you send your copy to your magazine or newspaper.

It seems another age when I wrote a weekly column for Viewpoint, the magazine brought out from Lahore by the late Mazhar Ali Khan, editor of the Pakistan Times before Ayub Khan’s martial law. I would write it in longhand, type it once and then twice on a manual typewriter and then drive to the PIA office which was then in Aabpara and post it to Lahore where it would arrive the next day. The envelope had to be collected from the PIA office in Lahore. Today I can be in my village and be in touch with the entire world. This is the revolution that has happened in our lifetimes.

Not all development has been for the good. We have to be clear about this. We are not being careful about what the human race is doing to the planet, our only home. We have damaged the seas and oceans and caused great, perhaps irreversible harm to the environment. Look at the smog and pollution in cities like Beijing and Delhi. Climate change is a reality. We are burning too much fossil fuel and spewing too much poison into the atmosphere. Glaciers are melting faster than they should. The ice cap on the North Pole is receding at a rate not predicted by the best scientists.

This is the flip side of development. The internet, however, is a marvel and the good in it – there is also much that is evil – is there to be cherished. Most of us will never go to the Bolshoi Theatre. But the next best thing is at hand. Even if you are living in a small apartment or a single room you can watch great performances from the past, listen to the greatest music, if you have an internet connection. And you learn as you go along. You open one site and it leads you to another…and so on.

Where did the computer begin from? Who created the worldwide web? All gifted souls…the word genius applies here. And to think of the things we in Pakistan are caught in: silly notions of faith and ideology even as humankind reaches out for the stars.

I hope the surreptitious approach we have applied to YouTube we can apply to some other things as well. Just as the ban on YouTube was sheer stupidity there are other restrictions we have put on ourselves which also fall in the same category. What we put into our bodies and how we use our bodies is ultimately a matter of individual choice and liberty…as long as the choices we make are no cause of harm or inconvenience to others.

Licence is one thing and there should be little scope for that in an orderly society. But moral policing and unconscionable restrictions is a bar to human happiness. We could do with less moral policing here. After experiencing the horrors of extremism and bigotry in the name of religion, this country now deserves a break. It could do with more openness and greater tolerance.

Even so, let’s count our blessings. The situation today is better than what it was a year ago. The terrorism threat has abated and the number of terrorist incidents has gone down. The TTP has been pushed back and Karachi is a different city. The army-led operation against terrorism and extremism has been a bigger success than many in the liberati are willing to acknowledge. We have our problems and the economic situation is not that rosy but Pakistan today compared to just a year ago is a more relaxed place.

Let’s pray and hope there is more of this. Let the frontiers of intolerance recede further. And let’s do away with antiquated laws like the Hudood Ordinance – a product of times long since gone – which put restrictions on individual freedom.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com