interaslam

UR On...
Aslam Azhar
An Interview for EDucate!
MASHHOOD RIZVI

“The world is mass producing literature just as it is mass producing other consumer goods”, says Aslam Azhar, the pioneering veteran of nascent Pakistan Television. From being the first Managing Director of PTV to a dynamic media critic, Azhar talks to EDucate! about the transition of electronic media in Pakistan, the rise of consumerism, the plight of our education system and the vitality of hope …

How did you get involved with Pakistan Television?

AA: Well very briefly, by chance, purely by chance. I was the first Pakistani to be employed in television when it started in 1964. It was started as a pilot project by a Japanese company who were given a contract by the Government of Pakistan. The Government of Pakistan said, look we know nothing about television, you start a pilot project, run it successfully for three months and then we take it over if it succeeds. This Japanese company was introduced to me, I was then a freelance theater person, writer, journalist and so I became the very first programmed Pakistani in Pakistan Television.

I started the Lahore station and that was very successful, I started the then Rawalpindi station, which later became Islamabad station and then the Karachi station. So I started all three of these. I went on to become the Managing Director of Pakistan Television Corporation and in Zia-ul-Haq’s time I was sacked. I came back when Benazir Bhutto came back in her first tenure, in December 1988, as Chairman of Pakistan Television and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Pakistan. After a year-and-a-half I decided that the policies the government was pursuing were not the policies that I had come to promote because I am a democrat and I resigned. Since then I have been a freelance.

So you were not only technically but also conceptually and intellectually framing the role of television media or for that matter media in the Pakistani society. What were your initial goals with respect to the societal elements and how were you doing it?

AA: Ofcourse I had a team, a very good team. All along, throughout my career, in the arts and in the performing arts and in the field broadly of culture, I have been concerned with somehow turning these two sub societies of Pakistan into one mainstream society. The two sub societies of Pakistan are the urban society and the rural society and there is a big gap between these two, it is not a class gap in the Marxist sense; it is almost literally a cast gap. There is the English medium class and there’s the non-English medium class and these are two casts in society and by and large the English medium cast inhabits the urban centers of Pakistan, whether they are poor or rich. Even the poor Pakistani today aspires to send his boys to an English medium school because he realizes there’s no future for them in the absence of an English medium.

The rural child or parent has absolutely no access to that, not only no access but his aspirations are different, his culture is different, so in the early days of television we laid a lot of stress on bringing rural culture into the cities via television. And this was a conscious effort.

Now in those early days, 1964 till maybe 1970, television was very limited in its reach, there weren’t all that many television sets in the country but then gradually it began to grow. In those days the big difference was that the programs were determined and decided and produced by us producers. Today, the situation is different, today the programs are determined, decided and produced at the will of he who pays, that is to say the advertiser, the great global corporations, which have swamped Pakistan. So this is why today television is no longer, in my opinion, serving society’s needs. It is infact serving the needs of the global producers.

Noam Chomsky was recently in Pakistan, you also met him. There are a lot of intellectuals in the West who have openly criticized the strangulating control of global media and have also analyzed the role of US media within their own society. Do you think anybody in Pakistan has been able to do that or if not, why?

AA: In Chomsky’s lecture he was asked a similar question and he said nowhere in the world today and nowhere in history have the mainstream intellectuals ever supported rebellion and dissonance. The mainstream intellectuals have always supported the power structures in power, the establishment. We are a small group of people in Pakistan, who are now precisely raising our voices on this issue but we get very little support at the moment because there’s a long process of creating lobbies in various sectors of society; in the middle-class, in the lower middle class, in the rural class. Lobbies which are conscientized and which understand what is being done to them and how they are being manipulated by the global media of which the Pakistani media, especially the electronic media, are a part and parcel.

Now, the electronic media in Pakistan are pursuing, without really thinking about these issues, the same course as the global media are, what we call in Urdu, bher chaal, they are following like sheep. Nobody understands that what the global media and today’s contemporary media essentially do is to destroy the critical ability of the individual. He is deprived of his critical ability to distinguish between good and evil, between necessary and redundant, between need and greed and this is what they consciously want because they want this individual to stop being a human being and become, in inverted commas, ‘a consumer’. A consumer who consumes beyond his necessary needs because that’s the only way in which the global corporations can continue to hold and exercise power internationally.

There’s so much comparison which is done between the way Indian media, especially the electronic media, has developed over the past decade after the invasion of the satellite dish and the way Pakistan has repositioned itself. Do you think this is an invalid comparison since their thought-control processes are more sophisticated than ours or is this comparison done on some other ground?

AA: You are right. Your question is well phrased. The Indians infact have turned out to be very good students of the Western global media and today Indian television, satellite television is even more efficient than the Western global media would have hoped for in converting human beings into consumers.

Now the comparison with Pakistan is simply because the Pakistani television was only state-owned, there was no private sector television and therefore Pakistani television in these early decades tended to be a little more service-oriented but now in the last five years, we see that Pakistan Television which is still state-owned is actually behaving like a private sector television organization, which is to say it’s doing exactly what the Indian television commercial stations are doing; it is in the service of the producers of goods and services.

In your opinion, whose interests should the media serve, the state or the society?

AA: Let me first say that I put this into three categories not two, not state and society. Number one is the state, number two the government of the day and number three the civil society. Now the state is all of Pakistan, the state has its permanent long-term interests and every member of civil society must serve the interests of the state without which he is nobody. The government of the day must protect the interests of civil society so that the state’s interests continue to be served.
The electronic media and ofcourse the print media are not to be in the service of the government of the day but in the service of civil society and the state. This is the important thing. In Pakistan we have stopped differentiating between the interests of the state and the interests of the government of the day. So the government of the day says I must stay in power, don’t criticize me and the electronic media says ‘yes sir’ and therefore the interests of civil society are ignored. Now people say, for example, that the BBC is a very democratic broadcaster but the BBC does criticize the government of the day, be it the Labor Party government or the Conservative Party government on particular issues, the BBC however never endangers the interests of the state of Britain. But because it is critical of the government here and there it is considered to have great credibility. It is not that the BBC is very sophisticated in its propaganda; it is that it has differentiated between the government of the day and the interests of the state. Now the interests of the state, for example, whether it be Iraq or Chechnya or the Falkland War against Argentina, the BBC was on the side of the state of Great Britain. But here and there it is critical of the government of the day’s policies. In Pakistan and in India they are not making this distinction.

Lets talk about the way the media have functioned under the present government. A lot of people think that General Pervez Musharraf has given more space to people in so many ways …

AA: I agree with that view because I have been at the heart of the electronic media in this country for all these decades and never before have either the electronic media or the print media have had the space to operate, which they have now …

Do you think that’s a good step towards creating some critical consciousness amongst people?

AA: Yes. In his lecture Professor Chomsky was asked whether military dictatorship can be expected to create the ground or prepare the ground for a real transition to genuine democratic society. His answer was that the work of politics in governing a country is not like the laws of physics. The laws of physics are unchangeable, if something has to happen, it will happen, if something can’t happen it cannot happen. But with human beings and politics, governments have interests, have wisdom, have vision, have insight. Anybody can show that vision and insight, whether he is in uniform or whether he is not in uniform. And he said that if your government has the vision and the statesmanship, well, then I don’t see why we cannot have the ground prepared for democratic dispensations.

How would you assess the strength of Pakistani media? In US, where there’s greater literacy and dependency on media, the people are literally subject to the worst form of indoctrination. As some critics say, they are the most disempowered society; they know nothing about what is happening outside the US. In India, there are so many consumers that the global corporations have put more efforts in furthering the sophisticated manipulation of ideas and manufacturing of consent. Do you think the same level of control is exerted by media in Pakistan too?

AA: Not yet. I like the way you have phrased your question, which is really not a question, you’ve almost answered yourself, I like your statement and I agree with it. Not yet, in Pakistan but it is going in the same direction because the comprador producers of Pakistan are in alliance with the global producers and have the same interests in developing the media in a direction where it becomes as effective in manipulating society in the directions in which they want, but the time is coming and I think that the speed with which we are going in the direction of the consumerist culture is accelerating.

Do you think that the religious values act as a deterrent or as something which would always resist in constructive as well as destructive forms the corporatization of our culture.

AA: No, I do not think that religion stands in the way of anything. I do not think that Islam stands in the way of the corporatization of our culture or in the way of the democratization of our culture. Also it is necessary to understand that there’s no one monolithic thing called Islam. Islam is the culture of its people; the Malaysian Muslims are one kind of culture, the Saudi Arabian are another kind of Muslim culture, the Lebanese are a third kind, the Egyptian are a fourth kind and the Pakistani are the fifth kind.

In the same way as in Christianity, Roman Catholic France or Roman Catholic Italy is very distinct from Roman Catholic Latin America. Very different, you had that liberation theology in Latin America, which has never come into the Catholicism or European Catholic Church. In the same way there’s no monolithic Islam. Now, what happens is that the forces of society, the productive forces of society can sometimes manipulate religion, be it Hinduism, Islam or Christianity, the manipulation is always done by the power structures. Now if the power structures choose to manipulate Islam then we have to first ask what is the aim of the power structures in Pakistan or what is the aim of the power structures in Saudi Arabia and accordingly Islam will be used and manipulated but intrinsically there’s nothing in it to stop anything from happening.

Pakistani Islam is very sufically influenced. People of Pakistan, the common people of Pakistan, be they urban common people or village people, are very strongly responsive to sufi Islam. Now sufi Islam teaches that you don’t forget the needs of the spirit, that you don’t fall in love with the world so much that you forget the needs of the spirit. In the West, in consequences of Renaissance and a long historical development, there has been a distance created between the life of the spirit and the love of the world to the extent that the life of the spirit has almost completely disappeared in mainstream Western civilization. Now the way this is put sometimes is that materialism has displaced God from the throne. Here this has not yet happened.

Do you think it’s on its way?

AA: It is on its way and the only thing, which can stand in the way and stop this process or atleast slow it down is a revivification of the spirit through sufi Islam, if we were to work on those lines because sufi Islam, by no means, is monastic. Sufi Islam does not say that you go and sit in a cave in the mountain to contemplate and forget the world.

There is a very beautiful statement attributed to the Prophet (PBUH) when he was asked by Hazrat Ali once to give him a piece of advice and the Prophet of Islam said “Live in this world as though it is to be your home forever and prepare for the next world as though you are to die tomorrow morning.” In other words “Live in this world as though it is to be your home forever” which means keep it beautiful and clean, look after your parents, attend to your worldly responsibilities because you are here forever and be a good citizen of the world, a clean citizen of a clean world but at the same time prepare for tomorrow; “prepare for the next world as though you are to die tomorrow morning” Now the two things have to go side by side; neither displaces the other, you must live in this world and you must prepare for the next.

I was just hoping if you could shed some light on Iran … I have had the opportunity of seeing some movies and they were very touching and sensitive. They addressed the cultural, social and the economic problems and were trying to strengthen the belief systems. Do you think that’s also indoctrination or that’s how media should function?

AA: I don’t know anything at all about how the media in Iran, the creative media, are developing. By hearsay, I hear that Iranian independent film producers are doing some very good artistic work. Artistic work is never propaganda. In artistic work, the artist is expressing himself and his insights, as he sees the world, his perceptions, he’s not in the service of any global corporation or any power structure. The artist is never in the service, this is the difference to understand, whether he be Iranian, American or British or Pakistani, an artist, a true artist, is not in service of any power structure. What is he in service of? He is in service of human beings, he is in service of humanism; Pavlo Neruda was in service of humanism, Faiz Ahmed Faiz was in service of humanism. They were not propagandists.

Lets go back a little bit and try to learn from your experience. You said that your major goal was to bridge the gulf between rural and urban masses and you even tried doing that. What were those things; policies and programs without the element of urban bias?

AA: Not very much, but basically our audiences at that time were predominantly, preponderantly urban audiences because the television sets had not reached into the countryside. So therefore, what we were trying to do was to educate the urban audiences about the culture and the life of the rural masses. For example, I placed a great emphasis on folk music. The folk music in Pakistani society is basically sufi music, be it Sindhi folk, Punjabi folk, Frontier folk or Balochi folk. And the folk music of Pakistan somehow expresses spontaneously the rural culture of Pakistan and the folk culture. Now city audiences were unfamiliar with these sounds and these sights. So we used to bring a lot of that into it. Also I encouraged our playwrights to write on rural themes and many of them did very well in this area.

Since you are not involved with the electronic media anymore, you must find it very disturbing the way Pakistani media is functioning these days. Most of the programs are being shot abroad depicting extravagance and urban bias to which majority of the population cannot relate to. One example from India is a recent film (Dil Chata Hai) which is under heavy criticism because what it displays is poles apart from the true realities of India and completely deviated from social responsibility.

AA: Ofcourse, ofcourse. I am distressed and I can’t bear watching either Pakistani television or Indian television or even American television for that matter for the reasons that you have just enunciated in your question. The media in service of Mammon. Now why, for example, have the other forms of art not gone in service of Mammon, the way commercial cinema or television all over the world, be it the Western world or the Eastern world. For example, theater in countries where theater flourishes on the stage continues to be the work of artists and not in service of Mammon. Ofcourse there is also commercial theater but good theater does exist, why doesn’t good television exist, why is the cinema no longer producing the Ingmar Bergmans and the Satyajeyteras and the Kurosawas of 20, 30, 40 years ago in the same degree. Ofcourse here and there, there are exceptions but the cinema has gone after Mammon. Why hasn’t the theater gone after Mammon, why hasn’t the painter gone after Mammon, why hasn’t the poet gone after Mammon, the answer is metaphor. Metaphorical expression is what the human spirit really needs; theater is metaphorical; you can’t bring horses and wars on the stage, as Shakespeare said in his prologue to Henry, the fifth, “Think when we speak of horses that you see them, printing their proud hooves in the receiving earth”, because he meant we can’t bring horses onto the stage but we are going to talk about war and horses and kings and soldiers so when we speak of them, you think of them. In other words use your imagination.

Now television does not require you and me to use our imagination infront of the TV set. Television predigests everything and gives it to you.

Therefore, television is an opiate whereas good theater is not an opiate, the painter is not an opiate, poetry is not opium. When you read good poetry or see a good painting your mind and your spirit comes awake. When you sit infront of the television set, your eyes are open but your mind and spirit are asleep because you are being given predigested entertainment.

So what you are saying is that television could never become a good educational or liberatory tool anyway?

AA: I am saying precisely that. It is severely limited due to its dependency on money and the commercial interest. Now if there was somewhere in the world a state and a government that said no commercial television, we will find the money to fund good television, it is possible, then to turn television into a metaphorical medium of expression, in the service of civil society. It is possible but then it needs the money; a writer just needs a pen, a painter just needs brushes, oil paints and a canvas but a television producer needs a lot of money, a lot of equipment and a broadcasting system, where is that to come from? No state is willing to fund all of that so who funds? The corporate sector, and then as they say, “He who pays the piper, calls the tune”.

In your opinion, when did the severe decline of media and public sector in Pakistan begin?

AA: Basically, what you call the decline of the media is the commercialization of the media. Ever since Pakistani society also began to be a consumer society, our media have been commercialized and, therefore, the purpose of the media is no longer serving society but serving the people who pay the media to flourish.

Do you think there’s hope that someday a framework can be brought in where things can be turned around or is it too heavily controlled by the corporates that it is too late?

AA: What comes to my mind is that just as the world is mass producing consumer goods, soaps, perfumes, toothpaste and McDonalds burgers and the rest, in the same way the whole world is mass producing literature, mass producing words and looking around I do not find a best seller that can be the creation of a Tolstoy today – there are no Tolstoys today, there are no Nerudas today, there are no Faiz Ahmed Faizes or Allama Iqbals today. Can there be? Now the world is consuming literature the way it is consuming all the other consumer products and so the bookshelves of the bookshops and of houses are full of trash because mass production of words can only lead to trash – these people who write novels are producing a novel a year and they are selling and selling and selling. Millions of copies is just nothing, here and there a good book also sells a lot but that’s because then it is somehow serving a felt-need in the reader.

And that is where that ray of hope is?

AA: Exactly, there is that ray of hope … here and there, there might arise thinkers who serve felt-needs in society be it via television or print or music.

The education system of Pakistan has nothing in its curriculum to create critical consciousness amongst students to critically examine what is on the news, on TV or in the newspapers. Do you think that if the education sector begins to take its responsibility, it can be a greater force than media and it can help break the cycle of manipulation?

AA: Ofcourse, education is at the center of hope, but education by whom and who educates the educator? Now, in Pakistan the state education sector, the public education sector, is moribund. They haven’t got the money, they haven’t got trained teachers, they haven’t got text book boards, which are properly educated and, therefore, they are just going on doing what they have done for the last 50, 70 years. The private sector is there in the education field to make money – I don’t have any hopes whatsoever from private sector education in Pakistan or anywhere else in the world. The public sector unfortunately, the government of Pakistan, is not in a position but even if it were, there are governments in the world that have the money, but yet they have abdicated from their responsibility in the field of education of the young. But there are some societies, which have not abdicated from their responsibilities. For example in Germany there is a very strong and good public sector education, in America there is virtually none.
Now, in Pakistan our public sector education is what I would hope for and one day I am hoping that there will be a government, which says these are now our new priorities of investment and the top priority will not be media, the top priority will be education and health.

Thank you so much, is there any message you want to give out through our magazine to people?

AA: Yes, since you ask because it might seem that some people might think I’m a pessimist. I don’t like the word pessimism it does not belong in my lexicon. I don’t like the word optimism either, that does not belong in my lexicon. I believe in looking at the world after removing scales from my eyes and looking at my society seeing it without propaganda, without prior brainwashing and then seeking answers. That’s neither optimism nor pessimism.

It’s a drive towards the truth.

Correct!