This female friend of mine had her Facebook status "Lets have some fun, this beat is sick, i wanna take a ride on your disco stick" when this song came out. I wonder what this disco stick is. I have a feeling, lady gaga outsourced the translation job to someone in jhang and got the aforementioned lollywood song translated into english and earned millions in revenue. Atleast give some royalty to the humongous poor woman in the video.
For people who still didnt get the point, i never said pyar ki gandheri is any better. I wouldnt waste my words arguing over how popular music should have evolved. thats a different story altogether. This post is a little different. Im not more fervid pakistani than you are, still i just put the non-english speakers and english-speakers on the same scale of love, hate or indifference. think about it, we're just promoting imperialism and capitalism and cementing the class divide, arent we. A schismatic society based on shitty values and shittier upbringing. I am not just attacking the parents here but everybody who plays a part till the kid graduates from kgs. Its sad how kids and teenagers in schools these days are taught just snob-ism. Are they actually taught how to ridicule urdu, mock non-english speakers, hate the made-in-pakistan tag? where the fuck is this remotely bilingual, snob-pack coming from then. English is the key to power as far as the modern, employment-based domains of power are concerned. Though i partially agree, I passionately dissent from nigger-ing of urdu speaking monolinguals, ostracizing them completely.
Sprouting of a dozen 'Language Centers' and 'English-medium schools' in every urdu-speaking street of Karachi tell the sad tale of this identity-blurring of our society. Maybe they can guarantee your smooth hobnob with the much desirable social groups. But no, I dont blame you. I blame the Kaala Pul.
I am ending this random blurting with a short poem. I have always been captivated by the simplicity and economy of these words by Tagore.
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake
hahaha
ReplyDeletei LOVE the lady gaga/pyar di ganderi comparison. super!
that said, the whole tirade against english speakers is perhaps well felt, but not well thought out.
firstly, lingual elitism is rife across all languages, all kala pulls. as i see it; english>urdu>punjabi>seraiki, sindhi, balochi, hindko etc
as you can see, its a scale based on power and socio-political status. its not exactly true that kids are being 'taught' linguistic snobbery, as much as they are being conditioned to do so.
more importantly, why privilege urdu at all? its the native tongue for less than 5% of the population. so its no better than english in that sense.
i think you are right about the fallacies of linguistic privileging, but the answer, i believe, lies in giving all the languages their worth. and secondly, not attempting to go back to some puritianical version of urdu, but rather the slang ridden, explitive full version you and i speak.
but, i still think we can sue gaga for copyright issues hahaha
I don't quite get the point of your whole "going to kgs" and "shitty upbringing" quote. Does that mean that people from lyceum, southshore - every other bullshit structure that proclaims itself to be a school - are any better?
ReplyDeleteOh and for the record, how do you define snob-ism? Am I snob because I stay reserved and among my own friends, or BECAUSE I party like an animal but ONLY with the upper class.
Yes Kanwalful, you really didn't get the point.Kgs represented southshore, lyceum, bayview and any other school that describes what I am talking about here in this post. Like I said, that lollywood song isn't any better.
ReplyDeleteAnd no Kanwalful, the post wasn't about introverted snobs and party animals. It was about the great linguistic divide and when I used the words snobbery, i meant this in those terms. Though i went on to describe them in a little detail. I hope you get the point now.