Once upon a time there was news; compact and closely orchestrated by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Fake news was unheard of; just plain vanilla dispensed by the government. The newspapers read like compendia of badly drafted government handouts, generally reporting the truth but never the whole truth.
One day, it dawned on the print media that news without views was like swallowing the ingredients raw. It needed to spice up government's bland concoction. It drew inspiration from the colonial days, when Statesman and Civil and Military Gazette often invited even rogue elements like Kipling to add a bit of sauciness to their pages, and generate tangy letters to the editor in response.
The world over it was becoming fashionable to look upon pure news as a bikini: suggestive but concealing the vital. The trend was to move away from pure news to a blend of news and views, euphemistically styled as 'news analysis'. 'News stalk; views walk' became conventional wisdom. There was also the urge to establish your own unique selling proposition. The hunt was on for known personalities to contribute a weekly column.
Welcome to the op-ed page.
In a piece that we contributed to this newspaper three years ago we had wondered "Who reads us anyway?" We guesstimated that there were forty op-ed pieces, each day, in the English language alone. That's a lot of pulp. That should be a lot of readers with their delete guns on the ready!
We had inherited a strong Editorial tradition. The trailblazers, Altaf Hussain, Faiz Sahib, Mazhar Ali Khan, lent inspiration to a string of powerful editorialists: M. A. Zuberi, Ahmad Ali Khan, Jamil Ansari, I. H. Burney. Ironically, even the architect of the draconian Press and Publications Ordinance, Altaf Gauhar, always proficient with the pen, suddenly discovered the virtues of freedom of speech - and ZAB made him pay the price for it.
Weekly columns built on this fine editorial tradition. It added to the cerebral punch of the newspaper, something more lasting than news that tended to wither soon as it blossomed.
Dawn took the lead, and we saw names like Edward Said, Henry Kissinger, and Eqbal Ahmed bylined across its op-ed. Newspapers also entered into syndicating arrangements with international papers. The reading tastes changed irrevocably: you skimmed through the headlines to go straight to your favourite columnist.
A whole progeny of remarkable columnists ensued. Many of them became a 'habit'. There was the incorrigible Ardeshir Cowasjee, always irrepressible and irreverent. Pity, Dawn's punctiliousness did not permit the flowery language of his conversations to flow into his columns. There was the immaculate Omar Kureishi, always right of length and line, his command of language never wavering. Unlike some of the others, he was quite unabashed about writing to make a living. There was S. R. Ghauri who paid for his sins; not for being too analytical but for his sarcasm that groped the officialdom's missing spine. There was the staid and steady M. B. Naqvi, there was the correct Ibn-e-Hasan with friends in high places.
There were shooting stars like Kunwar Idris and Amina Jilani too. Dazzling in their brilliance but their incandescence was not durable enough to leave a lasting meteorite-print.
And then there is Capt. Ayaz Amir (retd), formerly of the Foreign Service and the National Assembly, who now seems to have gone native. In his more active days he was so reminiscent of the illustrious columnist Khalid Hasan, lost to the civil service. He matched Khalid in wit and erudition; often naughty, sometimes abrasive, but never supercilious. Wonder if the Pakistan Military Academy made cadets gentlemen through a crash course in Classics?
But it is the current lot that one has to marvel at. It is an over-populated field now, and the competition, both from within and without, far more fierce. One is also witnessing a new crop of self-expressionists sprouting. These young men and women hold high promise and poised to topple some journalistic pedestals.
But we have to tip our hat to those who have been churning out columns week after week. In our book the doyen of the lot is Mazdek, aka Irfan Husain. He has been at it for more years than we can recall; never repetitive, always bubbling with new thoughts in his delightfully inimitable style. The highly respected I.A. Rehman, the journalist's journalist Zahid Hussain, the man for all seasons Ghazi Salahuddin, the defiant Zubeida Mustafa have been worthy fellow-journeymen, indefatigable in selling mirrors in the land of the blind.
The guy we miss is the enigmatic Cyril Almeida. He could be both amusing and frustrating with his penchant for different messaging for different people through the same column. That didn't make him less of a compelling read though - except he should have been consigned to Siberia not for the Dawn leak but for being so damn inscrutable.
How do they do it, the regular columnists, conjuring up a piece each week? Where do they get their creativity from? How can M. Ziauddin rustle up two or three columns a week? How does Anjum Ibrahim wake up each morning to configure her provocative dalliance with facts to produce what she calls facetious, the only word in English language with all five vowels in the right order?
Is the weakly columnist under threat? He has somehow scraped through the onslaught of social media. Will the coronavirus bring him to his knees? As the perceptive Abbas Nasir observed, "there is only one topic to read and write on these days: Covid-19". Is the tandoor of ideas, loaf after loaf, going to run out of gas?
The niche writers will always have something to write about. The courts will not fail the brilliant legal eye Babar Sattar. Khurram Hussain will always find interesting tidbits between Q block and the SBP. Hafeez Pasha can be relied upon to compere defiant statistics even if he is sleep-walking. F. S. Aijazuddin has the talent to do without ideas, as long as the readers have a dictionary handy and are steeped in Western mores. The class war is not ending anytime soon to put Aasim Sajjad Akhtar out of work. But what about such gifted writers like Arifa Noor? Will she keep opening new vistas?
Finally, there is the AI gorilla knocking at the door. Will it make all this irrelevant?
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