Writing after a hiatus of almost a year has its disadvantages. For many years, one’s weekly stabs at advocating the practice of tolerance within the body politic intent on cannibalising itself were tantamount to butting one’s head against the proverbial brick wall, so one day, I decided to go cold turkey. Despite the fact that a newspaper’s shelf life is limited to a single day, one’s columns too are, by default, just as easily relegated to lining a drawer or serve as wrapping for a variety of objects ranging from shoes to unripe fruit. While practising a total disregard for posterity as far as my musings were concerned, I must confess I missed writing. The weekly niggling and gnawing at an issue, the first draft and the second and occasionally the third, kept the juices flowing. As such, the hiatus is difficult to explain. Writer’s block, the most facile of explanations, does not hold water in the present case. I stopped writing because I appeared to have reached out to a tiny readership and largely heard only the echo of my own voice. The case for writing again pleads not so much for a newfound sagacity but disappointment at a state of affairs that no civilised people should be willing to accept silently. While the past year has seen Pakistan take baby steps towards the establishment of a democratic order; a new government with a huge mandate is in place; new and more stringent IMF conditionalities are in force; power outages are as frequent as ever; Balochistan and Karachi still bleed; the rupee continues its downward spiral; flour, ghee, petrol, gas prices go through the roof; tax defaulters continue their spree; ‘bad’ Taliban continue to blow innocent people to smithereens; the state reels, paralysed under pressure from one catastrophe to the next and the more things change, the more they remain the same. Yet Malala has celebrated her 16th birthday; the rapid bus transit system appears to be working; Pakistani cinema is sitting up and being counted; the Motorway police are as vigilant as ever and the weather finally promises to change. So what has brought one back to being a hack? In all the mayhem that characterises our present day volatile lives, there is one ‘island’ of activity that has impressed one so much that one is duty bound to laud its performance. The Pakistani electronic media is to be congratulated on benchmarking the lowest standards for decency, propriety and responsible citizenship. It would be a Herculean task for a jury to decide which media network would be the most deserving for an Olympic gold for performance at the lowest rung of investigative reporting, journalistic integrity and professionalism. The year has seen a plethora of channels breaking news at the sound of a raindrop, dissecting the TV image into multiples, run misspelled tickers across screens as advertisers animate figures capering in corners. A new breed of anchor whose sole task is confined to frothing at the mouth while screaming at panelists, outshouting guests and beaming with pride at the prospect of having decimated reputations dominates all talk shows. Ratings, they say, is the name of the game. Until recently, one’s highest personal awards for what TV should not be was reserved for a US-based news channel where former beauty queens anchored interviews and the best credentials for news casting and commentary were dependent on how much of a platinum blonde you were. Never mind the adage that said, “Underneath the dumb blonde there is a smart brunette” because it was so seldom that one found even a semblance of common sense among the panelists. This summer’s highlight of this channel’s claim to fame was the extraordinary interview of Dr Reza Aslan by a dark-haired former beauty queen (so there goes the brunette theory!). The good doctor is the author of Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, a blockbuster of a book that topped the charts immediately after the interview left the channel red faced and squirming. On July 26, 2013, Aslan was interviewed on ‘Spirited Debate’, a FoxNews webcast by anchor Lauren Green and questioned why a Muslim would write about Jesus. Ms Green said she was “unsatisfied by his credentials” and claimed that Aslan had misled readers by not disclosing his credentials. Dr Reza, a Muslim, countered that his personal religious faith was discussed openly on page two of his book. The premise of Green’s questions was universally criticised since she had obviously done no ‘homework’ prior to the interview. Had she done so, she would have discovered that the highly respected Iranian-American academic of long standing is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside, Research Associate at the University of Southern California Centre on Public Diplomacy, contributing editor of The Daily Beast, has a doctorate in Comparative Religion, teaches the same and also has another outstanding publication No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam, which has been translated into 13 languages, to his credit. Zealot, which had been selling steadily as the fourth ranked bestseller on The New York Times list, shot to first place on the Amazon US bestseller list shortly after the 10-minute interview, so perversely, some satisfaction may be derived from that. Sadly, we too have a number of Greens on our local channels, perhaps not as easy on the eyes as the original but as poorly informed, biased and prone to creating a sensation rather than a respected journalistic statement. A case in point is the recent vitriolic attack by an anchor on a respected school system’s attempt to teach ‘Comparative Religion’ and Biology. Textbooks with diagrams of the human reproductive system were shown as samples of the school’s efforts to educate students about the taboo word — ‘sex’ — and the slanderous campaign was rounded off by a statement that the school no longer taught Islamiyat! The issue of Comparative Religion is not a recent phenomenon. It can be traced back to the 1960s when luminaries and good friends such as the late Professor Hamid Ahmed Khan, then vice chancellor Punjab University, along with the late Chief Justice S A Rahman, syndicate member Punjab University, discussed the prospect of the university offering Comparative Religion and Comparative Literature as two new subject areas at the postgraduate level. Since both men have left an enviable legacy of excellence in academia and jurisprudence, their efforts to enable students to benefit from learning that allowed for a critical understanding of their own beliefs juxtaposed against the backdrop of other Abrahamic religions in the former and bridging linguistic barriers in the latter case are prime examples of an attempt to broaden the scope of intellectual activity in the best possible sense. The only reason the subjects could not be offered was simply the fact that no teachers were available at the time. While the rest of the world continues to offer doctoral programmes in Comparative Religion Studies, we are content with only paying lip service to the efforts of Karen Armstrong for her brilliant histories of the great religions (not to mention her inspirational biography of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH)), while steadfastly refusing to expand our intellectual horizons. A comparative study of religion should be required reading at a time when we find ourselves battling for our sanity (intellectual and spiritual) as well as our physical security against obscurantism and savagery. As for the biology course, as far back as the 1960s (again!), the matriculation subject of Hygiene and Physiology offered a study of the digestive, respiratory, circulatory, nervous and reproductive systems in the human body. I was educated at an all-girls public sector school and the subject was taught by a Mrs Baptist. The course was taught as a science and continues to guide me daily. I do not believe that a comprehensive knowledge of our physical selves is in any way detrimental to our growth either as mature women, wives or mothers. If anything, a scientific understanding of how the human body works is a blessing in acknowledging the miracle that God in His infinite mercy has created. This knowledge is neither carnal nor a stepping-stone to promiscuity, which is the great fear expressed by our worthy anchor and aired by a prominent local TV channel. The charge of ‘dropping’ Islamic Studies is as ill informed as the rest of the report. Suffice it to say that since Islamic and Pakistan Studies are mandatory courses for a local and overseas examination, these subjects cannot be dropped. In fact, and it may be a surprise to many, the school system offers an optional major in Islamic Studies at A Levels. The entire report vilifying a respected principal and educationist by name was nothing more than a sensation-creating ‘scoop’ with no substance. In a country where libel laws are actually practised, both channel and anchor would have had to pay heavy damages for their so-called ‘service to the public’. I waited initially for a parent response to the slanders. There were none. In fact privately, parents further pummelled the school system for not taking them into confidence before launching the programme. If any of them had looked at the school’s website they would have discovered that the course had been listed and explained many months ago. But, of course, this criticism comes from a group of mothers who never even wake up to see their children off to school. The whole idea of a proactive PTA alive to school policies and paradigm shifts, therefore, stands nullified. It is a great pity that a unilateral, journ