Daily Times

Men die but dreams survive. Each of us will die with a dream, a longing for tomorrow. The same happened to the young who died in Charsadda. Every death leaves some dreams behind. But the sudden, unexpected departure of any youth leaves a lot of unfulfilled desires. In places like Charsadda it is not only the dream of a person, but also that of a family, a village, a small town, a group of humans who die an untimely death. It is more the death, than the way it happened, that matters. The manner of death is a transitory story. It is important, no doubt, but life has to go on no matter what.

The media is the conveyer of information about such heartbreaking happenings. It is also the image factory that represents people, happenings, the aftermath and the follow-ups. The first function, naturally, is to inform the larger public about what happened. But then begins the phase of understanding the cultural context of the tragedy. Spot coverage and answering immediate questions is important; there is no journalism without spot coverage. But there are limits in continuing with the same basics. Professionally and ethically there is a need to build the capacity to switch from the news narrative to the human context. Following up on the same news spiral brings audience and media fatigue, which kills the story too early. It never helps understand the human problem a tragedy creates and leaves behind. It just keeps it a gory memory. The inability to follow tragedies from a human perspective is one great weakness the Pakistani media has to learn to overcome.

How to do justice to this human function of the media? This is possible through opening the canvas of media representation beyond spot coverage. People live and die in communities. They have lives that stretch far beyond the happenings that bring their lives to an end. They live in the real human habitat, the human environment. Once the immediate fact finding and representation is over, the media has to follow up the real life circles of the victims. Journalism has a responsibility to represent the community the victims belonged to. And this effort should not be focused on finding clues about the happening. The very reason for this is that communities under trauma need to be represented in the media. This is an ethical burden the media should be readily able to shoulder, whenever the need arises. This need visits us too often nowadays in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA but the media, unfortunately, fails to respond each time. When tragedies strike a human denomination, journalistic responsibility goes beyond the narration of happenings. It stretches into the realm of integrating the community, keeping the collective psyche together, healing the wounds of the bereaved and giving a sense of togetherness in moments of collective alienation.

How is it possible? Story telling, simple story telling. Do not let numbers make humans disappear. Always keep the human alive. In the present case, the number 21 or 22 has simply impersonalised the young souls departed. Were they not young individuals living lives, with families, loved ones, loves and places to go and likes to like? They surely were. But why to quantify them beyond recognition? I think no one ever gave any serious thought to the fact that we have eliminated the very human aspect of the tragedy through a routine ritual, the counting game.

Do not universalise. Making larger than life characters out of human beings is no tribute. It does not help. Keep them human so that ordinary mortals, their communities and other similar human beings can identify them. The misplaced idea of heroism being something abnormal, larger than life, is primitive. Death already reveals a lot about a human being. There is nothing more than the loss of a human life for a people who love the person. They need support, identity and fellow feelings to overcome the grief. They need to see how their loved one is being portrayed. And what could be the best portrayal than the way the person lived? Just do that if you want to help and put your bit into helping a people out of trauma. The person has family: a mother. Did they speak with their mother? What were the dreams they used to discuss? And, please, do not bank upon misery. Do not use the wailing of a mother to develop a story. Get information from sources that are in a position to talk normally. Everything can wait, literally everything. A friend might be a good source to talk to. A village elder might tell you about the young man who used to have a chat with him whenever he was home on the weekends. Do not go for extremes. Try to keep it normal. Keep in mind that the aim of such portraits is to help a people, not to make them a spectre of helplessness.

It is always about life, about the next day after the tragedy, about the stream of life. The human function after tragedies is giving survivors and relatives of the victims some closure that helps them live through hard times. Another aspect is to make a larger audience understand how tragedy affects lives in general. This helps in developing a lager community, a partnership in grief. The sharing of grief is always soothing. People who know that others are also feeling their pain can overcome trauma easily. They can easily defeat alienation, individual and collective.

It is also vital to understand the difference between misery and grief. Journalists too often think that a wailing female (mother, sister, victim) projects a tragedy best. This is untrue and extremely unethical. Being miserable does not create a bond. It simply attracts the audience for a moment and then shies them away. Nobody wants to see misery all the time. People have their own baggage to carry too. It causes depression and traumatises the audience. This does not mean that the audience is not interested. They are, more than anything else. But one has to give them something to relate to.

They are ready to understand life beyond the immediate happening. To know the lifecycle of the victims, the normal selves before the last breath. Why do they take such interest in it or why should they? Because they can identify with the stream of life. If none can identify with a happening, the marathon transmissions and all the air and space dedicated to the coverage of a tragedy were in vain. Catching traumatised people and asking nasty questions to make them cry is not journalism at all. It is the rating race.

Grief does not necessarily mean the weaker side of a human being. It is the total reaction of a person or a community to the loss of a person (or persons) who are important in the lifecycle of the people. Portraits of grief are showing this place of a person in the community. And the portraits are nothing but a holistic image of the life of a community with the understanding that a community is the basic unit of human interaction. A journalist representing this unit properly is doing his/her job properly. If not, there is a lot to rethink.

The writer is a blogger and his work can be read at mysticalwritingpad.blogspot.com