Broken filters

It’s the things they don’t say that fright­en me the most. What was Sharmila Farooqi thinking?

It’s the things they don’t say that frighten me the most.

We all have those thoughts, the ones that erupt out of the darkest, deepest parts of our brain. The thoughts that are formed in that part of the basil ganglia that still share vestigial memories inherited from our reptilian forebears. These are the thoughts that are prevented from transforming into spoken words because, thankfully, social decency has had an overriding influence on us. In other words, the filter kicks in. So we don’t, for example, call a baby ugly in front of its parents. Nor do we talk about our bowel movements at the dinner table. And we certainly don’t tell the groom his bride looks “hot” and “I wish I was you tonight”. We may want to, may have an urge welling up inside us from time to time that threatens to overwhelm any sense of decorum, but we don’t. That’s the filter at work. It prevents us from saying things that would open us up to ridicule, insult and vicious beatings.

When the filter is missing, then something has gone very tragically wrong. Such a direct connection between mouth and brain that allows every thought to come vomiting out as speech can only mean there has been a malfunction. Maybe a head injury incurred in childhood, a birth defect caused by both parents being first cousins or some sort of recent trauma is to blame. Regardless, the end result is a sort of Asperger’s Syndrome-esque inability to let social decency censor one’s words. I am assuming it is just such a condition that is to blame for Sharmila Farooqui’s latest attempts at communication. So when she described a rape victim as “hyper” and “rude”, it can be assumed that the filter was broken and the poor information adviser was suffering under her terrible mental handicap. It makes her further criticism of the rape victim’s testimony as lacking even a little bit of coherence all the more forgivable. The alternative, to assume the filter is actually in place and so poorly constructed that it actually thought these were things one should be allowed to say, is too frightening to consider. One can only hope the erstwhile adviser didn’t then visit any physically disabled people and call them lazy before stopping off at a school for dyslexia and covering it in graffiti written in reverse.

What is worrying is that this incapability to carefully consider what one says before saying it is oddly contagious. It is travelling through the political circles like a kind of virus that causes verbal diarrhea. Ms Farooqui seems to have caught it from her colleague, Sindh Home Minister Zulfiqar Mirza. Even if you ignore the recent failure of his filter to prevent him from further jeopardising relations with the MQM, it’s hard to forget how just a month ago he publicly trivialised the issue of honour killing by saying it could be overcome by learning to love death. He then receded behind the comfort and safety of his extensive armed retinue composed of, one assumes, policemen who were learning to consider the possibility of death, if not love it outright.

When things like these are said it makes me wonder what is being held back. What are the thoughts that Sharmila Farooqui, when faced with a traumatised and harassed rape victim, did not say? What are the ideas about ending honour killing that Zulfiqar Mirza considered too inappropriate to share? Luckily my own filter is working at maximum efficiency so I cannot share what it throws up as possibilities.

Unfortunately, it also prevents me from describing exactly what I want to do to the ‘journalists’ and ‘editors’ at The Nation and Daily Times, who saw fit to print the name, license plate number and other personal details of the rape victim.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 23^rd, 2010.