“In our time, then, the battles being waged around the world are no longer battles for territory alone, for oil and economies. They are battles for the minds of men and women. And these battles are being waged by the media in the service of, no longer kings and emperors, but the global corporations,” said Aslam Azhar, Founding Father of Television in Pakistan, exploring the current state of societal values around the world.
In Aga Khan University’s (AKU) Special Lecture Series (SLS), Aslam Azhar delivered an articulate talk, in which he declared consumerism to be the most addictive of contemporary drugs, whose effects are “insidious, widespread and thus far, incurable. They work on the cultural plane and on the plane of human values. When these begin to be degraded and deformed, the end of the lifecycle of a civilisation may well have come into sight.”
He explained that governments around the world were being increasingly compelled to abdicate their role as custodians of public good in the realms of education, health and other vital services to global corporations, the producers of commodities and services. “Now, producers need consumers,” he said. “And the agency which has done the reforging – turning humans into consumers, is the global multimedia: television and radio, and now too, the Internet and e-commerce.”
He went on to contrast today’s mindset with the sensibilities of ancient cultures which showed no trace of the “arrogance of modern knowledge.”
Speaking of ancient cultures which knew of their past ages and used the knowledge base to build their societies, he explained “The approaches of the thinkers of those very early times were what we would now term Synthesis – perceiving the knowledge of the parts as, in reality, knowledge of one coherent whole…. It was undoubtedly an approach which led to knowing not very much in detail, but about more and more, a holistic way of knowing and understanding, which saw the universe as One Great Being organically uniting within itself its innumerable ‘parts’ – animal, vegetable, mineral and yes, spiritual.”
“In their holistic vision, their Past formed an organic whole with their Present – a Continuum,” He stressed repeatedly.
“Our modern age, carrying its baggage of cultural arrogance, sees the earliest ages about which it has some little knowledge, as an ‘Archaic’ age, a pejorative term which implies an age which knew ‘little,’ ‘understood’ little, and was thus barbarian and inferior. Whence this arrogance?” he asked.
He reflected that contemporary conventional wisdom would have us believe that present is more knowledgeable than the past. “I find it difficult to separate the acquisition of knowledge from the use of that knowledge – which is wisdom. We witness today, the disappearance of once great forests, erosion of mountains, extinction of increasing species of wild life. We witness and contemplate the contemporary degradation of human feelings for our fellow human beings of different clime, colour or creed.
“It then becomes difficult in this free market economy… to derive any comfort from the sales pitch that the proliferating creature comforts that are marketed for us consumers in this brave new world, constitute the hallmark of a flourishing humane society,” he concluded.
Earlier, introducing Aslam Azhar, Firoz Rasul, President AKU, said that throughout his career, Azhar had been concerned with highlighting society’s needs, encouraging an ethical use of the media, and embracing the role of civil society in media development. Aslam Azhar was born in Lahore, and graduated from the Government College of Lahore in Physics and Mathematics before pursuing a Law degree from Cambridge University in the UK in 1954. In the 1960s he returned to his passions of writing, radio and film. In 1964, he was instrumental in founding professional television in Pakistan. In 1972 Aslam Azhar became Managing Director of the PTV corporation, and then became Chairman in 1989, a post from which he retired in 1991.
AKU's Special Lecture Series programme is a part of its policy of encouraging broad-based education in which eminent personalities are invited to illuminate the University's constituencies on meaningful and engaging topics of public interest.
Past speakers have included H.R.H. Prince Hasan of Jordan; renowned authority on comparative religion, Ms Karen Armstrong; Professor Stanley Wolpert (author of 'Jinnah of Pakistan'); Ambassador Dr Maleeha Lodhi; art educator Salimah Hashmi; renowned poet Ahmad Faraz; Sufi singer Abida Parveen and renowned kathak dancer Nahid Siddiqui, among others.
