Socialist ideas and an indiff erent working class

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 8/4/2020 10:56:39 AM

Nadeem Paracha

An acquaintance associated with an advertising firm once related a rather telling anecdote. Two years ago, his firm prepared a campaign for a food company owned by a gentleman from Faisalabad. The owner of the company was a self-made-man who, decades ago, had begun his career as a worker in a factory after arriving as a teenager from a village. He had passed his matriculate exams but because of his family’s deteriorating economic situation, he could not attend college. However, this did not stop him from diligently working his way up. From a factory worker, he became a foreman and then, years later, with some money borrowed from a friend, he first set up a grocery store and then a small food company. The business was a success and by 2006, he was a rich man. The campaign that the advertising firm presented to him was based on phrases and antics popularised by archetypal Punjabi films. After the firm was done presenting, the owner began giving his feedback. He told the agency’s executives that he would never want to use the campaign. He then explained: “For years, Punjabis like me have been struggling to eliminate this image of us as people who look and do things like Sultan Rahi in Punjabi films.” The businessman was disappointed that a group of educated executives from Karachi could not visualise his company as a modern entity as they would do for a multinational. This was a case of how superficially sometimes members of urban middleclasses perceive people from humbler backgrounds. The advertising executives had been told by “insiders” in the company about the owner’s rural origins. So, in a bid to appeal to this aspect of his personality, they assumed that Punjabi films were accurate depictions of the province’s rural life and, therefore, such imagery would suffice to get the owner’s approval. In the early 1990s, Imran Aslam, playwright and former editor of an English daily where I worked as a reporter, told me that when he was a young man and “experimenting” with communism, there used to be a trend among communists from well-to-do middle-class families to “prove their socialist credentials” by taking up “working class vocations.” Imran said that he once joined a group of labourers working at a construction site but the workers simply refused to let him work. This was not because his presence threatened them. In fact, according to Imran, it actually amused them no end. They just could not figure out why a person with a good education, spacious home and the potential to bag a lucrative job would leave all of it to lift bricks with a group of men who would rather have a good education, spacious homes and the potential to bag lucrative jobs.

 

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