Have Your Say: The ‘over-intellect’

F Z Khan, Islamabad

This is not to disregard or disrespect anyone. Kamran Shafi’s rating in the list of columnists, stands top-10, according to an online survey. Like many call Ayaz Amir English-columnists’ Irfan Siddiqi and Cyril Almeida Urdu’s Amr Jalil, Kamran Shafi is dubbed close to Hasan Nisar. Most of his readers, including me, get amusement from his own-coined words which he repeatedly uses in almost all his columns. Like famous cartoonist Fieca, and many others, Kamran Shafi uses personified symbols so frequently that it has become synonym to his own name. I am sure one can tell the name of Kamran Shafi by reading a piece of writing without his byline and even without his words of ‘hate’ like “dubya, deep state, commando, ghairat brigade, yahoos”, etc. In his August 23 column, Kamran Shafi has very rightly taken to task “the hate-filled red-capped extremist guest who is known to be a propagandist of the Deep State” and “a private TV channel’s vitriolic host”, everybody knows their names. But whatever the extreme one has is always a denial of pragmatism. One notices very interesting trend in Mr Kamran Shafi’s article i.e. the two extremes of the same thing. If, suppose, we consider the ‘writer’ as pragmatist and the ‘guest’ as propagandist, can’t we find out extremist views repeatedly projected by Major (retd) Kamran Shafi? His addiction of using ‘words of hate’ has become his art of alluring readers to their amusement, or attracting the bigs to the abuser, that too, without knowing how deep and how negative his ‘words of hate’ are leaving the impact on others at a time when there is a need of hope, offering solutions to problems. Such an extreme of his side creates the equally ripple effect which the Zaid Hamid-like ‘extremist propagandists’ unknowingly or by design are creating. The pen of a columnist must not restrict itself to the bounds of coined terminologies because it perpetuates wrong concepts and makes their negative impacts permanent. If Zaid Hamid is known to spit venom, Kamran Shafi is no less than the earlier. Zaid Hamid’s extreme maybe regarded in love of his country, but Kamran Shafi’s words of hate maybe dubbed out of his personal liking or disliking, self-praise or over-intellect. He himself seems to be in a ‘deep state’.