“We are sweeping our collective human conscience under the carpet by submitting to our increasingly voracious materialistic desire and this consumerism is playing on cultural values,” said Aslam Azhar, popularly known as the founding father of Pakistan Television, during his lecture on “Cultural Sensibilities in Contemporary Societies” held at the Aga Khan University Auditorium on Thursday.
Expanding on what he called historical and cultural amnesia, Azhar explained that cultural values in contemporary society are being weakened due to the negative impacts of consumer culture.
He said that no government (whose prime responsibility is to be the custodian of public good) in the world has abdicated the flourishing culture of consumerism and the global multimedia, particularly television, e-commerce and credit cards, are governing the world at the cost of human and cultural values. He also criticised the absence of proper economic policies that lay emphasis on consumption, which actually determines the economic structure of a society.
Referring to Mullah Nasreddin’s (a popular philosopher and wise man known for his humourous stories and anecdotes) wittiness, Azhar explained how culture is an omnibus term and in order to challenge conventional thoughts and wisdom, some of the old habits have to be ‘unlearnt’.
Using polyhedron [geometric objects used to refer to a variety of related constructs in Mathematics and the shape of the Egyptian pyramids to clarify his viewpoint, he defined the characteristic of each object and their mutual relation and how the ancient minds gained inspiration from them to define other disciplines and human values.
“Consumerism and modern day arrogance teach you that your present is better than the past based on knowledge, development and information technology, but I believe it is the acquisition of knowledge, which is true wisdom, that should be used to define whether or not you are better than the Greek historians and others,” he said.
The culture of consumerism and ‘greed for money’ has made humans vulnerable at the hands of the global markets that have blocked the capacity of the human mind to think and question and ‘transformed them into automatons’,” said Azhar.
“The media, which should be actively used to promote social control are instead being exploited at the hands of global producers too and have lost their aesthetic grace,” he remarked adding: “Today the media claims to provide public service but in truth they only provide public service which sells, which is sensationalism.”
Hence, he was of the opinion that the head of media organisations [who are creators of consumers, while the global market is the producer] have an important and responsible role to play in inducing a change in the mindset as well.
Azhar stressed that education, where students are forced to think, question and counter question, is the only way through which mindsets can be changed. He said that an alteration in the school syllabus is not a solution and that interactive learning needs to be encouraged to impart wisdom in the true sense.
Azhar graduated from the Government College of Lahore in Physics and Mathematics before pursuing a degree from Cambridge University in the UK in 1954. Apart from working in multinational companies, he worked in freelance radio broadcasting, documentary filmmaking and directed and acted in theatre as well.
In 1964, he was given a contract by a Japanese company to set up a pilot TV station in Lahore and, after the birth of professional television in Pakistan in 1972, Azhar became the Managing Director of the PTV Corporation.
