First of all I like to appreciate the production team of this debating programme to choose such an important topics and needless to say here that these topics are normally very gripping and informative for a layman like me. But I have to point out that after viewing this show I felt that the quality of debaters on both sides of the debating teams, was appalling especially the guy who was arguing in favour of the motion of this debate (And was accompanying the legend Sahira Kazmi). The production team should try to bring on good and somewhat mature debaters to accompany those who are actually have vast experience related to their respective fields.
Secondly there is no shadow of a doubt in my mind that Pakistani drama (Visual) has declined in its quality, substance and popularity after the golden eras of 70s 80s and early 90s. The reasons can be cited in manifold numbers but the fact of the matter is the modern generation of artists (Which includes the writer, director, producer, performing actors and actresses) are not sincere and give no worth of a penny (Of course exceptions are there but very rare) to the intricacies and subtleties of this genre of performing visual arts and solely concentrating on the quantity of the work, which of course means more remuneration for their work. Which is now become a shadow of its luminous past when great actors like Amitabh Bachchan used to acknowledge that the Indian parallel cinema is indebted a lot to their contemporary Pakistani TV dramas of 1980s.
It is interesting to notice that at the same time Indian commercial cinema was not getting the response from the audiences due to the run of the mill kind of productions and stereotypical plots of films and hence the creative artists of India turned to Art Cinema, which was more aligned to the realistic, experimental, meta-theoretical and socialistic form of PTV productions. But as the saying goes that rosy season stays for short period of time the same degeneration happened to our quality of drama productions after the early 1990s, when commercialism crept in slowly and steadily. Then come the influx of satellite channels of our neighbouring country India in the mid 1990s in many parts of the urban Pakistan and from there the trend was reversed. As the PTV productions used to be taught in the fine art academies of India and they used to learn from us now with the trend and streams of so called modernism invaded across the borders we use to imitate them and unfortunately that imitation proved to be lethal for Pakistani drama. Now what we are watching in number of TV channels of Pakistan and India is just the manifestation of this fickle and opaque tendency to promote materialism, unbridled so called social engineering subjects, glamour, gloss and pomp with no basis of fine plot and story.
No doubt the standard of production equipment might have increased but the more important ingredient of them all is the story have been neglected with utmost cruelty and therefore the respective connecting constituents elements of this product also suffered may be because of the much publicised interferences of production units, their inability to give proper time and hence avoiding the golden principle of trial and error, inability of actors to fully devout themselves to the theme of the play and doing justice with their respective characters and the decline of artistic sensibility from the directors. The current generation of these artists just want to get fame and to secure handsome amount of money in order to sustain their lavish lifestyles. Which is good but this practise should not be allowed at the expense of the quality of the product and they better do something else rather wasting their and viewers (Which are now become scant day by day) time on such weak and pathetic drama productions and it would be better to introduce the new blood with the constant patronage of those real artists who know what are the requirements of fine arts and how to do reasonable and good work in this field.
Bret Hawk
