LANGUAGE (THE)

THE

By: NASSER YOUSAF

A student in the examination hall was continously pestering another candidate sitting on the front desk for some help. He wouldn't get any. Frustrated, the helpless student begged the candidate who was ardently filling up sheets to help him out with just one word. 'The,' the candidate on the front seat blurted out.

A friend once asked me If I had paid attention to how much our bureaucracy relied on 'the' in their official memos and indeed all types of official and semi and demi official letters. 'Do note it! officialdom is riddled with it,' she advised with a mischievous smile. I started doing so and found numerous examples that would force a smile or two.

'The competent authority is pleased to order that the drain that runs from the Hayayabad through the University Town and running through the length and the breadth of the city of the Peshawar should be immediately cleaned before the smell rising from it chokes the people of the whole of the Peshawar to the suffocating death,' a typical official circular to the line departments would read.

Apparently, there is little harm in banking so heavily on a definite article, and drawing strength thereof, in an area where all that one sees and hears of is so painfully indefinite.

Bureaucracy thrives on clichés, especially when it comes to covering up its ineptitude. And, then there are also some catch-words that it loves to keep harping on.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's bureaucracy loves using nouns like 'paradigm' and adjectives like 'overarching' to sound more impressive and indeed not to be taken lightly. 'This is a paradigm shift,' an introduction to a proposal reads, and 'this will be an overarching solution,' an addendum to every proposal so as to convince the approving authority of its unique efficacy.

One wonders if such fashionable phraseology wasn't employed in various stages of the ongoing project called Bus Road Transit (BRT) right up to its fateful execution. It might have run something like, 'BRT is a paradigm shift from the existing road network which was conceived during some idle moments by the previous governments when bureaucracy was seized with some other tasks, and that the BRT after it is built will be such an overarching frame around the cityscape that every living being living in its proximity will cease to live thereafter.'

Officialdom in our part of the planet has changed little except to the extent of employing neologisms and playing around with some otherwise sacrosanct words in a manner that has only spoiled the very sounds of these words. It would do us all a world of good if we stop reading and hearing words like 'reforms,' 'monitoring,' 'e-government' and the best of the trash 'paperless government' in the official documents and conversations.

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