Do bodies move? Yes, of course. Can they make people lose their minds? Yes, in certain cases they do.
One retired bureaucrat Orya Maqbool Jan – a self proclaimed custodian of morality in Pakistan – is badly hurt by the depiction of a girl during a cricket game in a TV commercial. He manifested his perverted mindset, while critiquing the TV commercial. The girl under microscope is hardly of his granddaughter's age. Keeping count of body movements is not humanly possible in a few seconds long TV commercial – unless one is crazy, microscopic and suffering from chronic mental disorder.
Orya Maqbool Jan claims to have lengthy postings in Baluchistan as a high ranking bureaucrat. However, no woman’s movement while carrying water on her head for miles in hot sun ever enraged him enough to propose clean drinking water project in Baluchistan. Women do have bodies in Baluchistan and these bodies do move as well.
Why could these women not shame Mr. Orya?
In Muslim majority Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt and UAE – where jeans and T-shirt are common dress and women do participate in all sorts of games and physical activities, none’s morality is endangered. A girl in short skirts and tight blouse would not make men go crazy. In Europe and those parts of the Muslim world where gender interaction is not restricted people like Orya Maqbool Jan would be undergoing psychological treatment.
So why do female bodies fetch anger and outrage in some of the men in Pakistan? Even if it is a cricketer, her body endangers their dignity and culture.
One must ask if female anatomy is endangering our culture, what our culture really is…
In our culture, 70% of Pakistani women do labour jobs and are associated with farm work in rural Pakistan. Their bodies do move during work. No one pays any attention and nobody gets hurt. Women do labour jobs in cities carry bricks and cement on heads and their bodies move while they walk. Women were involved in every field of life during Muslim rule in the Indian subcontinent and in Arab Peninsula. Their bodies moved as well. Is it not the same as what we call ‘our culture’?
Then whose culture is in danger?
The culture of 20% urban middle class is in danger – the class which believes that it is the custodian of collective morality. Their women get shut down in homes and do not need to participate in physical labor like working class women. Borrowed cultural imprints direct their morality – they believe they inherited the morals of Rajas of India and Sultans of the Middle East, and that their harems should be restricted places. They conveniently examine female bodies in TV commercials; these movements are vulgar in opinion of mentally sick men – for them 70% of working women in country whose body movements are visible in public are vulgar as well.
If these people have grown up in rural Pakistan or in working class families in cities and had watched their women at work, they would command respect for these women instead of contempt. But they hate real Pakistan’s culture – they dream of the lifestyle of Rajas and Sultans. Women being their private property should not be visible to others.
From a farmer in Punjab to a shepherd in Baluchistan, no one is hurt by breasts, or the movement of bodies in a harsh day's work.
It is this mental sickness of few – not the moving anatomy – that is putting our culture in danger.
In our culture, most of the women participate in harsh labour jobs and their physical movements are a common sight in villages and cities. So whose culture is in danger when a girl plays cricket and Orya Maqbool Jan is examining bodies?
It is the 20% urban middle class – composed of corrupt traders and government officials – which wants to impose their morality on rest of 80% populations. They want women to be confined within four walls harems. They live far away from the real world around them – where women of the 70% working class have to work to support their families.
That is our culture – for centuries we have been living in it and never felt offended.
Half of the population of country cannot be segregated and confined, just because their body movements offend some sick minds. Sick minds should not assume that these movements are endangering any cultural or moral code – rather take it as natural body movements. They should rather find out how to eradicate poverty – so that 70% rural women working at farms and labourer at urban centres do not have to take harsh physical labour in harshest weather of Pakistan.
That is a real shame for us – not the depiction of a female cricketer in a TV commercial.