For those of my readers who are not ‘down’ with Twitter, this is a pointless read. Please check out Sabir Nazar’s excellent cartoon instead
Freedom of speech has to be the most ridiculous idea since people said to Noah, “Nah, I think we’ll be fine without your boat.” It is that piece of statutory (s)crap which has caused the most wars, conflicts, professional wrestling matches and husband-wife separations than any other freedom enjoyed by man. Except maybe the freedom of conjugate.
But even the beghairat liberal in me gets outraged when certain individuals take their right to say what they want, a little too far. If one has any preoccupation with the social media, one knows that one is referring exclusively and vociferously to the entity known only as @SaroorIjaz. Never before has malice, wit, venom and goose-stepping neo-Grammar Nazism been so perfectly encompassed in one Twitter handle. But what started as a seemingly-harmless joke, quickly degenerated into an unbridled verbal sword fighting with soiled diapers being hurled in all directions. You had to be there. It was hilarious. And outrageous.
I will hold my horses for the next two paragraphs to bring you all up to speed. @SaroorIjaz is a brand-spanking-new Twitter account which has resisted all attempts to label it ‘a parody account’ of one Saroop Ijaz, an erudite legal eagle who exercises his pen for the Express Tribune. And what a lovely pen it is. Indeed, Saroop is a master wordsmith and has the power to turn dribble into poetry, all the while writing in prosaic prose. He is also an extremely affable chap, praised by all and sundry who have allegedly met with him. While one has never had the privilege, one can safely report that said lawyer is a ‘Good Man’.
That, unfortunately, is more than one can say for the fictitious @SaroorIjaz. Saroop himself has no Twitter account, nor does he have (I am told) the inclination to own one in the near future. However, the imposter uses Saroop’s photograph and his persona as an Express Tribune columnist and has the bejeezuz fooled out of nearly everyone on Twitter. Like Engineer Majorly Profound before him, @SaroorIjaz has gone viral on Twitter. Well, sort of.
You see, the best way to be popular on Twitter is to have Twitter fights. This was my first lesson in the 140-character world, courtesy a musician friend of mine. Then, it was made clear to me by an ubertroll, that trolling (which is another word for foreplay, really) was what two people did to each other when one of them wanted to take the other out on a date. Obviously, he was trolling too. But then I was set right by another writer, who pointed out that ticking off the right people was the wrong thing to do. The right people being assorted haseenas or hawt wimmens. One young intellectual taught me the importance of having something intelligent to say all the time, while a certain former newspaper editor showed me that it was possible to be precise, funny and nice at the same time.
However, @SaroorIjaz has interfered with that utopia. He has singled out many of the above individuals and has chosen to make himself a marked man by marking said individuals and making them the focus of his grammatically-perfect and verbose attacks. This, obviously, means war. For too long has anonymity been the bane of the existence of many social media users. Too plentiful are cases of users being bullied, battered and made to wet their self-esteem by excessively vicious cyber-bullies. Mostly of the feminist variety. It is high time that we put into practice what @SenRehmanMalik said to us at #SOCMM12 in Karachi. It is time. Ladies and gentlemen. To fry some eggs. Some very bad eggs. Out with the andas and in with the hawt wimmens with gratuitously doctored-and-photoshopped display pictures.
There are simply too many excuses for being a gratuitous potty mouth. But when you turn that mouth onto others, things get complicated. And bloody. I am currently in process of enlisting the services of a good lawyer to take the right dishonorable @SaroorIjaz to court, via Twit petition. RT this if you agree.
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