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CALL it my poor understanding of the English language or my love for Urdu that the only way I have learnt to enjoy cricket is through radio commentary in Urdu. I share this weakness with the over-whelming majority of my countrymen. Like them, I too can also visualise the action if described in English as well, but the real enjoyment comes from commentary in Urdu.
Way back when Radio Pakistan introduced commentary in Urdu, the cricket-loving audiences were already under a deep spell cast by our legendary pioneers of English commentary. And when Radio Pakistan decided to allot a little chunk to Urdu running commentary in their programme, everything changed. Cricket now became Pakistan’s most popular event ever, with its commentary-hungry fans eagerly waiting to listen to their favourite commentators, both within and outside the country.
This great success was achieved not only because of the high quality of commentary alone but also because Radio Pakistan made it a point not to miss an opportunity to bring home to its listeners the joy of cricket even if it meant travelling to unpopular venues to cover matches Pakistan cricket team participated in.
Unfortunately, following the advent of too many small broadcasting units coming in and capitalising the commercial gains, the nobler character of broadcasting was pushed aside. Radio Pakistan, who had a purpose to their broadcasting mandate, took the backseat and allowed the new broadcasting units to develop - probably as a strategy.
The new units had their own priorities, which were naturally commercially-oriented. As a result, the cricket loving public, who had by now been hooked to a very high level of ball-by-ball commentary, both in Urdu and English, suffered.
Since vacuum does not exist long, the commercial broadcasting units moved to fit into Radio Pakistan’s shoes, but sadly ended up with ‘dubba commentary’ only. What I refer to as ‘dubba commentary’ means that they sit down in front of a television set (dubba) and keep on describing what they see on the screen, leaving no stone unturned to make the listener believe that they are running the ball-by-ball commentary from the actual venue itself.
The reason for playing this gimmick, termed by many as outright cheating, could be that they did not have the resources like Radio Pakistan’s and were also unable to muster up the affiliation of majority of stalwarts of commentary. This unpleasant and uncalled for change greatly disappointed the poor listener, whose main link with cricket despite the prevalence of TV was still through radio commentary. Besides, he was not prepared to be cheated through ‘dubba commentary’.
During the ‘dubba commentary’ era, the disappointed radio listener drifted away. Radio Pakistan realising the dwindling of its most valuable asset; the listeners, jumped in to rectify the situation and carried out the ball-by-ball running commentary on all the matches of Pakistan Cup tournaments held in Faisalabad in 2016.
The comeback of traditional commentary was not only welcomed but widely acclaimed as a great step forward to re-infuse listeners’ confidence in Radio Pakistan and its running commentary. It was also accepted as the end of ‘dubba commentary’ and with it the end of cheating. There was even a vow from Radio Pakistan that they would never resort to ‘dubba commentary’.
Lo and behold! We are being subjected to the same ‘dubba commentary’ - that too at the hands of Radio Pakistan who had unequivocally renounced it after the great success of their running commentary on Pakistan Cup matches, only a year ago.
As someone as ardent a follower of the game of cricket as I am, I have a few observations, which I have formulated after subjecting myself to the ordeal of listening to the ‘dubba commentary’ broadcast by Radio Pakistan over its FM 101 network on Champions Trophy matches. I would have loved to share them with someone in authority and connected with Radio Pakistan, but because of our office culture where nobody attends your calls nor responds to your correspondence I would rather submit them for public reading as below:
1. Choose the language
First of all we must decide who our target listeners are. In a country where the literacy rate is low and the quality of education lower; where most graduates wouldn’t be able to write a job application in English correctly, why are we wasting our precious broadcasting time by dividing it equally between English and Urdu? What we experienced in the recent ‘dubba commentary’ each ball was shared both by Urdu and English commentators with neither being able to give his description a proper finis.
If you are catering for that insignificant number of English knowing people, then forget about them. They have better options than listening to ‘Dubba commentary’. Gone are the days when people having no knowledge of the English language would still not miss a word if it were coming from master commentators like Omar Kureishi, Jamshid Marker, Iftikhar Ahmad, Chisty Mujahid and Tariq Rahim. If you really want to keep them in the loop, allocate periodical resumes for them in English. After all we have some world class exponents of Cricket commentary in English, who are capable of bewitching their audience. Why can’t we benefit from their art?
2. Selecting and grading the panel
We have some extremely knowledgeable, experienced and world-renowned commentators in Pakistan with complete command over the language of their expression, be it Urdu or English. But they were not to be heard during the whole Champion Trophy. Instead what we heard from June 1, 2017 to-date was that the 4-man panel was in competition with each other - the Urdu commentators trying to outsmart the English ones and vice versa. What a listener likes is that voices should keep on changing to avoid monotony and the description needs to be accurate and in flawless language. We should select real experts, groom them and grade them. The time tested method to groom juniors is to give them a chance in the initial stages of a series, then in the mid series their seniors should replace them and in the final stages the reins should be handed over to the top commentators for winding up the series. It’s the standard practice around the world to keep listeners absorbed in radio commentary.
3. Urdu commentators better mind their pronunciation
My experience of listening to the ‘dubba commentary’ in Urdu during the Champions Trophy has been one of uneasiness. The Urdu commentators not only didn’t have their pronunciation of words right but were also not sure of the Cricket ball’s gender in Urdu. At times it was referred to as masculine while at others as feminine. The famous broadcaster Z.A. Bukhari had it mandatory for everybody appearing before a microphone to have their ‘sheed qaaf and knowledge of gender’ absolutely perfect. Since he did not like the medium of broadcast to be polluted, there was a linguistic expert at hand to correct the defaulters. How anybody could be allowed to publicly mutilate the national language, he may have thought?
It is not expected that the above observations would bring back the lost glory of radio commentary or help Radio Pakistan regain its laurels for discarding ‘dubba commentary’ and achieving excellence in radio commentary. There is however one way that things can improve i.e. we all need to be optimistic and hopeful that someone in authority gets to read these lines and finds some wisdom in them. I am sure many more things will pop up during the brainstorming sessions, which will definitely lead to the same high quality of radio commentary which has been a hallmark of a national institution like Radio Pakistan.
The writer is a former Pakistan Test umpire and ICC-Asia Resource Person on Umpiring
Published in Dawn, June 17th, 2017
