On the first Wednesday of each month the Frontline Club, a journalists club, hosts a discussion evening. It is pretty good, I've never been to one of these current affairs style shows, think Q&A in Australia, but less polished and on radio instead of TV. The month we went it was a discussion about Pakistan, so they had a guy who had written books about Pakistan, and was working on another, the Pakistani high commissioner and a couple of journalists, who report from the really crazy areas of Pakistan. It was mainly to do with the election, which was a very important one, it being the first where one democratically elected government passed on to another one.
It must be so hard to be the moderator of one of these things, and the journalist running it did such a good job. He has to contend with the audience members wanting to show how smart they are, panellists waffling, off topic questions, all whilst trying to remain polite, in control and on time. Also with the topic being on Pakistan, he had to try and keep the mood upbeat. The more the audience and panellists discussed Pakistan all you got was how very bad the country was, and how close it is to becoming a failed state. That nobody pays taxes, that members of Parliament are constantly being killed, that the violence is almost out of control. One interesting thing to come out of it was that according to the panellists and the people in the room, that the people in the remote areas are actually all for the drone strikes. Which I found really surprising, and I wonder how true that is, I thought everyone in the country hated the drone strikes, since innocent Pakistanis are being killed as well.
You do get the feeling that if you went along to a few of those you would definitely be on top of politics and current affairs around the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment