**To ‘sir’, with love
*By Muhammad Barkaat Ali ***
‘Sir’ is now well-entrenched in our minds and has come to be accepted as a term of respect and reverence for those with some degree of power, authority or wealth.
Spoken by millions of countrymen everyday, ‘sir’ has permeated the very psyche of Pakistani society. Be it an office, a classroom, a small gathering or any other place, this tiny, little word or its derivatives such as ‘yes sir’, ‘ji sir’, ‘right sir’, etc, are inordinately employed to every conversation or correspondence. The expression probably gives loads of satisfaction or some sort of justification to feel superior to the one it is meant for.
The fact is that we have inherited this habit from our colonial past wherein we used to address our British rulers as ‘sirs’. Whereas, the British use this expression solely for those who have been conferred knighthood by the Queen. Fifty years down the road, ‘sir’ is now well-entrenched in our minds and has come to be accepted as a term of respect and reverence for those with some degree of power, authority or wealth.
For some odd reason, I always felt uneasy using the term for teachers and later on, for my bosses. It was not that I did not respect them that dissuaded me from using this ‘expression of respect’. ‘Yes sir’ gave me a sort of self-inflicted inferiority complex - that my bosses were supreme human beings and I was a lowly creature. The feeling created an urge in me to see for myself how people addressed each other in the country where this expression originally emerged from, in this case Britain. Fortunately, I got an opportunity last year to do MSc from the UK and this put me in a situation where I could actually see face-to-face the ‘real’ sirs and madams.
A few days after I arrived in London, I felt like calling every gora ‘sir’ and every gori ‘madam’. But that was not to be. The expression was hardly heard there and it was only used, with extreme respect, for knighted personalities. I remember being scolded by my professor whom I tried to give the kind of respect we give our teachers or bosses in Pakistan by saying “Yes, sir” in reply to one of his questions. “Just call me Robert or Mr Robert; nothing more, nothing less,” came an admonishing piece of advice from my 58-year-old professor.
In the streets of London you get the same kind of reaction. Upon being called ‘sir’, even a well-dressed Englishman stares at you surprised, as if you have ridiculed him. I remember at the London’s Euston Station, I got confused about which train to board and had to ask an Englishman standing next to me for help. “Could you tell me, sir, which one of these two trains is leaving for Milton Keynes at 11?”
He looked to his left and then to his right, and then realizing that I was talking to him, said, “Of course, mate, this one is leaving at 11. By the way, I am Dennis, plain and simple.” I immediately understood, with a bit of embarrassment, what he meant by “plain and simple.”
Those were my early days in Britain, so I could be forgiven for not being considerate toward gora mannerisms. Euston Station was the last time I used ‘sir’. From then on, I hammered it into my mind that no matter how old or young a person was, I must call him/her by name. Months passed by and I completed my studies and learnt a good deal of British mannerisms, thinking that I would put them to use once I was back in Pakistan.
Enter Pakistan and "Sirji ki haal ae, hun tey farangi lugday ho (How are you, sir? You look like a foreigner) was the first sentence that I got to hear on the first day I rejoined my office in Islamabad. By the time I reached my room, I had heard countless similar sentences. All efforts to explain that it was not appropriate to call me ‘sir’ was responded to with expressions such as 'Ok sir, not next time, ‘Kyun sirji’, ‘Tabyat to theek hai na, sir?’ Every time I gave them a lecture on the drawbacks of using this expression with colonial connotations, I got to hear more and more of it. It was not a very pleasant experience to see an essential part of my newly-acquired mannerisms fall by the wayside.
I must confess that seeing the response of the people in general and how I was laughed at, my lowly but noble effort at taking the ‘sir’ at least out of the office has almost been given up by me. Need I comment more on the success of my mission? I guess not.
SOURCE: Dawn Magazine 28/3/04