Ayaz Amir is a psycho. Have you ever seen this man smiling? He has woven a world around him and anything outside it is either a tragedy or a farce.
I had written a piece on him in January this year on my blog:
**Of ‘human owl’
**
A paragraph in the 4th lecture of Henry Ward Beecher’s book, Seven Lectures to Young Men, reads: “The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes – openly bad and secretly bad.”
In 1844, Mr. Beecher was talking about Mr. Ayaz Amir – a prototype of intelligent life which was not followed by serial production as, perhaps, the heaven decided to populate the earth with lesser mortals instead.
Mr. Ayaz personifies pessimism to a tee. He wants the world as flawless as his own self. Life, on the other hand, is neither pitch black nor snow white – it carries many hues of grays. Contrasts and contradictions are inbuilt features of nature and we are bound to live with them. Rains help crops and floods destroy them. Houses are made on earth and destroyed by quacks. We are not only a product of nature, but a victim as well. But we do not quit because we know that the best way to retaliate is to live on.
But given Mr. Ayaz’s unceasing angst, he should have been the first one to land on earth or the last one to take off – what else for a misanthrope? But it is still anyone’s guess if he would have been any happier.
Conviction and obsession are two different things. When you cannot get rid of one thought just because of your dislike, one should go for psychosis treatment, instead of writing a series of columns. Mr. Ayaz was so overwhelmed by the PTI’s rally in Lahore that, in a matter of hours, he thought to “cross party lines.” And merely a few weeks later when emotions settled, he started to mourn his impulsiveness and began to denounce onstage “antics” that included offering of prayers and a slogan that everyone chants. It is not known if he asked himself if he was immaturely spontaneous then or incomprehensibly irrational now?
Mr. Ayaz has nothing to his credit than his holier-than-all attitude and a sea of columns sadistically wailing and grieving throughout his professional life. A self-appointed national watchdog who could neither become a pillar of journalism, not a leading light in philosophy, nor an idol in politics, seems to have made it a mission to castigate a national hero for as absurd an excuse as a slogan he did not like in PTI’s Lahore rally. Mr. Ayaz has suddenly started to hate just anything about Imran. The phobia is so sudden and intense that he likens Imran to every villain he could exhume from history and any other the heaven may send in the future! He will perhaps leave in his inheritance a bagful of articles for posthumous publication so that his legacy of cynicism continues unabated.
Imran is not a god and he should not be perceived as one. He might have committed mistakes and may continue to do so just as all of us do. Margin of error, thus, be given to him as readily as it may be available to the rest of us. But an inwardly-looking self-righteous pessimist cannot figure out that perfection lies in the balance of things — neither in their abundance, nor in their insufficiency. Perfection — therefore — is an illusion and anyone insisting on it, should really “reach out for his gun” and have a shot at himself.