Saba Qamar Photoshoot: controversy or no controversy
BY ALI NAQVI –
How about a lesson on morality or righteousness or what’s right and what’s not? We as people are always interested in teaching others more than correcting ourselves. We want to see the world exactly as we want it to be without realizing that we are not the center of the world. Saba Qamar recently uploaded some pictures of her latest photo shoot. The shoot has caused a bit of a storm in a teacup.
Communal living has played a vital role in the development of societies and civilizations alike. The basic principle of such a living is to accommodate each other and formulate a set of principles that ensure the physical wellbeing of every member. Morality also follows this principle and that’s how it keeps molding itself from generation to generation and from civilization to civilization.
The debate about morality is important here because there is a huge difference between being a moral judge of others and knowing what morality really stands for. Morality is the outcome of age long human interactions. Not more than two thousand years ago, it was morally acceptable to keep men and woman as slaves, and not more than two hundred years ago half the Americans were fighting the Civil War to retain slavery.
As humans have progressed materially over the past few centuries, there has been some evolution on the moral front as well. It has been morally acceptable to inflict cruelest and harshest of punishments on criminals, but today civilized societies are looking to address the psychological, economic and social factors behind crimes. They are now looking to find the ways for the rehabilitation of criminals. The old morality that demanded “eye for an eye” is fast losing ground.
Coming back to Saba Qamar, one must not forget that we live in an age where individual freedom and liberty is the axis on which the modern world spins around. Saba Qamar is a star and you cannot tell a star what to do. Similar outcries were also heard when Mehwish Hayat’s item song Gangster Guriya was released.
We as free individuals have the liberty to criticize her work. We might say that the shoot was not up to professional photography standards or that her makeover was not complimenting the dress she was wearing or we could simply say that she was not looking good at all. But to bring a question of right and wrong, morality and personal integrity of a celebrity is absolutely unnecessary.
Saba Qamar is a celebrity and above all an artist. In a civilized world artists, thinkers and intellectuals come at the top of social hierarchy. They are revered, loved, followed and looked up to by the masses. Do we have enough stars on our dark gloomy sky to look up to?
