“We as a nation have reached a stage in bad-mouthness….” “I had heard of a bad mouth in English, never bad-mouthness.”

“There you go, you learn something new every day.”

“Don’t be silly, you can’t go around rearranging words into a different grammatical…”

“Hey stop. Is there a word lota in English?”

“No.”

“Right, but in Urdu it refers to a water receptacle commonly used in the Subcontinent that is susceptible to fall over or roll over, and now we use it to define our extremely sadiq and amin politicians who jump from one party that is now out of power to another in power.”

“Right languages do evolve differently, for example in Urdu there is a verb that translates into having something done by another – let me give you examples pakwanaa (to have it cooked), hattwanaa (to have something removed), churrwanaa (to have someone released). The English language does not have such a verb.”

“You Khanzadahs can’t resists that, can you?”

“All parties have experienced it – I mean, once the circle is complete the verb hurwana comes into play.”

“Right anyway going back to bad-mouthness we as a nation have developed, after a period of intense training, a tendency to bad mouth anyone or any institution that is not doing what we think we are entitled to.”

“Right, but bad-mouthing as opposed to attacking installations…”

“The constitution was revised to make it illegal to bad mouth….”

“Right, but the amendment to the constitution was at a time when there was no concept of a widely accessible internet or a pervasive social media with the capacity not to disclose the name, address and other details of the offender….…”

“Hmmm that’s a bummer but in time perhaps another constitutional amendment would be required to deal with these illusive social media trolls who have angered our institutions and those wrongfully convicted for not taking a salary from their son and not for refusing to provide details of the source of income….”

“Hmmmm that’s a bummer – I mean whatever you may say of the massive rise in the wealth of The Man Who Must Remain Nameless we know he accumulated vast sums from the sale of what he was gifted as the prime minister but who knows about the others.”

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024