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The Overlooked Side Of Sharmeen’s Tweet: An Issue Above Legal Definitions And Board Decisions

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Okay, so we all know about the harassment/firing issue and can see that the entire country is torn between deciding which side they stand on. In the drama that has unfolded since I have my two cents to offer.

Firstly, I do believe that the doctor was highly unprofessional in his conduct. If a board of directors reviewed the issue and decided to fire the doctor, then they must have had some solid reasons to support the level of punishment. At least, I hope they did. Since there is no evidence to suggest otherwise, I don’t have any reason to doubt the board’s decision.

Secondly, there is a lot that has been said about the legal parameters that constitute a case of harassment and there is an argument that the requirements were not entirely met in this issue, in which case Sharmeen’s definition of harassment would not be justified. Well, she is not a lawyer and as a person who is not familiar with the legal definitions, she can be prone to misuse a term in a tweet that was by no means carefully planned or constructed.

That brings me to the next part of this post, i.e the language, audience, and tone of the tweet. I do have an issue with the way Sharmeen started her tweet, by proclaiming that “there are zero boundaries in #Pakistan…”. I feel that as a person who has a large fan base inside and outside the country, she should have been more careful with the choice of words and certainly in where she chose to locate the causality of the incident.

Now if you have read until this point of the post, you should know that I condemn the doctor’s behavior but now I’m forced to consider another issue. Was the nature of the incident of a type that would warrant a blanket statement against the entire doctor fraternity in Pakistan? If not, then how is it justified to drag along a country of 180 million — its cultural values and boundaries, over one professional’s misconduct?

To be fair though, again considering that the tweet was probably typed in anger, one may say that she might not have really taken into consideration her international audience or the extent of the blame on the entire society in her tweets. Granted. The next part of her tweet said that “the doctor messed with the wrong women in the wrong family”. This part stinks of arrogance. Again, rage and arrogance go hand in hand. Though not expected of a celebrity of her caliber who has bagged two Oscars, she is a human being after all and can at times slip out of her public cloak of humility (in anger of course).

But why has she not given an update on the issue? If following her initial viral outburst and formal complaint, the issue was taken up by the board of directors at AKUH and the doctor was fired, shouldn’t there have been an update from her end about the issue? She said that there were no boundaries anywhere. Clearly, there were some that the doctor was found to be crossing and lost his job as a result.

The decision to fire a doctor is by no means a daily occurrence. It was a huge achievement for her. I just feel that we are so caught up on legal definitions and board decisions that we are entirely overlooking another issue of significance. Why is it that the same people who are so loud to blame the entire country for a single, isolated incident become silent when there is an action on their complaints? Do we only get to express our frustrations using our social media handles and never any positive developments about our society?

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