Success is a trend set by the successful.
There have always been intense, heated, debates on the subject of “success”. It starts from nothing, rises to its peak and then drops to back to nothing. Business students will concur that if you have a great product, the right strategy, perfect timing and a tinge of luck, you’ll have success on your hands.
However, what nobody prepares us for, is how the presence of controversy can put just about anything on the path to success.
Controversy sells because it stems from extreme emotions. People hold numerous things close to their hearts, belief systems (or lack thereof) being at the epicenter of our emotions. If someone questions/disrespects that system, it will unhinge every emotion attached to it.
Some people rely very heavily on unhinging these emotions to generate publicity. Without controversy, Salman Rushdie would have been a nobody, Malala would have been just another statistic and Burka Avenger would just have been just another show.
You’ll notice oncoming discomfort with where this might be going. That is my point exactly.
Read through:Burka Avenger nominated for Emmy Kids Awards
Let’s start with how Malala = controversy.
I remember a friend saying: “The [Nobel] Prize hasn't been given to 'a strong female peace activist from Pakistan', rather 'a strong female peace activist who stood against the plague that is Pakistan’.”
This leads us to Burka Avenger.
I must assure you all that Burka Avenger’s and Malala’s similarities are purely coincidental. I wrote the script for Burka Avenger long before Malala’s incident happened.
However, the global extremes see the show as a force against what they presume to be the norm in Pakistan (torched girls’ schools, then Malala, now this). Local extremes consider it an affront that demonises our people.
I can assure you all that these extremes are rare. However, they are highlighted so much that they overwhelm the majority opinion.
Also read:‘Burka Avenger’ wins US award
International award bodies are historically famous for being politically motivated. Awards are not handed to “the best shows”, as the ostensible purpose is. If that were the case, Burka Avenger would not have won. Burka Avenger was subject to numerous issues (editing, rewrites, re-renders), management issues and countless other difficulties that created an end-product which was far from perfect.
Granted, it looked great to the untrained eye, but it was definitely not a masterpiece.
Yet, Burka Avenger won a Peabody Award and is up for an International Kids’ Emmy for Animation. This is because it generated the right kind of traffic and carried the perfect amount of controversy for its time. Not necessarily for the show itself, but the idea it represented.
People are surprisingly unfamiliar with the actual show.
A vast majority still calls it Burka Avengers (plural, with an 's'). They are not aware that education is only the subject of the first episode, and other episodes deal with other, more pressing issues, like child labour. Even the Facebook page has a measly 150,000 likes. For such an admired show, that is an abysmal number.
Also see:What Malala's win means for your daughter
The network that aired Burka Avenger had so little faith in it (predating the controversial fame), that they stowed it away on their least viewed channel, at an unwatchable time slot.
Left to them, it would have disappeared completely. Even their announcer called it Burka Avenger(s). Then, when the accolades started rolling in, they gave it a fair chance where it did considerably well. Without that controversy, the show would have faded into nothing.
As much as we don’t like being antagonised, we have garnered an international reputation of being an unstable people. The world takes a macabre interest in what we dislike, like a school bully picking on your insecurities.
The reason for that is the same reason we look at a traffic wreck – out of curiosity. We want to know what happened and if everyone survived.
If we gave this post a misleading title like, “Burka Avenger is like Salman Rushdie”, its dishonesty would be overshadowed by how well it circulates.
That is the nature of controversy and when timed right, it can turn anything into a success.