It didn’t take long. Within moments of Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy bagging Pakistan’s first ever Oscar for her documentary short Saving Face, the internet trolls emerged in droves from under their bitter-pill bridges and started the inevitable gnashing of teeth and jiggling their whatsits in her general direction. ‘Bringing shame to the country!’ ‘Pandering to stereotypical Western notions of the East!’ ‘Western cultural imperialism!’ ‘Selling out!’ ‘Oscar ain’t all that!’ were some of the choice phrases being bandied about, but pretty much all of them had the same essential whiff about them: I’m unlikely to achieve something comparable in my sorry lifetime so I’ll just try and piss this into the ground. Well, sorry to rain on your urinary parade, trolls, but I think it’s safe to say that Ms Chinoy couldn’t give a fuck about you and neither does the universe – Twitter or otherwise – at large, so why don’t you crawl back to the sour milk teat that you suckle at when you’re not spewing its contents on the majority of us who don’t share your peculiar lactic predilections.
We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat 