[DAWN] A political gathering is pelted with bricks; the house or vehicle of someone with a political background is vandalised; a state institution like PTV is broken into; who is responsible for this politically motivated violence in Pakistain?Of course, it's Gullu Butt(s).
The chubby, handlebar-moustached man who made his first public appearance on June 17 in Model Town, Lahore, and smashed half a dozen vehicles parked around the Minhajul Koran Secretariat; refuses to go away from public discourse, political speeches and even news 'analyses'.
Already with more than 10,000 downloads of a game named 'Gullu', the word 'gullu' is now likely to make its way to the Oxford Dictionary as a term standing for the disruptive behaviour of someone enjoying (whether explicit or implicit) backing of the ruling/powerful segments of society.
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Syed Shamim Azam, a linguist from Lahore, has been watching the Gullu phenomenon since it hit the TV screens on June 17.
He wrote to Oxford Dictionaries for including the word 'gullu' in its upcoming edition for Pakistain and India, considering that events have certainly established the semantic value of the word.
The publishers say that if "the term achieves enormous currency with a wide audience in a much shorter space of time, and people expect to find the new 'high-profile' word in their dictionaries, it sure is included in the dictionary".
Azam sees a strong case for bringing in 'gullu' as a common noun in dictionaries, for its popular usage and widespread appeal and understanding of a certain phenomenon in the Pak society. He says,
Whenever someone or something is threatened or harmed by the cronies of powerful figures, the violent actors are referred to 'gullus', and without any further explaining, the usage of the word is properly encoded and decoded by the public.
