I like Londonstani’s Pakistan dispatches for Abu Muqawama very much. And I find the point made in this post very interesting. But professionally I have to cringe when I read this:

The Sufi tradition has very deep roots in Pakistan. The country is dotted with shrines that are visited by thousands of people daily from across Pakistan’s ossified class structure. Londonstani’s taxi driver of choice is a fairly typical adherent.

Chacha (uncle) supports eight children on about £7.40 a day, which takes him 12 hours of driving to earn. His family is from Murree, a hilly area about 2-1/2 hours drive from Islamabad. But he spends most days of the week living in a small unheated concrete room outside a small stall owned by a relative who also works in the capital. Chacha has a terrible cough, exacerbated by his constant smoking and his taste for the local Murree whiskey. If he could afford it, Chacha would go to the doctors to find out how to treat it. But unlike Londonstani, he’s not too worried about it…

Cabbie journalism has a rich and ignoble tradition. Basically, you use whatever your cabdriver says to make conversation during your trip to wherever as a means to (a) validate your preexisting biases; (b) claim an emerging trend on the basis of precisely one data point; (c) collect a man-on-the-street quote in a flash; (d) claim an “authentic” perspective for this-or-that point; or (e) all or some of the above.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with one dude’s cabride-borne take on things. To be fair, Londonstani’s post is a lot more than Chacha quotes, and it’s worth reading. But while I don’t wish to be overly harsh, I’d prefer it if we in the blogosphere don’t reproduce some of the worst malpractices of journalism.