ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani tea merchant with velvet eyes saw his life changed this week when his portrait spread around the Internet, sparking ardent debates on class, objectification, and the place of ethnic Pashtuns in society.
Arshad Khan had no idea he had set the Internet alight from Pakistan to India and beyond: he has no phone, and cannot read.
“It was a real surprise,” the young “chai wala”, or tea seller, told AFP.
“I was aware that I am handsome but you can’t do anything when you are poor,” he said, adding that the image has “changed the way I think.”
In the candid photograph, snapped by a passing photographer and posted on Instagram, Khan prepares Pakistan’s ubiquitous milk tea, his blue green eyes looking frankly into the camera.
It set social media users swooning, with the 18-year-old’s image shared tens of thousands of times since October 14.
By Tuesday, the Islamabad market where photographer Javeria Ali took the fateful shot was swarmed by dozens eager to gawk at the young worker.
But in a country where women have long fought for rights and rarely express their feelings publicly, that fervour soon morphed into an intense debate on what it meant to reduce a poor man to a beautiful object.
“We are more used to seeing this happen to women, it is still creepy whan it happens to a boy,” feminist columnist Bina Shah told AFP.
“Just because people are bored does not mean you can play with someone’s life.