OPINION: "People think you've gone mad since you stopped working." These words came out of my eldest son's innocent face. Kids and their gnawing truth can be easily dispatched to school. But as I lay on the trampoline in my pyjamas at midday, watching the birds, there was something about his judgment that was inescapable. The elusive thing about sanity is it is a quality wholly judged by others and to the afflicted, madness comes as a searing bolt of clarity.

Gainful employment and a modicum of fame can cover a lot, however, and it looks like my ship came in this week with a fresh debate on diversity in broadcasting heating up. Surely it is only a matter of time before New Zealand's most prominent Pakistani broadcaster is catapulted to a significant position thanks to this new age of enlightenment. I'm writing this on Tuesday. The phone hasn't rung yet. But it's early days.

Rachel Smalley has picked up her blazing sword of truth and is waggling it around for all to see in pursuit of a more representative media. Her face popped up again and again in my Twitter timeline. When I squinted my eyes, I was sure it was somehow familiar.

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Casting my memory back to the less cosmopolitan era of 2011, I was an up-and-coming satirist on the TV3 show Nightline, whose nihilistic approach to the life of the nation was quite in. TV3 management, perhaps hoping to harness my knack for causing wholesale offence, suggested there was a place for me presenting the third break of the show. The only hurdle, it seemed, was convincing the incumbent newsreader of the plan's beauty. Sadly, Smalley, in those pre-revelatory days, could not be swayed and despite my status as an ethnic minority, I remained in the ghetto of reporting before eventually embracing my current oblivion.

Broadcasting does not run on good intentions. The beast is fed with greed, pride, lust, envy and gluttony. The people who "make it" are possessed with an enormous desire to get to the top and stay there. Sir Paul Holmes had it – he once presented Q and A with a catheter in, such was his devotion to the job. Smalley also has it in spades. I, actually, don't have it – that's why I'm currently lying on a rebounder in a suburban garden in my night clothes when it's the middle of the day.

But in that world, the tyranny isn't white against black, rich against poor, man against women. The tyranny is the waiting. The media industry is devoted to every day artificially creating the sense of renewal our forefathers would have only experienced with the coming of spring. To dwell on that heady plane, waiting for it to finally be your face on the poster at a bus shelter,can be exhausting – we thrash about and become less lovely as a result.

Frequently now I find myself pushing a heavy child past one of those bright hoardings. Aloft, invariably, will be the face of someone I met on the "way up". Carefree, charming, fresh, young and unguarded then, here they are airbrushed, coiffed, smiling broadly, with the light slowly draining from their eyes.

I find a cafe to order my son a fluffy.

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