Story of Pakistan

There is no denying, that the story of Pakistan isn’t very encouraging. Rather it has been horrifying and appalling. What went wrong? Where did we falter? Why we are the way we are? Who is responsible? These are significant questions everyone is asking. Books can be written on the causes. But I am reminded of the book, “Awaken the Giant Within” by Anthony Robbins. He said to focus on where you want to go and not on where you are heading. He said if you are about to meet an accident and you are focusing on the impact point, the accident will be more severe. However, if you focus on the point where you want to take the car, the accident may still be there but it will be less severe. 

In my life of 59 years, Pakistan has hardly been ever out of the woods. Pakistan is defined by two words, “Turbulence and Resilience”. Turbulence is natural as well as of our own making. The leadership creates turbulence while the people of Pakistan display resilience to come out of turbulence. The system doesn’t hold creators of turbulence accountable so we get into a vicious cycle. Accumulatively, Pakistan has come to a stage where the resilience of the people of Pakistan is losing its viability.

So much on the past, as I said we need to focus on where we want to go. Mostly, discussions on social media are related to the causes. Indeed, analysis of the past gives us lessons. However, we should focus greater energy on the solutions rather than analysis. ‘Paralysis through analysis’ isn’t desirable. As a nation, we have been so terribly wrong that no analysis will be sufficient. Our situation is unfortunately so precarious that no amount of energy can be adequate to turn around. Instead of questions like what happened? Our questions may be, how can we turn around? How can we contribute? What are the solutions? Etc. This article is intended to suggest certain measures that seemingly are easier said than done, but there is no other solution. 

First and foremost, we need to stick to democracy and a parliamentary form of government and avoid experiments. Let democracy evolve itself and take firm standing.  

Human actions are inhibited by two factors. Firstly, a feeling of inadequacy of one’s action and secondly, fear of the response of the opposing party. We need to overcome such inhibitions. We need to chip in whatever we can. Religion is a very touchy subject, so very briefly I want to suggest we need to be more practicing Muslims than ritualistic/ showoff Muslims. We need to take our founding fathers out of the closet and practice their injunctions. Recently I was at Karakorum University. I advised the youth that if we merely focus on one injunction each of our founding fathers we can be a different society. We pick one from Quaid e Azam, “Our duty to the State comes first: our duty to our Province, to our district, to our town and to our village and ourselves comes next”. And one from Allama Muhammad Iqbal i.e. the concept of uprightness. If the bulk of us start to follow these principles we can reform our society.

As a society, we need to recreate and nurture our values, culture,and ethics. Respect for women, children, the elderly, teachers, and the needy, preference to source rather than money, and truthfulness have been the hallmarks of our society. These attributes are lost, and we need to revive them. Nations are not made by natural resources and wealth, these are rather made through investment in human resources – a neglected aspect of our society. We need to build the courage to say the truth and bear the truth. In today’s social media-empowered environment, reality cannot remain hidden and the time lapse for truth to come to the surface has shrunk. Once society improves any system will work, else, “bad people can defeat any good system”.

We need to pick the right leadership and our leaders need to harness the power of social media rather than shying away. It’s a reality, we need to take measures to exploit its strengths rather than getting crushed under its pitfalls. We need to support the right even if wrong is more appealing.

Our mosques should teach humanity, empathy, and love rather than, hate, bigotry, extremism, and violence. Our schools should teach the use of fair means, education, and humanity rather than cheating, qualification, and materialism. Our parents should focus on grooming their children through self-example.

I believe we can turn around provided each one of us agrees to change itself rather than venturing to change the world.