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Pakistani Awam: Remembering Pakistan in Bad Words


Let’s start this with a real life example. Once during a lecture on inequality measuring techniques at my university; teacher had drawn supposedly a graph of unequal society, a student passed a comment “This should be of Pakistan”. Doesn't it shows how we think of our mother land? Pakistan is doing or not doing well as a country is a different story. But here comes a question: Why Pakistan is not doing good in our minds?
We from our childhood are sensitized in a way that if a person does anything bad, we relate it to Pakistan; "Pakistani awam". Let's get into the depth of it. I read a quote in a book named "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundara;

You begin to liquidate a people," Hubl said, "by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world forgets it still faster."
"And the language?"
"Why bother taking it away? It will become a mere folklore and sooner or later die a natural death."

Well we are not in a mood to give time to understand what actually happened to our history. At present we are suffering that's for sure. In most of the countries our passport does not have much value. We have to understand it's not Pakistan, it's about Pakistani's making an image of Pakistan. Every nation that gets respect is because they respect themselves. Why we do not understand it? Why we made English a benchmark for intelligence? We have to understand, English is not our language. We can do mistakes in English without feeling ashamed but we cannot do mistakes in Urdu with proud. Being truthful to our country should be the pillar of our behaviour.

In the library at my university, there probably be only 5% books on Pakistan or by Pakistani's. And in Urdu, probably there would be 2-3 books. I have not studied any course in Urdu yet and it is my 5th semester. Presentation has to be in English, paper in English, books in English; every thing from writing to speaking, from listening to reading is in English. What our next generation would do? Students will then have a communication gap from their own people. People of whom students meant to work and solve issues. It will be and is exactly like foreigners running developmental programs for our people.

This year I had an opportunity to listen to the seminar in which Turkish scholar came. One of them studied in Pakistan. Only he was the one who could speak English, rest were speaking Turkish (and we definitely had translators for them). He said one thing, if he would have been studied in Turkey he could not speak English then. But who? We, we taught him English. He said, if you people have taught me Urdu, I would have be speaking Urdu now.

Who's fault is this? It's not Pakistan's fault, it's the fault of we people. We are to make a respectable image of Pakistan. The source are we. No matter our history was good or bad, we have to carry forward both the faces.

Thank You!

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