Skip to main content

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!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Environmental Campaign in Pakistan

World has been industrializing rapidly as it did in the past as well. We humans realized its consequences pretty late. Environmental change is the biggest threat to the world collectively because of the excessive exploitation. Careless usage of natural resources now took us to the brink of destruction. In the past few decades, we have lost nearly a million species. This for me is the biggest ever loss we have had because we cannot reverse it ever. Along with specie lost, the overall average temperatures have already risen by more than 1.5 degree centigrade. Now we face frequent droughts and the soil fertility has been lost in many parts of the world. Deforestation led to soil erosion and caused threat to poor regions of the world as majority of the population lives near water sources. Due to global warming and greenhouse effects, our cities face frequent attacks of heat island effect and hundreds of lives are lost yearly in most of the poor countries. Concrete structures standing ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Book Review: Kicking Away the Ladder

As the topic suggests, this book holds pretty interesting combination of history, economy and politics. Providing a gist of the entire book in a summarized way is difficult but appealing to do. This book is written by Ha-Joon Chang; he is a South Korean Institutional Economist. Other than that he has a multi-disciplinary background in academia (Economics, politics and development) for writing such a book comprehensively. The main objective of this book is to present the real face of Now Developed Countries (NDCs) and their historical experience about development. The author historically explains how developed countries hide the way they themselves developed, their motives in hiding and what they dictate to developing countries. The author uses secondary sources of data to explain historical perspective. Author defines how industrialization occurred in Britain first and then it was done in other countries afterwards and how different factors helped them in doing so. A detailed histo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pakistan; Its your turn now

You can find good and bad in every nation. It depends on which side you portray the most. Pakistan is a country went through so much of the socio-political instability over the years. But still it fought back really well and stool tall even in the harshest times. Most of the time we put our energy into talking about its failures and issues only. Ignoring the fact that the resilience of this nation is worth appreciating as well. The critiques do not understand the real need of the hour; which is positive criticism. Even though the people of Pakistan have gone through some of the hardest times, still they are one of the hospitable people. They only need a healthy environment to progress. Take an example of people migrated abroad earlier; they have become one of the leading businessmen or women of their fields. Medical doctors, engineers, social scientists, artists and sports persons; in every field the people of Pakistan have become global stars. Talking about the history, this cou...
Post a Comment
Read more