It struck me as I was reading this book the other day, that we Pakistanis have not gone beyond barbarism if we take the road to civilization as a straight path. We are somehow fossilized and frozen in this barbaric state of thinking, behaving and reacting. We are oblivious to the advancement made by other nations, we may try and emulate the 'progress' we see in other societies, but, we fail to comprehend that mere copying isn't going to make us evolved human beings. We need to naturally move from one stage to another by finding for ourselves how to do things in a better and a more civilized manner.
Barbarism is crude natural reactions, instinct, fight or flight. It is animal like response to the environment and its challenges. As a species we need not look out for threats from other larger predators as our ancient ancestors did, rather we have to try and find our way through the traps built by our own belief systems. We in Pakistan are animals, we cannot define ourselves completely as a member of the human sapiens as yet, or so I believe, we are still barbaric in our actions, our approach to gender relations, our convictions in miracles of the occult kind, our insidious ways of dealing with opponents, our ready to attack mode found especially in the female speaks volumes of our affinity to the animal in our nature than to cultivated.
Culture can be defined as ways of doing things collectively, common beliefs inclusive of religion, it means customs and traditions of doing things developed over time. A society is known by its culture, which includes food, clothing, ways of raising a family so on and so forth. My question is, and that with due respect to that obscure sounding Government dept of Sakawat (culture in Urdu) that does nothing per say except don Ajrak on some obscure sindh day, do we actually have a culture? and if yes, what is that culture? what are its defining parameters, its face, its identity??? I really want to know whether Pakistanis and here I'm not talking sindhis, mohajirs, punjabis and pathans, I am distinctly asking if as citizens of a country living in proximity with each other, and of course sharing the 'great ideology' that is Pakistan, what is our culture? Is there anything we do collectively?
Lets take festivals, do we have any national festival that we celebrate? not religious, not ethnic, not sectarian, not local, not tribal. Errrr.. yes, there isn't any. I will not count Pakistan day as a cultural festival because it isn't that, it is historical and ideological more so an imposed day of celebration nothing more than a public holiday. We do not have shared stories, shared histories that weave a people together in seamless bonds, that hold a nation in one space. We may have thousands of cellular phone connections in 2011, but sadly we lack connections between souls in this country. I share nothing with other women of my country on the whole except for language and gender, I may share something with women from my social makeup but that is mere superficial likeness to each other. My problems are not the problems of a large section of the people or women of this country, and their issues have no relevance to mine. I exist like the rest of us in small bubbles, we each identifying with the small group that we form a part of, and anybody beyond that is as different as an alien from another planet might be.
We as a nation are barbaric almost nomadic in our culture as we only identify with a very small immediate group and nothing beyond that. Mostly, nations become civilized and then deteriorate, we have jumped the middle part of civilization all together and have landed into decadence. We have no value system, that is a home-grown, time tested ways of doing things our way. we do not have a "Pakistani way" if you will. We are only good at ridiculing at whatever ways we may have had so we haven't been able to develop and strengthen them over time, we have only tried to be copy-cats, wanting to do things the way others do, we always value the outsider, the foreign, the exotic to our own. That may be good in a way to be open and receptive to new ideas, but to be porous, to be like a sieve, to be absolutely empty from inside is another matter and veers on being dangerous. We have no identity today as Pakistanis, because we have no concept of what it is to be one? what defines a Pakistani? lets say like the quintessential Englishman or the Japanese or Chinese? We apart from a few typical derisive stereotypes have nothing to fall back on, how do I explain my own country and culture to others? what is it to be a Pakistani is the question of the hour and the sooner we answer it the better for us!
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