February 06, 2015
Journey of Recovery
Education is supposed to be the be-all answer to everything. But that isn’t always necessarily so. If education doesn’t instill confidence, defiance, and grit, it doesn’t make much of a difference. Sometimes, the educated elite in Pakistan appears the least sanguine about the nation’s prospects.
Scanning the media gives a quick idea of how steeped in despair, despondency, and defeatism are many educated elites and their even more educated progeny. Taunts and epithets are hurled at their own countrymen, the founding of the nation is questioned, and sweeping generalizations are made about conditions becoming incorrigible. There is too much venting about victimhood and too little introspection. Admittedly, the recurrence of potential inciting events cements despair.
Top university education is not enough. It is about exposing more people to a wider world. Ironically, today, more people are more insular, more isolated, and more excluded from the wider world because they are more exposed to more of the same. Attacking the symptoms while ignoring the core cause lets loose the underlying ailment free to metastasize.
50 years ago, Pakistan stood as one during the September ‘65 War. I was in Dacca then, about to fly to Lahore to rejoin classes in FC College, when war erupted, severing inter-wing flights over Indian airspace. Stranded in Dacca, I had considerable interaction with Bengali people and saw firsthand their spirit. Lest it be forgotten, the foundations of the Muslim League were laid in Dacca in 1906.
The Bengalis took pride that Pakistan had fought its much bigger neighbor to a standstill. This was attested to by no less a person than the now-90-plus Arnaud de Borchgrave – founding editor of The Washington Times whose mother, he told me, was Rawalpindi-born -- through his Newsweek dispatches.
Because the lessons of 1971 have not been comprehensively registered, many of the fault-lines riven apart by factionalism, provincialism, and sectarianism remain a festering divide.
But the journey of recovery is never too late, as long as the human spirit is unbroken. Cuba demonstrated that. After 55 years of steadfast leadership, it eventually compelled America to reach out and implicitly acknowledge the folly of its policy of exclusion and isolation right in its own backyard.
25 years ago, Nelson Mandela was released from jail. The uncomfortable truth is that Mandela’s African National Congress was dubbed as a terrorist organization in mainstream Western circles. Mandela’s determination to resist, against all odds, led to the tumbling of the walls of apartheid. Today, in South Africa’s 15-man World Cup Cricket squad, more than 25 percent are Muslims.
It is grit that sustains the journey through a long dark tunnel and shows the pathway to light.
The US is still to recover from 9/11. NBC-TV anchor Chuck Todd, in a January 25 “Meet the Press” conversation with basketball legend, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, stated that “Islamophobia is on the rise in America.”
A few super-wealthy lobbyists -- who control the agenda both at home and abroad – have put America on a downward spiral. They have successfully elevated their narrow interests over public interest.
Small men can make a big nation small.
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