Possessed by Possessions
By Mowahid Hussain Shah

The West is associated and equated with crass materialism. A new documentary, “Generation Wealth,” investigates this. But is the East less infected by this virus?
Excessive material acquisitiveness has been an enduring Subcontinental malady. Whether at home or abroad, the mindset has remained unchanged. Drive through an American neighborhood and one sometimes runs across opulent homes. But not too infrequently, the gaudiest house on display would be that of an expatriate. Parked outside would be the flaunting of familiar material trappings. It is indicative of visible, over-compensatory steps to fill in the blanks inside.
To say this is an elite problem would be misleading and would be missing the point. It cuts across all classes. At the lower rung, the pressures are no less brutal. How many poor women have been tormented against the measuring yardstick of insufficient dowry? And how many already impoverished families have been driven to the brink of ruinous debt to keep up with social appearances? Marriages then can become transactional, with solid character attributes subordinated to wealth considerations.
Even seemingly pious people get lured and entrapped in the spider’s web of avarice. This mindset has never been sincerely discussed and seriously attacked.
There are two cultural dimensions to material fixations. One is the awe, which morphs into groveling and prostration before the moneyed and the powerful. Look at the self-inflicted wounds that can be caused by saddling one with leadership authority without having being put through the furnace of an Abraham Lincoln-like struggle or an Obama-like upbringing, with fusion of Africa, Indonesia, and Pakistan.
The other dimension is cruelty to those bereft of pecuniary crutches.
In the States, the work-life imbalance and the over-engagement of monetary pursuits have come at a steep price to community-building.
For many, a sturdy platform beyond the fragile survival mode has yet to be obtained. Predictably, it is why the sizeable US Muslim community remains disempowered and frequently a punching bag.
Energies, which could be better-allocated and harnessed for community and media uplift, have instead been squandered in pursuit of ephemeral gains. Lonely is the plight of those in the community who strive onwards to break the shackles of a colonized mindset, miserly toward one’s own.
Then, there is this illusion that one’s time on earth is limitless. It is a social irony that rampant materialism persists despite the moral appeal of the Qalandar ethos.
In the immediate aftermath of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan’s yet-to-be-satisfactorily-explained assassination, it was found that the socks he had worn had holes in them. Those were the men who had fought and sacrificed for a Muslim homeland.
During election year, I was privy to a discussion on disbursement of tickets. Invariably, the deal breaker and the conversation changer was insufficient paisa.
The 24/7 all-consuming obsession with politics perhaps overlooks that the problem of Pakistan is more cultural and less political. That moment of epiphany may require a cultural convulsion.
A recent conversation with Syed Yawar Ali, the refined Executive Chairman of Nestle, Pakistan, centered on the perils of being “possessed by possessions.” It is a simple emancipating message that bears reaffirming.