CNN
Pakistan's Indomitable Spirit
By Irum Sarfaraz
Fremont, CA
The wise have said that it is in the face of the worst adversities that our greatest strengths break through the surface. We as a collective Pakistani nation witnessed this as we persevered in the latest Pakistan-India altercation. Despite the potentially dire situation, if there was one thing our opponent was not able to dampen was our national spirit. Indeed, there wasn’t such a mad scramble of jets and drones in the air as there was on social media of memes, reels, clips, and videos that strove to take the edge off the bleak situation. If analyzed closely, all of these helped to send two different messages.
The first message was to those beyond our borders—'It’s not easy to deflate the Pakistani spirit, so don’t try’, and the second, the more important of the two, was to those within—'Life happens! So, move on!’.
Bravo! Pakistan, hail to your resilience and camaraderie when it is most needed. An impending war, which is realistically supposed to be a cause for great apprehension, unease, and dread, was nothing more than ‘just another normal day’ in Pakistan. Our nerves are steely and the whole world saw that. An enemy wins a war by initially breaking the nerves and spirits of the opponent—and it failed. The army took care of the rest.
Watching this drama unfold and the country clap the backs of national heroes, the image of the mother came into mind who beats up, yells, and slaps around her own kids whenever she feels like it but can never tolerate anyone else laying a finger on them. That’s what we are. A fiercely possessive bunch of 250 million kids who bicker, squabble, fight, wrangle, and quibble over electricity bills, water shortages, missing manhole covers, potholes, and disastrous traffic but when our borders are threatened, the same 250 kids coalesce like an iron band.
In the opinion of academia, this burst of ‘non-serious, uneducated, and ridiculous national response’ of our citizens to an extremely tense face-off between two nuclear nations reflected a very frivolous, uninformed, and simplistic national attitude. But in reality it was far from that. By refusing to cave in under the escalating pressure, we as a nation watched very objectively in real time, had complete confidence that our borders and skies were adeptly guarded, and understood full well that things were likely to go south very quickly. However, we refused to let that lurking reality overshadow our national pride and spirit, instantly opting to keep spirits up by unleashing our mental and emotional strain by waging a massive memes and reels war on social media. It can easily be proven in any court of law that the mud, slurs, jokes, ridicules, taunts, and jabs hurled through these to the ‘Dark Side’ poked more holes in the Indian national pride than the actual missiles!
However, one thing must be kept in mind and avoided in the mudslinging that inevitably happens in this war of words and jokes. The mud has to be aimed and slung at the opponent and must not tarnish our own, and especially not the forces that are putting their lives on the line for the nation. We may disagree with national policies and may not side with certain parties or have a bone of contention with the army, but when it comes to presenting ourselves on the global stage, then all bones of contention must be buried for the time being. As a nation, we must be united and must present ourselves as such. Doing anything to the contrary is nothing short of lowly. Just like the mom who turns into a fierce bear when her kids are targeted by the neighborhood bully. The bully has hell to pay then, as we also witnessed.
So, Pakistan, hail to your spirits and keep up the indomitable joviality that defies dampening in the face of extreme odds.
Pakistan Zindabad!
