The lure of the inane

What has this society come to?
We have a seriously sly lot parked comfortable within the cosy confines of a house supposedly erected to do the bidding of the citizenry. Apparently, they exist as fact sheet statistics on pieces of legislative paper printed by our taxes and paid for by the national exchequer because we, the people, require individuals of exemplary leadership endowments to prevent the gutting of the masses by forces bent upon looting and corrupting.
Parliament exists to debate, deliberate, and deliver on ideas that benefit progressive manoeuvres and combat symbols of social suppression. However, in Pakistan, so far, the national and provincial assemblies have done little else but profiteering. From the highest echelons of power, the trickle down effect this attitude has had on the masses is that the entire country is now spinning in a vortex of its own putrid immorality. And they’ve been very smart about it.
That Pakistan is seeing the most exacting time in its short and stupendous history is an understatement. State institutions recently braced themselves for a near pile-up, one that is still rampaging through the headlines of this nation’s dailies. We have an army watching from the dark corners of the GHQ – the very sidelines of this country’s political structure – and we have an executive and PM ready to do the bidding of whichever player is willing to extend their term, one where corruption has riddled the crescent on the green as oft as our feared security agencies are suspected of ploughing the bodies of those who oppose and expose their policies with bullets.
We have a land where natural resources and basic amenities are now few and far between, where water, gas, electricity and fuel are items of immoderation. Where religion has become dogma, spirituality is found numb and void behind a smokescreen of sullied sermons and where hate and fury disguise themselves as scapegoats for sanctimony. Journalists are made to swallow the disgrace of self-censorship because Pakistan is now ‘the most dangerous place in the world’ for the watchdogs of accountability. Pakistan is also now debasing its Sufi core to become a Wahabi revival ground for those who have found so little honour in themselves they must enforce it upon others. Anti-Ahmadi rallies and sloganeering for the marauding of all other faiths except that of which only a minority of hardliners believe in has become a mantra by which to make even the air in Pakistan colourless, the beings within lifeless and the sanity that may have prevailed irrelevant.
In the midst of all this, you’d think our assemblies would be working round the clock like the harried courts of London during last year’s riots to tackle the mauling of the nation’s heartlands. An active establishment of aware and ready civilians would be frothing at the mouth to see what our parliamentarians have delivered and, if exactitudes were anything less than crystal, there’d be all hell to pay. So, then, why did the Punjab Assembly recently decide, of all things, to declare a resolution seeking to ban concerts in educational institutions? Could it be the same mindset that leads our parliamentarians to call for banning late night phone packages, dithering on Facebook pages, encouraging bodies like the PTA to remove ‘inappropriate’ words and bumbling around looking for excuses to address all other issues but the real ones?
Pray, what might this mindset be? It is one that slowly yet surely conditions the masses to huff and puff over the most inane drivel one could ever forgive a nation for debating. It is the kind of mindset that is cunning enough to know that if you engross the people in the most vacant of frivolities, the real issues will become irrelevant. It is this mindset that is being represented by the media-men who deliver the punch-line amidst the white noise of screaming politicos and the Maya Khans who patrol our parks looking for ‘less than honourable’ behaviour. It is this mindset that has trickled down into the homes, mosques, belief of every single individual with an impressionable heart and idle mind. It is this mindset that has made every sitting Pakistani provincial, so incensed by the irrelevant that issues of negligence and neglect by the powerful are smugly grinned over and forgotten. We have become little in our actions, conversations, entertainment and even our beliefs.
Our parliamentarians and our representatives will never relinquish their power. They have us wrapped around their sweaty fingers and we’re the only ones to blame. It is time we gave our own lives the direction needed to wrench our minds out of this state-sanctioned ignorance. Revolutionary fists have been bound in struggles of blood and intellect throughout history by the minds of rabid dictators. In Pakistan, revolution, whether intelligent or impulsive, has been repressed by the inane, the senseless and by duping the easily primed public. Next time you hear a nonsensical bidding for primetime space by our parliamentarians, don’t act so surprised, you made it easy for them.

The writer is an editor and participant of the Salzburg Trilogue. She can be reached at [email protected]