- And how one may lead to another in our beloved fatherland
Let’s start with a quick roundup, dearest sirs and ma’ams. Our Lordships are on a crusade to end all corruption, our executive is on defensive while the sword of Damocles hangs above many of its members, our legislators have reached the fag end of their tenures and have to make tough choices in the future, our khaki warriors have a new B-Doctrine to put their trust, lives and faith in. While the institutions are doing whatever can be done to keep themselves afloat, for the good many people in Pakistan the endless struggle to make ends meet continues.
For many, like you, me, and majority of Toms, Dicks and Harrys the best, or rather the only way, to make sense of volatile things and nebulous happenings is to be totally, utterly and completely indifferent. Then, the mantra is to stay aloof, don’t give a damn to anything or anyone no matter how provocative it gets, maintain a safe distance from all that makes one uncomfortable and live life like a stoic-accepting the highs and the lows with sheer equanimity. Or, and it’s a very dangerous ‘or’, you become a blind follower of one of the either men fighting in the arena. You bark your man’s opponents down, you bite once they are down.
We, the good people of Pakistan, love dramatising our deeds and utterances, we treasure our devil-may-care attitude towards life and its dilemmas, we think it our foremost responsibility to interfere, supervise, and criticise everything that we neither have the knowledge nor the ability to even comprehend. Those who can bark the loudest mesmerise us since they show that life, with a bombastic sound and with all its bells and jingles, is still around. Barks entertain us, push us ahead, make us weary, inject small doses of hope in our despairing veins, leave us terrified at times, at others turn us into ascetic fools or epicurean morons.
Why this bark and bite bent of mind? Well, I’ve an insight to offer. Since day first, we’ve convinced ourselves that our salvation lies in surrendering ourselves to a Leviathan-like ideology
Nature has its own way of taming man, dearest sirs and ma’ams. Nature warns through a bark, it ensures compliance through a bite. If one gets bitten immediately after being barked at, he be rest assured that the gods have turned against him with extreme vengeance. Now it’s up to you, dear reader to fit whomsoever you want to in the above description. Former PM’s, former army chiefs, former CJ, or many other has-beens. .
An old English idiom divides the kingdom of canine between those who bark the most, bite the least and those who bite without barking. The humorists, courtesy their sheer ingenuity, warn us of uncertainty inherent in this misleading division; one can’t be certain when dogs stop their barking and start shredding flesh apart.
Why this bark and bite bent of mind? Well, I’ve an insight to offer. Since day first, we’ve convinced ourselves that our salvation lies in surrendering ourselves to a Leviathan-like ideology. It’ll answer all the grand questions pertaining to ‘why’ of our individual and collective identities and entities, be them big, small, of here or of beyond. And that’s so because of our innate urge to worship simplicity when answers are either unpalatable or unacceptable. Since time immemorial, we humans have settled for explanations that soothe us, their veracity matters little. We humans are hard-wired to believe; everything makes picture-perfect sense when the inquisitive, curious voices inside our brains are rendered aphonic.
It is about time to wrap up this piece and I find nothing more relevant, more apt, more thought provoking and more piercing than the excerpt below from the book ‘The Murder of History’ by the inimitable and erudite KK Aziz.
‘An uncultured nation whose students are terrorists; whose teachers are pillars of ignorance; whose colleges and universities are moral wildernesses; whose educated classes prefer television to poetry, cricket to prose, and fireworks to theatre, and whose ignorance is therefore like the twilight that neither rises nor sets, neither fades nor disappears, but sticks to them like rarely of infamy; whose elite wears a coat of many colors and has an athletic ability to leap aboard any passing bandwagon; whose men of letters are not too proud to mouth base panegyrics to every tyrant who wears the raiment of authority, and whose highest ambitions are to become members of the official academy of letters or edit official journals or head official institutions of research and culture; whose intellectuals are bribed according to their measure of eminence and degree of greed, because they believe with Mephistopheles that “Dear friend, all theory is grey/And green the golden tree of life” (Goethe); whose doctors of religion subscribe to the the dictum cuius regio eins religio (whoever runs the country decides which church you go to); whose thinkers are so intolerant that they look at every difference of opinion as a barricade which had to be pulled down, and for whom consequences are more important that the truth, and whose rich classes have not acquired a fortune, the fortune has acquired them.’
Welcome to the dog-eat-dog world full of barks and bites, mates and ladies.
