- Forward thinking required. Immediately!
By: Amna Khan
What do you want to be when you grow up? ‘An astronaut’ a naive child in every American movie would say. That’s the power of films, they can help you dream. They make you reimagine possibilities. Of course, India’s economy had always performed well enough for them to participate in the space race but they needed dreamers too, dreamers willing to take risks.
Probability seems to favour the country with a population to spare and amongst so many; the options for employability have to be equally as many too. So their institutional set up became diversified to accommodate people in a plethora of professions. Our world has roughly over 12,000 careers and counting and surprising as it may seem, not everyone wants to be a doctor, engineer or lawyer. Also as hard as it is to believe, in today’s world some Instagram influencers make twice as much as all three professions combined. The doctor, engineer and lawyer’s obsession doesn’t seem to subside though, despite cinema’s best attempts (3 Idiots). Of course there’s also the inherited belief passed down from our forefathers, that a country only needs these three skills to survive and the furthest that you’re allowed to stray is in the fields of business, finance and for those blessed enough to be born power hungry – politics.
Lucky for us; we don’t have any artists, film editors, theatre actors, classical dancers, violinists or any other creatively inclined professionals born in this great country of ours. Such purposeless citizens would’ve just been a burden on our inflating economy. How do people even grapple with pursuing meaningless work with no monetarily solvent future – I mean is it even ‘work’ if you’re not getting paid to do it? We don’t allow thinking let alone progressive thinking here, what worked for our ancestors seems to be working just fine for us.
Of course there’s also the inherited belief passed down from our forefathers, that a country only needs these three skills to survive and the furthest that you’re allowed to stray is in the fields of business, finance and for those blessed enough to be born power hungry – politics
I see no reason to update in a world where the top 1% is mainly investing in building spaceships & colonizing mars. Besides being a patriotic Pakistani actually means relocating to another country when you become corrupted with innovative, progressive and inclusive thoughts. That’s the nature of sacrifice Saim Sadiq, the director of the Pakistani short film ‘Darling’, had to make. When he won at the Venice Film Festival for Best Short Film he knew he couldn’t deliver something as gut wrenchingly vomit inducing as ‘Baaji’ so he settled for a lesser honor. That’s the kind of sacrifice all foreign Pakistani’s make when they choose to innovate abroad, what ideas go unrewarded in their homeland.
An assault of start-ups has been a significant side effect of this vacuum in a market suffering from growing pains. Conventional professions just don’t seem lucrative enough anymore, the years of work isn’t complemented by a large enough pay off. These start-ups however greatly lack infrastructure & engagement as well, because consumers are given better choices internationally. As the world goes global, competition does too. Neither educational nor institutional make-up seems to be catching up to the program that millennials are going to choose GOT over Geo every single time!
The world is pivoting towards inclusion and progress while Pakistan continues to pander to predated colonialist norms. In short, the British came, made everything about money and told us our art and history is excrement equivalent. Cut to the present day with our parents telling us our O & A level scores should qualify for scholarships abroad. Millennials are looking for something else and demand seems to be outstripping what no one in the country knows how to supply. Perhaps because we still seem to be hung up on saas bahu melodrama and just as films shape dreams and frame our reality – the air time Pakistani television provides seem to be disconnecting ours from the world.
The new iPhone has three cameras for picture precision but I’m sure we can function in today’s world with an education system that dates back to 1986. It not like anything has changed since then anyway & it’s obviously easier to implement IMF austerity than achieving media and tech literacy. How beneficial has our neighbour’s policy of investing in software engineers and Silicon Valley style corporations been anyway? It’s not like India is home to some of the biggest tech giants in the world listed on the NASDAQ (digital stock market) that relatively relieves them from depending solely on IMF bailouts.
According to the Los Angeles Times 16% of Indian immigrants are the co-founders at Silicon Valley start-ups and those who don’t immigrate attracted the valley to their neighbourhoods back home. Understanding that the God of today’s world is tech giants and his choice of fuel is big data capacity puts a lot of things into perspective. Media entities such as Netflix and Amazon Prime saw an untapped market and respectively set up gargantuan offices in India. Amazon has reportedly set up one of its biggest offices in Hyderabad.
It is an enviable work environment, with enough jobs to cater to the flood of IT specialists and software engineers hungry for jobs. The Indians unable to immigrate to the Valley were so crucial for these companies that they brought the valley to them! Given the abundance of population and holistic re-education, the incentive for growth was simply too good to pass up.
Job outlook and work environment matter more to us than money- when will employers understand that? A large and attentive part of our day is spent at work and we need it to be good, even meaningful. Pakistan’s demographic is young enough that a media/tech switchover is inevitable. You can join us or own our success when it’s validated by our colonizer.
The market needs to diversify to accommodate a multitude of professions. Monotony more than anything else has crippled our economy. An extreme keenness for palatable tastes needs to be built for our population craving to be endorsed by its own media. Pakistan’s digital future is a mass of niches and everyone has their own echo chamber of truths reinforcing a set of outdated beliefs. We need to embrace our authentic Pakistani distinctiveness to attract an individualistic audience who are far more exposed than ever before. We have some of the lowest literacy rates in South Asia and one of the highest consumption of smartphones, let’s use this information to our advantage and adapt to the future.
