Yesterday, my husband and I got into an argument with an anthropologist, who explained to us that the discipline and civility we see in the West is the result of centuries of evolution, development and modernism, a process that Pakistanis never went through. The argument was that our attempt to bring such civility to this [...]
Yesterday, my husband and I got into an argument with an anthropologist, who explained to us that the discipline and civility we see in the West is the result of centuries of evolution, development and modernism, a process that Pakistanis never went through. The argument was that our attempt to bring such civility to this society was doomed from the start. We had just told him about the Take Back Pakistan site.
He wasn’t the first, and I am sure he won’t be the last to tell us that both public and personal reformation is beyond the people of Pakistan. Too many people have shrugged away the problems of our country onto someone else’s (e.g. the ‘government’) shoulders, and with a laconic “yeh hai Pakistan” (This is Pakistan), have calmly joined the greek chorus in lamenting their woes without ever doing anything to change it themselves. For many people, especially expatriates, the effort to change society is too much; my parent’s generation, at least, is weary of trying and failing to bring change.
Take Back Pakistan is not a political movement, nor a social one. We don’t want meetings, or protests, or public speeches; we don’t want discipline enforced on us, or on anyone else. We believe that ONE individual can make a difference in the world. Among the 160 million Pakistanis out there, we want you to know that even if ONE person decides to change his ways, it can impact more people than you realize. And until we change the mindset that insists that as one person we can do nothing, we really will do nothing.
This is what we want. YOU, the individual need to remember that YOU the individual are master of your own destiny. Go to the site, read the manifesto. Start there, as an individual. Don’t preach to anyone else, don’t impose your beliefs on anyone else. Just let them know that you have made a decision to stand as a civilized human being, rather fall as a nation of barbarians. Let the rest of the country find its own way. We know where we’re going.