Ever since human drew his first breath in this world, he has set up certain rules and regulations to limit his potential. Each time a child is born, an unsolicited, already-defined trajectory of life welcomes him. Confining the most magnificent creation of God within four walls of a system and perplexing one between the list of do’s and don’ts is like an infinite loop in which all of us are trapped. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, “The world constitutes of reasonable people who adapt to the world and unreasonable people who persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable people.” In the 75 years of independence, we continue to struggle with enormous debt. Words and ideas, if executed properly, can change the world. We reside in an ever-evolving world. In the last 75 years, we can observe a significant increase in the world population. From 2.5 billion to 7.9 billion, we have witnessed the People’s Republic of China making its way back from The Great Chinese Famine with a death toll ranging from 15 to 55 million; the emergence of Japan as an East-Asia model, also referred to as the third-largest in the world by nominal GDP despite the Hiroshima Nagasaki catastrophe and the inception of a constitutional monarchy ruled by a representative democracy in Denmark after WW2. I look around and ask myself where did we, as a nation, go wrong? In the 75 years of independence, we continue to struggle with enormous debt. Is it because of incompetent leaders? Or the system they have made is impertinent? The first rule of problem-solving strategy states; you cannot move past the problem you’re facing unless and until you deduce the root cause. According to the finance division budget speech by Miftah Ismail, the defence expenditure for this year is Rs 1523 billion while only Rs 90.5 billion have been allocated to the education sector. As per reports, the highest brain drain in the history of Pakistan was recorded in 2022 with over 765,000 educated youth leaving Pakistan for seeking employment overseas. We, as a nation, have failed to provide a secure future to 765,000 students who could’ve potentially changed the course of Pakistan’s history. Since its creation, Pakistan has spent several decades under martial law. Those several decades of dictatorship affected the progress of almost every sector and overturned the efforts of our ancestors who spent years fighting and sacrificing for freedom. B-class and incompetent people became the top-tier leadership, and the ones whose ideology was based on the principles of Tauheed (monotheism), Ihsan (righteousness), Adl (justice), Qisas (retribution), and Aman (peace) had become the lost chronicles. The education system has always been neglected. Our youth adheres to the education system that was established at the time of partition, implemented in 1955, and later revised under the FBISE Act of 1975. Still, we find ourselves asking why have we not been able to keep up with the rest of the world. When our justice system is questionable in all its adjudications, when the people who are responsible for the country’s downfall are still looking after 22 crore individuals, when every sector in Pakistan is subjected to establishment rather than the people they are supposed to serve, we all must think where did we go wrong? The writer can be reached at m.haaniahh@gmail.com.