Daily Times

The first time I travelled out of Pakistan was at the age of 18, when I had not only ‘earned’ a scholarship for my undergraduate degree in the US, but also earned, so to say, my fare to travel overseas! Prior to that, life had revolved between Lahore and Karachi and the odd trip up north to Swat. Pakistan was all that there was, both literally and metaphorically, and, at that time, my young mind would never have fathomed that anything Pakistani could be ‘un-’, or worst still, ‘anti’-Pakistan. Similar was the case with many, if not most, of the boys and girls of my generation. Our parents, the first generation that had reached adulthood in the cosy, independent boundaries of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, may not have been vocal, but were indeed practitioners of a secure, unfailing patriotism. Little were we ever told of political cop-outs such as Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s decision to nationalise private industry in order to accommodate undeserving party workers and attempt to make forever the average Pakistani a work-shirker who would be happy to be on the dole. Many from our parents’ generation would play ‘hush-up’ to historical atrocities like the Fall of Dhaka. Instead, our parents went to great lengths to ensure we respected our leaders as much as we did our motherland by trying to focus upon comparatively puny victories like the Islamic Summit Conference in Lahore in 1974. While I had a semblance of slight political awareness during General Zia’s era, it was minuscule compared to the insight that the average teenager may have today. While militancy, human rights violations and narrow, opportunistic and radical interpretations of our religion were rampant in our country, somehow Pakistan spelt ‘holy’ and our eager little minds had been coached that ‘it will all work out’. Year after year on August 14, Sohail Rana’s choir comprising young children singing the national anthem at the stroke of 9 am from the Presidency in Islamabad not only brought tears to millions but also brought hundreds of millions together, if only for those few minutes. There was hope that ‘it would all work out’.

And there were reasons galore for this hope, some practical and others merely symbolic. For one, our unsung war heroes were not unsung back then. Each child in Pakistan could recite by rote the names of our soldiers decorated with the Nishan-e-Haider at martyrdom. Some children went further and knew of M M Alam, one of the most significant figures in the history — worldwide — of airborne combat. While few followed global sports, names like Kaleemullah, Samiullah, Shahnaz Sheikh, Hanif Khan, Akhtar Rasool and Islahuddin ran within each and every sensitive nerve within each and every Pakistani. School-going children were successful at quizzes by elders to name the numero uno hockey player in the world: “Hassan Sardar!” The list of Olympic golds, not to mention world championships, won by the hockey team was too extensive, thereby beyond rote! Not to mention the likes of Jahangir Khan and, then, Jansher Khan to follow. Whilst purely symbolic, such achievements, unparalleled by any athlete across the world, both lifted the national spirit as well as symbolised a deep, latent, strength that was truly ‘Pakistani’.

And Pakistani it was that latent strength. It encompassed arenas as widespread and as divergent as industry, manpower, infrastructure and scientific breakthrough, to name only a few.

Whenever a FIFA World Cup was held, the ‘white’ organisers insisted by name on a Pakistani ‘Tango’ football, hand-made by Pakistani labour in the cottage industry of the industrial city that was Sialkot. “Tango or nothing,” they echoed every few years. In those days, the national flag carrier, PIA, a global role model, was fresh from setting up systems and procedures, training pilots and coaching cabin crew for scores of airlines around the world; indeed ‘great people to fly with’, PIA was among the handful of airlines the world over that served patrons with silver cutlery! Similarly, in 1954, when the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the US decided to set up the very first business school outside of North America, they selected Pakistan over all the competitor nations present, thus laying the roots for what is today called the IBA, Karachi. Our motherland was truly an Asian Tiger not only in the economic sense, but also in the sciences. Can any Pakistani of any generation forget the sight of the mystic and physicist Dr Abdus Salaam receiving his Nobel Prize for singular-status research in Physics in Oslo, and adorning his native shalwar kameez with turban at the ceremony? To top it all, Pakistan boasted a crème-de-la-crème list of top notch civil servants, be it in the foreign service, the police service, the district management service or any other suite.

Those were some of the moments of national pride I grew up with. To this day, I know — in fact I am confident and convinced — that either despite or because of, the stiff odds and the general sense of dismay, the average Pakistani remains industrious, smart, enterprising and hardworking, as proven by each one of us when provided a fair structure and system and a level playing field. Wherever in the world, the expatriate Pakistani is a sterling example.

With the world crumbling around me and offering little solace, what with the US’s recession and repetitive failure in foreign policy, the UK’s societal quagmire, the Middle East’s political upheaval and the Greek and Spanish debt crises to name a few, I have resorted to introspection and inner soul searching for strength. After all, we as humans feel more at home and relate better to our heroes from childhood, to the notion of our country neither crumbling nor having too many focusing towards that. Today, I have assumed the role of ‘sheet anchor’ that my parents played a quarter of a century ago. I tell my children not what the popular opinion is, wrong that it is, but, partially in deference to my parents, something that I can think independently. I generally say, “Pakistan has a large population, so large that even with our low literacy percentage we have more educated persons than all of Europe, headcount to headcount. We are the cradle and seat of the world’s present day populations and only two of our neighbours, India and China, alone account for 2.5 billion of the world’s population. We have access to Central Asia. We happen to have a large army. We are nuclear. These may be some of the reasons we will Insha’Allah bounce back.”

A twinkle in their eyes betrays the questioning words, “Dreamy. Quixotic.” But if I am not optimistic about Pakistan today, my children may have no one to tell them that “it will all work out”.

The writer is a financial consultant and a teacher, and still pursues the Pakistani dream. He can be reached at taimurtsh@gmail.com