Living in this country require that we take what destiny, fate and our combined stupidity and greed throw our way, in our stride and move on.
I have now been a thinking state resident of Pakistan for about 20 years. My earliest recoverable memories are from school days; getting on G-3 at Regal Chowk to get back home. An open, clean city without complications for a class 9th student.
From that the next core dump that I have is the burning Karachi of 87-98 with the rangers, the corpses in bories (bags), the ethnic killing, the extra-judicial encounters, the check posts, the random security stops, murders, the daily rising body count, and the strikes that brought this city to standstill. I remember being stopped at every occasion, I remember questioning, is this really home?
We survived that. We lived and worked and delivered with no electricity, no transport and close to zero resources. We beat companies in and outside the region that had all of the above. And we still did it cheaper, better, faster.
I don’t remember the war of 1971 or fall of Dhaka or the misery that preceded 12 December 1971. I was just a few months old. My father and his generation does! I can still see the pain, the shame and the anguish in their eyes.
So if we survived partition, survived 71, survive the 80’s and 90’s and the sanctions in 1998 and are around as a nation with a credible presence, there must be something here, in our water, in our genes, in our people that allows us to keep our chin up when lesser nations would have give up long ago. (Hey we worked out Ayub, Yahya, Bhutto, Zia, Bhutto, Nawaz, Bhutto and Nawaz again, all in one generation)
You have put it right. What happened last night felt like a betrayal and a violation! We
were all hacked. But we have been hacked before and lived to tell the tale. It is part of our destiny, strength and weakness…
This is my home, no one should be able to run me out of it on account of their short sightedness and arrogance. And if they do, how will I ensure that I do whatever little I can to write a better future for my children here (not outside).
Chin up and as you said, let’s move on. We have work to do.