"Our Mindset Reviewed"

We are a nation of zealous, highly emotional and spirited people. A lot has been written about our characteristics and how we behave. Numerous writers from home and abroad have commented on how we react on certain happenings. Situation how grave maybe, our outlook remains always the same, couldn’t care less, numb, if it’s not happened to me, everything’s alright. How long can we go on acting this ways? Now is the time we ponder on our behaviour and analyze our weakness, fallbacks, let’s all of us do an inner checkpoint and review our actions.

Our biggest fallback in my view is the blame game we so inherently carry out. Everything bad is associated to India/ United States/ Israeli agenda, active plotting of enemies of Pakistan. Never have we sought to the nearest of all “ourselves” for any bad thing happening to us on daily basis. Outside factors play a more major role in our lives rather than the rule of taking the responsibility individually.

The caste/clan culture that exists so deeply in our society has played a major role in the blame game. The Pakistani mindset is clearly marked by a set of persistent assumptions; personalizing the impersonal! Anything or everything is attributed to someone’s manipulation and malevolent intentions are it:  flood disaster, earthquake rehabilitation, poverty, a child’s truancy, marital problems, electrical failures, broken roads etc. You name the domestic problems and there is always a person to blame, a name to throw the bulk of blame on. Anything positive or worthwhile happening in the lives is always good will!

Ethnicity is another factor in the deteriorating scenario of attitudes. Blaming the ethnic Punjabi’s, Sindhi’s, Pathan’s and Balochi’s over each other is becoming the new “in” thing. Throwing the blame of Punjabi’s not being fair on the rest of the ethnicities are some of the cheap ways our people have adopted to gain popularity, politicians banking on such a slogan.

 Conspiracy as a cause of events is a constant. The theory is packaged in a paradigm that can be slapped on any situation. In other societies conspiracy theories are marginal; in Pakistan they are main stream. Responsible people propound them and school textbooks offer them as historical truths. Then there is the Pakistani doublethink. The West is portrayed as immoral and yet almost everyone wishes to migrate to the West.

Incompetency, contributes 70% and corruption contributes 30% of the 100% failure of the government. Every Government department in the world today needs expertise that are educated and trained in the specific fields….look at us! The worse people who got themselves elected with fake degrees in basic graduation are the sole fathers all the departments today. For example, the federal education minister found asking a student whether A’ levels is before O’ levels because alphabetically A is before O!! If this is competency level of the head of any department be it Education, health, petroleum, water and power etc. what to expect of the juniors. Here God would go hands up too!  

Corruption is at peak level. What elaborate starting from any department and ending on any sector anything and everything is dependent upon give and take of money. The Current government is concentrating for 5 years in power and making as much money as they can, to take care of the next four generations, they know that they will not be elected next time, they are not bothered and as the track record shows maybe after 10 years of cycle they will return to power again. Everyday life is based on ad hoc decisions and personalized dealings.

 Road traffic in Pakistan is another example of doublethink. Drivers’ curse others for breaking the rules, yet routinely cross red lights, drive on the wrong side of the road wrongly park the car, over speed in city limits or tailgate. The archetype of the Holy Warrior is embedded in the Pakistani psyche. Pakistanis also believe that given the right connections, anything can be fixed. The pursuit of the ‘fix’ feeds back on the state, making it all the more arbitrary. The going abroad culture is strong and underscores Pakistani enterprise and the desire to pursue success and advancement in life.

We should as a nation contemplate and do some inner searching to where we are headed, all is still not lost in the storm of being selfish, mean and malicious. There is good out there but concentrated in certain pockets of our society, we need to take that good out and start planning from now on. Our citizens who are into charities and social work should be boasted by us, should be taken as examples of surviving against all odds. We should concentrate in helping those people; for only on self reliance can we survive.

(This article was published in May 2010 by Ausaf Urdu Newspaper)
http://www.dailyausaf.com/edi_detail.php?id=2471&art_id=64

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