As the moving finger keeps on writing

If times are hard why don’t we adjust to them? Why aren’t we a bit more stoical about our misfortunes? We’ve made a fetish of moaning and breast-beating, the new media – lest we forget, Gen Pervez Musharraf’s gift to this distraught and confused nation – feeding this frenzy and in no small measure profiting from it. For a change why don’t we cultivate a bit of philosophy?
Our troubles are not going away in a hurry. Of this we can be pretty sure, although why should we complain when for the most part we ourselves, not agents from the skies, are the authors of our misfortunes? Wrong choices made, wrong paths chosen, the most pigheaded adventures embarked upon.
Look at our moods...the passions guiding us seeming to defy all understanding. Look at the sainthood about to be conferred on that champion of the faithful, Mumtaz Qadri. This is no aberration. It fits in with the evolution of national thought since 1947. We began sowing the dragon’s teeth long ago. Let us not be surprised at the consequences.
I can’t figure out one thing. Although the British ruled us for a long time, our faith then was never in danger. There were other concerns weighing on the collective Muslim mind, never the thought that Islam stood in any kind of peril. Masters of our own fate, this at least being the prevailing fiction, why have we become so hysterical about matters of faith? What is the insecurity gnawing at our hearts?
Indeed, about too many things we have become hysterical, behaving almost as if the right to moan is one of the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution. The sequence of cause and effect seems to escape us. Particular choices lead to particular consequences. If too many notes are printed, prices will rise. Even an economic illiterate like me can work this out. No invasion from Mars destroyed our railways. This we did ourselves and if our roads are congested as a result, with the number of motor vehicles growing, there should be little room for surprise.
If the geniuses presiding over the affairs of Lahore insist on widening the city’s famed Canal Road, let’s not be surprised when the magic of that road becomes a distant memory. More than we care to realise, culture is destiny. Choices are not made in a vacuum. Our minds are not independent bodies. They are shaped, among other things, by culture.
The virtual canonisation of Mumtaz Qadri is a cultural happening. The widening of the Canal Road is a decision reflecting a certain cultural outlook. No one would fool around with the Mall in London or the Champs Elysee in Paris for the sake of vehicular traffic. We do not suffer from the same inhibitions. Different cultures, different outlooks.
Demonise colonialism as much as we may like, the British were master empire builders. In what now constitutes the territory of Pakistan they were around for only 98 years, 1849-1947, but the things they built and created – not just physical symbols like bridges, canals and railways but laws and institutions. India, which then included us too, stepped into the modern era because of the British.
The proper study of history is a neglected subject in Pakistan. We are not a historically aware nation, mythology and myth-making often taking the place of history. But we could do with a better understanding of the past, even as the realisation sinks in that we have proved ourselves unworthy of the inheritance of the past.
In our 64 years as an independent country – nearly two-thirds of the time the British were here – we have done our best to dismantle what the British left us. If we haven’t quite succeeded, it is not because of any lack of effort but because the foundations of British rule were strong.
What have Iqbal and Jinnah got to do with present-day Pakistan? Is this the land of their dreams? Iqbal honed his talent as a scholar and philosopher not in the seminary of Deoband but the universities of Europe. Jinnah was a product of English education, steeped in the ideas and sentiments of English liberalism. What would he have made of the Pakistan of today? From every office wall his portrait looks down on us. But if a growing number of Pakistanis had their way, Mullah Omar’s portrait would replace Jinnah’s.
Still, let us not lose hope. What we see rising are not the tides of barbarism – no, the Vandals or Goths are not at the gates of Rome – but the high walls of illiteracy. We somehow seem to have made it our national motto to cultivate illiteracy in everything. If we were mentally more aware, culturally more alive, we wouldn’t have allowed our railways to die. We wouldn’t have allowed our environment to be degraded, our trees to be cut, our landscape infected by the insidious poison of the plastic shopping bag. The list is endless. (Paper mulberries flourish in Ayub Park. Doesn’t Gen Kayani get to see them?)
To stem this tide, to roll back this creeping invasion, to while away the evening hours when darkness is at hand, instead of beating our chests we should cultivate philosophy and the arts, learn to live by candle and lamp light, make love under the stars and fall back upon the two greatest antidotes to human despair and suffering: reading and music. (“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from nearly all the miseries of mankind”...Maugham. He might have added something about music.)
There is, however, no cultivating the arts, nothing of the kind, without the comfort that comes from the worship of that most smiling of Greek gods, Bacchus. All art is the product of frenzy and passion. There must be a frenzy of the mind, a passion of the soul, for great poetry and literature to be written, for heavenly music to be composed, for great painting, the madness of perfect dance, for a Lata to sing or for someone like Callas to enchant successive generations.
The worship of Bacchus also induces a passion of the soul (it leads also to the gutter but that’s a separate subject). Kill this worship, as we have done in Pakistan, and society shrivels. The flow of blood slows. Certainly, alcoholism is no recipe for artistic growth. But then to each his own. Just as every man is not a genius, every man is not an artist. Every prospective nightingale is not Lata or Callas. These are gifts of the divine. But the divine emerges best where freedom prevails. We are turning Pakistan into a necropolis, not so much a city of the dead as of the walking dead.
Our troubles are not so great as of those countries which bore the brunt of the last century’s two world wars. Can we even imagine what they had to endure? Do we even have a vague idea of the battles of Leningrad and Stalingrad, of the wars in the Pacific? Those wars could not have been fought without the aid of Bacchus. Churchill lost his naval ministry in the First World War after the disaster of the Gallipoli landings which he had championed. He went to join his regiment in France and to fortify himself for the rigours which lay ahead equipped himself with a veritable cellar of the choicest wines and whiskies.
Our regiments and battalions, and our air force pilots, gave a good account of themselves in the 1965 war (although it is another matter that that war should never have been started at all). The culture of the armed forces then was different, the materialism of today not so much in evidence. Messes were wet and officers drank but no one kept hidden bottles at home. The army was a relatively austere institution with little of the hypocrisy which is a hallmark of Pakistan today. And beards, mercifully, were all too rare.
That Pakistan perhaps is a lost dream. But we should study history and appraise the past more judiciously than we are in the habit of doing. If, besides, we learn to avoid futile debates and unnecessary theology, who knows the furies may be kind and we emerge into the light...or at least a semblance of the light.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com