ick any topic in Pakistan and you’ll find a redundant theory behind it. Be it the polio vaccine, or the Covid jabs, or the world’s popular sales day known as Black Friday; leave it to us hot-blooded Pakistanis to put a negative spin on anything we lay our hands on.

It’s that time of the year again. People are going to blow fumes through their nostrils if anyone, God forbid, associates anything other than ‘blessed,’ and any colour other than ‘green’ or ‘white’ with Friday.

It’s strange, isn’t it? I mean, how would you feel if throughout the year people call you by your own name, but on one particular day of the year, you’re bullied into being called by something else? The last Friday of November has it the hardest in our part of the world.

It all starts with the refusal to adopt globalisation. Too vague? Let’s call it Westernization, then. The Black Friday sale is a concept that originated in the West. It was one of the ‘good’ ideas that we adopted. I agree, not everything the West does is good for us, but this business idea is a cash cow all right. The only thing they did ‘wrong’ (for us) was to call it ‘black’.

So, in an effort to not let anyone mess with the sense of piety we attach with Jumma Mubarak, we rechristened it Blessed Friday, which is fine but people actually have gone as far as calling it White Friday.

We have some serious trust issues with anything the West brings. Though, it’s strange that even in this day and age we should not be able to figure out what actually to embrace and what not to.

Indeed, we have some serious trust issues with anything from the West. Though, it’s strange that even in this day and age we should not be able to figure out what actually to embrace and what not to. The attitude can be traced back to the same minds that had rejected the railroads as being irreligious.

Regardless of all the hoo-hah we create, this day even here has become one of the busiest business days. Don’t buy this? Check out any clothing outlet in the city; you will see a real tsunami (since tsunami is quite a buzzword these days). The customers are seen waiting in hordes outside the retail shops, waiting for the doors to open. These doors feel like a sea parting, making way for a flock of sheep being hunted by the lions. In fact, it might be a fallacy to call them sheep because they fight over clothes on sale like hyenas over a carcass.

There are many backstories to the whole situation, of naming the day, but practically the deal was sealed when businesses in the US named it Black, as that’s the day when the ink in their cash registers would go from red (symbolising loss) to black (symbolising profit).

But, leave it to us Pakistanis to feel like the world revolves around them, and that everything the West does is to demonise us and our beliefs.

The writer is based in Lahore and currently works at COLABS