Life outside my safety blanket

Our Pakistani Dream - much like the American one - lies. Everything doesn't fall into place even if you strive for it.

Before I begin, I’d like to make a few things abundantly clear. You are about to embark on a dark and depressing road. Even though the purpose of this article is to vent, the means used are painful. The light at the end of the tunnel may in fact just be an illusion rather than a ray of hope. I am about to help you face facts which ironically are always harder to accept than fiction.

It is officially too late. You are about to graduate. Everything that you have accomplished so far isn’t even close to what you should have accomplished. You look around you and see the world changing before your very eyes and even though you’d been preparing for this change you find yourself unable to keep up. Just like the infamous American Dream there is also a Pakistani Dream. Most of you who thought the political alliance between America and Pakistan was the edge of it, prepare to endure this! Our Pakistani Dream is much like the American one that lies that everything is going to fall into place if you strive for it. Well, let me tell you that if God had a voice, He’d tell you that too much is never enough. Deprecation and deprivation are two new axes that our world revolves around.

Once you escape the regimented schedules of academic life and enter the vast amorphous market you get to know your worth. You feel no better than the infant raven that gets kicked out of its nest by the jealous siblings even before opening its eyes. The ‘R’ word looms over you like a vulture anxiously waiting for you to collapse in desolation. Recession isn’t the beginning of your problems; it is the problem that could be the end of you.

And to add to everything, you will always have people from bigger and (slightly) better universities, the sort that could be labelled as the ideal victims of capitalism, to rub their self-professed superiority in your face, completely trashing all those times you have proved that your creative ability is anything but substandard. Ever had the feeling that everyone around you is snickering over a joke you are completely ignorant of? Yes, that’s what it feels like.