How exactly can we enhance the Pakistani mind?

OXFORD, UK: This is in response to the column published in the newspaper on May 26^th ‘Enhancing the Pakistani mind’. It is excellent but the gap is cavernous. How do you inculcate the sort of ideas you expound to people — not just in Pakistan — but everywhere who are drawn to trivia or ideology or religion? That is the question. Until teachers and political/religious leaders can be drawn towards the elite way of thinking as you put it, I don’t think there will be a strong enough influence against the cheap aggression and hedonism that exists in all our societies.

There has to be a quality ‘trickle down’ effect, but unfortunately the leaders in our society are imbued with questionable standards and taste which are pushed by commerce. In the UK, very frequently when you are given a biography of a politician or some academic, you are told which football team he supports as if it was of defining importance. Perhaps it is! It reduces that person in my estimation. I wonder if you have a classical music channel in Pakistan? We do, but it is becoming undermined by trivia so you get folk singing, jazz, some pop and now increasingly birdsong superimposed on serious pieces. Today I was in despair listening to a breathy Norwegian pop singer ‘singing’ Purcell. The announcer said “perhaps some may not approve but I thought it was great.” And another bee in my bonnet is the TV news which rarely has news. After Manchester we had an hour of weeping teenagers telling us how they felt. Ok, but not on the main evening news and it went on for three evenings plus The Guardian to whom we wrote to complain in devoted nine pages to the same sentimentality. The trouble is that there is an inverted snobbery put about where people are inhibited from listening or reading seriously.

Julia Miles

Published in The Express Tribune, May 31^st, 2017.

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