KARACHI:
Step into almost any modern workplace and you will witness a quiet, unspoken performance. Accents shift mid-sentence to match whoever is deemed impressive. Hairstyles, gestures, even laughter are borrowed from someone else's confidence. Nobody wrote this script, yet everyone seems to be reciting it.
Beneath this performance lies something more telling - a hierarchy in disguise. Authority is mocked in the name of "freedom of expression," and mockery itself has become a kind of currency, exchanged casually and without weight. What looks like informality is often just another status game, dressed down to look harmless.
This is not a complaint against individuality. It is a question about authenticity: when did difference stop being about who we are and start being about who we are imitating? In offices, classrooms, even friend circles, originality is rare and most people are simply performing someone else's idea of being interesting.
Perhaps what we need is not louder self-expression, but quieter self-possession. Fewer imported personalities and more of the disarmingly simple courage to be unremarkable and real.
Shanzay Javed
Karachi
