Eat Pray. Prey No Love

Social media is the place to be these days and Twitter is this whole world of friends and detractors. A space where thoughts, images, ideas, love, hate, culture, anything are compressed in a hundred and forty characters. In our world where there are no public spaces to play, learn, expand our minds, feel safe and more, Twitter, sadly, is the substitute for discussion. It’s about as close as we come to the concert hall, theatre, museum, university and playing field. Is that good enough? Has complacency set in? Do we need more? The real thing perhaps?

I live in Karachi a sprawling metropolis with an estimated twenty million inhabitants; which offers little in the way of mental stimulation to its inhabitants. The only entertainment is food. We don’t have public galleries, museums or exhibition spaces. There are no forums for debate and discussion, no place where we can exchange ideas. There is no sense of community, of building institutions and giving something to the next generation. Forget the opera and the ballet, there are no theatres or concert halls, no dance no music and barely any cinema. We do have a lot of mosques.

Over the past thirty years we in Pakistan have reinvented who we are and where we came from. Shunning our heritage we moved out of Mehergarh and the Indus Valley Civilisation and into the deserts of Arabia. We have ceased to engage each other in debate, we have no tolerance and to anyone who may wish to engage and debate with us the answer is violence.

It’s not something we should be surprised at; it is after all the inevitable result of a closed mind. It’s a bit like constipation if you only take in what will close you up it will make you ill. The same with the mind, if you are fed something all your life and lack the tools to challenge or even question what you are being taught it becomes an undisputable fact and makes for a ill society. For in this society it is the only narrative, and any attempt to challenge it is met by violence. And that is the way we have introduced our children to religion. As neither they, nor, in most cases, the teacher can read, a strange brand of religion has overrun this country. Life on earth is unimportant and temporary the real life awaits us in death. A strange logic or is it perfect logic?

A young person with no education, no prospects and no seeming reason to want to live a life of deprivation would most likely say perfect logic. For anyone with options, opportunity, ability living in an environment that encourages development, ideas, thinking and creativity there is much to do, much to live for. For such a person there is a sense of history, a legacy, a sense of destiny, the idea of leaving something behind, something future generations can build on.

To build we must have ideas, to grow we must innovate, to succeed we must have creativity. Our cities are not the products of ideas, innovation or creativity. They do not boast theatre districts or centres of academic excellence. Arts councils are struggling to survive and its not just a lack of funding its a lack of interest from a population that is a product of the Zia years. Where we were told that its wrong to be happy, to think, to be free. Shackled by his personal brand of religion we’re no better than Ferdinand and Isabel’s Spain (circa 16th century). Repression torture and murder all in the name of a new order.

Today we talk about fighting the extremists in the north, in southern Punjab, in the seminaries and mosques let’s start with the extremist within us. Let’s agree to engage with each other, not deny our collective history and learn to love who we are so we can eventually love one another.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 18^th, 2011.