Embracing the challenge

It has never been so depressing a situation in Pakistan since the Fall of Dhaka as it is now. Political division has crept into every institution, economic meltdown is real and social polarisation is on the rise. What is even more heart wrenching is the institutional confrontation that indicates that leadership, worth the salt, is conspicuous by its absence at all levels. The so-called leaders are seemingly busy hoodwinking the public with hollow slogans and clichés either completely disconnected from the ground or uninterested to embrace the challenge and do something creatively different.

Let me share my personal, tiny but meaningful experience, about how one can learn from experience and chart a different path to glory. After a couple of lectures on the philosophical foundations of research (ontological, epistemological and methodological underpinnings of social sciences), the professor (who was tough and demanding) handed us some journal articles, published in the Academy of Management (a prestigious journal) and Public Administration Review for written critique with individual presentation in the next class. To get the job done within a week was not a small and easy task.

We did not have any prior training in writing critique so we started from scratch based on ‘learning by doing’. Besides understanding the substance of each article, the real problem was how to come up with a logically sound critique of various aspects of the research conducted including abstract, gap analysis, research problem, literature review, research design and conclusions. I started with reading about ‘critique’ with focus on its nature, types and typical styles in vogue. It was a great learning experience!

Having learnt a great deal about critique, I turned to the given articles for analysis. I wrote a very scholarly, or so I thought, two-page critique of one selected article highlighting its good, bad and ugly points. It was to be used, I supposed with a sense of pride, as a template/model for others to emulate. The next day, per chance, I was the first to present it in the class and so I made every attempt to impress the professor with my eloquence, depth of knowledge and writing skills. After I had finished, the professor, in her typical style, carried out a surgical strike on my critique and tore my work to shreds.

I was now standing dumb-faced with no clue of how to defend the critique. My first attempt thus ended up in total embarrassment but I did not lose hope and took it as a challenge. It was a blessing in disguise in the sense that I reflected back on what had gone wrong. I had to change some of my hardwired habits and assumptions about reading and writing. It was difficult but not impossible to re-program my mind. My performance in subsequent classes and exams improved a great deal thanks to confronting the challenge head-on and trying a different strategy.

The key takeaway for me was that every challenge brings an opportunity. Fear of failure is the main roadblock in achieving success and so is one’s stubbornness to adapt and relearn. People and for that matter organisations (governments included) often fail to make right choices in the face of challenging circumstances (political turmoil, economic instability and social crisis) when they do not hear dissenting views, ignore facts and fail to read writing on the wall. Pakistan is a typical country that insists it cannot fail given its geo-strategic importance for the world and being a state founded in the name of Islam.

The problems Pakistan faces today are chronic, complex and challenging but not impossible to address given the immense amount of talent, natural endowments and resilient social structures. The political leadership needs to build consensus on key institutional reforms that ensure efficiency, effectiveness and accountability. Pakistan, according to Hussain Haqqani in his latest book, Reimagining Pakistan, is a volatile semi-authoritarian national security state which has failed to run itself consistently under rule of law (constitutional order) since its birth. This needs to change if it wants to succeed and make progress (not just survive) in an increasingly competitive and turbulent world.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2023.

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