Our own one battle after another

We are all in battle mode. Ask Donald Trump. Ask Masood Pezeshkian. Ask Leonardo DiCaprio. And ask Pakistanis braving loitering munitions, rising prices and growing uncertainty engulfing every aspect of their lives.

War in the season of Oscars could well be a movie title itself. Today the Hollywood's best and the brightest gather in Los Angeles for the 98th Oscar award ceremony, taking place under the shadow of a Trump/Netanyahu imposed war on Iran whose script has gone awry.

As Sinners fights One Battle After Another for the best picture Oscar, never before have titles of the two leading contender films more reflected roles being played by American and Israeli leaders on the geo-political screen. Life often imitates art in the most grotesque manner.

Life has also acquired the nasty habit of throwing informational curve balls on our digital timelines. With the Gulf war dominating global and local news cycles at the expense of literally every other issue (including our very own war), the insatiable appetite for information is growing by the minute. To satiate this craving – and make money via audience engagement – content generators have gone into overdrive to disseminate content regardless of how much it weighs on the Truth-o-Meter.

It is such a struggle; this stress-inducing losing battle to make sense of the ballooning chaos around us. In a world seemingly spinning out of control, how does one excavate sense from a growing reservoir of senselessness? Those familiar support structures we all used to depend on, they are all slowly withering away in a digital storm that shows all signs of growing stronger and wilder in times ahead. When a genocidal maniac like Netanyahu gets to ignite wars and unleash mayhem at whim, what can make sense anymore?

Speaking of no sense, life with a petrol hike of Rs55 in one fell swoop is not something that any of us could have imagined a few weeks back. And yet, here we are, doing all that is doable to adjust behaviours, routines, habits and budgets to endure the times we are thrust into. War on our west, war on our north-west, and a threat of war on our east – not exactly a recipe for self-actualising life's full potential in this land of ours.

The best coping mechanism? No, its not Netflix. It is, in fact, quenching the thirst for clarity by consuming maximum and credible information. That's a task-and-a-half in itself.

Who do you turn to? On factual reportage, some international media outlets provide value-added content. It is surprisingly admirable that The New York Times, CNN and a few others have conducted investigations to prove that it was indeed an American Tomahawk missile that hit a school in Iran and murdered nearly two hundred innocents of whom an overwhelming majority were girls. But for each such professionally solid reporting, there are many more instances of these organisations whitewashing horrendous crimes committed by their governments. The western media's shameful coverage – or lack of it, in fact – of Israeli genocide in Gaza has severely damaged its credibility, probably irreparably so. We read and watch them today, but we do so with a healthy dose of skepticism.

So, we turn to the deluge in social media. The last two weeks of the Iran war have catapulted many commentators and analysts to stardom in Pakistan. None more so than Tucker Carlson. He was unknown to most here till his devastating and incriminating interview of Christian Zionist and American ambassador in Israel Mike Huckabee. Now Pakistanis consume Carlson's Israel-bashing podcasts with relish. But reliance on social media comes with the avalanche of fake news, doctored images and AI videos that are shaping opinions and formulating perceptions in all the wrong ways.

We consume what reinforces our beliefs. This war provides a classic test case to prove this. It also provides algorithms an opportunity to create even bigger echo chambers for us. In the post-truth world, my truth is always better than your truth. But what do I do when my truth also becomes a bit discomforting?

Ask our government. It is doing fine diplomatic tightrope walking (by most standards) but does it have a truth it can hold on to? We are with Iran against US and Israeli aggression, except that we are not really against the US. We are with the Gulf states under attack from Iran, but we are not really against Iran for launching attacks for its defence. Given the fact that we don't have the luxury of too many choices within this diplomatic maze, it is natural for us to embrace various versions of our truth and gel them into one big fat one even though the contradictions within don't sit too pretty.

It is, quite literally, one battle after another.

Take Afghanistan, for instance. We know this war is ours. But knowing anything more than this requires finding information beyond the tightly controlled text of press releases. There is no serious reporting on the conflict, and few information-based analyses that would give us Pakistanis a fair idea of the situation. In times like these, I turn to credible and knowledgeable colleagues like Ismail Khan, Tahir Khan, Iftikhar Firdous, Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud and some others (how I miss the iconic Rahimullah Yusufzai at times like these). But even experts like these have to work under limitations. We all suffer in the absence of timely and authentic information that has a direct impact on our lives.

The wide arc of conflicts is getting wider. For us in Pakistan, the new normal will require adjusting to a deadly combination of external and internal threats. Who knows what the new Middle East will look like once the bombs start falling, and how it would impact us? Who knows how much we will degrade Afghan Taliban and TTP's ability to export terrorism to our homeland, and what toll this would take on our lived live? Who knows what our hybrid system would mutate into as a result of these security challenges, and what shape our politics will take as a consequence? The known unknowns are blending seamlessly into unknown knowns as we wage one battle after another.

Best wishes to us for navigating our new normal. And to DeCaprio for today's Oscars.