Whatever happened to the thinking man?

Editorials that appear on a regular basis in the country’s newspapers are predictably weighed down with the barnacles of despair, triggered off no doubt by the recent ecological disaster that has taken place and the state of helplessness and behavioural malfunction in its wake.

Rumours are now being circulated of a possible change of political system. And this is not coming from the old timers who still gild their thoughts with the nostalgia of golden ageism, when you could get a dollar for four rupees, but from the privileged classes who believe that from now the country will be travelling downhill all the way. The unfortunate thing about national catastrophes is that while the media catalogues and choreographs every fresh disaster with a morbid relish, often reaching new types of vainglorious intrusion, the coverage does take away the spotlight from other troubled areas that need attention, like, for instance, the economy.

But then, after the unceremonious exit of Ayub Khan, the economy has always been something of a problem for the people who governed this country. One of the first things that prime ministers in Pakistan discover, through sheer serendipity, especially those who don’t have an O-level in economics, are those two magic words that appear to provide a solution to every financial problem — deficit financing.

Now in a country like Pakistan, where M2 (money in circulation) as a percentage of GDP is around 150 per cent, there is bound to be high inflation. And therefore every time the government borrows billions of rupees from the State Bank to finance enterprises that are not creating wealth, that further fuels inflation. The State Bank has warned against the excessive printing of bank notes, and suggested methods to curtail this extravagance, but unfortunately this has fallen on deaf ears.

All this is inevitable, but what is really alarming is the fact that the thinking man appears to have disappeared in this country. Whatever happened to the spirit of enquiry, the quest for knowledge, the old creativity that surfaced in moments of disinterested contemplation?

There was a time in prehistoric days after the first martial law was imposed when there were discussion groups, think tanks, seminars and debates, and mercifully no cooking shows on television. Left wing intellectuals sat in Karachi’s Victoria Road coffee houses and discussed politics, philosophy and classical music as they plunged headlong into the 20th century’s great ideological chasms. Saddar had at least five book shops and a small clutch of jewellers. Today jewellery shops there outnumber bookshops 78 to 0.

The thinking man has been replaced by the conspicuous consumer who accepts everything and questions nothing. Conspicuous consumption is the order of the day. It is a sort of ringing homily to the glorious homogeneity and adaptability of the new us.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 16^th, 2010.