What has living abroad taught me

You’re a stranger in whichever country you step into. And most importantly, it just doesn’t feel like home. When I was abroad, my family and I would wait for Eid and other such festivals or celebrations where Pakistanis and Indians would get a chance to meet. We just looked for excuses to meet Asians. Honestly, they are family when we’re away from our home country.

Punjabis, Sindhis, Baloch, Pathans, Mohajirs, Shias, Sunnis, Dawoodi Bohras, Hindus, Sikhs, etc – nobody even cared about these differences. Or shall I say, nobody refused to meet the other person on the basis of any of these differences. If the other person would have trouble understanding the other’s language, they would start talking to each other in English instead. Life was so simple then. Surprisingly, I felt like a Pakistani more when I was not living in Pakistan.

And suddenly, everything changed the day I moved back to Pakistan. Moving to Pakistan meant that nobody in this country would take me as a Pakistani, but would rather be interested in learning about the city/province that my parents and I belong to, what language do I speak and, most importantly, what thoughts have I got regarding people from other backgrounds. And the moment those thoughts would ‘by-chance’ match with the other person’s, BINGO [Yay! We can gossip about people from XYZ province as much as we want to, she won’t get offended]!

Especially in a city like Karachi, one has to be so careful while conversing because you never know when a person may find any statement of yours offensive. Why Karachi? Because this city is home to people from everywhere [literally].

I don’t understand why we are having difficulties in uniting as a nation. There is too much hatred between people here because we’re just too obsessed with making differences an issue. How hard can it be to ignore these differences? We are Pakistanis, let the name of our country and the Pakistani flag be our identity. It’s high time that we grow up and stop hating each other just because of language, sectarian or provincial differences.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 26^th, 2013.