63 years ago we made a covenant with Allah and had a tryst with destiny. Serried like tidal waves under the proud banner of Islam, led majestically from the front by an indomitable great leader, imbued and buoyed by the stirring lessons imparted by the poet of the east, swept over by a frission of unwanted unity and unheard of camaraderie, the multitude fell into a paroxysm of collective greatness and by defying and re-writing the known laws of human conduct altered the course of history forever. Muhammad Ali Jinnah did what hardly any other man can be credited with doing; Creating a nation state!

When the situation and the man meet, the machinery is set off by which history takes one direction instead of the other. The man met his situation with legendary aplomb and fate descended from the heavens to have a rendezvous with those who stood behind him like a rock, animated with the singular desire of making the greatest and most significant experiment in the entire human history. Pakistan was the result of that monumental and epoch changing experiment; a corollary of the man’s meeting with the situation; a testament of the rendezvous between the fate and a nation! The laws of nature and human conduct treat individuals and nations on the same footing; no exceptions admitted! In order to experience a smooth, measured and phased evolution, to acquire all the requisite facets of a complete personality, to equip oneself with all the tools and the weapons to wage the war of life successfully, a child needs a conducive environment and benevolent lady luck. If any spanner gets thrown in the works leading to the vitiation of the environment the growth of the child shall get stunted. The life and times of a man are a mere reflection of the events surrounding his birth and rearing up. Same is exactly true for the birth, growth and evolution of a nation or a country.

When the conception and gestation was such history defying, the birth was expectedly cataclysmic. A cataclysmic birth means an unstable childhood, precocious adolescence, and a riotous youth preceding a robust and dynamic maturity. When the creation of the country entails massive destruction, to cut the umbilical cord from the rancor and hostility of the past becomes an arduous task. A nation flowing through the womb of violence has to fight against the nature and surrounding circumstances to find its feet and clamber out of the dark valley of disunity and divide. A country witnessing such gore and bloodshed at the time of its inception is bound to remain engaged in a life and death struggle to merely stay afloat and keep itself intact. Much of the instability and acrimony characterizing the accident ridden history of Pakistan is attributable to a cataclysmic birth, precocious adolescence and a riotous youth.

We survived the partition holocaust; started literally from the scratch and went about building our Rome with renewed vigor and unending zeal and braving all the odds heavily stacked against us steered our way into a precocious adolescence. The nation began to decipher the contours of a viable and robust state; began to get used to a new socio-cultural identity; began to write a future tinged with the acrimony of the past but laced with scented leaves of the tree of freedom. This was the time when economists and pundits around the world were churning out rosy and promising forecasts for the future of Pakistan; when we were in throes of a green revolution; when we were being imitated by the would be Asian Tigers; when we were the great people to fly with; when royalties of various hues and colors were making a beeline for our prestigious educational institutions. Those were the times when we stared at nothing but the peak, when we saw nothing but the sun, we did nothing but what was fruitful. But to defy history is to earn its ire; the blowback struck, the inertial forces managed to grab an upper hand and induced a downward slide, which soon got converted into one steep fall from grace for us. We have had our share of follies, blunders and faux paus; we broke our covenant with Allah, we obfuscated the memories and the message of that glorious tryst with destiny which gave us Pakistan; we fell from the high pedestal of sacrifice and unity and slithered into the slimy waters of divisiveness and self seeking. We constructed a glorious nation state, envisioned democracy as a way of life for it only to wreck the chariot by becoming indifferent. We glossed over the cardinal lesson of history that the tyranny of a prince in an autocracy is less disastrous for the future of the nation than the indifference of a common man in a democracy.

It was us, who had clothed the skeleton of Pakistan with our flesh and blood; adorned it with the hem of our love and sacrifice. It were us who staged the biggest migration in recorded history; who suffered unheard of brutality and untold misery on the road to Pakistan; it were we who packed the locomotive mortuaries; it were we who were uprooted from our homes, separated and lost from our own kith and kin and yet did not allow the flame of freedom to extinguish No gust of adversarial wind was strong enough to blow out our lamp of Pakistan. It was us who paved the road of progress and prosperity of Pakistan by putting our limbs on the line; it was us who sublimated and synergized our intellectual and creative faculties to script an inimitable and ingenious blueprint for a viable, robust and impregnable Pakistan. It were us again, tragically, who allowed the chariot to get wrecked; who allowed the blanket of our fortunes get blackened by the vile deeds of humbugs whom our indifference had catapulted to power.

A man with a mission knows no rest; greatness countenances no complacency; heroes cannot afford indifference!

Indifference breeds mediocrity; once perpetuated mediocrity invites ruin and ruination is a guest which knows not how to bid farewell. When ruination settles in, the machinery of the universe shifts a gear and everything begins to run to seed; all fabrics begin to come apart at seams and vivisection of an entire nation begins. This vivisection is met with supine indifference coupled with simmering self pity. It may be some bodily malfunction which paralyzes a man; but its criminal indifference and simmering self pity which cripples an entire nation. To be hemmed in by its own fears and flattened by the weight of circumstances are the hallmarks of a nation paralyzed by a piteous inaction. Same is happening to us. We rush in where angels would fear to tread, only to get cold feet where angels would scamper ahead.

Another characteristic trait of a paralyzed and supine nation is to blame the leadership or the lack of it for its miserable lot. An unhappy and dejected man loves to clutch at straws and heap opprobrium on most extraneous of circumstances. Like a rudderless ship, it keeps tossing about the vagarious waves of time and space and ends up chasing its own tail when time for a mandatory transition strikes the hour. It loses its capacity to learn from the past; hence, gets condemned to keep repeating it. The cognizance, the consciousness, the ability to distinguish good from bad; hero from villain, crisis from opportunity, opportunity from crisis and gold from dust is lost and battle lines in the war of survival get blurred. Same is happening to us. We denigrate and run down our heroes while ascribe divinity to humbugs and charlatans.

Ours is not an ideological crisis; nor is there any identity deficit roiling our self image. The ideological foundations were helped laid very firmly in the sands of time by the Almighty itself; without an ineffaceable ideology underpinning the caravan of freedom, the dream destination could never have been arrived at. We have not lost our way because of want of ideology or some historic infirmity of ours; there is nothing wrong neither with the ship nor with its rudder or the anchor; just that the hands behind the helm are too venal, too ineffectual and too plangent to induce it to a smooth sail. It’s not that our guns have been spiked or our pitch has been queered; just that the hands behind the gun and the players on the pitch have faltered big time. The ideological foundation once laid can resist and withstand all tremors and jolts, but a covenant once betrayed through sheer apathy and delinquency saps all the moral vigor and ethical spirit of the nation. We are faced with a critical moral crunch; a telling paucity of ethical power ails us; hence our delinquency, hence our self pity, hence the unbreakable stranglehold of lassitude and inaction.

Self infliction and incessant lamentation have not got us anywhere, nor is it going to take us anywhere In future. The sparkling road to glory is paved by noble intentions and valiant deeds not by fanciful self deception. Fiddlers do not build Rome In a day, that too with borrowed brick and mortar. To be in harmony with nature is the only good in the world; to harmonize yourself with nature is to tap the vast reserves of potential and creativity endowed by it. To galvanize your faculties and realize your true potential is to set yourself on the path of salvation and lasting glory. Sky is the limit for those who know how to hit top flight.

History always comes a full circle to repeat itself. What goes around comes around. Our deeds boomerang with their results. Paybacks, blowbacks determine our fate. The cycle of action reaction, cause, effect, deed, result continues to repeat itself to keep providing us humans the chance to learn from the past and make amends for the future. We made a covenant to Allah during this very month of Ramadan, 63 years ago. We swore it on our collective oath that we shall prize, cherish and safeguard this sublime gift ennobled by his numinous hands and shall turn it into a laboratory of Islam, from where it shall send out seismic tremors to bring down all vainglorious structures of false pretences and hollow civilizations. How have we shamed ourselves? How badly have we fared on our sworn duty? Just how mortified are we before our Lord? Darkness has descended upon the laboratory; sterile have become the imaginations; morose are the souls; a dreadful hush prevails over the landscape disturbed only by the piercing explosions of terror hits. The once shining armor lies riddled with innumerable holes, each of which is an aperture through which the empire is trickling. The dream has gone sour, the miracle has been eclipsed, and the bastion of peace and purity now remains marooned in monstrous floods. But in this hour of greatest despair lies our greatest opportunity. Only from the ruins of the past flows fresh life, renewed vigor and new leadership. Let us renew our pledge, let us revisit our oath, let us go back to the drawing board, let us make a new beginning, let us revive the long forgotten and much abused covenant with Allah, in the very month, during the very hours, in throes of the same misery, in which 63 years ago, he deigned to award us with this dreamland. The moment of truth has arrived; we have come to a crossroads in our history. Here each individual step forward would be a giant leap for the nation. Let us renew the eternal pledge to regain the lost moral fibre, to resurrect in the infirm ethical muscles. No excellence can be separated from right thinking and right living. No living can be right once shorn of moral courage and ethical honesty. Let us reclaim the lost ground and once again climb the high pedestal of devotion and sacrifice. Let us re-learn to smile through adversities; let us again be cognizant, alert and honest.

The day we galvanize our collective will to power; the cosmic machinery shall shift a gear and the vagaries of time shall come into play and we shall discover our new leaders. We can never manufacture leaders, we can only discover them, let the hour discover its men; cometh the hour, cometh the men!

Allah gave us Pakistan; and Allah shall defend and protect it from all harm, it is just that how we conduct ourselves is what shall seal our fate. It is us who are on trial not Pakistan, it is us who need to rediscover our true potential and regain the lost respect not Pakistan. It is us who face a momentous war of self renewal not Pakistan. The war is very much on, the bugle of the decisive battle has sounded, and lines remain clearly drawn. Piteous fence sitting and self lamentation have become passé, time to stand up and be counted, to choose a side. Those on the side of courage, cognizance and honesty have already been assured of a splendid victory while the rest shall find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Wake up Pakistanis! Destiny beckons and luck is ready to turn its smile upon you. Time to pick up the threads and wriggle out of this labyrinth of lost illusions and wasted years. Time to make the historic transition from being a nuclear power to an economic power. From being the fifth most populous country to being the most productive country. From being an Islamic state in the name to a real, actual Islamic welfare Republic. The end of the tunnel is lit up with the promise of a bright future, let us all take the first step in unison towards it.

Let us be honest to ourselves and in our covenant with Allah and the long journey to glory shall commence!

Pakistan Paindabad!!!
PKKH EXCLUSIVE | Umar Khayyam

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