Escalating your vision beyond national boundaries
It’s 2011, PTI holds a massive rally at Mazar-e-Quaid in Karachi. I and a few friends from university attend this jalsa along with hundreds of thousands of Karachiites. For many of us, this was a renewed hope towards change. This was the first time we were participating actively in national politics in our lifetime. Before this time, for many of us middle class, university educated folk, politics was the game of hooligans and the landed class.
This was great. It felt exhilarating and it felt like we were contributing for perhaps the first time in our lives to a cause bigger than us. My journey into politics or rather political awareness started with that jalsa and then I grew my participation to becoming an active member of the political office in my constituency.
In those 2–3 years in which I was very active I did feel quite excited and purpose driven about life however, I saw that even with politics, the narratives are divisive. There is a strong push for personal glorification and principled stances were not really appreciated.
After a few years of participation I realized that politics is perhaps not best suited for a young educated person at this point in his life. First, I could contribute a lot more to society and be of service in a better manner by pursuing my career whole heartedly in my younger years and two maybe politics also requires wisdom that is best had after greying a few hairs.
I retracted my participation from politics somewhat and pursued my professional work as a public health physician and an entrepreneur for the next 5–7 years.
During this time, the politics of Pakistan evolved. Governments came, governments went, prime ministers came, prime ministers got deposed. Parties changed, elections happened.
During this decade I went from my 20s to my 30s. Got married, had a kid, completed my grad school abroad and came back. Built a business — closed it down. Many significant life events happened. However, on the national front, there were ebbs and flows. The titles changed the people stayed the same. Many political workers died, went missing. Activists fled, activists went missing. I realized something when I observe all of this from the balcony. It is that the people that mean the most to us are immediately around us and live with us day in day out. Our family, our friends, our extended family, our neighborhood, our community. The larger circles don’t really miss us. When we are younger we go out thinking we need to impact the larger circle without first thinking of or doing justice to those immediately around us. That is not our fault that is by design. Let me explain.
National agendas and propaganda is meant to give us passion and quite often unreasonable conviction about our national claims of merit. We feel we belong to this much bigger whole. However, the problem with this propaganda is that it is always built on the grounds of exclusion and division. By belonging and being passionate about your nation it means you are doing it at the expense of excluding someone else purely on the basis of man-made boundaries and a man-made document called the passport.
So if you are patriotic about your country, you don’t just get to enjoy the pride of the good things but equally so you have to take ownership of the horrible things your country has done.
Over the last couple of years, I have chosen to shed that burden. I know the country I currently reside in has blood on its hands — like any other country in the world for that matter. However, many things that were done were not my doing, also I have little to no influence in preventing them. Why is it my burden to carry.
I chose to be responsible for my actions, the well-being of my family, friends and my immediate vicinity and community. I chose to do a spectacular job at the employment I have and aspire to be a capable and outstanding professional at my vocation, that of an Emergency Physician and public health doctor. I chose to do my service to God and his creations no matter where they are regardless of what passport they have or even if they are human or not. God made us, we made countries and passports. I do not want to restrict my vision of the life I wish to create with man-made boundaries and impositions.
It is for this reason I have chosen to shed my nationalism and subscribe to a much larger identity of that of a creation of God who is educated to be a physician, who is a father of a lovely boy, a husband to a beautiful wife, a brother to the best young man I know, a son to the kindest people and a friend to some of the nicest people I can think of. These are all the things that make me — me. I love it.
An advice I would give to my younger self — which I don’t think he will heed but that’s okay because that’s how he would learn. I would say don’t get too blown away by nationalistic jingoism. It’s meant to manipulate you and use you as fodder for larger agendas. Focus on doing the work that God sent you on this planet to do and exercise the philosophy of compassion in service. The rest automatically takes care of itself.
This article is a bit jumbled up because this is a somewhat complicated issue to unravel but I have given it a shot for now. Will revisit this topic in the future again perhaps
