Politics: A social mystification in Pakistan!

‘Democracy is the ultimate means to figure out egalitarianism in a broken society.’ ‘It isn’t chaos rather the manifestation of freedom ensured by the democracy.’ ‘Oh, don’t consume it so badly! Since we are in transition from absolutism to democracy and it would take time to have a mature politics in Pakistan.’ These were the resolutions of my students to an open ended question about their views on whether or not we are heading toward a civil disorder with the present state of governance in Pakistan.

Frankly speaking, It wasn’t unexpected for me because what else can you expect of the young  creative thinkers for whom everything said in a Prime time TV talk Show is the ultimate fact—a revelation.  A plain folk rhetoric presented and reinforced every day by the mainstream media.

Nevertheless, all of them were thunderstruck to a follow-up question on what do they believe that whether an uninterrupted decade isn’t ample for a nation to learn the job of running a country, especially when the country has such a struggling political past.

Our routine political affairs in Pakistan today give us a vibrant hint that we are entirely unaware of the usage and benefits of persuasive politics-an essence a country vitally needs for serenity— Persuasive politics practiced on the part of government contributes diversity and Rule of Law to the state where the rules are legitimated by traditions, customs and constitutional procedures. 

The most silent attribute of this system is the compromise politics of give and take. Such system automatically discourages and to a certain extent blocks the opposition’s opportunity to a configuration where political parties and media merge into a network to test government through rallies and litigation. Media in this setting isn’t capable to fuel the hype by having the dedicated coverage of rallies and opinion shows on wishful outcomes for the litigations against government. Media debates in such setting revolve around the advantages and disadvantages of government legislation and development.

Education at curve

For better or for worse, the university education is moving into the curve.

No doubt, the technology particularly, Internet revolutionizes the way we process and search for information. It serves as a personal informant and in some ways as a private teacher. With a wealth of knowledge within our reach, many teachers are beginning to seek out the Internet as a means to streamline the classroom experience.

While the Web serves as an excellent tool to distribute the gift of knowledge, teachers should reconsider its use in the classroom before committing a portion of the curriculum to it. Online homework, tests, assignments and examinations provides many benefits to students, but its function at times can hinder rather than provide a boon.

The manual way of grading pencil-and-paper assignments, tests and terminal marks can often be a daunting task for academicians especially when grading hundreds of papers.

Online examination does provide instantaneous feedback to the students and makes grading considerably easier for the teacher, but it’s a flawed system.

CITIZENS' DIVIDE

What I perceive as one of the biggest problems of Pakistan is the interconnected problem of large scale ethnic, lingual, and cultural divide among its citizens. We are perhaps one of those countries where individual differences are reported and valued stronger than the commonalities at different manifests of importance. The ghost which is hunting us most since our very inception is the prevalence of ethnocentric groups’ formation of either being a Baluchi, Punjabis, Pashtun, Sindhi, Seraiki, Muhajir, Chitrali, Kohistani, and Hindko rather than the ‘Pakistani’.

No doubt, the need for egalitarian society exists and has been voiced several times over the years by intelligentsia, but the struggle for it usually ends up in beginning of another ethnic conflict in Pakistan. Despite of offering resolution, Political parties exploit all this in turn to get an existence fuel for their presence in the coming years. 

though diversity contributes to culture and creative richness, yet in case of Pakistan, the division among the people on the basis of economic disparities, geographic associations, language, religion, cultism has not only affected our economy and progress, adversely, but the Urdu-Bengali conflict has also led us to war in 1971 between the Eastern and Western parts of our country, which resulted in division of the country and creation of an independent state.

Despite of the loss of thousands of precious innocent lives in the past two or three decades, the problem of ethnicity tends to intensify with the passage of time.

Keeping in view the impact of media on society in Pakistan, media Houses and universities need to develop media contents aimed at bridging the differences between ethnic and sectarian groups by highlighting their commonalities and similarities, instead of highlighting their differences.

Though media is never supposed of to operate to reduce conflict however the presentation of accurate, balanced and impartial reporting can help a lot in conflict reduction.

Essence of Conflict Sensitive Journalism and getting command on technical aspects of the program's contents, like how to do prior research, theme workout, putting hooks, transition and multiple sources, scripts etc will place Journalists in a position to have the required confidence to produce programs having such active and progressive themes. As usually the lack of confidence on a part of the journalist ruins implementation of creative ideas. Similarly, programs on themes trying to provoke people into thinking in terms of similarities are probable to lose impact all due to the reason that journalist wasn't able to wrap it up with conventional structure despite of having novel and relevant ideas. I believe it is the reason why journalists from rural areas, despite of availability, fails to produce valued contents.

HEAD_LIGHTS

In addition to being a requirement of travelling in the dark, Crystal Clear, glittering headlights are the most prominent component of persona of a contemporary car today. They add looks and emotions to the ride as a headlight can easily make any car look happy, angry or gloomy. People even use to call certain popular models of Honda, Toyota, Mazda, Nissan and Chevrolet as snake, dolphin or cat all due to their facade. Since my childhood, I personally feel attracted most towards cars with the smartest headlights and I wonder how cars would look if they don’t have the headlights.

 Why do all classic cars have round headlights and why do modern cars have more architecturally designed headlines? These question creep to my mind when I was rubbing the wax out of my 2012 Corolla GLI headlights today. Was it style, choice or other techno limitations?

I then also remember my father’s saying, “They are the eyes of my car,” he once uttered these words to me when he was polishing his early Mazda 929 headlights. Indeed, they look like the eyes of a car! But it wasn’t just a styling choice or technological limitation rather it was the law.

The story trace its origin back to 1940 when the motor vehicle administrations of several states in USA came up with the idea of uniform standard of seven inches sealed-beam headlamps for all the vehicles throughout country. These one-piece lights combined the filament, reflector, housing, and lens. They were supposed to improve reliability as the chances of dirt and dead bugs finding its way into the lamp, possibly causing hot spots and early burnout were nearly impossible. The standard was adopted by the government and remained into effect for the next 40 years known as a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108. USA being the large market for cars in those days compelled the Japanese and European manufacturers also to adopt the same standard for all their productions.  

  

Healthy Viewing Choices

It wouldn't be wrong in saying that the mushroom growth of media in the last decade has left us with an important question of how can we have the healthy viewing choices for  whole family, particularly when it has the tremendous liberty, lot of audience and 24 hours seven days screen presence in majority of the bedrooms in Pakistan. I believe screen time for public is like chocolate. It’s delicious, pleasure in small portions, but eating too much can lead to a lifetime of bad habits.

 Although there's no single recipe for producing a successful program that could be valuable to the whole family yet with the inclusion of certain fundamentals we can easily have a high quality television contents for the entire family.

A RANDOM DAY AT SHRINE

Located at the foot of Margalla Hills, a few miles away from the Prime Minister House, the shrine of SHAH ABDUL LATIF KAZMI ( Bari Imam) is the center of hope for the disappointed, ill, heartbroken and needy people of the subcontinent for centuries.

It’s been more than 300 years when (Bari Imam) came to this place- barren land in those days - from District Jhelum.

 After helping his father in grazing animals, at the age of 12, he left for Ghaur Ghashti (now Attock) to learn fiqh, hadith, logic, mathematics, medicine and philosophy. The Saint is believed to meditate there in a cave for about twelve years visited only by the wild beasts and demons. A rock in that cave resembling a snake is also believed to be the miracle turned into stone by the holy man for being the devil’s advocate to break his meditation.

QADRI: MYTH OF DISPLAY & POWER

 Qadri holding the Constitution

What impelled a dual national Dr. Tahir ul Qadri to suddenly terminate his self- exile in Canada and come back with so much display, money and publicity?

Is the only question I can ask of myself in a situation when I've been limited to my guest house’s room watching everything on TV due to emergency identical situation in Islamabad today.

Is it the pain and love for the nation which he had shunned six years ago or is there some other hidden agenda? Only time will tell!

Dr. Qadri however says he is not interested in power and claims to be back only to save the nation from a total disaster.  He appears and poses to be a Khomeini- type messiah and savior of the nation and believes he can transform Constitutional Avenue into Pakistani tahrir square.

  

 He certainly demonstrated one thing that he has the capacity to gather mammoth crowds.  Two factors in my opinion helped him in this task, the influence of political Islam in our society and the extreme frustration that the people have towards the present regime.

With more focus on the few emotional clauses, Qadri’s demands seem very inconsistent with the provisions of the constitution.  As the document which he urges to be upheld in its spirit and totality, unfortunately didn't have any provisions for a caretaker government to make decisions beyond running of routine affairs and the holding of elections.

Similarly an individual cannot arrogate to himself the right of representing people by merely gathering them together under the constitution. He or she has to be first elected by the people before he/she gets the constitutional prerogative of representing them.

Above all, our constitution does not prescribe any role for our army or judiciary in holding elections under a caretaker government.