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WHATEVER one’s opinion about the revelries that take place around the globe to usher in each New Year, there is no doubt that these have by now reached spectacular proportions.
Criticise all you like the unashamed commercialisation, the excess, the waste; nevertheless, you have to admit, the scale is impressive.
There’s no way of knowing who enjoyed themselves the most out of the millions and millions of people celebrating last week. But the city that won the party games was Dubai, which shattered the record for the largest New Year’s Eve pyrotechnic display by sending over half a million fireworks up in smoke — and that too in under 10 minutes. On that fresh first day of the fresh year, when much of the rest of the world must blearily have been thinking of all that went down the night before, we in Pakistan also put in a serious bid for a record of sorts. But like much else here, it was far from what would be wished for: the record for the most depressing, distressing and worrying start to the coming 364 days.
A banned militant outfit, the Jaish al Islam, orchestrated a suicide attack near Quetta, ramming an explosives-laden vehicle into a bus carrying 45 Shia pilgrims that were on their way home from Iran. While the bus burned, gunmen bombarded the scene with bullets. It was a miracle that the number of deaths was as low as it was. Still, over 30 men, women and children were injured, all present scarred for life.
But the people of Pakistan have had to learn over the years to give short shrift to distress.
The start to 2013 was even more horrifying, after all. Jan 10 will mark a year since the attack, also in Quetta, on Alamdar Road’s primarily Hazara community, that with one blow immediately cut short over 90 lives. There were lines of coffins and faces in unbearable agony. And then, there was nothing.
A few days ago, while discussing these and similar matters, a colleague asked me whether I thought that Pakistanis were as a nation becoming slightly warped as a result of the circumstances in the country. My response was (since this question has been on my mind for some time): “Slightly? Without doubt, and quite possibly to a very high degree.”
Times that are under way must be lived, each new horror dealt with and then filed away as another rears its head to have to contend with.
The big picture becomes clearer in hindsight. When the shadow of Zia loomed large, for example, it took a few brave, more clear-sighted, people amongst the millions to tell us that what was being done to the country would prove in future to be an irreversible slide towards the dark.
Most people then just got on with their lives, hoping that things would readjust. It is in hindsight that it becomes so readily apparent how the mischief sown then led us to where we are now (helped along by others, too).
Will there come a time when we, or future generations, may look back to the decade and a half of this millennium and ponder how circumstances affected the societal mindset?
I hope so, because space to introspect in such a way requires a distance to have developed between the Pakistan of now and of the distant then — in other words, only people in peace would properly be able to examine the effects of a time of very high levels of violence. Or could it be that the effects of these 10 or 15 years are in fact society-changing, so that no one will be examining the psyche because they will be the products of that altered psyche?
Today, there are a great many people who remember a country where schools did not have to send out ‘no weapons on the premises’ circulars, where the line between the haves and the have-nots was not writ in stone, where blood was not wasted so wantonly and where the possibility that one might not be able to return home at the end of the day didn’t cross most people’s minds on a daily basis.
But generations fade, their memories and experiences with them. A child born in the post-‘war on terror’ world, say in 2001, will now be on the cusp of consciousness to unpalatable realities. The youngest to have voted in last year’s election would have been born in 1995. And Pakistan’s age demographics are heavily skewed towards the young.
So what we’re looking at is a predominantly youthful population growing to maturity amongst blood and tears, in circumstances that warp society. The traditional three words at this time of the year … I wish they applied to Pakistan.
The writer is a member of staff.
