IN a fair world, Donald Trump should have won not only the Nobel Peace Prize, for ending seven wars, but also the one for literature for his brilliant tweets on Truth Social. But once again the Nobel Committee played politics and awarded the prizes to complete unknowns, at least to us here who know very little.

Shortly after, I read a lament that if the prize for literature was to be awarded to an unknown why couldn’t he/ she be from Pakistan which is full of known unknowns. Surprisingly, the account attributed the omission to the decline of reading which was never much to write of anyway. True, the print run of serious books is 500, in a country of 250 million, but it was not more than 1,000 at the best of times.

If at all one were concerned about this (and who is?) one could better direct attention to the language policy that insists on English as the medium of instruction and considers it a superior language to any other. As a result, the washerman’s dog is stranded, so to say, between the home and the laundry. People rarely get good enough in English and lose whatever they knew of their own language to write anything decent, let alone creative.

I am sure there must be excellent literature in local languages but there is no one with near-native competence in two languages to achieve any kind of decent translations. Otherwise, there is no reason why Faiz should not have been a serious candidate in his time. As it is, he is barely known outside the Urdu-speaking world.

Treating all languages with respect matters. This can be seen in India from where two novels, in Hindi and in Kannada, have won global recognition through translation and awarded the International Booker Prize within the last five years. By and large, individuals reach this kind of excellence by writing in their native languages as was the case for Tagore who is the only winner of the Nobel Literature Prize from South Asia. Such was also the case for Orhan Pamuk and Han Kang. Even Iceland, with a population of less than half a million, uses Icelandic for higher education and has claimed in 1955 a Nobel Literature Prize for fiction in that language.

Individual brilliance can’t make up for uninspired leadership.

Let me not even get started on Nobel prizes for science. It was bemusing to hear our academic leading lights opine that the way to discover one was to search widely and find the diamond in the rough. Nowhere in the world is excellence nurtured in this manner. We should reflect rather that just the Government College Lahore of the British era produced two Nobel Laureates. So what has happened to the institution once liberated from the clutches of the notorious colonialists?

To look at the deleterious impact of alien languages from another dimension, consider the fact that cricketers of world renown emerge from Burewala, Landi Kotal and other such places but never any physicist or chemist or biologist. Why? Because cricket talent escapes the stifling constraint of miseducation.

But, as we should know, no amount of individual brilliance can make up for uninspired leadership. And, it is here that the education system comes back to cripple. I was struck by the comment of one of our many revolving foreign coaches that the Pakistani team was full of talent and all they had to do was to learn to think on their feet. Right on the mark but alas if it were that simple. A school education designed to crush thinking cannot produce captains who can think on their feet. Just looking at Pakistani captains gives away the truth that in every situation they are trying to recall what the coach told them before the match. Teaching in an alien language is an invitation to rote learning.

The good thing about cricket, or any sport, is that one has to deal with objective facts and set aside myths and delusions of greatness. The recent performances of the men’s and especially the women’s teams against India show the huge gap that has opened up. If only we could send in the Chinese in green uniforms we might have something to celebrate if, that is, we wish to continue to deceive ourselves.

India and Pakistan are similar in many ways, petty and petulant behaviour sadly being one of them. In others, however, the differences have become stark, the performance of women being one of them. From no representation at all at the time of their first Asian Games, they won 42 (out of a total of 107) medals at the latest ones in 2022. The Pakistan tally was three of which none was a gold. Not surprising given that women who used to cycle to college in the 1960s are now preferably restrained from head to toe.

In any case, Trump need not worry. Our strategic geniuses have started another war — so much for strategic depth — and will no doubt nominate the Great Leader again next year.

The writer is the author of Pakistan: Clash of Ideas and Thinking with Ghalib.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2025