It takes a human being no less than Faiz to see hope against hope at a time when distress stalks the land; when darkness envelopes an entire nation; when eyes long to see light at the end of the tunnel; when despondency reigns supreme; when hearts are filled with fear and minds with despair.

Murder, mayhem, chaos, misery and disarray have found a home in Pakistan. Those who have taken turns in happily presiding over such utter suffering for so long are the ones responsible for it all; our tragedy is that we keep looking up to the same bunch of heartless souls for a redress. But Faiz insists that hope we must, for it is here that we’ll live and die, as if it were ordained in the book of destiny.

Revolution does not become us, and it shan’t happen amongst a people who are so prone to denying reality; reality, as the rest of the world sees it. Even if all the conspiracy theories and misgivings that many Pakistanis hold to be true regarding American and Indian designs on us, then we, too, must have done something terribly wrong to ourselves for the world to have ganged up on us.

Our failure to foresee and forestall the tragedies that keep hitting us must also be blamed on our intellectual inadequacies to take stock of the emerging realities around us in a constantly changing and evolving world that is not married to a stagnant ideology.

All this while, we have been perhaps too busy cooking up an ideology that we believed would be the panacea to all our problems, without our having to put in the hard work others have done to better their lot. In the process, we let our people stay ignorant, and feed them a diet of lies and deceit. We told them that if we had the bomb nobody would as much as dare look us in the eye let alone have bad designs on us.

We thought if we could find and secure a strategic depth in Afghanistan, we would be a very strong nation and could then concentrate on challenging India to either accede to our demands or be ready to face the music. We believed the entire Muslim Ummah would readily come to our succour, assuming it was at our beck and call, because with the bomb in hand we were the natural leaders of the Muslim world. We believed that a strong and a well-equipped military would be our guarantee of security against any foreign aggression.

While we nurtured such notions and kept reinforcing them with the resources that should have gone into equipping our people to be worthy and able global citizens, with modern knowledge and skills for landing gainful employment, the world around us kept moving forward at its own pace, undeterred by our self-obsession and an inflated ego which did not even have two legs to stand on. Now that the time has come for this immense ego to be put to test, we don’t even know what has hit us and where the next surprise may be coming from. An orchestrated, hollow state ideology of self-aggrandisement has consumed us to the point where little professionalism or even a sense of reality remains.

This is the state of affairs in which the army chief says, with much pride, that we’d rather be sovereign than prosperous, without even considering that we are neither. When Hillary Clinton and General Mike Mullen came to Islamabad, it was they who informed the Pakistani and the American people what they had discussed with our president, the prime minister and the army chief. There was not a word of public briefing given by any of our leaders in these critical times as to what had transpired between themselves and the visiting Americans. Such is the disdain the rulers reserve for the people of Pakistan.

WikiLeaks’ Pakistan Papers are now an open secret, and they reveal the way we beg others to conduct our affairs for us, even amongst ourselves, and give us more money in foreign aid for allowing them the honour of doing so. A sitting judge in the highest court had questioned the government rather unwittingly only last year that if parliament declared secularism to be the basis of state laws by a two-thirds majority, would it expect the judges to accept that? No brownie points for guessing the right answer.

Then, belatedly, briefing the media after the terrorist attack on the PNS Mehran naval base in Karachi, the navy chief said that the security of the base was the responsibility of the air force, with which the navy shared the premises, and not his people’s. As for the politicians, the least said the better.

We truly need Faiz back amongst us to tell us where to look for hope now; there’s not even hope of seeing another Faiz emerging.

—The writer is an editor with Dawn.