0 reactions
Independence Day hate posts are not surprising
I was initially very surprised to see all these posts hating on other people for celebrating Independence Day, but thinking a little deeper about it, it’s not all that surprising. Of course this is all just my opinion, but please bear with me as I try to explain. I think the crux of it is that the real issue is we don’t really have a strong identity as Pakistanis.
Let me preface this by saying that we do have a long cultural history, perhaps one of the longest of any people, but history does not automatically turn into identity. After partition, we were so occupied with separating ourselves from the others that we ended up completely erasing our own identity. Most people in this country either don’t know or don’t care about anything that happened before 1947 . No wonder we have such a weak sense of identity when our history starts at the partition.
Let me also preface that this is not some indirect way of bashing on Islam because I don’t think this has anything to do with the religion, but the worst offenders of perpetuating this erasure in my opinion is the misguided religious class who really wants to pretend that we’re Arabs. Of course Islam is as much a part of our history as anything else, and we are a big part of Islam’s history, but our people have existed since a long time before Islam.
The fact that we completely threw away a language as old as Sanskrit just because it wasn’t “Islamic” enough is a good example of the insanity of this. Urdu is a beautiful language, but it’s not the language of our people no matter how much we want to pretend that it is. You can find the same pattern in everything else, be it our clothing or the festivals we celebrate. Just think about it, the Indus civilization was predominantly in what is now Pakistan, and yet our neighbours have inherited the name India?
So it is not surprising to me that the newer generations who are completely brainwashed into thinking that our history started in 1947 don’t feel like we have much to celebrate on August 14. For them, this day marks the beginning of this elite takeover of our land and our culture that is slowly squeezing every ounce of life out of them. Of course you have no reason to celebrate when it marks the beginning of the slow decline that lead us here.
I get it, things are in the gutter right now and it doesn’t feel like this independence meant anything, but at least we have our own country. We got a horrible start, and I’m afraid we might not have even seen the worst of it before things get better, but this is not as bad as being a nation colonized by outsiders. Horrible and shitty as these people ruling us might be, they’re at least one of us.
By no means is this a call to accept the way things are, but I think a strong identity will go a long way towards pushing us as a nation to claim our own country. You can only build that identity when you embrace our history and who we are, otherwise we’re just a bunch of people who built their whole identity around a land partition that was for the most part grounded in politics.
P.S. I’m not anti-partition, but I do believe that it was politically motivated to secure the rights of Muslims, not to forget the past and create a new identity.
#local #current_events
source
I was initially very surprised to see all these posts hating on other people for celebrating Independence Day, but thinking a little deeper about it, it’s not all that surprising. Of course this is all just my opinion, but please bear with me as I try to explain. I think the crux of it is that the real issue is we don’t really have a strong identity as Pakistanis.
Let me preface this by saying that we do have a long cultural history, perhaps one of the longest of any people, but history does not automatically turn into identity. After partition, we were so occupied with separating ourselves from the others that we ended up completely erasing our own identity. Most people in this country either don’t know or don’t care about anything that happened before 1947 . No wonder we have such a weak sense of identity when our history starts at the partition.
Let me also preface that this is not some indirect way of bashing on Islam because I don’t think this has anything to do with the religion, but the worst offenders of perpetuating this erasure in my opinion is the misguided religious class who really wants to pretend that we’re Arabs. Of course Islam is as much a part of our history as anything else, and we are a big part of Islam’s history, but our people have existed since a long time before Islam.
The fact that we completely threw away a language as old as Sanskrit just because it wasn’t “Islamic” enough is a good example of the insanity of this. Urdu is a beautiful language, but it’s not the language of our people no matter how much we want to pretend that it is. You can find the same pattern in everything else, be it our clothing or the festivals we celebrate. Just think about it, the Indus civilization was predominantly in what is now Pakistan, and yet our neighbours have inherited the name India?
So it is not surprising to me that the newer generations who are completely brainwashed into thinking that our history started in 1947 don’t feel like we have much to celebrate on August 14. For them, this day marks the beginning of this elite takeover of our land and our culture that is slowly squeezing every ounce of life out of them. Of course you have no reason to celebrate when it marks the beginning of the slow decline that lead us here.
I get it, things are in the gutter right now and it doesn’t feel like this independence meant anything, but at least we have our own country. We got a horrible start, and I’m afraid we might not have even seen the worst of it before things get better, but this is not as bad as being a nation colonized by outsiders. Horrible and shitty as these people ruling us might be, they’re at least one of us.
By no means is this a call to accept the way things are, but I think a strong identity will go a long way towards pushing us as a nation to claim our own country. You can only build that identity when you embrace our history and who we are, otherwise we’re just a bunch of people who built their whole identity around a land partition that was for the most part grounded in politics.
P.S. I’m not anti-partition, but I do believe that it was politically motivated to secure the rights of Muslims, not to forget the past and create a new identity.
#local #current_events
source
| 4,000 mlx | |
| 5 | |
| 0 |