Whenever I think of Europe, I see the ancient Greeks, the Roman empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, Industrialization, and finally, the World Wars leading to the world we have today. I can even picture how each of these different eras looked; I can trace things as back as 10,000 BC.
But, what do I see when I think of Pakistan? Just the partition and it’s aftermath. Questions like what’s a Punjabi, a Sindhi, a Baluchi, are never even thought. Who our ancestors were? What was our history? How many of us know that India is named India because of the Indus River. This Indus River and other rivers were the birth places of the earliest known civilization which existed here which can be merited with ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia.
We do not even visit our national sites, Chaburji lays waste on the round-about and the Lahore Fort is downright neglected. We do not even care that in old Lahore, buildings used to look so beautiful, unique, and different from other parts of the world. We copy Western designs of housing however, we could also have focused on updating our on culture to be at par with that of the West, where it is celebrated rather than shunned. The message here is that there is nothing wrong with implementing some parts of a foreign culture, but it’s despicable to downright disown your own heritage.
Not only are we as a nation not honest about our own history, we never even discuss Quaid-e-Azam or the fact that he married a Zoroastrian because it hurts our “religious identity”. We do not discuss how we got nuclear weapons by stealing technology from Europe. Look, all nations make mistakes, but not talking about your mistakes or attempting to correct them is where we go wrong.
This attitude leads to a very serious problem, as we do not know our past properly; we end up making wrong decisions as wrong lessons are have been taught.
‘So what’s the solution?’, you may ask.
First, we need to rewrite our textbooks without government interference, the course making body should be an open-sourced, independent institution free from political meddling. Then we need to preserve our historical sites and invest money on anthropology ,archaeology and on historians. And as a society, we need to be more tolerant to be able to consume hard realities which we cower away from.
What happens when you disown your history? Over time, the bad decisions that are made on faulty information will start piling up, resulting in a considerable number of new problems. And that is exactly what has been happening up to this point in our history as a nation.
While there has been a new, positive trend that gives hope that there will be change, there is still a long way to go for our young nation, and obscuring realities will only hamper its progress.
