When the match was over on early Friday evening, the two captains came together for comments and our Shahid Afridi said with a brave grin: “Honestly speaking, we’re not good enough.” But this could hardly calm the nerves of an emotionally aggrieved nation, when we were unceremoniously knocked out of the WT20 race.
After the Asia Cup debacle, this has certainly been a setback felt deeply at the popular level. Cricket is the most popular game in the country and our team has done gloriously well in the past. We know how spectator sport and nationalism get intertwined and defeat or victory in an international tournament can severely affect the mood of a nation, with possible political implications.
But I am not into cricket as such, though I love to watch the game and am not immune to a show of emotion. Still, I feel that what Shahid Afridi said is meaningful in a larger context. We are not good enough in many respects and since we have been denied the diversion that glory in the game of cricket would provide, we may be prompted to think about it in a sober mood.
For the time being, we have to contend with the cricket blues and how the nation is preoccupied with the aftermath of the Friday elimination from WT20 2016. You know what the experts have been saying on our news channels, verbally hitting their sixes and fours. The affairs of the cricket board are under scrutiny. Are there intimations here about the overall performance of our institutions?
One very instructive angle is the continuing achievements of our women’s team, playing in India. This seems providential because the empowerment of women in Pakistan has become a central issue in setting the ideological sense of direction of the nation. The law on protection of women in Punjab has triggered a confrontation between the clerics and the government.
We have a string of jokes and sarcastic comments on social media about this disparity between the performance of the men’s and the women’s cricket teams. Shahid Afridi’s macho, boom boom image has obviously been tarnished. The confident face of Sana Mir, skipper of the women’s squad, has become familiar. She has been quoted as hoping that the men’s team also gives the fans reasons to smile.
Anyhow, when I said that we are not good enough almost across the board, I was responding to another fiasco of a different kind that I experienced on Friday. I was on the campus of the University of Karachi in the forenoon, speaking to a class in a department that I do not want to identify. The idea is not to be specific but to look at in a general sense. Let us say that it was just an encounter with a normal group of educated youth in Karachi.
For me, it was immensely more painful and inexplicably more depressing than what transpired on the playing field of Mohali later in the day. I confess to being a pessimist in my assessment of the national condition. Because ours is a young country, demographically, the largest public university in the country should ideally be a reservoir of hope.
A visit to its campus could, then, be prescribed for someone like me for therapeutic reasons. Unfortunately, I have known the university for a long time and, like all old men, I am nostalgic about what it used to be many decades ago when I would go there as a young reporter and to meet friends. Things should have changed for the better, considering the attention that has been devoted to education in recent years.
I am sure there must be some bright spots there in the sprawling landscape of gloom. But the overall situation has not improved. There is still no kiosk selling newspapers on a campus that has more than 20,000 regular students. Essentially, it is the standard ambience of a campus that is missing. It is not a place that could be intellectually invigorating. What you read on the faces of the students, mostly girls, is not the joy of being young but the misery of being lost in some kind of a wilderness.
There are, of course, a large number of private universities that should have a more inspiring group of students. I have visited the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) campus in Lahore and it did provide me with some respite from my pessimism. But when I thought about how divisive, socially and intellectually, our education system has been – and LUMS may serve as an emblem of this fragmentation – the relapse was more severe.
One of my reasons for being a pessimist is what I see as a decline in the quality of our human resources. At one level, it is a comment on our schizophrenic approach to education and a kind of exodus of the better educated children of the middle class and the elite. These are matters for a more serious debate on our deprivations. The paucity of social capital can hardly be rectified by the World Bank or other lending institutions.
So, I was on the campus of a major public university on Friday and I can now invite those of my friends who diligently challenge my pessimism to come with me on a guided tour of the place and then we may resume our discussion. While there, I was also mindful of the small percentage of our youth that has access to higher education. There are so many of them out there who have nowhere to go but still have their needs and their aspirations.
I informed the students I interacted with about the battle of ideas that is being fought in India on the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus in New Delhi. Speeches made by its student leader have sometimes competed for media attention, with the pronouncements of the prime minister of the country. But this union is liberal and leaning rather far towards the left. Universally, too, this trend is dominant on campuses.
In our case, the teaching faculty seems more devoted to defending conservative ideas and discouraging students from free thinking – a tribute that naturally belongs to the youth in their search for identity and a purpose in life. There is so much else that incites dark thoughts about the future that awaits our university students.
Arundhati Roy was among those scholars and social activists who visited the JNU campus to support the students’ struggle for freedom of expression. She said: “We’re at the beginning of a battle between those who know how to hate and those who know how to think.”
The writer is a staff member.
Email: ghazi_salahuddinhotmail.com