Age of self-loathing

Through successive periods of extreme frustration in recent decades, Pakistanis were told that it was alright for them to experience depression – so long as they stopped falling into the pit of self-pity.

Unfortunately, the voices of sanity that defined the difference between disappointment and utter resignation to ‘fate’ have since faded away. Today it takes a lot of effort for an average soul in the land of the pure to rediscover the spark that is essential to living.

It has always been easy for people to fall victim to the urge of complaining about their own inadequacies. In common spaces, the tendency to predict self-annihilation has been a loud feature of commentaries on social forums, for example in newspapers.

The self-flogging chorus has become all the more inescapable in the presence of newer inventions that cannot help but perpetuate old human fears. There is simply no running away from the boulders of ‘truth’ placed in our face by the legions who are fully within their rights to express the thoughts they find disturbing.

Darkness is easily spread, whereas optimism comes in small quantities. It is so upsetting to note that even our sense of humour, that saw us through so many of our dark phases dominated by all kinds of antagonists – from dictators to half-cooked democratic saviours to terrorists to myopic policymakers – can now desert us in moments where we direly require reprieve.

Or it is so deeply buried under our collective pain that it takes so long to find and furnish for the sake of survival? The die is cast strong and wide and hence it is not remarkable at all how so many amongst us were naturally drawn to comparing our own little airy mission to rescue a bunch of stranded students and their teacher with a neighbourhood rocket that had just landed on the moon.

The mourning was vociferous, until it became unbearably heart-wrenching in tone and breadth. Once again the same old refrain about how we were so much ahead of India was repeated in toto – an exercise that like all discussions about our scientific journey had to inevitably featured poor old Dr Abdus Salam.

To some, it might have offered a strain to build upon. For instance, the strand about how unrepresentative non-civilian rule has played havoc with the country’s priorities could well have been worth pursuing – just as it is always advisable to try and push the frontiers of debate about the mindset forwarding a certain kind of security – state ideology. But then so intense appeared to be this self-loathing that it became literally difficult to breathe.

So thick was the sense of despondency, aided by all these references to all that had gone wrong in the making of this country, its very creation, that it took the jokes so much more time to have an effect on the shocked audience.

The witty one-liners that prevent proceedings from getting too heavy for the ‘perennially troubled’ Pakistanis had to be initially dug up with effort, until it became too overpowering for those busy merrily writing their own hurried obituary to suppress the counterpunch aiming to lighten up the gloom.

The eventual jokes that so typically summed up India’s much-sought and anticipated ascent to the moon aptly captured both the significance of this rise as well as ‘our own’ small frustrations for lagging behind.

There were some brusque and unprintable Punjabi lines that appear to have particularly caught the fancy of people looking for some urgent relief after a severe round of unhindered indulgence in self-pity. Among the stuff that seemed more shareable at public forums, the joke where a maulvi sahab was shown to be commenting about the impossibility of the Indians arriving on the moon. His logic: in these early days of the lunar month, the moon had just too thin an existence to afford anyone a landing opportunity.

I am sure this kind of escapism, if it is not impossible, will be deemed by many as lame in the face of the enormity of our permanent state of underdevelopment on the yardstick countries are measured on. This precisely is the motive for shunning the acute seriousness that surrounds and reinforces the sense of resignation. Cannot go on forever beating our chests in anguish.

The writer is a senior journalist.