Four years here

Milan Kundera once said that he is a hedonist trapped in an intensely political world. Perhaps that is true for any artist, writer or aesthete. Humanity to a large extent feels the same. We seek pleasure and abhor pain. However, there are artists and writers who believe in expanding their hedonism. They are happy and gratified when people around them are happy and gratified.
I fall among those who suffer from this expansionist form of hedonism. But the intensely political world that has trapped us is run by a minority – the dominant social classes as well as institutions of the powerful elites. They nurture bigots and sadists of different hues and colours who in turn come to their aid in keeping the world poor and belligerent.
Although schooled in other disciplines, my primary interest is literature and art. I used to contribute at leisure which I still sometimes do. But exactly four years ago on this day of the week and in this very space I took to writing weekly. The reason was to comment, analyse and dent the intensely political world around. This is the world in which my generation is not only trapped since birth but increasingly squashed by each passing day.
I was born under the first martial rule, was sent to kindergarten under the second, finished high school under the third, and my prime young age was vanquished by the fourth. The first overwhelming experience of my generation was seeing the country disintegrate after the bloodshed in East Pakistan and war with India.
Our first memories are the plight of the POWs and those claiming Pakistani citizenship languishing in camps in Bangladesh. Then we saw some people excommunicated from the folds of our faith. We saw the first elected prime minister hanged. In the ninth grade, we were told that even being Muslim is not enough. We had to choose between a Sunni and a Shia Islamiat course. We witnessed laws discriminating against women and religious minorities promulgated. We saw ourselves becoming the frontline state in the cold war between the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union in our neighbouring Afghanistan.
We saw the MRD movement, particularly in Sindh, crushed. We saw the country flooded with small arms and heroine addicts. Balochistan burnt twice and is still burning. There was another war with India in Kargil. Karachi witnessed worst violence and bloodletting.
The short-sighted external policies pursued and the divisive internal politics cultivated by our undemocratic civil and military establishment, in the name of some twisted national interest, result in terrorist outfits having a field day now. We see tolerance for any difference, religious, sectarian, ethnic or tribal, dwindling fast in the length and breadth of Pakistan.
Today, China wants us to help curb militancy in Xinjiang. India wants us to put a squeeze on organisations exporting militancy. Iran wants us to help fight Jandullah. Afghanistan begs us to help bring peace there by not choosing to support the militants. The US wants us to fall in line because our economic under-development has made us dependent on international powers and financial institutions.
Within the country, the killing fields in Quetta, Karachi, Gilgit-Baltistan, Fata and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are kept heated by ethnic, religious and sectarian hate brooding on narrow vested interest. There is irreparable loss of human lives in each conflict. A third of the population in the country is malnourished and another third finds it a privilege to have two square meals a day.
But who can stop us from being hedonist-turned-dyed-in-the-wool-optimists. So we speak and we write. For all unuttered truths become poisonous.

The writer is an Islamabad-based poet and author.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail. com