What if political and social decadence reaches our doors and we find our feet taking their last steps towards any real moral, social, or political elevation?
Look at the lines of a female student from the University of the Punjab at a recent scholarship distribution programme:
“My father, a retired teacher, didn’t have much money, but he had a generous heart and even greater dreams: to see his daughters educated and empowered. Honourable Chief Minister, thank you for giving me the wings to fly. Without the Honhaar Scholarship, completing my degree would have remained just a dream.”
Just imagine – she is speaking on behalf of the entire student community, expressing what students truly feel about such charity schemes. States are considered responsible for providing good health and education to their citizens. If we are living in a state with a political reality, then why should we accept that young people from our civil society, with 16 years of education, are so deprived in political understanding that they come, receive charity schemes, and worse, express gratitude to specific oligarchs (whether Maryam, Usman, or Zardari) instead of struggling for their basic civil and human rights—and the constitutional guarantees of quality education and health that should be provided without needing to thank anyone? We are not living under a kingship where we should be grateful every time to someone. We are living in a country with a constitution and a civil structure.
She is a graduate of this society, but how easily she is being politically exploited and used for political gain is miserable. Our students are incredibly vulnerable to political forces. At least in the context of Pakistan, where democracy has always remained questionable, it is particularly demeaning for a graduate to be so easily used—for their energy, voice, or presence—for someone’s political benefit. Freedom of opinion is another matter, and inherently, everyone feels respected in its exercise, but this case—and the case of the girls whose videos were uploaded to Punjab University’s official pages during the recent so-called hostel cleanup operation—are both disturbing.
I personally know how videos were made during the hostel cleanup operation: wardens called the girls they were familiar with, made them memorise a script with phrases like “Sir, your vision” and “Sir, your initiative”, and then uploaded the videos—as if we’re not in a university but a propaganda state. This political manipulation of girls by wardens, similar to what happened with the student quoted above, deeply damages the political integrity of contemporary students. I’m stunned they didn’t even question it.
Through the strokes of time, we as a society are once again drawn into a new social stratification—a stratification where the rationale of culture is distressed. Just look at the mass media: the content is hollow. The main means of mass communication—broadcasting, publishing, and the internet—are more unreliable and irrelevant than ever. And journalism itself has been reduced to footpath-level antics in Lahore and Karachi, where reporters chase prostitutes with cameras and microphones, as if this is the most urgent issue in a society where everyone is a rented person with rented identities.
The same goes for films, dramas, and theatres. Who doesn’t know the uneducated and uncultivated theatres of Lahore? Short films and social media acting have become the new cinema of our world, which already operates far below the average intellectual standard. The level of daily vlogging is a new mess of our time, now serving as the working model of a large stratum of our population. Music—once elevated by the likes of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Noor Jehan, Mehdi Hassan, Abida Parveen, and Reshma—has now reached its Stone Age, with dummies like Chahat Fateh gaining ground as celebrated figures. From consumerism to the massive control of market forces—even in determining our sexual relationships—there are numerous disturbing case studies. The concerns are so grave that it is depressing even to talk or write about them.
These are not isolated cases; we are witnessing continuous waves of collective downfall caused by the rapid transformation of social and cultural norms and by the undeniable gap between solid foundations and the current socio-cultural landscape.
We are living in a society where art, literature, and all sources of earnest human development have become irrelevant. Integrity is absent. We are living without any profound sense of fulfilment. We know that with the advent of a high-tech world, there is a shattering and cracking of all the moral and intellectual foundations built over the last hundred years. The problems are enormous. But despite all this, we cannot afford to accept these lows as the new normal. We have no option but to either rediscover the truth from the debris of modernity and the new world or to construct new truths. Until then, arts and literature must continue to prevail in our minds, and we must look forward to cultivating the kind of mental energy that can elevate us through the wisdom of the self.
Welcome to Pakistan