Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the grand social experiment — Pakistan in the year 2025. Imagine this as a huge petri dish, where each ingredient is rich in flavour; some may be undercooked while others are overcooked. This clutter is a mix of resilience, chaos and a dash of absolute absurdity.
And somewhere in between all those elements live the citizens, each tested for their endurance on a regular basis. This giant bubble of dirty politics, power cuts, inflation and culture — does it make it easier to survive or difficult to exist?
First up, let’s break down the dish ingredient by ingredient. Starting up from embracing the lifestyle, as we all know, is a complete blackout. The electricity here stays like a guest that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Load shedding has, over time, evolved into a national technique used for meditation. A light push into eternal darkness is no longer terrifying but rather a moment for self-reflection until it is interrupted by the low hum of your neighbour’s generator and the very nerve-wracking buzz of the mosquitoes.
Next up is to fix your diet. We are adding this ingredient, unfortunately, by force and not by choice. In a place where vegetables are considered a luxury and minimalism is trendy, some people are abandoned on the side of the streets because they can’t afford the basic cost of living, while others spend thousands on overpriced coffee at the cafe right across the street. Who needs a three-course meal when a single samosa can now cost as much as a tank of petrol? Yes, you guessed it, inflation. And then, to make matters worse or better, we add a pinch of freelancing fever with the traditional jobs being scarce. Every person around you now is a digital consultant, an AI genius, or maybe very good at crypto. In this dish, Wi-Fi is sold as currency, Canva as the capital, and anyone who has a laptop and speedy-running internet is now a proud entrepreneur or a startup founder.
Then, of course, the actual experiment begins, revealing a complete circus of politics. Now imagine yourself sitting in a big amphitheatre, watching the same show like a broken record: promises, protests and then also the same dialogues and the same theatrics. Here, the wise citizen becomes desensitised to these manifestos while sipping on their daily morning chai, which is another interesting phenomenon in this society.
Interesting phenomenon in this society, accepting that politics here is less democracy and more like a drama full of cliffhangers but no final season.
The kind of history that this country has had, people used to go to wars, but now our main battlefield is just another argument that is, by the way, completely unnecessary and a waste of time on Twitter.
According to psychology, when you go through immense grief, your reactions get completely opposite to what is expected. The people of our country are facing a similar dilemma amidst the chaos around us, choosing to use our iconic sense of humour rather than simply worrying about the situation. What we do is use our ever-so iconic sense of humour. Memes here often
circulate faster than politics does, and ‘cancel culture’ has replaced family dinners as a prime source of national bonding. And to thrive here, keep your opinions vague. Cricket commentary is safer than nuclear codes, and memes are sharp enough to survive the next trending hashtag.
Yet in all this chaos, there is an odd beauty. A mix of patriotism, but also people just being entirely immune towards whatever is going on around us, and they still find a way to be happy. We turn graces into comedy. We invent new things every single day. There’s a concert and a rally going on at the same time. We joke about our problems but also hustle and use these shortcomings and uncertainty to show our resilience. Knee-deep in debt, crumbling economy, puppet rulers, and yet we have mastered this experiment one blackout, one overpriced tomato and one sarcastic tweet at a time. This, my dear citizens, is 79 years of excellence in our field, and our petri dish may not always be sterile, but it is for sure never dull.
Such a nice article