Wednesday, October 14, 2009

What is behind the ‘Ghairat’ Debate? - A Rejoinder

Today I happened to read an article with the above mentioned title in The NEWS, by a businessman based in Toronto named Sadiq Saleem. It was the most incoherent article I ever read in this newspaper since I started reading this newspaper a decade ago. I was unable to understand what the author wanted to convey. His line of argument can be broken like this.
1. Aid brings economic growth [.. economies of nations grow through aids ..]
2. Pakistan gets aid but does not use it properly. [.. but instead of completing the cycle and moving towards the large scale investment ..]
3. Pakistan gets military and economic strength based on aids. [.. we got massive amounts of aid enabling us to build huge airports, secure F-16s ..]
4. Kerry-Lugar aid will bring more prosperity. [With the Kerry-Lugar aid money we will be bale[able] to invest more ..]
5. Kerry-Lugar aid can be eaten but ‘Ghairat’ can not be. [The nation needs to know that it cannot eat ‘ghairat’ ..]
All the above arguments are highly flawed and debatable, but even if they are accepted upfront, they demonstrate a stark incoherence, which the author seems to confound willingly or otherwise. On one hand the author accuses our past governments to plunder the aid, while in the same breath he glorifies them with the economic and military development. How can Kerry-Lugar aid bring prosperity or fill the poor’s stomach when as the writer puts it that "but instead of completing the cycle and moving towards the large scale investment and productivity stage our ‘Ghairat’ makes us abandon and restarts [restart] the cycle periodically."
In his famous novel '1984', George Orwell writes:
"By 2050 earlier,probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton,Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’"
To let the readers understand what does the above excerpt really mean we need to define a couple of terms.Oldspeak are the words in their actual meanings while Newspeak is their new meanings as suitable to the benefit of the totalitarian fascist government of Oceania [the country in the novel]. The government had three slogans which would be hammered on the minds of the populace every now and then:
1. WAR IS PEACE
2. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
3. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
These slogans are self evident, but what I am shocked at is, here in this real world we have real person chanting one of the slogans explicitly i.e. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, while implying the other two. And it gets published in an elite newspaper like The NEWS. It is not 'GHAIRAT' my friend, its FREEDOM, that is at stake. What the heck are we going to do with the AID, when our very soul is fettered into perpetual slavery. You are living in a continent where the words slavery and freedom has lost its meanings, you can not envision the trials and tribulations of slavery and the serenity and tranquility of freedom. You got to visit Kashmir, the Indian occupied and the 'Pakistani occupied' to contrast the two feelings. You need to see the documentaries about the Gujarat Massacre to look into the bottomless pit of slavery, You got to read about the 1947 partition to get a glimpse of realities of Freedom and Slavery. You got to read the history of slavery, how it evolved from slavery in shackles to slavery in economic bondages. You got to read 'Surkh Feeta' by Qudrat Ullah Shahaab, 1984 by George Orwell, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, Pirates and Emperors by Noam Chomsky, to know WHAT IS AT RISK.

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