As 14th
August approaches today, most of the country is already dancing green and tall
buildings are bedazzling people with decked lights wrapped beautifully around
them. It is fortunately this time of the year again when green flags grace
rooftops and cars, and stereo systems explode with national songs in fervent
exuberance. Patriotism gushes thick like blood through our vessels and burns us
with patriotic zeal. What puzzles me though is, why do we we keep the patriot inside
us in hibernation all year round only to revive it up on August the 14th? Why is it that are we not
‘Proud Pakistanis’ during January, March or April?
This
one-month patriotism is something that I could never manage to comprehend and
it still strikes me as nothing short of hypocrisy . An average Pakistani man
doing rounds of the visa office all year round, striving hard to get the green
signal to land in the USA, turns his “Sab se pehlay Pakistan” mode on, once it
is August. A woman proudly seeking to abstain from buying Pakistani products,
simply because it would be below her dignity to purchase anything less than
Loreal or Armani, is seen changing her facebook display picture to the green
Pakistani flag and dedicating her day’s status in the love of the country.
Putting up
display pictures or writing lengthy patriotic statuses showcasing your love for
the country on Independence Day, might earn you a hundred ‘likes’ or
comments or retweets but they in no way mean that you are lavishing on
Pakistan the love that it deserves.
Any such
claim must come with owning the country as yours. It doesn’t only mean that you acknowledge the fact of being a
Pakistani with pride, it also demands you to own everything about it- good or
bad.
This means
even if you remotely claim to be in love with it, own its people, own its
products and with it, each and everything with the label ‘Made in Pakistan’ on
it. Respect the people who are serving at various capacities, no matter how
trivial you take their positions to be. Even a plumber has a role in nation
building in how he fixes drainage pipes for the convenience and cleanliness of others . Respect the brave
soldiers vigilantly guarding our borders and do not disregard them on any slight
slip they might make. If it were not them, we would not be sleeping sound as we
do today. Not just this, respect the players who bring laurels for our homeland
rather than passing derogatory statements on them when they even slightly turn
you down.
Moreover,
we are blessed with perhaps one of the richest culture, ever so diverse and
dynamic. Celebrate it! It is our culture that tells the world about our
identity and who we are. Wear shalwar kameez with pride, and don’t discard it
for jeans and t-shirts. Own Urdu as your national language and speak it with
pride rather than jabbering a farrago of half-learnt English. In short, take
pride in all that’s yours.
To accept
all as ours, must come with an acknowledgment that we can’t separate ourselves
from that which looks bad around us. If we blame our politicians to be buried
under heaps of corruption, it only reflects something about us. It’s not an
alien phenomenon, it’s something we all are embroiled in, at different levels
as we speak. Therefore,we don’t require a sincere government or a Tsunami for
things to change for that matter. We can do away corruption once we root it out
from within and things would actualize the same way outside.
And perhaps
this is the panacea to all our whining about how our country is going down the
precipice and how things just don’t show bright around us. All that is dark
outside is because we have disowned the very country that defines us. How would
things ever change if we pretend to be
outsiders and keep cursing the evils only we have sown.
The day
we’d dare to change this, own what’s good and bad, and take responsibility to
make things better, that day we’ll entitle ourselves to blow trumpets of
patriotism and nationalism on Pakistan day, 14th August.
