speech on we are crowd, not a nation of 3'5 min
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Explanation:
This moment of adversity has proved to the hilt that we are a crowd, yet far from being a nation. Even to ward off the evil effects of coronavirus, we prefer not to agree on a consensual mechanism; there are cacophonies galore and very few voices articulating sanity or sense of any sort.
People having a claim to being called a civilisation, community or a nation, have a ring of unanimity in their response to adversity. Empathy, not point-scoring or petty politics acquires salience. The feeling emanating from a sense of tragedy has a gluing effect but a precondition for such a feeling to pullulate is a mutuality of empathy that is markedly lacking among us.
Even though I have been a full-throated advocate for individual rights and have always held that their preservation holds the key to civilised existence, I also realize that in times of national or trans-national crises opposition for the sake of opposition marks a people as a crowd incapable of collective vision. They are no more than incongruently varied souls and characters who listen only to the command of their inflated egos.
Countries where people are so totally deficient in concord fail to come up with an appropriate response to challenging situations. One may argue that such asininity and the false sense of self-importance widely prevalent among our commentators (I wouldn’t call them intellectuals as not many of them qualify as one) are responsible for the ongoing fracas.
Remember the response of our people when our northern areas were hit by a severe earthquake in 2005? We clearly acted like a nation. Sadly, that spirit seems to have been lost. So far, nobody has come forward with a significant donation. The affluent among us could have emulated Ambani and Azim Ji Premi Ji, the Indian business tycoons who have given huge amounts in charity. They have done that despite the Modi government having messed things up in a big way. Why is our response in Pakistan so apathetic and polarized while the whole country is in a state of distress? What can one call this: social evolution in reverse? The phenomenon calls for an in-depth analysis.
I am somehow reminded of the iconic Abdul Sattar Edhi. As it happens in post-colonial states and societies like Pakistan, great people perform amazing feats but ironically, they don’t leave behind a legacy. Their successors are often not even a pale shadow of them. That, indeed, makes it a doomsday scenario. Hope, unluckily, has gone extinct.