Pakistan: A paradise not lost

August 15, 2024

ISLAMABAD – The people in power and the citizenry en masse must come forward to restore the depleting confidence of the younger generation in their ability to chart the future course of the system along the right lines.

THE dichotomy often strikes with a jolting revelation that the 77-year journey of Pakistan mainly signifies the destiny of an adrift nation marching in the false direction from the word go.

Over and above a dichotomy paradox, the collective wrong turn thus far culminating in the wrong side of history is dotted with a blood-ridden migration, an unforgivable delay in constitution-making, the abrogation of an already lately promulgated Constitution by the use of force, together with the breakup of the hard-won country merely after 24 years of its inception.

However, as things stand at present, the unfinished task of nation-building is winding up to the extent that the well-cherished concept of ideology-driven nationhood, laced with the academic sense of togetherness, is losing steam at a breakneck pace. Thanks to the country’s increasingly deteriorating human development indicators, the citizenry is now thinking of moving in droves from the promised land to far-flung regions across the globe with a ghost of a chance to make a new beginning in uncharted territories.

Pursuing enviable means of subsistence beyond national borders, the ubiquitous mindset of fellow citizens is heavily tainted with a rapidly flourishing desire to permanently settle in every nook and cranny of the world other than their own homeland. This prevailing perspective of desertion can be compared to the spectacle of mass animal migration on earth, but only on a seasonal basis. Most interestingly, the beasts tend to be