By Wali Muhammad (Proxemic Consulting – Islamabad) @ ‘SUNDAY PLUS’ – THE NATION
Pushed into uncertainties by the turmoil of independence, 62 years ago, we started our national life with the great survival dream. Dream inspired by the spirit of insecurity and the urge to go on.
All generations between, we nurtured and guarded the dream like perennial wisdom. In the course of time this must have changed its shape and content according to the dictates of contemporary norms, however, the spirit, and the urge essentially remained the same.
The dream is about survival, a decent earning source, sadly from a few designated ones only, a house, a car, and a family, and few more accessories of the sort, nothing more, and nothing less. The need for us to attain these objectives is so deeply woven in the fabric of our society; we have started raising and educating our kids with this single objective in mind. We struggle to exchange a lifetime of efforts with a decent earning source, a house, car, a family, and few other accessories. Before we call it the day we make sure that the mission has been adequately passed on to the next generation.
The panacea of survival taproots in most domains of our life. Take any sphere for instance, government, education, politics, sports and recreation, business, media, industry, agriculture, public affairs, etc; we barely come across a case in point where we have carved a niche of our own. Ordinary quality, barely adequate, if not bad or worse is the few words that generally describe the state of affairs.
Dreaming this dream on and on, the history of our nation’s performance may be measured in few hiccups where individuals were able to flood the barriers. Such names are only few. Mostly we have been missing on producing people specializing in the art of impossible. As a result there are few role models, and few examples of our own to boast against the dead lock.
An ancient Chinese proverb says, “We find only what we look for”. So why do we get shy of harnessing our energies to challenge the impossible and get trapped in the fear of survival instead? Why for most life becomes a personal venture of one standard achievement – survival, and nothing more than that?
The question summons a close enquiry into the nature of our fear and how we inculcate it in the next generation. Unless we come to grips with it we can’t control it. Unless we control it we can’t come out of the clutches of mediocrity and unleash our unquestionable potentials.
The classical Pakistani model we follow in nurturing our kids is “the fear model”. The fear of not being able to earn a decent living or what will people say?
All schooling and education are different rungs of the ladder to reach at a decent earning source. Convention is the rule of thumb here. Any urge to find one’s own truth is seriously curtailed and experimentation is seriously prohibited. They simply provoke insecurity in the minds of parents.
The result is a bumper crop of youth who when the season starts all of them are either pursuing MBA’s or computer sciences. The others are preparing for civil service exams or joining armed forces, and if nothing, trying for jobs in other governmental departments. If any thing else comes in that comes after they have exhausted all other possibilities, and that comes in as a compromise.
The dilemma is that most people in non-conventional fields are there because they could not do something else. Their desperation characterizes the state of affairs in their requisite fields also. Their anxiety is a constant warning sign of “don’t join here, we are losers”, to any deviant who wants to be there because s/he feels for it.
This reminds me of a friend who wanted to study Philosophy and earn a Master degree to pursue his career in the field. Upon consultation, his mother said that’s fine, but what will you do? What will I tell my son does to the girl’s family where I will seek a match for you?, he is a philosopher? Questions of the sort confront all those who want to do something other than convention.
Those who make it up to the pinnacle of landing in the conventionally impressive jobs gain instant social respect, recognition, and power. They become senior citizens. However, that doesn’t mean at all that they are out of their fear. Now the fear is how to maintain it, keep it and preserve it. The rest is all the same old game of survival, in which personal agendas are far more important than respective organizational agendas. Welcome to mediocrity! The state of affairs in the departments is ordinary quality, barely adequate, if not bad or worse. Mediocrity grips the whole nation.
Mediocrity is realization of the great survival dream.
What is the way out of this self imposed inertia?
Do we lack in the kernels of mental technology, or the physical muscle required for it? Any notion built upon the premise of answering the question in yes can easily be refuted by instances of great out puts by our people. However, those could not be replicated in larger masses and couldn’t verge up to the creation of some systems that would consistently help people tap in their drives to do extra ordinary.
Imagine, the great Pakistani cricketer Wasim Akram in any career other than playing cricket? Probably, doing MBA or a degree in computer science, or may be a career in civil service, or armed forces, or if none other he might have ended up opening a general store in the commercial area next door. There could have been so many career options for him but none would make him the Wasim Akram as we know of him today.
Imagine, Michael Schumacher, the great Formula 1 driver, from Germany, winner of seven world championships, winner of 81 grand prixs, not being a race driver. Probably graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business, pursuing a job in a local pharmaceutical company. Probably he would have brought in lot of sales contracts, or he might have withered for he could not realize his true potentials. There could be so many possibilities. The bottom-line is, just separate these people from what they are good at doing and nobody knows, they live or die.
Both Wasim Akram and Michael Schumacher are examples of men who could tap into their potentials and come up with great outputs in their respective sports. To pursue their careers they both followed “the model of inspiration”.
Both were charged by the desire to do what they liked. Probably at the start of their careers they both had not realized they might reach at the top. They just did what their heart’s desire and their inspiration lay, and they never got tired of doing it.
Both inspiration, and fear driven people go through their equal due share of hopes and desperations to make it up to their destinations. The difference is in the quality of the destinations. The difference is that one approaches work as a series of regular tasks that make him feel tired, the other approaches work as meditation that ends up in enlightenment, one more step towards destination. But another difference is, who feels happier at the end of the day, and who feels tired.
Now for one second imagine we help our kids find out what they feel for. Imagine they tap into their inspirations and potentials. Imagine we prepare a bumper crop of youth who are driven by the urge to materialize their potentials, imagine people work in their offices because they want to be there, imagine at the end of each day their collective work has helped push the goals one step forward, imagine they feel happier and satisfied at the end of each day. Now can you imagine prosperous, happy, developed, enlightened people called Pakistanis?
Can you see Pakistan – the land of opportunities?
Credit: S. Roman Ahsan
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