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Chickens or Suicide Bombers

www.pakpositive.com After completing auto biography of Edhi "Mirror to the blind" by Tehmina Durrani my drive for reading took me to a completely different book "Orientalism" by Edward W Said. In no way I wish to draw comparison or find similarity between the two books but I couldn't stop myself from falling into a thought, a message of understanding, which highlights need of intellectualism.

As a child watching PTV productions on Mohammad bin Qasim, Major Aziz Bhatti, Pilot Officer Rashid Minhas (famous dramas like Duhaan, Sunherey Din, Alpha Bravo Charlie) made me passionate about joining army or giving away my blood for a cause. Again, just to brush of critics, I will say that the role these men played in history was a sacrifice and I appreciate it but here I am talking about impact of shows. In current times, my experience with different regions (beyond main cities) via institutions as speaker, I see we either have chickens or suicide bombers. Very few of the people we have fall in between the two extremes and work boldly (call me a chicken too).

Checking history one tends to observe that radical advancements/happenings are result of intellectualism rather than blood or in some cases later resulting in blood. For instance many social ideologies took birth on paper or in mind building up to become opinion resulting in revolutions where blood was shed some resulted in success others (majority) failed. Another example is technology where idea became a prototype resulting in a product with no bloodshed. Even though above statements seem confusing they are not, what I am illustrating here is importance of intellectualism and how it is used and its application.

The very foundation of this country is master piece of intellectualism (also after its creation intellectualism, positively/negatively used, dictated the country policies resulting in present day scenario). Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Sir Aga Khan, the Johars and Mohammad Ali Jinnah were all intellectuals whose ideas propagated and had massive impact. Even though in the later part (migration due to independence) resulted in blood but it would be safe to say the bloodshed was by the people who hung onto extreme thoughts.

In our society, as mentioned earlier chickens and suicide bombers, we in my opinion lack direction and wantingly or unwantingly are sacrificing blood of fellow brothers/sisters which for us is becoming everyday story. It seems to me that the civil society needs to promote intellectualism the most at this odd turn of history (Amricaa, Bartania, Arab bhai, Chinis dost and other great empires have this commonality while changing course of their respective histories).

It is clear that in Government/political parties there are intellectuals who are doing their job well in keeping common men suppressed and in mounting money in interest of few privilege ones - just the execution of intellectualism here is negative but intelligently enough they are not shedding their own blood for it, instead playing with masses. In understandings of Gramsci's "theory of hegemony" one can clearly find the critical relationship of civil society and political society that generally end up overlapping one another. Civil society's role has been rising every passing day in our country where intellectualism is being used both in positive and negative way resulting in peaceful conduct and in many cases violent conduct.

My generation seems to be lured by being the hero sort by shedding blood thus giving birth to violent youth engaged into social destruction and many are unaware and others, who have seen too many footages of dead people on media (media in my opinion for now is working less for civil society and more for political society) and hear a lot of violence, end up becoming chickens. Civil society groups/circles must promote the idea of balance between blood and intellectualism and in times like now, more on intellectualism for resolving civic issues.

Blood v/s intellectualism is a tough topic to understand and it will be ignorant of me to say that one is important than the other since both have history and success/failure stories but only current times can dictate which is important for present. Civil society (not governed by any one in political society) must play its role and for now in my opinion intellectualism is the way to solutions.

Slogan "Bleed Green (Pak)" makes sense to me. violence www.pakpositive.com