Salman Rashid

Travel writer, Fellow of Royal Geographical Society

Whithout pride, nations fail 
Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Pakistanis are the most shameless nation on the planet earth! And let no man contest this statement for I make it with sound, unassailable reason.  

We do not deserve to have a country. We should forever have remained slaves to be guided by men better than us. Men who could teach us the meaning of patriotism, self respect, sense of belonging to a land, and, above all, a sense of identity and pride in our nationhood. Men who could have taught us to forswear empty rhetoric and words high-sounding devoid of substance and sincerity. For this is all we have learned in our six decades and a half of sordid, sorry existence.

Everywhere you turn you hear men of straw proclaim loudly for the world to hear how much they love this country. On television (which is of no worth really), radio and the print medium, the harshness of public announcement of love of country jars the finer senses of anyone possessed of wisdom and perspicacity. But really, it takes less than these superior qualities to see the brazen mendacity of these avowals made for the consumption of the public. Yet we don’t recognise deceit even when we have an over-abundance of it and nothing moves us when we see something anti-nation occurring.

 We have a new phenomenon that sickens me. It nauseates me even when I have never made any claims to patriotism and I am surprised why all these high-falutin, loud-mouthed, fork-tongued ‘patriots’ are not offended by it. This is the phenomenon of the new car registration plates that is quickly catching on at least in Lahore. I estimate there are several thousand such plates and counting.

The registration number on these plates is in Urdu. Above the number is a red strip which carries in Arabic script the words Al-Bakistan. I ask you! Al-Bakistan, indeed. The name of one’s country is sacred. If this sorry country was peopled by real patriots who had taught us the value of being a nation there would have been some condemnation of this shameful act of bastardising Pakistan’s name. But we have committed this act of high treason with impunity. We have committed it in public and we exhibit it without shame. I ask you if there is another country in the entire world whose citizens would so proudly commit this atrocity.

 Not a single so-called patriot is offended. I have never seen a newspaper editorial or op-ed or heard from a TV watcher (I never, never watch TV) that a discussion to curb this reprehensible act of high treason has taken place. And what, I ask you, is it, if it is not treason of the highest order to bastardise, corrupt, disfigure the name of one’s own country? We are guilty of this treasonous crime without help from RAW, CIA and Mossad. After this, don’t anyone please tell me of the foreign hand trying to destroy this unfortunate country.

 The cars are mostly expensive models and the fat-faced men (the pot-bellies being hidden) who drive them are clearly the uncultured yahoo types with whom you can never have a decent, logical exchange – the very types who make all that empty clangour about their ‘patriotism’. Every time I see such a registration plate I have wanted to talk to the owner to congratulate him on the creation of this new country of Bakistanis. But knowing where such an act would lead, discretion has always taken the better of me. So, let no man challenge my statement that we Bakistanis are the most shameless, unpatriotic mob of people who never deserved a country.  

 Postscript. In a fortnight’s time, Bakistani flags will go on sale to celebrate Partition. The flags will carry images of Mickey Mouse and Superman in the white space meant to signify the country’s maltreated and terrorised minorities. This disfigurement of the national flag has gone on unnoticed and unchecked for more than two decades. It will happen again this year and forever after. And we Bakistanis call ourselves patriots. Hot, putrid, foul-smelling air. That is what we are all full of.