Seeking ease, creating problems for ourselves.
Engr! Shahid Siddique Khanzada
We, the people, have left behind very valuable things in the pursuit of being called modern. We sought ease and created problems for ourselves. Today we cannot go out wearing dhoti, but after centuries of trials, this was the only dress that was suitable for our season. We imposed jeans on ourselves and installed AC in the rooms to wear it. We kept shawls for fancy dress shows and adopted coats and jackets that hugged our shoulders. We got empowerment in cutting beards, moustaches and long hair and when fashion changed, we were empowered even after keeping all this! We gave up hookah and picked up cigarettes and when the same thing came in the form of glass from the province, we started smoking it by paying a thousand rupees per pipe. Is there anyone as lucky as us? We gave up lassi, grabbed cola bottles, we gave up sattu and poured slush cups, we made tamarind-aloo bukhari unhygienic and bought sealed juice boxes with essence and fed the same thing to our children, the pack which cannot be seen through is made of cardboard. We trusted this blindness and made what we saw unhealthy. We gave up desi ghee made from milk and drank oil made from seeds happily, we gave up white butter and started licking yellow mummy daddy margarine, its harms become established then we stagger and move around. We cannot tolerate guava water but we get drunk on milk made from urea, thank God! Real milk makes our tea smell and we drink tea water which itself says is not milk. We tied a buffalo under the house and bought dried milk from abroad, and what a great deal! We are the ones who drink its juice in glass bottles even during the mango season. We used to call jaggery "Pando", we liked white sugar, brown sugar came back to the hotels and slapped us. Now we look around and enjoy it, but we also eat jaggery, whether yellow or brown, we still don't like it because of its color. We die of thirst in emergencies, we cannot drink tap water at home, neither by boiling nor filtering it, we also buy water. We are the descendants of the Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab and Sindh rivers, we buy water by paying money to provincial companies. We even buy mint sauce in cans. We eat curd and free mint sauce for Rs 150 in the taste that our grandfathers used to get when they got it. Suhanjana used to taste bitter to us, since it has been made into moringa and comes in capsules, we buy fifteen days' supply for Rs 2,000. When the same dried crushed leaves were given to us by the doctor for Rs 50, we were not sure. We will buy a cough syrup worth Rs 500, but we will not press a piece of five rupees of milti between our teeth, it is a strange test. We sleep on polyester pillows, wear nylon mixed clothes, wear warm and cold shoes, wear some more clothes under our clothes and run on the road of life, when night falls we have to eat anti-allergy anyway. We cannot speak our mother tongue in the accent of our parents. We raise slogans for the language but speak to our children in Urdu at home. We cut our own roots in fear of Urdu or English and later find the reason why we are ‘misfits’. We declared Arabic and Persian as the language of the madrasas and sat down peacefully with our hands folded. When ‘Forty Rules of Love’ came in English, we never got tired of kissing. We kicked Alif Laila, Kalila and Damna and our own native stories, when it came to the whites from German, we remembered that Ustad Mal was ours. Go and see, whether it is old or new in Arabic and Persian, only those books are left to us now that are included in the madrasa curriculum. The rest is a treasure that we have divorced. If Paulo Coelho makes a tincture of it, we will put it on our eyes while saying Big Wow. Who was Mutanbi, what did Amli do, what does Shams Tabriz's Diwan say, what stories are there in the songs, we don't know! No one weaves a bed in our streets anymore, we no longer distinguish between neem and baqain, our suns have become hard and our shadows have run away from us, our moons have swallowed the light and we liked to buy the fragrance of the soil in the form of perfume. That Baba who makes a bed in the shade of neem and lies down next to a tube well wearing a dhoti, he takes a puff of the hookah, looks at us and closes his eyes like a swan. When did he understand, we didn't...!!! |