One hundred years ago there was a revolution in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution. Communists, socialists, progressives, and majority of the over-thinking types with tender hearts, all over the world think very highly of this revolution, take pride in what it experimented, promised and achieved.
About 130 years before the Russians, the French too had one, in 1789. Then both did nothing. In the following years, they only remembered and commemorated their revolutions.
This piece, however, is not about these revolutions. For, we in Pakistan are not too impressed by Frenchs or Russians and their revolutions. This treatise, therefore, challenges those who admire both revolutions, invites them to Pakistan to learn from the rich history of a poor country, and know what real revolutions are like, and how to have many successively.
Pakistanis have always been ahead of others. We only commemorate smaller things, like Defence Day, or Kashmir Day. We don’t sit idle on bigger laurels like revolutions. We instead focussed on having more. So that our future generations say 50 years down the road, have more to celebrate than others’ future generations, after all, we are a celebratory country. So in a small span of 70 years, we have had dozens of revolutions in Pakistan.
Initially, we were slow and had five in the first 50 years. Then we paused, cracked the code, accelerated and can proudly boast of ten revolutions in the last ten years alone.
Since revolutions have a historical impact, and several books are written on one. It wouldn’t be fair if I do just one piece on all of ours. Therefore, I count the first five in this piece; and in the next, the rest.
The speed and frequency of our revolutions may confuse you as if Pakistan is an electrical motor with 1000 revolutions per second. Just be truly patriotic and refuse to be confused.
First of all, let’s talk about the fact that we have had so many in one decade and half of them in the previous five. Well! there are many reasons for the lethargic process of revolutions in first 50 years. One reason is the absence of democracy in the first 30 years; because, in a democracy, everyone is trying to do some revolutionary act and thus a revolution becomes easier.
Now we are living in the age of daily revolutions, where every day we hear of revolutionary revelations by Trump, Dick or Harveys. I assure you, we’ll beat them all on this count too.
Since columns cannot dispense details of revolutions, I am only listing them with a brief comment.
The red colour symbolizes Bolsheviks Revolution. We equate ours with green (not for any love of ecology). On the issue of environment, we are on the same page with Donald Trump, i.e., Man proposes, God disposes.
In the first 50 years, we have had Identity Revolution, Language Revolution, Islamic Revolution, Education Revolution, and Chicken Karahi revolution.
Soon after we officially became Pakistan after the partition of India (I say officially for actually Pakistan was there even before India), it was revolutionary endeavour to imbibe Muslim identity, to avoid mess and crowding of ethnic identities.
Now, it’s another thing that we have more sub-Islamic identities, than what we tried to avoid, ‘parochial identities’.
The only community that comes close to us in a variety of sub-identities is the LGBTQ2SASPA (Lesbians, Gays, Bi-sexual, Trans, Queers, 2-spirited, asexual, polyamorous) community.
On language revolution, we are the only country who successfully made minority language our national language overnight. In 1947, less than 3% people spoke Urdu; now more than 100% speak it, but 90% ignore what is being said in it. Every revolution has some side effects, so no big deal.
Islamic Revolution is perhaps our proudest production. It took us a bit longer to unfold, was revealed in piecemeal in the 50, 60, and 70s. But in the 80s we exploded it, and you can still hear regular blasts.
Now, we have more Islamic political parties in Pakistan than Iftar parties in Ramzan. Just like every iftar party blends predictable and unusual items in the menu, these parties serve Islam in multiple, blasting ways.
The Education Revolution manifested itself in the 90s, though we were working hard on it since the 50s. The learned scholars we produced in this revolution are painting the social media town red.
The last but certainly not the least is Chicken Karahi revolution which happened in the 1980s & 90s. In the last 30 years, we have consumed more chicken than the entire humanity did in the last 3000 years.
To be continued in Part 2 next week…
