The Problem with Pakistani Youth

Pakistan has talent. Pakistan has power.

Talent, that is confused. Power, that is blind.

Our youth has all the merits that a nation needs to make use of to climb the ladder of progress.  Our youngsters have buoyant energy, meticulous intellects, greater insights than most of their international rivals and enough emotional elasticity to cope with the rigors of modern life. And still, they’re not what they should be. They look forward to bright futures. They’re waiting for their talent to be focused on some great destination. They’re anxious to see their power controlled and manipulated to generate extraordinary outcomes!

So, what’s the problem with them?

I belong to Pakistan. I’m 26 years old. I’ve got more social links and connections that most of the people make during their lifetime, due to some of my insurmountable complexes. That’s why I believe I’ve enough right to claim to have diagnosed the problem. The problem with Pakistani youth… The problem with the future of Pakistan… The problem with the present moment in which we’ve got to live in Pakistan. And the diagnosis is more simple than the preface I’ve composed to introduce it!

It’s that Pakistani youth have started questioning!

Now, questioning is not something bad in itself. You must continually update your knowledge of the world by questioning your previous beliefs. If a mind gets too satisfied with its certain set of beliefs, it looses the ability to cope with the ever new challenges of life and has ultimately to succumb to rejection by its surroundings. It has already happened with Muslims in the course of history. The followers of Islam had started to loose their enthusiasm in the art of questioning and reasoning after gradually becoming satisfied on having almost half of the world under their feet. This negligence of the dynamicity of life and ignoring the need of continual reconciliation has resulted in the current lethargy of the Islamic world.
But the problem of our youth is not that simple. If they would only question their current state and beliefs and attempt at some sort of reconciliation, it would not be a problem at all. But they have gone much far. There’s a proverb in Urdu which says that a new servant hunts for nothing less than gazelle. The excitement of something new and unprecedented is hard to hold, both in individuals and nations. Our intellectuals have relearned to question after a thousand years, and now they want to question just everything.

Skepticism is a philosophy in the West, and a lifestyle in the educated strata of our society. We question just everything we come across, without ever thinking what consequences such inquiries may entail. We question not to learn something better, but to unlearn everything our ancestors taught us. This is a revenge. A revenge upon the ages-old customs and conventions. A revenge upon the religion which could not give us a bit of inner peace. A revenge upon our forefathers whom we’re so satisfied to call ignorant. A revenge upon ourselves who are doomed to have been born in Pakistan. We question to destroy! We question to escape! And we question to dispel any probable answers!

As we said earlier, questioning is not bad, but it must be under certain limits. The West has an older tradition of questioning than us. They’ve learnt to avoid its pitfalls. They question, but don’t just abandon or boycott the thing or idea right away, until they find some better alternative to rely on. Our youth is novice. They start questioning their societal norms and go on disowning them right away. Sometimes, even the mere rise of a question persuades them that they should quit that norm. But they don’t have any alternative code of action. Their hasty disposition doesn’t allow them to wait for one. And even if they find one, their irresistible skepticism is ready to pounce upon it as well. So, they are left with agony, pain, frustration and loneliness in this whole paraphernalia of a perfect world which is way subtler than their immature intellects!

Iqbal, the great philosopher and poet of the subcontinent, has written a short poem named “Aazaadi-e-Afkaar.” He has boldly stated the classical Muslim stance on the problem of freedom of thought in this poem. He maintains that freedom of thought is only detrimental to those who don’t even know how to think.  I second his stance because I have personally suffered from the outcomes of free thought. I had started free speculation when I was nearly 19, after the death of my father. The trauma of father’s death, financial problems as the new head of family, and social and familial tensions had roused in me a reaction which I didn’t even know to be a reaction. I only thought myself a free thinker whose duty it was to blow out the candles of dogmas and customs and learn to live in the darkness like a true intellectual.
Today, almost every Pakistani youngster who is educated enough to develop sensitivity and sensibility in his character has the inevitable drive to criticize society. As I said earlier, it is a reaction, but they don’t know. The just want to destroy everything that looks like having something to do with belief. They’re distrustful of the grounds of their society. They believe that the progress of the West is because they are not dogmatic. They think they must think like intelligent guys of the West.

William James, the godfather of psychology, has written a great essay named “The Will to Believe.”  He shows that we humans cannot assume any ideal impartiality in the matters of thought and judgment. We have an infrastructure that binds us to believe one thing or the other. We cannot perform a single function of life in the state of unbelief. Belief is the power that makes our life possible. We’re bound to believe if we have to live.

So, the thing our youth needs to learn is that they will ultimately have to believe in something. They can’t keep on questioning endlessly. And more importantly, as long as they’re questioning and lacking belief in something, they’ll not be able to act and perform. So, they should be a little selective in their inquisitions. They should question everything they can do without, and nothing they can’t do without. If they question something which is essential to their lives, this inquisition will only lead to a discrepancy an conflict between their perception and conception of reality, thus contributing only to an unbearable pain and lethargy. They should learn that we’re not gods. We can’t do everything we like, and uproot everything we dislike. Whenever we feel like something is going wrong, we must first question ourselves, and if we find no problem here, then we should turn towards the external issues like the societal and religions conventions.