For example, in Europe, if you tell someone that you are a vacationing Pakistani, you are bound to get curious looks. They only know about Pakistanis who have settled there or come only for quick business trips. Every year I find less and less Pakistani travellers on the streets of Europe or even in many Asian countries. The only ones you do see are either those travelling to Dubai or now Malaysia. However, I do come across a number of Indian travellers.
So it becomes natural for many across Asia and Europe to believe that I must be from India. This does not bother me. But it does bring to light the political and cultural perils of a nation that has just stopped travelling for leaisure.
Wise men across history have rightly emphasised the need for travel — especially how it enlightens the understanding of a person about the ways of those living outside their social and belief systems; and how this infuses in us an instinctive realisation about the importance of things like plurality and tolerance; and how tiny, rigid and delusional really is the world of an isolationist.
Of course, over the past many years, it hasn’t been easy for a lot of Pakistanis to acquire visas to a number of countries. Also, the economics has made it tough for most Pakistanis to even think about taking a vacation abroad. This is a cause for concern. I say this because the moment you step into another country, you begin to realise that life can be lived without constantly contemplating the fate of a government or the status of one’s religious beliefs. It happens to me every time I travel.
The realisation is always about how small and stressed our world has become. We work and then come back and watch or talk politics or religion, and nothing else besides. This can’t be right. The human mind is far too vast to only be cramped with cyclic political gossip (mistaken as political analysis and news), or with the constant, obsessive lashings of faith.
Raise your head out of your one-dimensionally contemplative navels, and you will notice how fast things like music, literature, sport, theatre, et al, are vanishing from our list of things to do and enjoy in Pakistan. There is no doubt about the gigantic economic and political problems we as a nation face. But think about it. Go through histories of some of the most powerful reform movements and revolutions and it is clear that none of these were complete without hefty cultural contributions made to these movements by poets, playwrights, musicians, painters, even sportsmen/women.
Our whole perspective on life, or more so, about what needs to be done has unfortunately shrunk to such an extent that all we are left with is a constant need to make lofty moral and faith-based judgments and denunciations, believing that ‘positive’ change can only come through ‘danda’, militaristic politics, or some impalpable form of religious order.
That’s all we talk about now. Faith and what gets passed these days as politics. Everything else has become unessential. It seems all of us have become myopic political animals with a narrow understanding of politics, something which now colours our understanding of the faith as well. We’ve forgotten where politics ends and faith begins.
We crave for reform, change and sometimes even revolution, and yet we have failed to understand that religion and politics alone can’t achieve these. And if and when they do, such a change or revolution will lack sympathy or admiration of what makes a civilisation thrive as an enlightened, cultured people.
Whenever I travel now, I look forward to meeting people who are not always judging me through their religious biases or figuring out where I stand politically. That can be a problem if you are a Pakistani, though. Because then all they want to talk to you about is Islam. But I don’t. I want to talk about music, sports, food, drink and art — subjects one rarely gets to talk about in Pakistan these days.
So what do I do? Let them call me an Indian? Sure, but then all they want to talk about is Bollywood and the IT! Don’t know much about that, I’m afraid. So this time when I went travelling, I decided to introduce myself as a citizen of Surinam!
I got this idea way back in 2003, when, while travelling across Europe I got talking to an Indian taxi driver. From English he swiftly switched to Hindi when I told him that I was from Pakistan. I asked him from where in India he was, and he shocked me by saying that he wasn’t from India at all. ‘I am from Surinam!’ he proudly announced.
As it turns out, Surinam, a small country in the Caribbean, has a huge Indian population. So this time that’s what I told people: I was from Surinam. And lo and behold, I got what I wanted — lots of discussions about fishing, hurricanes, beaches and drinks. Absolutely nothing on religion or politics. A fantastic time I had.
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