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Dear Readers,
While All Things Pakistan has remained alive and online, it has been dormant since June 11, 2011 - when, on the blog's 5th anniversary, we decided that it was time to move on. We have been heartened by your messages and the fact that a steady traffic has continued to enjoy the archived content on ATP. While the blog itself will remain dormant, we are now beginning to add occasional (but infrequent) new material by the original authors of the blog, mostly to archive what they may now publish elsewhere. We will also be updating older posts to make sure that new readers who stumble onto this site still find it useful.
We hope you will continue to find ATP a useful venue to reflect upon and express your Pakistaniat. - Editors
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Interesting post. I came across this blog by accident, but it was a good accident. I have now bookmarked your blog for future use. Best wishes. Ragheb Alama Website Team….
The quote in the picture also reminds one of some other thoughts/questions that often come to mind.
Why are Pakistanis so polarized? Our discussions on politics often tend to degenerate into heated exchanges, extreme opinions are more to be found, while Down to earth voices often get drowned in the noise. How is this to be explained?
Also, at times I wonder how much of the foreign influence on our national discourse is positive. I am certainly not an isolationist, we should learn good things from other societies by all means. However, identification of our problems and solutions should mainly be inspired by our own independent thought rather than resulting from what others would like us to think about ourselves. Sometimes it seems that we Pakistanis get too much gratituous input on our internal problems from outsiders who have their own biases and/or vested interests, and our educated and English speaking elite (all of us at ATP included) is at times more in touch with the rest of the world than our own fellow Pakistanis. The gap between the haves and have-nots has not only created an economic apartheid, but also that of worldviews. There are several different Pakistans, and they all have very different experiences, issues, outlooks and languages, very badly disconnected from each other, with very little effort being made to bring them closer.
PS: Naveed, thanks for copying the quote in the picture.