I Am Awake! Are You?

Mahru Khalid |
They are everywhere. In the cinemas. In our homes. On our TV. On the internet. And we take it all in. We revel in it. We consider it the only good source of entertainment we have.
I’m talking about the American and Indian movies, dramas, TV shows, music videos, all the stuff we can’t seem to live without. I’m talking about Hollywood and Bollywood. I’m talking about mind-control.
How many of us know we are living in a world where we see and believe what’s shown to us? That we are deliberately, artistically, creatively, kept under an illusion, so that we don’t care about, or get the time to dwell upon seeing this world with our hearts, from the inner eye. The illusion is so deep, so beautiful, so all-encompassing, that most of us are fooled into believing it is reality. Many among us know it isn’t, but don’t care and go on living in this fable that life is all about mortal love, song, dance. It’s all very superficial.
Did you ever think before going out to watch an Indian or American movie, of the real-life murders, brutality, bloodshed happening in Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan that would put the most riveting Hollywood script to shame? Did you ever think before playing your Modern Warfare game on your X-box, how a whole family in Waziristan is devastated when a missile from a drone strikes their house like a blitz from hell? Some American sitting in an air-conditioned fancy Army lab, somewhere in Nevada, made that shot, and what a rush it gave him! It is just like playing a game, a game where you kill real people, destroy real innocent Pakistani lives, and then you go home.
Did you ever think before blowing your hard-earned money on a movie ticket to an Indian movie, of Kashmiri youth being ripped apart on a daily basis, of proxy wars wreaking havoc in our own country, of terrorism being financed by elements across the border? Didn’t it ever occur to you what a sorry choice you are making, paying money to watch mindless nonsense, money that could be used for a better purpose?
But not all of us are like that. Many of us have woken up. We have decided to do something, give something back. We have woken up to the truth and the purpose of this country. We are alive to the promise and we are ready to fulfill it. We realize now that this wonderful country of ours is no ordinary one. We know of the sacrifices, the blood, sweat and tears that went into its making. We know of the unbreakable and eternal relationship between Islam and Pakistan. We know that Pakistan is destined to be the fortress of Islam and we want to be the ones who build it to that point.
We are the youth of Pakistan, the wonderful secret of Allah. We are Iqbal’s shaheens. To us, the meaning of success is not having lots of money, a nice car and a huge house in a posh location. We know that real success is having Allah’s ‘raza’, and we want nothing more than Allah to be happy with us. We are ready, we are ready to fight against those who want to destroy Allah’s gift, that is Pakistan. We are ready to lay down our lives for its protection. We want to rid this pure nation of the filth that has plagued it since its beginning. We have decided that the time is up for the blood-sucking leeches that have ruled this country for so long. We have decided to stand up to the looting, the inefficiency, the ineptitude, the deception, the lies.
They ask us why we are like this? We tell them we have woken up. We tell them we are no longer content in living our lives with our eyes closed. We are no longer content in sitting around, hanging out with friends, playing Farmville, finishing the latest game on PS3. We tell them that life is not just about striving for material goals, or spending all your energies, resources and talents on making a better life only for yourself. We tell them there is a higher purpose to this life, a selfless one. We tell them if each one one of us plays their smallest part, we would be unstoppable. We tell them that oceans are made up of little drops of water, and we are those drops.
We are alive to the threats this country faces. We spend time reading all those stories of how this world has been fooled into believing that Pakistan is all about terrorism, AK 47s, missiles, and nuclear power that ‘could go into the wrong hands’. People have been forced into thinking that “Pakistan is the most dangerous nation on earth”. We want this world to know, that yes, we are the most dangerous nation in the world, for anyone who has the audacity to look us in the eye and even think about attacking or offending us. We are a nation of lions, and we will prove it if and when the time comes. But we also want them to know that the only thing we really want is peace. We would never be the first one to charge on our enemies, it is the enemy who will make the first strike. We want the enemy to know that we will be ready!
We know that our time has come. The time to complete Pakistan. This is the resolve, the duty, and the promise, which we have decided to fulfill at any cost. We may not succeed in our lifetime, but we want to start this process which we know is destined for fruition. Pakistan, we are here, we are here for you, because we know you need us.