Like you, I also feel a social pressure to write something cool, but for a moment, let’s be ourselves. Let’s bravely face our humble, real selves and leave our cool masks on the shelf. We, millennials, associate our identity with plenty of artefacts; social media, pop culture, Netflix and the stories they tell. We know these distant, detached stories told to us; those that we can only see or hear through a device, but not touch or smell. We know less of our own selves and the immediate surroundings which can be seen, heard, touched, smelt and felt – realities that are more certain than the former. We all carry an urge to be “cosmopolitan middle class individuals through indulging in transnational consumerism of things, ideas, ideologies and cultures”. But imagine that internet or cable networks cease to exist today; then what are you? Who are we? How will we have conversations? The consequences will be horrendous: our Johnny self will become Jamshéd and will fall short of “pickup lines”.
“World will always look for unstable, impulsive, hormone-imbalanced youth to further its propaganda on one hand, and grumpy, old, arrogant lot on the other.”
Our identities depend on these distant stories so much that if they cease to exist, we would be nothing. This is our weakness. We have built the world around us, but there is nothing inside.
پڑھ پڑھ علم ہزار کتاباں، کدی اپنے آپ نوں پڑھیا نئیں
جا جا وڑھدا اے مندر مسیتی، کدی من اپنے وچ وڑھیا نئیں
We must link the immediate with the distant. As our sense of reality is dislodged from our immediate surroundings, we are pushed to a conundrum of expectations that inculcate a façade of a “certain” future. But that “future” never happens. You’ll be asked to connect the dots, but the expectations will align them in a way that the line goes in a direction that the “expectors” wish. When we pursue life with a detached sense of reality, we deceive and lie to ourselves about the “is” through “ought”. The world disappoints us each time; and unlike our numb “reality”, these contradictions are felt bitterly through all our senses! As what is, exists independent of what we think is, and we do not run over the bus when we have our arms crossed, the bus still runs over us.
I’ve been believing in something so distant,
as if I was human!
I’ve been denying this feeling of hopelessness,
in me; in me!
So much in this world, ultimately, tends to move from instability to stability. Perhaps that explains our need for certainty and meaning. But to reach the highest level of certainty, we need to conjoin all our senses to know, than relying on only seeing and hearing through devices. We are only exposed to the ‘distant’; detached from the ‘immediate’. We are an unstable generation plagued with a weaker sense of certainty than our ancestors. Perhaps this is the “instability” that reflects as mental illnesses, among other reasons?
I have built this as a foundation to encourage you towards “originality”, and “being yourself” in your creative projects, which you must understand in terms of eliminating the problem I have put forth. We are a society, a community that has a common goal: writing. All our departments work together to produce this end, learning manifold skills in the process. As I see a promising future of this newspaper, it is imperative that we preclude this ‘millennial problem’ of detached reality, disconnected from our immediate surroundings, in our writings. Let’s link the distant to the immediate. Right now, for instance, we are students at a university. What being a “student at LUMS” means, is for us to define; not just the administration or faculty; not Google; not Instagram, not JSTOR and certainly not Netflix.
کوئ دور رہ کے قریب ہے
کوئ قریب رہ کے بھی دور ہے
Should we be “critical”? A popular concern found in the students’ culture these days, is of “thinking out of the box”. What we don’t realise is that when we go out of the box, we jump into another box and stay there. Should we, then, keep jumping through the boxes persistently to facilitate inquiry? I never really understood that. If you wish to “deconstruct”, you find yourself in Jacques Derrida’s box—you may choose to stay there, perhaps because it’s a “French” box. But following the earlier logic, no matter how much we jump, we are tempted to make a box around us; of certainty; of stability; and stay there even when it starts corrupting with contradictions. And do you see, we have the audacity to see this world in a “horse shoe”? If we realise our surprising abilities, no horse shoe will be able to theorise us.
If we believe that there are no absolute right or wrong – or no “box” – we will still be tempted to generalize our personal right and wrong to the world. Maintaining a façade of acceptance of others’ values counts to nothing if, by practice, we still move towards the absolute in many respects. Just because we say or believe that we are not, does not change the practical reality and its consequences. Isn’t that we are tolerant in being, tolerant in sayings, but intolerant in doings? Though we have grown apparently elastic in it, we still compete to be the demagogue.
As this society is relieved from resource dependencies, you will witness this newspaper leaning towards such direction, which will be an existential threat. I already see certain factions running after it like wild hounds. There is apparently a consensus among the academics that being completely value neutral is impossible. For a person, I find it true to a vast extent, but not for the institutions. For a newspaper that hosts a constellation of persons, using this consensus to justify propaganda is precarious; it can compromise free speech, result in compelled speech and a lack of diversity. You will see dominance of one narrative and exclusion of others. The contrarians will be discouraged to write or enter the society altogether. The newspaper will attract a label and facilitate cult formations on either sides, which is a catastrophe. We don’t want to see an “Intellectual Dark Web”, do we? Cults are, by definition, exclusive; when you make one cult, four more cults will be formed around you. Would you wish such a campus?
I declare this society open for all kinds of students—Northerners and Southerners alike, brand schoolers and non-brand schoolers alike—if they can think originally and be themselves. For how long can we hide behind an arbitrary grandiose of city, or a brand name of a social engineering factory? We are someone else too, without association to these jewels; someone more than a market niche. We must not be eager to replicate the tyranny of the world inside the campus. The world outside is, but a huge ego-sizing contest. In reality, their ego is the same; it is the gazing of the shadows that misguides them. Thus, those who are farther from the light, see bigger shadows of their egos, and those who are closer, know their place and that of humanity very well. I encourage you to be the latter, and not the former.
The media in the world too, is accused of showing a distorted reality to facilitate narratives. They have to, but we dont. As I depart, I recommend the Editorial Board of PLUMS to maintain as much value neutrality in the editorial policies as it is possible, and to avoid implicit and explicit association with any ideology or narrative that must govern all writers. As I stated earlier, we will be tempted to turn populist, towards any side of the spectrum. But the highest level of maturity is when we strictly observe that what we are tempted to do is not always what we should do. Though it generally happens in the world outside, it is not best for us students. We are here to learn acceptance of differences, not activism and propaganda; the former is harder to learn; the latter is, or soon will be, instilled in us by the logic of the world anyway; as we let it.
Another reason why I deplore propaganda through the newspaper and its unapologetic affiliation with a narrative is to keep us students from being used. We get used by the things we don’t know how to use. We don’t control the narratives that we are a mouthpiece of, someone else does; who doesn’t love us as much as we begin to. How does religious fundamentalism use us, tapping into our beliefs, which they don’t themselves respect? How does right capitalism use us, taking advantage of our greed, avarice and vanity; feeding us theories of individual agents, then treating us as collective? And how does neo-Marxism and postmodernism use us, capitalizing on the “millennial weaknesses” these days? Karl Marx or Karl Mask? Taking a moral high-ground in the comfort of the blanket about the complicated world (immediate reality) that we never interacted with! Have we read a book called the world? What we say, remains in our throat, as we say so to be sublime characters, online or otherwise. It was all a meaningless hashtagging and posting, until they said it can change the world, and we adopted it impulsively to get meaning, stability and certainty in what we were habitual of doing meaninglessly. Can it really change the world? We were never critical of its premises, as what the world is and which direction of “change” it must follow, are not questions devoid of narratives, shortcomings and interests. The list above is not exhaustive or literal, be imaginative! We are in a world of defenseless lawyers and diseased doctors. All in all, we are not the end for them all, but a means to an end unknown to us.
Some cover their propaganda under cunning “rationality”, others facilitate demagoguery by a façade of compassion and piety. Serving humanity in saying, could be feeding our vanity in doing. They are a “public consent” away from a vulgar dictatorship that they had been hiding all along. Seemingly benign, inherently sinister!
Faking compassion for politics, rather; harms the very regime of it, by making the public skeptical of its discourse whenever it is signaled—failing to distinguish the fake from the genuine. Let the postmodernists disagree.
ہے علم جسے ہو حاجتِ اندازِ بیان، محض رعب
پاک علم ہو گرچہ سادہ، کرے شعلہ بیان زدوکوب
Yet another choice is edginess, but that too is meaninglessly endless. You get edgy, edgier, edgiest and then what? You “walk over the edge”?
Though I am a big fan of feminists, as they say “men are trash”, I rather contend; why are they so lenient? How about the whole world is trash? Why is there a food-chain? We complain about the game theory, but why are the
resources scarce? Isn’t water running out, in our immediate reality? What will we do? If the world is this trash, does that imply we must adjust and be trashy ourselves? Or that we must manage to make it less trashy? How do we do it? Resource allocation? Modernization? Eliminating grand narratives? Revivalism? Hedonism? World abnegation? Self-purification? Which is the best answer? No one is sure. Façade of certainty! We are all internally scared and insecure; and we hide this behind the veil of vanity. Some get to shout and hurl through a pedestal; others get to sit with a European leg-cross at an NGO’s event. Their sayings are not doings, and doings are not what they speak of; their thinkings are not feelings, and feelings are not for what they think; their beings are not what they are, and what they are, they don’t want to be! They are distant, and all alike. They will bring us nothing, but make us become like them. You’ll be swimming through life somewhere, but your heart will float elsewhere; the heaviest of its pieces will be drowned, others will go here and there.
حق نوں آکھ کہ ہک کرے
ترا ٹوٹا پھوٹا دل
But the world will always look for unstable, impulsive, hormone-imbalanced youth to further its propaganda on one hand, and grumpy, old, arrogant lot on the other. We must spare ourselves from this game, at least as long as we are in the university or in the learning stage – or in a hormonal imbalance, for that matter.
Growing up is not a choice, but a necessity, for if we act like a pre-pubescent kid, the world will treat us like one; that treatment will less resemble that of our parents and more so of pedophiles. We would never know when, where and how were we ripped off.
Yet I’m militantly against pessimism, though I know that my words reek of it. But it only reeks to those who have learned to be governed by it; I have conjured all optimism in my Urdu poetry; those who cannot read it, missed out on it.
ٹھانی تھی دل میں اس نے اک آرزوۓ عروج
کہ کردار باکمال ہو ، شجاع خوب خوب
کروں میں کچھ ایسا کہ عالم حیراں ہوجاۓ
ٹالوں میں وہ بلا، کسے ٹالی نہیں کبھو
ملے اسے جلال و اضطراب و استطاع
مگر بلا نہ آئ ، بلا ٹالتا وہ کیا
جب کام ہی نہ تھا تو کامیاب کیا ہوتا
نہ تھا کوئ فرعون تو موسیٰ وہ کیا ہوتا
جانا، کہ مصیبت بھی ہے اک نعمت خدا
مانا، کہ اہم ہیں یہ فتن ، فِسق اور زبوں
نہیں ہے دنیاۓ عفریت و عزازیل بلا مقصد
دجال نہ فضول، نہ یاجوج وَ ماجوج
The only acceptable activism is one that originates from yourself; from your immediate reality, that is: you are a student at a university—which is just one shallow instance. What concerns do you face being a student? Ask yourself! Would you not speak of non-profits shifting from social service provision to a mere donation collection; from “altruism” to “greed”? Do you see your peers implicitly excluding NOP scholars and then rant on LDF about mutual acceptance? Do you recognize imposters amongst you, who talk of feminism, tolerance and piety, but do the opposite? But first sweap your own house, as the most immediate is, yourself. For us, it is less terrible, as this is our age of making mistakes; though it’s over for those who sit in offices. It is when you are aware of the immediate reality first, you are good to talk about the distant matters, while maintaining a link. And for that, you do not need to follow an ideology or a school of thought. No PhD knows more than you, what being a student at this university today feels like. You own this domain. You have the right and legitimacy to speak out through the platforms that PLUMS provides. Lastly, be critical, but not in the manner described earlier.
Words never erupt out of a newspaper to grab anyone’s collars. I have no right to obligate you to listen, nor have you, to constrain me to explain. As through this, I do not seek the limelight; I never wanted to be noticed. But I humbly put these words out, so the consequences that are not consistent with them, are off my shoulders. Mera Ranjhan hun Koi Hor!
If Harvard Crimson can last more than a century, this newspaper can last as long as LUMS itself, and it will (IA). With this hope, I bid farewell, both, as the Vice President of PLUMS (EC’19) and as a student at LUMS. Khuda Hafiz!