Mein bhi Pakistan hoon ... Tu bhi Pakistan hai

Facebook is a phenomenon; technologically very simple but socially very far-reaching.

One of the things you can do on FB is "tag" people on pictures. Initially intended to let people know that they featured in a picture, now people tag a picture with your name simply because they want you to see it.

I too was tagged in a picture recently which of course did not have me in it. Or so I thought.

It was a painted picture. It was a bleak picture.

It had two portions; the left half with a caption saying "Day", showed people struggling in flood waters while the portion on the right was captioned "Night" and showed a mass of black. The idea was, that Pakistan was moving into a dark future.

The picture was published on FB on this last August 14th; Pakistan Day.

Needless to say it spawned a rather spirited discussion on the subject.

There were two groups; those who said that this kind of view was just depressive and did nothing to fix anything. While the others had a list of complaints against Pakistan which they quoted to support their viewpoint.

The debate went on and I soon started feeling a bit inundated with all the emails telling me that there was a new comment on "my picture".

After two score and ten such emails, I thought enough was already enough and that this had gone on for quite some time and that I had a right not be "spammed". After all I had nothing to do with this picture nor the discussion. I logged on to FB with the intention of removing my tag from the picture so that I will not be spammed anymore.

I almost clicked on the option for removing the tag when a part of me took over and started speaking back to me. The insolent me spoke to me thus:

"It is you", it said to me.

"Does it matter if you think that the people in the flood waters don't look like you?

To everyone else who is not a Pakistani, it is you! For are you not Pakistan?"

And that of course brought back memories of the countless times, that I sang along with my friends, with a lot of relish, the famous song.

Who is this degenerate, corrupt, unjust, cruel, huberistic being that all of us seem to be sick of? Who is this Pakistan that we are all so mad at?

I realized that I was indeed that Pakistan. Pakistan is not the name of the rivers and the mountains within a geographical boundary. Nor is it the bricks and mortar that we plastered on it to build it up.

Pakistan is me. It is you. And therefore it was indeed me in that picture in the reeking flood waters.

What shall I do? To decide upon a course of action, I have to first have an opinion. An opinion is a pre-cursor to action.

So of the two camp, who is right? The people who think Pakistan is a collection of everything that is wrong with the world or the ones who say that everything will be alright with Pakistan?

We need someone to tell us that something is wrong with us. We need them to be bitter, we need them to shout. We need them to jump up and down and wave their hands in the air pointing to everything that is wrong with us.

We also need those with a lot of optimism, with Mega Joules of energy; those who can be cheerful in the face of the fastest floods and the quickest quakes and the crookedest corruption. We need those who can then go and fix everything that this former group points to.

We need both. We should cherish both.

Does this start and stop at these two clubs only? No, there are others ... countless others:

We need our young to do it

We need our old to show us how

We need our educated to figure it out

We need our un-educated to help out with everything that they can muster

We need our Shias, we need our Sunnis and everyone in between

But most of all we need all of us to know that we need the others.

Mein bhi Pakistan hoon

Tu bhi Pakistan hai

/Slash