Arshid Malik
There is a wide, very wide hiatus between the East and the West. Certain differences are well spoken for, while others have never even been named. The differences that be, set the countries and their people falling within each domain so very acutely in opposition to
each other that any historical adjunctive where a union of the two polar opposites could be perceived is not even seemingly possible. The main threshold which the West has crossed, that sets it distinctly and discreetly apart from the East, is the awakening of reason brought generally about by the wide based Industrial Revolution. We at the east end of the pole have never even imagined anything close to that and all the industrialization and urbanization that is taking place down here is going on at pace which may never qualify as a neo-cultural apostasy. Thereof all the phenomenal occurrences that have taken place on the socio-economic platforms are seemingly thrust
upon and not genuinely cultivated and as also not imbibed.
We need to understand that we cannot ever step in to the big shoes that the West wore in the yesteryears and all attempts aimed at doing that would only take us far away from our own idiosyncratic and also indigenous pathologies that are so very obtusely characteristic of societies across the planet. When we talk of Globalization as a phenomenal occurrence that is supposedly going to change the contours of the world order we are actually refereeing the cause of the Western imperialistic agendas and these are not even remotely connected to our seed, our core. But whatever the practices and beliefs be, we are actually and in real time witnessing changes at the behest of this global phenomenon and thereof accepting it into our lives as if it was so to say “destined” to be”. We have somehow, over the decades, lost the ad juncture which positioned us where we stand today – the very genesis of our formal existence in this world as beings, which were and are intrinsically focused inside upon deities and demons.
These misunderstandings in terms of economic and social referrals to the non-intrinsic modules of existence have rendered us, over time, so very fragile and susceptible. It is now, when we have started aping the West and following its grandiose agendas into the future (that happens to be grouchy and grotesque at the same time). We are now faced with facts that are thwarting the unfolding of our actual and preserved growth opportunities. We have farmers, housewives, school children, office going gentry, troopers, craftsmen and who not committing suicides at every failure that could be interpreted as a chapter in ones life in the local non-urbane contexts, but which otherwise in the grand scheme of things, look oneself look silly and stupid. The unnatural and adapted ethics that we have started subscribing to are resolutely crafting their furrows from formal education to earning one’s daily bread and all other chapters of day to day living making the very task of survival so very unmanageable and unpredictable.
We have not witnessed industrialization at scales which could have altered our psyches and neither have we witnessed modern warfare in its full fury. We are a remote people and our secrets are outlets to our emergence. By tap dancing to the alien tunes of the West we are only falling apart and we need to realize that.
