Cultural Metaphor of Collective Suicide
By Karim Khan
We are all so concerned with and about an individual’s unfortunate suicide. Law comes into action over such an individual’s act… What if a nation in its history’s critical juncture of its so-called modernizing, its majority commits so by culturally over-speeding in saying goodbye to its language or culture in its erroneous understanding of modernism and progress even by its illiterate elders! The pace of doing so may be amounting to a rather suicidal one in self-negation as compared to even highly developed nations. There are so many of the cultural pull and push factors involved.
Better we individually paused sometimes for pondering over and reflecting on the common strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities and challenges/ threats. Yes. We should spread awareness in our youth about it through seminars and other awareness sessions and try to find the solutions for problems within society instead of doing so individually as the next step in this right direction.
But unfortunately, what happens mostly is that we do have a lot of awareness sessions, but since they are mostly based on internet-downloaded stuff, so mostly non-issues are presented as issues and real ground reality-based ones being presented and discussed as non-issues. Merely being social workers does not grant us the highest degree of being social scientists as well. Merely brushing issues under the carpet will serve no collective purpose at all.
Anyway, this does never mean that culture is static and it does not evolve. Never so. It got to be dynamic always, for as is wisely put in a poetic way ‘Faqad sabaat taghayur ko hay zamanay may’. What we just mean is see the overly ‘fast’ pace at which we are rather quite unnecessarily throwing our culture into the garbage bin of history is rather an alarming one in comparative terms of ‘WHAT’ “others” are doing. I mean even great nations like of the West must not have still been throwing away their culture as we are tending to go into the garbage of past. They, despite having explored the outer space, are naming their great space shuttles like ancient mythological Greek gods like Apollo etc along with some others. Similarly, yet another ancient mythological name is still having its name as one of the world’s famous companies like NIKE which has not named it like Rahul Karim or Vijay Khan or Karina Kapoor of a poor father’s daughter. If the world’s superpower or US ex-president’s middle name was not deleted as Muslim name like Hussain, then are we the superpower or Einsteins or …..? We just are highly literate people does not at the same time mean got to be great intellectuals as well.
The difference between really great and civilized nations and mimicking ones is that the former preserves its culture to make it a great civilization to impact others and not to ape. A nation really declaring itself as modern and developed one has got to impact others not to ape, for doing so is a monkey’s trait!
