“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don’t care much where. The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go. Alice: …so long as I get somewhere. The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you are sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.” “(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)”.

Readers, isn’t a 78-year-long walk not enough to determine, which way we want to go…? Pakistan, cannot afford to be the Alice of the current wonderland of international and domestic politics. We have been wandering far too long.

Going back to yesterday will serve no purpose, because, we were different and our sense of unity was different. We cannot continue to remain a puzzle for our own selves. Dressed in ignorance, we are more a spectacle of confusion than a jester on the world stage.

“It is never too late” is an Italian dictum. And more so, in the life of a nation, it is never too late to alter, amend, modify or change course, if the going is not good or is not as per plans. The raison d’etre of our creation as a model state as envisioned by the Quaid Mohammed Ali Jinnah got buried, when his directional speech of 11th August, 1947, was expunged of its ‘real spirit’.

He was too clear headed, and that clarity didn’t suit those who followed him. The speech was truncated beyond its original content and context. We don’t write history. We repeatedly distort it. A case of reference is the tragedy of 1970-71. I was alive then. I can recall what happened. But what I read on the pages of the imaginary history is very different, very different, from what I saw on PTV and what I was reading the newspapers, then.

All we need to do is not to re-visit, but to learn from it and re-pledge to the commitment, we made at independence. The first principle being the adherence in letter and spirit to the laws of justice. Let’s regain our courage, that like all things in the universe, we can change our thoughts, actions – we can, if we transition easily into being different from what we have been in the last 78 tumultuous years.

The nation........

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