Only a javelin can puncture the bubble we live in.
The dysfunction inside the bubble is getting denser as we traverse the bumpy road towards elections. Yes, those same elections that you say may not happen. Or not for a while. Or at least not within the constitutionally mandated ninety days. The same elections today constitute one of two key agenda points around which our politics revolves. And around which the bubble is built.
The other agenda point is built around this: the elephant in the room was always housed in Rawalpindi. Today, he is in Attock.
Life inside the bubble echoes with two – and only two – key questions: first, when, or whether, elections will take place; second, what to do about Imran Khan.
The dystopian version of the emerging situation - shaped as it is like a best-case scenario - provides little comfort to those hoping against hope for a ray of hope. But inside the bubble, this is hope
Today, the answers to these questions depend less on facts and more on personal perspectives. Of the many changes that have engulfed the country after the horrific May 9 incidents, one is clear as day: facts have become harder to come by and perspectives much easier. Dig deeper inside the Red Zone, and you get a whiff of such perspective-laden answers.
The short and sweet version says elections are likely in February and Imran Khan to languish in jail till at least then.
So there you have it. The dystopian version of the emerging situation - shaped as it is like a best-case scenario - provides little comfort to those hoping against hope for a ray of hope. But inside the bubble, this is hope. That nothing pushes elections beyond February. And nothing worse happens than Khan spending time in jail reading books.
Inside the bubble, the contours of our tragedy are hinged on the fate of individuals whose personal and collective failings have birthed this crisis and the ones before.
It ain’t a one-dimensional tragedy, this. The cascading pessimism, and fear of the future, and of shrinking purchasing power, and of devaluation that extends beyond our currency, and of the past continuing to haunt the future, and of the lack of leadership options on offer, and of the recurrence of failed experiments that never seem to go out of fashion – and above all, perhaps, of the deep dismay at knowing that few, if any, lessons have ever been learnt.
The unsettling familiarity of people, politics, and patrons looms like a dark shadow over a landscape desperate for something, anything that is not a reminder of all that has gone wrong over and over again.
There is little exactitude to the nature of the crises – economic data representing only one, though major, aspect of it
For a country no stranger to crises, why does the present one then sound more ominous than previous ones? Is it perhaps because it is the first real mega-crises of the digital era? Amplified by the reach, noise and intensity of social media, are the crises mutating into something bigger than their actual magnitude? There is little exactitude to the nature of the crises – economic data representing only one, though major, aspect of it – and this makes it as dangerous, or not, as we want to imagine it from our own perspectives.
These perspectives are hatched inside our personal bubbles, nurtured by our social surroundings, and cemented by the impact on our lives. Add to this the raging storms of information on our timelines, unhinged from facts and truth, and we have for ourselves the ultimate toxic cocktail of persistent paranoia and panic. The bubble shapes perceptions that, in turn, shape reality.
There’s no denying this reality. The price of sugar, petrol and electricity is as hard a reality as reality can get. So is the acute failure of governance – and, by turn, leadership – when it manifests itself daily in kids falling to their deaths in manholes, dangling between life and death on makeshift chairlifts, or churches being set aflame by fires lit by myopic and medieval policies, or even political leaders claiming, yet again, that if they come to power this time, they will reshape the destiny of Pakistan.
A bubble oxygenated by the Red Zone can become dangerously inflammable. The javelin thrower is breathing the impure air outside this bubble and yet is beating the world. He and millions of others like him wear their excellence like crowns despite the failures of our leadership, despite the misplaced priorities of our politics, and despite the inglorious sins of our governance. Even in their success, theirs is a tragedy foretold.
Certainly not discomforting if you’re a member of the brigade that screams and shouts that all will be well and settled as long as elections are held and the elephant in the room is once again the inhabitant of Pindi and not of Attock
It is foretold because it is a tragedy recycled. Yesterday’s saviours are today’s villains, and tomorrow’s saviours again; friends are enemies till they are friends again till they are not; and promises of progress through council-of-this and authority-of-that are re-imagined, re-designed and regurgitated till shelved for another time with another name by another saviour out to sculpt his or her destiny at the expense of the electorate.
Is this disconcerting? Discomforting? Not if you’re inside the bubble and your only concern is when elections will be held and when Khan will be out of prison; not if you’re swimming in the flow of the news cycle and obsessed with who said what and how that would shift balance on the political seesaw in the months till February; and certainly not if you’re a member of the brigade that screams and shouts that all will be well and settled as long as elections are held and the elephant in the room is once again the inhabitant of Pindi and not of Attock.
But then ask yourself this: today, at this moment, what does Bani Gala/Zaman Park stand for? What does Raiwind stand for? What does Garhi Khuda Bakhsh stand for? What does Rawalpindi stand for? If there is a way forward, what is it? And who has it?
Not in terms of emotive ideologies that mean little, and clichéd slogans that are hollowed out by time, and tired appeals to a glorious past that never really was – no, not these, but in terms of plans, policies and proposals that chart a way out for us of this morass.
There is a growing disconnect between the crisis raging inside the bubble and the tragedy unfolding outside of it. The ramifications will reverberate beyond February 2024. That’s the only certainty in this uncertain age.