Why Doesn't the World Care About Pakistanis? - By Mosharraf Zaidi | Foreign Policy

Why Doesn't the World Care About Pakistanis? - By Mosharraf Zaidi | Foreign Policy

A month on...ANXIETY

It's been a month since my previous post. I have spent most of my time trying to finish my dissertation. It's been a slower process than I expected and with the heat and the attention span of a 2-year-old it hasn't been that easy to concentrate.

I'm also getting to that stage where I am starting to get anxious about finding work and being okay financially. I had a job interview about two weeks ago but didn't get what would have been an interesting and amazing job that I think I could have done pretty well.

And I'm just starting to PANIC. I don't know whether in addition to looking for paid work I should try and apply for an internship somewhere, or just do some volunteer work here. That is, if I want to work in International Development, whatever the hell that means. Another part of me wants to isolate myself and just try and write a little bit more.

I get anxious when I hear about people doing this and that and living their dreams and reaching their goals. If they're people I know, I'm happy for them of course. But at the same time I worry about when I'll be brave enough to recognise my dreams and go after them. I wish I had a clear idea about what I wanted to do and just went for it.

I also get anxious when I read about devastating events in the world. Most recently I've been reading about the floods in Pakistan. I get frustrated and angry with things like that happening to a country that's already gone through so much hardship.

I want to do something but I feel helpless and -more than helpless- scared.

Khuda-hafiz, Benazir

There is a photograph of me taken in the summer of 1990, my first full summer in Pakistan. I'm 9, a blonde, skin-and-bones girl, standing erect with a big smile, my two big front teeth gleaming. I'm wearing my mother's red-framed sunglasses and a pink dupatta wrapped around my head. I'm dressed up as Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's prime minister at the time.

Benazir Bhutto became the first female prime minister of a Muslim country in 1988, a year before my family moved to Pakistan. She seemed a breath of fresh air in the political spheres of Pakistan, if only for being a woman, and quite charismatic at that. She was prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996, and was going to lead her Pakistan People's Party in the elections of January 2008. She spent years in prison in solitary confinement and in exile. The footage of her stepping down from the airplane to her homecountry after a 9-year absence shows a more human side to her as she wipes tears from her face, overcome by emotion.

When the news announced her death yesterday, it wasn't so much a feeling of disbelief and shock that overpowered me but a sick feeling in my stomach of yet another disappointment, another violent act to continue the cancerous legacy of Pakistani politics. "The unrest", an overused expression in the English-speaking media that I have grown to strongly dislike, has continued to grow in that weary artificial nation since the day a group of Oxford-educated gentlemen - who had never set foot in their colonial relic - forced a border halfway down the Indian subcontinent and created The Land of the Pure.

Ah, Pakistan. You break your people's hearts. What will become of you?