Haw Hai Tauba.

When I talk about Karachi or Pakistan in general, I always seem to be talking about contrasts and clashes, oxymorons and stark differences. I'm always awed but how all these opposites exist side by side in the same small place. Well I've just recently moved to Istanbul, Turkey, and my first real epiphany about the city is how you wouldn't use the word contrast to describe anything here. It's not that it has fewer opposites, it doesn't, in fact it has more then I'd have ever imagined a city to be able to hold. But what it does have is a seamless blend; nothing really stands out, or doesn't fit or doesn't seem to belong, it's a city filled with contrasts, but somehow you'd never describe them as such. And it makes me think that as a nation, that's probably what we're missing, the ability to take all these differences and let them mix together.

We're so focused on provincial differences, political differences, religious differences, ideological differences, and we think that coexisting is synonymous with homogeneity, that the only way to live peacefully is to eradicate the differences. What utter bullshit. We're so shocked when our team receives the loudest cheer at the opening of the commonwealth games in India, or when an entire stadium full of Bangladeshis supports us over the West Indies, in a recent cricket match. We're always so taken aback and pleasantly surprised by these gestures, that people don't hate us, not realizing that it's because most people don't judge others on the basis of ideology or politics, they judge them just as people, with the capacity for both good and bad, innocent until proven guilty, giving them the benefit of the doubt.

We don't get this because it's not how we function, for us it's all about labels and preconceived notions. Everyone who isn't like us is evil or wrong or out to get us. We teach our children to be endlessly wary and suspicious of someone who doesn't fit, to stay away, to stick to our own, and we're not even entirely sure of who our own are. We're hardwired to believe that everything evil is based in everything that we don't agree with, don't understand or just don't believe. And it's bullshit to say that we aren't all like that; take someone who swears to be open minded and non-judgemental and sit them down in a group of people all pointing fingers and haw-hai-ing at what doesn't fit and watch them nod their heads. I've done it and it makes me hate myself every time. That is who we are, and maybe if we just admitted it we'd be able to change it. I'm trying.