The Pakistani Spectator

‘’It was the best of the times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair’’

Charles Dickens’s portrait of Paris in A tale of two cities emphasized the turmoil of the capital in French Revolution; the hope had been vanished away by a wave of impending anarchy. Darkness was prevailing in the country every where. The eyes of a common man were looking in the horizons for a single beam of twilight. But there was nobody whom they were waiting for as a reformer, as a leader or as an angel from horizons with a stick of stars, transforming everything into crystals just by touching with that stick. Sooner or later they had to realize the cruelty of situation, they had to! But common men were being crushed for so many times by their lords that they could only be relaxed by just weeping. The shedding tears turned into a wave of violence. They stood up against hunger, starvation, thirst and craving not of stomach but also of the basic human rights, injustice, inequality,  and law & order. The streets of Paris were dirty, bloody, and violent. It was the best of the times; it was the worst of times.

French Revolution, major transformation of the society and political system of France, lasting from 1789 to 1799. During the course of the Revolution, France was temporarily transformed from an absolute monarchy, where the king monopolized power, to a republic of theoretically free and equal citizens. Although historians disagree on the causes of the Revolution, the following reasons are commonly adduced: (1) the increasingly prosperous elite of wealthy commoners—merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, often called the bourgeoisie—produced by the 18th century’s economic growth resented its exclusion from political power and positions of honor; (2) the peasants were acutely aware of their situation and were less and less willing to support the anachronistic and burdensome feudal system; (3) the philosophers, who advocated social and political reform, had been read more widely in France than anywhere else; (4) French participation in the American Revolution had driven the government to the brink of bankruptcy; and (5) crop failures in much of the country in 1788, coming on top of a long period of economic difficulties, made the population particularly restless.

During the ten years of the Revolution, France first transformed and then dismantled the Old Regime, the political and social system that existed in France before 1789, and replaced it with a series of different governments. The initiatives included the drafting of several bills of rights and constitutions, the establishment of legal equality among all citizens, experiments with representative democracy, the incorporation of the church into the state, and the reconstruction of state administration and the law code.

I was walking down a road at a humid evening of late July in the city of Lahore when suddenly met with a mob at a busy square. They were being violent, lighting up road signals and causing the traffic to stop by firing tires. Slogans were everywhere. Emotions were at peak on every face, red faces by loud slogans mixing with fumes, tears mixing with hot flushes of sweating, young, old and children, men and women; a crowd of hundreds of people. No rules, no law, no justice, no peace but violence, dirt, pain, slogans, crying and  craving for thirst; only one thing left was Blood.

What they want? What are their demands? What kind of exhaustion caused them to come out of their homes? What they wanted to say? It’s just in your mind I don’t want to go into the details as these kinds of strikes are common now a days. The way of expression of aggression for their needs can vary but the demands are same every where.

The American psychologist Abraham Maslow devised a six-level hierarchy of motives that, according to his theory, determine human behavior. Maslow ranks human needs as follows: (1) physiological; (2) security and safety; (3) love and feelings of belonging; (4) competence, prestige, and esteem; (5) self-fulfillment; and (6) curiosity and the need to understand. Psychological needs mean the basic needs of hunger, thirst and sexual drive. A society which fails to fulfill the requirements for basic psychological needs and feeling of security and safety means the society as a whole has turned into an incurable state. This kind of behavior can only be tolerable in a psychiatry bay at a hospital.

When there is electricity at your place, just tune up your television sets to any local news channel. This ludicrous behavior is all around there, every face wants his basic needs of hunger, thirst, safety and security and freedom of expression. What is the hottest topic? Its electricity, Its terrorism, its question of IDPs, its America’s influence in our system, its supply of land water, its hiking prices of petroleum products, its supply of clean drinking water, its traffic jams, its rising rates of crimes, its fights of political leaders, its freedom of expression, its rising tension across borders, its question of safety of N-weapons or what else. The question is not about all that but about the basic needs which were also absent in Paris at the time of late 17th century when a common peasant was suffering from all the hardships of his time and system shook up by a wave of anarchy and then revolution against all the odds of system.

So the question is about what?  It’s all about the infrastructure of system. There is no system, no hope and no light (light of thought and electricity also!). At times I wonder whether we are living in fool’s paradise where we are leaving behind nothing but political and social debris for the coming generations. Lets find the ways to correct the infrastructure of system for next generations otherwise they will find the solution in their own way by saying;     ‘’It was the best of the times; it was the worst of times.’’

By Muhammad Qais Luqman