“I would also like to be wise/ In the old books it says what wisdom is: to shun the strife of the world and to live out your brief time without fear/ also to get along without violence/to return good for evil/not to fulfill your desires but to forget them is accounted wisdom/all this I cannot do: truly I live in dark times,” says the German poet Bertolt Brecht in the third decade of the last century when Europe was in a state of suppressed agitation. In the ancient books of the subcontinent we find sages not only stressing the need for self-restraint but also delineating the manners in which it can be exercised in day to day life.

Yoga and ‘Tapas/Tapp (austere physical and spiritual practices)’ both as disciplines of knowledge and practices are well-known and in some form are adopted by a sizable number of people in the world for attaining their physical, psychic and spiritual well-being. But in Pakistan, especially in Punjab, an overwhelming Muslim majority, unlike Brecht, has completely forgotten our old scriptures in the belief that wisdom coming from other than our current faith-driven world-view is patently false. It’s not just a matter of not being able to practice what has been prescribed in the books.

We reject with disdain what can be appropriated in the changed social conditions. In the holy books patience for example is held as one of the great virtues that can make human life more bearable which, otherwise, is hardly bearable due to its being full of sufferings, natural and man-made. One should not equate patience with resignation. Resignation implicitly implies absence of choice in a certain situation while patience doesn’t mean absence of choice but rather exercising self-restraint as a means of tackling a situation with poise which can also be dealt with differently.

Self-restraint, an outcome of patience, is a bedrock of individual and social life free of unnecessary strife. But what we see all around and experience is the opposite of it in a society that appears to have been unhinged with unbridled self-destructive fear driven rage. You can start from the top. Our politicians, the most loquacious and querulous class, with their no-holds-barred attitude have now such low tolerance threshold that interaction between political opponents has been reduced to atrocious mud-slinging and chances of having a reasoned political dialogue in a decent manner are quite slim. Almost all the politicians worth the name do pure politicking. They are in fact loose cannons; they hurt their opponents with their founded and unfounded allegations rather than argue. The language they use in their statements and public rallies are meant to degrade whosoever opposes them. What they utter in the name of democracy and national interests is little more than balderdash. Politics has come to mean washing private dirty linens in public. Restraint or self-restraint is considered to be a sign of being politically gutless. They have subverted the biblical verse and believe that ‘cursed are the meek: for they shall not inherit the earth [The original verse reads: ‘blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth]’.

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Now let’s hear and see what our honourable clerics, the sacred cows in our Muslim society, say and do. Some of them, which in no way means a small number, openly and publicly spew holy sectarian venom against all who are not of their ilk. They rant and rave against other Muslim sects/ schools of thought and quoting arcane sources issue Fatwas[decrees] declaring them ‘infidels’ full of guile. Thus they in the words of the holy Quran spread strife on the earth. A number of clerics with upward social and political aspirations proudly offer their services to the civ-mil establishment as proxies and mercenaries to rattle the democratic forces whenever they assert their legitimate right to rule as peoples’ representatives. Some such clerics, half literate and uncouth, muck around with their nauseating harangue laced with unrepeatable invective and expletives. And all this ugly mundane nothingness in the name of our faith! They launch an unbearably abrasive diatribe against the current fledgling democratic system. Self-restraint for these macho men is something ‘womanish’. They feel free to say things that are patently wrong. Nobody dares to correct them. They dislike pausing and pondering, and thus offer garbled explanation as the divine truth. Nobody has the guts to challenge it. It seems we have accepted their ‘holy noise’ which is gobbledygook, as an irrational reality we have to live with. Violence suffered for long without resistance tends to appear as natural.

And now our common folks! Just look at our city roads, the feverish arteries of our contemporary urban life. They simply cannot wait for traffic signal to turn green. They jump the red light as if it’s not for real. Baseless road rage is the pride that every driver wears on his ‘forehead’; scowling is the way of reacting. Giving way is considered to be a sure mark of being effete. In an indecent haste the drivers turn highways like four-lane city roads into six-lane roads and then each driver curses the other for the mess thus created. If there is an accident, no matter how small, the first thing the drivers do is to hurl abuses at each other and because of being abused come to blows in a jiffy. Here again we witness lack of patience and subsequently a loss of self-restraint.