Pakistani Culture Quotes

Ever since I could remember, I'd been engaging in literary transference/transplantation/translation from one culture to another. Growing up on English literature, I taught myself to see my daily reality reflected in my reading material, while plumbing its universal truths in search of particulars... In reading English literature with a Pakistani lense, it seemed to me that all cultures were concerned with the same eternal questions and that people were more similar to one another than they were different. As Alys Binat says in Unmarriagble, "Reading widely can lead to an appreciation of the universalities across cultures." But as Valentine Darsee says, "We've been forced to seek ourselves in the literature of others for too long.

Life is beautiful mess...and I am tangled...though I am the spider but a stupid one. Cheap I am by name, views and actions.

Many immigrants fear that by embracing the culture of their adopted country, they are scraping away the defining contours of their heritage.

Much of Chinese society still expected its women to hold themselves in a sedate manner, lower their eyelids in response to men's stares, and restrict their smile to a faint curve of the lips which did not expose their teeth. They were not meant to use hand gestures at all. If they contravened any of these canons of behavior they would be considered 'flirtatious." Under Mao, flirting with./bre/gners was an unspeakable crime. I was furious at the innuendo against me. It had been my Communist parents who had given me a liberal upbringing. They had regarded the restrictions on women as precisely the sort of thing a Communist revolution should put an end to. But now oppression of women joined hands with political repression, and served resentment and petty jealousy. One day, a Pakistani ship arrived. The Pakistani military attache came down from Peking. Long ordered us all to spring-clean the club from top to bottom, and laid on a banquet, for which he asked me to be his interpreter, which made some of the other students extremely envious. A few days later the Pakistanis gave a farewell dinner on their ship, and I was invited. The military attache had been to Sichuan, and they had prepared a special Sichuan dish for me. Long was delighted by the invitation, as was I. But despite a personal appeal from the captain and even a threat from Long to bar future students, my teachers said that no one was allowed on board a foreign ship. "Who would take the responsibility if someone sailed away on the ship?" they asked. I was told to say I was busy that evening. As far as I knew, I was turning down the only chance I would ever have of a trip out to sea, a foreign meal, a proper conversation in English, and an experience of the outside world. Even so, I could not silence the whispers. Ming asked pointedly, "Why do foreigners like her so much?" as though there was something suspicious in that. The report filed on me at the end of the trip said my behavior was 'politically dubious." In this lovely port, with its sunshine, sea breezes, and coconut trees, every occasion that should have been joyous was turned into misery. I had a good friend in the group who tried to cheer me up by putting my distress into perspective. Of course, what I encountered was no more than minor unpleasantness compared with what victims of jealousy suffered in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. But the thought that this was what my life at its best would be like depressed me even more. This friend was the son of a colleague of my father's. The other students from cities were also friendly to me. It was easy to distinguish them from the students of peasant backgrounds, who provided most of the student officials.

All cultures seem to find a slightly alien local population to carry the Hermes projection. For the Vietnamese it is the Chinese, and for the Chinese it is the Japanese. For the Hindu it is the Moslem; for the North Pacific tribes it was the Chinook; in Latin America and in the American South it is the Yankee. In Uganda it is the East Indians and Pakistanis. In French Quebec it is the English. In Spain the Catalans are "the Jews of Spain". On Crete it is the Turks, and in Turkey it is the Armenians. Lawrence Durrell says that when he lived in Crete he was friends with the Greeks, but that when he wanted to buy some land they sent him to a Turk, saying that a Turk was what you needed for a trade, though of course he couldn't be trusted. This figure who is good with money but a little tricky is always treated as a foreigner even if his family has been around for centuries. Often he actually is a foreigner, of course. He is invited in when the nation needs trade and he is driven out - or murdered - when nationalism begins to flourish: the Chinese out of Vietnam in 1978, the Japanese out of China in 1949, the Jankees out of South America and Iran, the East Indians out of Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Armenians out of Turkey in 1915-16. The outsider is always used as a catalyst to arouse nationalism, and when times are hard he will always be its victim as well.

purposes,’ he insisted. In Suhrawardy’s view, the Muslim League government was not making non-Muslims, especially Hindus, feel safe within Pakistan and questioned the government’s claims to the contrary. ‘Why are the Hindus running away from Sindh [if] they were safe and sound, where they had established business on colossal scales and which they made their homes?’ he asked, pointing to the deep cultural ties of Sindhi Hindus to Sindh. According to Suhrawardy, the rhetoric of an Islamic state was responsible for causing insecurity among non-Muslims. ‘The Pakistan State, if it is to be maintained, must be maintained by the goodwill of Pakistanis of all people, Muslims or non-Muslims whom you consider to be your nationals,’ he stressed. The minorities could not depend ‘merely on the goodwill of the Muslims or on their authority or their strength’.48

My father always addressed my mother as ‘’Darling’’, which was surprising for my brother’s wife. Even more shocking was the fact that he would greet his wife with a kiss when returning from a trip. This was also rather unusual in Pakistani culture, where affection towards spouses is restrained and frowned upon.

Muttrah and neighbouring Ruwi also offer the city’s most interesting streetlife, and the best view of the patchwork of cultures which make up the city: Omani, Indian and Pakistani, with an occasional hint of Zanzibari, Baluchi and Iranian thrown in for good measure – a living memory of the city’s surprisingly cosmopolitan past.

We sang and danced all night as if it were a real marriage. We began with Yemeni dancing, moved to Afghani, back to Pakistani, back to Saudi dancing... we learned the dances of all our brothers' homes and then we ended with our own new dance that brought them all together. We called it the Guantánamo dance.

The Pakistani elite has not even observed, leave alone adopted the crucial aspects of modem western culture, whereby eighty percent of their problems were resolved through social welfare. Our people absorb their flair for fashions and their methods of entertainment, whereas the basics by which the West is exemplary remain unnoticed. They should see them plumbing, painting, cooking and struggling very hard to earn a living.

Elena came up with the idea of a fusion elote, taking her beloved Mexican street corn and adding Pakistani and Filipino twists to match with Adeena's and my respective backgrounds. Not only did Jae gave us his mother's recipe for the oksusu cha, or Korean corn tea, but he'd also volunteered to handle all elote duties: slathering the corn with thick, creamy coconut milk before rolling it in a fragrant spice mix that included amchur powder and red chili powder, grilling it, then squeezing calamansi over the corn before sprinkling it with your choice of kesong puti or cotija cheese. It was a simple yet laborious task, but he seemed to enjoy himself ( I wasn't one for gender stereotypes, but what was with guys and grills?) and I'd caught him sneaking more than one smoky, salty treat as he worked. The benefit of being the cook. Meanwhile, I arranged the sweet offerings I'd prepared: mais ube sandwich cookies, mais kon keso bars, and two types of ice candy--- mais kon yelo and ginataang mais. Corn as a dessert ingredient may seem strange to some people, but Filipinos absolutely love and embrace corn in all its salty-sweet possibilities. My first offering sandwiched ube buttercream between corn cookies, the purple yam's subtle vanilla-like sweetness pairing well with the salty-sweet corn. Cheese and corn are a popular savory pairing, but guess what? It makes one of my absolute favorite Filipino ice cream flavors as well, and I channeled that classic combo into a cheesecake bar with a corn cookie crust. Mais kon yelo, literally corn with ice, is a Filipino dessert consisting of shaved ice with corn, sugar, and milk, while ginataang mais, a simple porridge made with coconut milk, glutinous rice, and sweet corn, is usually served warm for breakfast or meryenda. My take on these simple, refreshing snacks utilized those same flavors in a portable, easy-to-eat ice pop bag. However, if you wanted to try the traditional versions, you could just pop down a few booths over to Tita Rosie's Kitchen, the restaurant run by my paternal aunt and grandmother. While my aunt, Tita Rosie, handled the savory side of the menu, offering small cups of corn soup and paper cones full of cornick, or corn nuts flavored with salt and garlic, my grandmother, Lola Flor, reigned over the sweets. The aforementioned mais kon yelo and ginataang mais were the desserts on offer, in addition to maja blanca, a simple corn and coconut pudding. Truly a gluten-free sweet tooth's paradise.

Mostly Pakistani electronic and print media are talking, spreading, and participating in the foreign policy agenda against Islam, the Armed Forces, Pakistan, and the Pakistani nation by receiving funds for that purpose. It is common sense to understand that no one will do anything against their people and land without getting any reward or money. They have organized the so-called "Amn Ki Aasha"; they are not on the "Mission of Peace" but on the "Mission of Destruction" of the moral, Islamic, and cultural values of our society. They are open traitors and agents of foreign secret agencies, especially Indians. The agencies never leave proof or signs of their involvement behind them. We should, as a Muslim nation and as a great Armed Forces of the world, first trace and clean up the traitors and agents at home and within us, and then turn to others, out of the homeland. The enemies who are active in destroying our beloved Pakistani security and peace, our media is the ugly enemy of our defense system; it should and must be brought to justice and addressed for peace and security.

A Pakistani exchange student's maternal American host "managed to summon the transforming question of her culture, built on the revolutionary idea that people are the sovereign, the boss, captains of their own fate. She said, simply, "But what do YOU think?

Liaquat and his westernized colleagues thought they had given Islamists what they wanted. But for Maududi and his fellow Islamists, the Objectives Resolution marked the beginning of a process of cleansing non-Muslim influences from Pakistani State and society. In one of his writings, Maududi had argued that non-Muslim culture had a negative impact on Muslim life. ‘It destroys its inner vitality, blurs its vision, befogs its critical faculties, breeds inferiority complexes, and gradually but assuredly saps all the springs of culture and sounds its death-knell,’ he wrote. He argued that, ‘the Holy Prophet has positively and forcefully forbidden the Muslims to assume the culture and mode of life of the non-Muslims’.

i believe in the freedom of state where every people have to right develop their culture and maintain the democracy while two things are very essential justice and equality - Long Live Pakistan and Happy Independence Day

The history of the bagel suggests that Americans’ shifting, blended, multi-ethnic eating habits are signs neither of postmodern decadence, ethnic fragmentation, nor corporate hegemony. If we do not understand how a bagel could sometimes be Jewish, sometimes be “New York,” and sometimes be American, or why it is that Pakistanis now sell bagels to both Anglos and Tejanos in Houston, it is in part because we have too hastily assumed that our tendency to cross cultural boundaries in order to eat ethnic foods is a recent development—and a culinary symptom of all that has gone wrong with contemporary culture. It is not. The bagel tells a different kind of American tale. It high- lights ways that the production, exchange, marketing, and consumption of food have generated new identities—for foods and eaters alike.

unqualified people, mostly for monetary gain. Some of the extreme cases then ended up dying. Since abortions were legalized in the United States, such serious complications are rarely seen anymore. The Pakistani medial students and residents were much like their American counterparts and mostly well trained and

Chesler cites the claim by the Palestinian American writer Suha Sabbagh that Western feminists, simply by writing about Muslim women, exert "a greater degree of domination" over those women "than that actually exercised by men over women within Muslim culture." A brown woman in (say) some Pakistani village, then, is actually more oppressed by some white woman tapping away at a computer at some American university she's never heard of than by a man who's beating and raping her in her home.

IBAAS Pakistani suits in Delhi showcase a rich tapestry of cultural diversity and intricate craftsmanship.

Mostly Pakistani electronic and print media are talking, spreading, and participating in the foreign policy agenda against Islam, the Armed Forces, Pakistan, and the Pakistani nation by receiving funds for that purpose. It is common sense to understand that no one will do anything against their people and land without getting any reward or money. They have organized the so-called "Amn Ki Aasha"; they are not on the "Mission of Peace" but on the "Mission of Destruction" of the moral, Islamic, and cultural values of our society. They are open traitors and agents of foreign secret agencies, especially Indians. The agencies never leave proof or signs of their involvement behind them. We should, as a Muslim nation and as a great Armed Forces of the world, first trace and clean up the traitors and agents at home and within us, and then turn to others, out of the homeland. The enemies who are active in destroying our beloved Pakistani security and peace, our media is the ugly enemy of our defense system; it should and must be brought to justice and addressed for peace and security.

14 August -Independence Day Pakistan need not, to be new, or its institutions should stay under the Constitution, Pakistan turns into new Pakistan until our collective and mutual thinking, as long as, becomes capable, to match with the world's decent societies and communities, adopting within its religious, cultural and social values, and welfare's boundaries; then the change can be possible. The slogan of a new Pakistan can be just a slogan; however, our collective status, shape, and thought will stay unchanged, collapsing as the earthquake, and Pakistani people will remain the victim of it; indeed, no one else. As a fact, Pakistan's prestige and also beauty situates and depends upon its stronghold, independent, prosperous, self-sufficient, stable, and compatible with all its institutions. Long live, Pakistan. (Pakistan Zinda-o-Paindabad.)

India is touted today as the most multicultural, ethnically diverse country in the world. This country is home to four major racial groups, which overlap due to racial admixture: Caucasoids, Australoids, Mongoloids and Negritos. With over two thousand ethnic groups, four major families of languages, and multiple religions (Hindus do comprise the vast majority at 80.5% with Islam at 13.4%), India, in the words of Coon, is ‘the most complicated geographically, racially, and culturally’.[38] Yet all these racial groups are descendants of waves of invaders centuries ago; immigration is practically non-existent today, apart from a trickling of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Burmese migrants. With its endogamous rules, India has remained racially stable for centuries; its caste divisions have been historically deep, with limited gene flows across racial boundaries. The racial differences that exist can still be traced back to the migrations into India before Christ. The Indian racial populations can be well demarcated as separate from most of the other Asian populations, from the Persian Gulf, Arabia, Burma, China, Vietnamese and Malayan lands. It is not a complicated land to locate on a map; historically the country has always been located more or less in the same place.

Throughout the decades after Independence, the political culture of the country reflected these ‘secular’ assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 80 per cent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, three of India’s eleven presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices. During the war with Pakistan in 1971, when the Pakistani leadership was foolish enough to proclaim a jihad against the Hindu unbelievers, the Indian Air Force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim (Air Marshal, later Air Chief Marshal, I. H. Latif); the army commander was a Parsi (General, later Field Marshal, S. H. F. J. Manekshaw), the general officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh (General J. S. Aurora), and the general flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal was Jewish (Major-General J. F. R. Jacob). They led the armed forces of an overwhelmingly Hindu country. That is India.

Pakistanis have constantly forgotten that offers of autonomy and recognition of linguistic and cultural separateness is often a better option than imposing greater centralization by force.

Mostly Pakistani electronic and print media are talking, spreading, and participating in the foreign policy agenda against Islam, Armed Forces, Pakistan, and the Pakistani nation by receiving funds for that purpose. It is common sense to understand that there is no one; who will do against their people and land without getting any reward and money. They have organized the so-called "Amn Ki Aasha"; they are not on the "Mission of Peace," but on the "Mission of Destruction" of the moral, Islamic, and cultural values of our society. They are openly traitors and agents of foreign secret agencies, especially Indians. The agencies do not leave the proof and sign of their involvement. We should, as a Muslim nation and as a great Armed Forces of the world, first, trace and clean up the traitors and agents at home and within us and then turn to others, out of the homeland. The enemies, who are active to destroy our beloved Pakistani security, and peace, our media is the ugly enemy of our defense system, it should and must be brought to justice to give the lesson forever.

The debate, throughout the eighties, was no longer about what we had inherited as our 'culture' or what, indeed, was the 'culture' we adhere to, but about how to root out the insidious 'foreign' (and therefore anti-Pakistan) elements which had crept in. Since it was feared that the slightest whiff from across the border would annihilate our 'ideology', the performing arts were confined to horse and cattle shows, and the fine arts, to calligraphy--at an official level that is.

From the perspective of academic models, the PTI has cynically operated the wind turbines of accountability to put opposition heads under the water.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

Pakistan need not, to be new, or its institutions should stay under the Constitution, Pakistan stays new Pakistan until our collective and mutual thinking, as long as, becomes capable to match with the world's decent societies and communities, adopting within its religious, cultural and social values, and welfare's boundaries; then the change can be possible. The slogan of a new Pakistan can be just a slogan; however, our collective status, shape, and thought will stay unchanged, collapsing as the earthquake, and Pakistani people will remain the victim of it; indeed, no one else. As a fact, Pakistan's prestige and also beauty situates and depends, upon its stronghold, independent, prosperous, self-sufficient, stable, and compatible with all its institutions. Long live, Pakistan. (Pakistan Zinda-o-Paindabad.)