In an era when nations project their influence not just through economies or armies but through culture, art, education, and digital narratives, Pakistan—a country of 240 million people—remains conspicuously absent. It is not just that Pakistan has a poor image abroad; it is that we barely register in the imagination of the world at all. This absence is not accidental. It is the result of a deeper, more troubling phenomenon: mental inertia—a collective unwillingness to adapt, evolve, and engage with the world on new terms.
This is not a lament for the loss of global prestige. It is a mirror we must hold to ourselves. Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, with a diaspora scattered across the globe and a rich cultural, historical, and intellectual heritage, should be a natural soft power. Yet, it has no globally recognized intellectuals, artists, or institutions shaping global discourse. In the imagination of the average Westerner—or even many in the global South—Pakistan is not misrepresented; it is unrepresented.
A Nation Unimagined
Soft power is the ability of a nation to shape preferences through appeal and attraction. Bollywood shaping India’s image, K-pop and Korean dramas rebranding South Korea, Turkish serials weaving Ottoman nostalgia into global living rooms. Pakistan evokes little more than security concerns or nostalgic memories of cricketing legends long retired.
Despite a large, resourceful diaspora and a rich cultural history there is no Pakistani equivalent of Fareed Zakaria or Arundhati Roy. No Pakistani university ranks among the world’s intellectual powerhouses. Its artists rarely exhibit at global biennales; its writers seldom make the Booker shortlist. Even among its diaspora, assimilation often means invisibility. This erasure is not accidental—it is structural. We remain defined by the vocabulary of crisis: terrorism, floods, IMF bailouts. But behind these external crises is an internal paralysis—an inability to imagine ourselves differently.
The Weight of Inherited Scripts
Pakistani identity today is trapped between nostalgia and denial. We romanticize the lost promise of 1947, the mythical purity of a founding moment. We invoke Iqbal and Jinnah without interrogating the gaps between their ideals and our realities. Our educational curricula remain steeped in myth, discouraging critical thinking and fostering conformity. The tragedy is not just that the world misunderstands us. It is that we misunderstand ourselves.
At the heart lies a failing education system that churns out graduates without curiosity, without inquiry, and without systematic thought. The humanities are dismissed as distractions, and critical thinking is discouraged. The result is a population ill-equipped to project its story, much less compete in a globalized cultural marketplace. We recycle the same tropes, produce the same bureaucrats, and export the same narrow vision of Pakistan—one that is insular, defensive, and afraid of modernity.
Moreover, the state has often viewed intellectualism with suspicion. Censorship, conformity, and fear have driven away its brightest minds. Universities are underfunded, public discourse is stunted, and creative expression is policed rather than nurtured. The most promising Pakistanis often leave—and rarely return.
A Diaspora Adrift
The Pakistani diaspora, particularly in the West, is vast but disconnected. Unlike Indian Americans who have built media empires and shaped political narratives, or Jewish Americans who have leveraged cultural capital into institutional influence, Pakistani immigrants often remain fragmented—siloed in professions but not in power.
Why? Partly because many Pakistani immigrants never fully transition from survival to storytelling. Their successes are private, not collective. They become doctors, not documentarians. Entrepreneurs, not editors. And in the absence of cultural production, there is no soft power.
Even in the mundane rituals of global multiculturalism—at the grocery store, in food festivals, on the menus of trendy urban eateries—Pakistan is a ghost. There is no Pakistani section in the Asian grocery aisle. Our cuisine is sold under other names: Afghan, Mughal, Indian. The flavors are there, but the flag is missing.
Our embassies are not centers of cultural diplomacy. Our universities do not foster global academic partnerships. Our wealthy expatriates build mosques, not think tanks; donate to charities, not to cultural institutions. There is philanthropy, yes—but little imagination
The Mirror We Avoid
Countries that ignore soft power do so at their peril. It is not simply about pride or perception. It is about leverage. Nations with compelling narratives attract investment, tourism, and talent. They shape the rules of global engagement. In today’s world, power is not just measured in missiles and markets—it is measured in metaphors, in memes, in the stories nations tell and how often others listen. The global order is increasingly curated not only in boardrooms and battlegrounds but in writers’ rooms, universities, film festivals, and algorithmic feeds. If you are not at the table, you are on the menu. And right now, Pakistan isn’t even in the room.
We are one of the world’s most populous nations, with a diaspora that spans continents, yet we remain a geopolitical footnote and a cultural afterthought. We are the sixth largest country by population, but we wield neither narrative nor normative power.
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There is a mirror we refuse to look into—a reflection that shows us not as victims of a global conspiracy but as architects of our own erasure. If Pakistan is missing from the world’s imagination, it is because we have failed to imagine ourselves with clarity and purpose.
We have the raw material: a poetic tradition that rivals any, a cuisine that intoxicates, a musical lineage from qawwali to Coke Studio that transcends borders. But these fragments have not been stitched into a coherent narrative. We have not invested in translation—not just linguistically, but culturally.
Reclaiming Presence
The path forward is neither quick nor easy. It requires rebuilding institutions, rethinking education, and re-engaging the diaspora not just as remitters of capital but as ambassadors of culture. It means empowering artists, investing in public intellectuals, and creating platforms for global engagement.
As the post–World War II order dissolves and a multipolar world emerges, the urgency grows. We must find our story and tell it on our terms—or risk being defined by others, or worse, forgotten entirely.
If Pakistan is to matter in the 21st century, it must do more than exist. It must inspire. It must narrate. It must reimagine. The task ahead is not just one of geopolitics or media strategy. It is a battle against mental inertia, against the slow decay of vision. It is a call to imagine—and then to build—the Pakistan that could be.
The writer is a technology analyst who writes under the pseudonym Patience Quill.