Some people in that room wanted unity. A single story they could take home and feel good about. I understand that. But unity that requires silence is not unity. I would rather sit with disagreement.
There was something refreshing about sitting in a room where people did not have to agree. I like rooms like that. I always have.
Our community evenings are warm. I am grateful for that warmth. But they can also feel careful. Too careful. Everyone smiles. Everyone is decent. And then we go home without saying the things that matter.
APPNA in St. Louis on September 12 looked like every other such night at first. Physicians. Families. Speeches. Music. I am not a physician, though people in these rooms always assume I am. It used to amuse me. Then it stopped being amusing. As if a medical degree were the only acceptable proof that someone can think. I have a seventeen-year-old daughter and a thirteen-year-old son who are watching how we argue, and I have a habit of listening.
What stayed with me was not the program. It is that more than one version of Pakistan was allowed to stand in that room without being tidied up into one comfortable message.
Three Different Corridors
Moeed Pirzada trained as a doctor, then the civil service pulled him in. He could have stayed. Instead, he chose journalism-which means he chose to ask hard questions of powerful people. He studied at Columbia and the London School of Economics. He founded Global Village Space. He supported Imran Khan; he thought Khan’s removal by the general will be troubling for the national institutions. Time has proved he was right! But he was forced to leave Pakistan–he now speaks and writes from Washington.
Raza Rumi took almost the same path out of the civil service. He topped the CSS exam. He worked in Kosovo as a peacekeeper. He moved into journalism. Then in March 2014, gunmen tried to kill him. They killed his driver instead. He had to leave Pakistan to survive. Now he writes from the United States. Unlike Moeed, Raza thinks that Imran Khan was part of the problem.
Ahmed Ali Khan came from somewhere else entirely. Medicine in China. Then a trucking company in Canada. From that unlikely place, he became one of the sharpest voices on Pakistan. He talks in for a new generation – that has been shaped by social media, by sound bites of TikTok and Insta. His world is essentially different from the world of Moeed and Raza. But all three are ready to listen to each other without the losing the respect for other.
Three men. Three different roads. And none of them seemed interested in convincing the other two to agree with them. This is what I witnessed in Saint Louis on Sept 12. I did not sit there keeping score about who was right. I sat there thinking this is better than agreement.
Some people in that room wanted unity. A single story they could take home and feel good about. I understand that. But unity that requires silence is not unity. I would rather sit with disagreement.
How a Basement Challenged Culture of Authoritarianism?
Later that evening, away from the stage, I spoke with Salman Ahmad. Not a lecture. A memory. He told me about Gen. Zia’s Pakistan in the 1980s when music was considered dangerous for society. But when young musicians and singers still found ways to create anyway. Sometimes in basements.
I cannot stop thinking about that image. A basement is a strange place to keep a culture alive. But in some years, it is the only place left.
They did not stop creating. They just changed rooms. He said it simply, but listening to him I thought: not all courage looks like a speech. Sometimes it is a guitar where no official can see it. Countries are not built only by power politics. They are also built and shaped by songs and rhymes that resonate with hearts. In faith. In people who refuse to go quiet.
The stage does not know what the basement knows.
Read more:When System Fails, Generations Pay-Long Shadow of Corruption & Systemic Breakdown
The analyst and the artist are not fighting for the same chair. The critic and the builder are working on the same wound from different angles. We need both. We need all of them.
Our community loves the word unity. It sounds responsible. But unity that cannot stand disagreement is just quiet with good food. A real room is one where someone can say the difficult thing, be answered, and still be offered tea afterwards.
Pakistan is not short on opinions. The problem is how fast we decide the other opinion is wrong. We packed that habit when we packed our bags. We choose a side and then wait for applause.
St. Louis, for a few hours, offered something different: stay. Listen anyway. Think about why the other person thinks what they do.
I do not know if anyone changed their mind that night. I do not think that is the point.
The point is whether a community this far from home can hear more than one diagnosis of a country they still love. Whether we can respect someone even when we think they are wrong.
Every voice matters. Every small effort counts. Nothing is not an option anymore.
We may never find one voice that speaks for everyone.
We might start by letting different voices sit at the same table.
Sameena Faisal Khan holds a master’s in English literature. She is a civic activist and has been working with multiple organizations to support fundraising for humanitarian causes including Indus Hospital, NAMAL, Shaukat Khanum and Zindagi Trust. She lives and works from Midwest.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of global village space
