The Country We Inherited

Before Pakistan was home, it was a journey of survival.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE!

“August 14”

The day the map changed.

The day the future of the Muslims changed forever.

The day a new country appeared on the world map,

with the name…

PAKISTAN.

A country that trembled in its earliest days.

A country whose birth was paid for by one of the largest mass migration in modern history, one that costed hundreds of thousands of lives before the ink on the map had even dried.

When we read that in a textbook, it doesn’t feel like much. Does it?

A sentence, a statistic, a paragraph to memorize for an exam.

But I am the grandson of people who crossed from India, and to me, it was never just a sentence. My grandparents told me what they had lived through, not what they’d read.

My grandfather heard the Quaid giving a speach on a train. They told me how they and their relatives ran. How they hid from the massacres. How some made it across, and others didn’t.

There were people who boarded trains believing they were headed toward safety. When those trains arrived, they carried only bodies and blood. Families left behind everything they owned. Some families never found each other again.

All of it, the running and the losing and the surviving, is the reason a country named Pakistan exists at all.

And yet we, the generation born after all of it, rarely feel the weight of what it cost.

We criticize the country freely,

but forget that the flaw was never in the land itself.

It’s in the system.

It’s in the leaders.

It’s in the people.

*It’s in *“US”.**

So today, go and celebrate Youm e Azadi.

Today isn’t for mourning what the country isn’t. It’s for remembering what it took just for it to exist. However it is, it is ours, and it will remain ours.

Inshallah.

Be happy and enjoy!

Azaadi Mubarak!

DON’T FORGET TO SMILE :)

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