Rule of the 'holy' alliance.

In 2021, the Noble Prize in Literature has been awarded to Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. He wrote a novel, Memory of Departure, in 1987. This is the story of a 15-year-old boy Hasan Omar born in a poor costal region of East Africa. All around him there is only poverty, despair, corruption and all kinds of indecency. Every individual of Hasan's family is a victim of this environment. But everyone accepts its influence in their own individual way: his failing father finds refuge in alcohol and tortures wife and children; his sister seeks escape in the arms of non-men; his traditional, defeatist and oppressed mother is endures everything silently in an effort to maintain the basic structure of her house. All members of the family are ashamed of each other, but at some level their hopes are bound up with Hasan's aspirations. Hasan's thoughts are high and his goal is clear, but he does not want to reach the destination alone. He also wants to rid all in his surroundings of the poverty and despair.

Such an environment is normal in post-colonial societies - like Pakistan of today. And Hasan's story is the story of almost every youth of our country. The question is whether these conditions have surfaced automatically, or they have been crafted very quietly. And those who are forced to bear with such an environment are made to believe that only this is their destiny.

This whole game was first understood by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator. He had experienced the pangs of hunger firsthand. Such harsh conditions had a profound impact on his life; due to miseries, he fell far behind in his studies. This crisis led him to pledge at the age of 11 that he would spend his life fighting against hunger so that other children do not have to face the physical and mental pain that he was experiencing. Spending his early years with the poor gave him the opportunity to discover the 'culture of silence' of the underprivileged. He says that dominant elite do not listen to the voice of the...