On a cold January, in the first twenty-first year of the last century, a play written by a former soldier who had served in the trenches of the Great War, opened in London. The response was immediate and it was one of utter amazement. The play was called The Journey's End and I remember seeing it, performed, in Ottawa many years ago. It was the first realistic look at life during a war devoid of the gleams of patriotism and disrobed of any cloak of nationalism and it showed, in words of a seldom remembered poet, the hell where youth and laughter go and how glad we should be that we will never know how that place, and where our dreams of patriotism and glory end.
The realism of the play was a slap in the face of a generation that never truly understood what was the true face of war. F .E. Manning was right; the real face of war is our own face and the reason why we dislike looking at our reflection in the mirror is because, it is ugly and it mocks our own sense of a faux vanity, created on an ediface of a hollow pride.
The play's title is also an introspection of how the human mind changes and the progress by which we mature to new ideas and new thoughts. T. S. Elliot, once wrote in his poem, "The Hollow Man", that between reality and the idea lies the shadow and it is in shade of that shadow, where most of us pass our days debating the proverbial cross-roads of our choices.
From the realm of unthinkability to the shores of thinkability to the firm ground of the inevitability is how the evolution of reality progresses. In Pakistan, we have crossed over from what was once unthinkable to the thinkable and are now staring at the inevitable, which is staring back at us and what we do from here is upto us and our actions, will decide how our story will be told to the generations who will come after us.
The realism of the play was a slap in the face of a generation that never truly understood what was the true face of war. F .E. Manning was right; the real face of war is our own face and the reason why we dislike looking at our reflection in the mirror is because, it is ugly and it mocks our own sense of a faux vanity, created on an ediface of a hollow pride.
The play's title is also an introspection of how the human mind changes and the progress by which we mature to new ideas and new thoughts. T. S. Elliot, once wrote in his poem, "The Hollow Man", that between reality and the idea lies the shadow and it is in shade of that shadow, where most of us pass our days debating the proverbial cross-roads of our choices.
From the realm of unthinkability to the shores of thinkability to the firm ground of the inevitability is how the evolution of reality progresses. In Pakistan, we have crossed over from what was once unthinkable to the thinkable and are now staring at the inevitable, which is staring back at us and what we do from here is upto us and our actions, will decide how our story will be told to the generations who will come after us.
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