It doesn’t surprise me that the current state of the word - to my a mind supernova of lit sh*t hurtling at lightspeed towards an galactic fan - would decimate school grades with the same casual ease it did the rest of life. I feel bad for the confusion, loss and anger that the thousands of O- and A-level students (the very terms trigger stress hives) are having to face this year. It is not their fault, and highlights the absurdity of an apparently changeable colonial education system that insists your entire future can be expressed in single letters.
I was never very good at the parts of school Pakistanis are trained to think about. “Hard Subjects” my mother liked to call them. I was told that excelling in substantive topics like Mathematics and Physics were reliable steps towards secure futures. To succeed, then, meant I had to be either good at guessing prime numbers or playing sports, while everything else was little more than a hobby.
The closest I got to football was when I looked like one in the tenth grade, and it is probably not a surprise to you that my interests leaned instead to “soft subjects” like Literature, History and Art. For years I carried around the guilt of my talents in these.
Of all the BS we are told as children, this was probably up there with the tooth fairy or angels. I couldn’t understand why we demonized things like paintings or dramatics when the world around me insisted on their value above all else. The kids around me were obsessed not with equations or engineering feats, but with movies and TV shows and comics. Ancient history was a history of people’s arts and plays, not their budgets. With the advantage of hindsight I can see that the people who told me that belonged to the boomer generation, trained en masse to equate asset collection with purpose.
Dr Mavalvala’s successes are entirely her own. The truth is: like the success of most Pakistanis abroad, hers came despite, not because of her home country
So when it came time to choose my own single optional subject, I succumbed to Biology over Art mainly because my mother always regretted not taking it during her school years. For three years I suffered through plant biology and cellular mitosis; eventually I even enjoyed it. But when it came time for the actual O levels, I secretly added Art as an extra subject as well, insisting I’d study for it on my own time, outside of school. I did well in my exams, better than I had in any exams before or since. But what I was proudest of was to get a prize for my art results, an early sign sometimes you know what’s best for you.
Afterwards the school gave me medals and touted my achievement in newsletters and assemblies, and it was this late arrival at my party that really angered me. That the school - or anyone else - would take credit for excellence in a subject they had actively forced me to study in secret was perverse. It reeked of the most juvenile, obvious kind of hypocrisy. I’ve seen the phenomenon repeat itself again and again, but nowhere more than home.
Most recently this week Pakistan erupted in pride that a Pakistani born astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala was named Dean of Science at that temple of Hard Subjects: MIT. It is remarkable, seminal achievement. That she is the first woman to serve in the role is just one of the many ceilings she’s broken. Some of us see her as proof of Pakistan’s inherent talent, its “untapped potential.”
And while that’s true to a degree, it also willfully ignores the truth.
Dr. Mavalvala isn’t simply a gifted scientist and trailblazer, she is also a Parsi and a proud lesbian, married to her wife. She is amazing, this is true, and it is also true that any one of these things - being a woman in science, being a religious minority, a sexual minority, even simply someone who believes in evolution - would have been enough for a serious death threat in Pakistan.
Nergis Mavalvala
Her success isn’t a reminder that Pakistanis have potential. We know we do, that was never in question. What it does raise is the blood-boiling hypocrisy on display when we praise with the brilliance of Dr. Mavalvala while conveniently ignoring our national bigotry, homophobia, sexism and intellectual infantilization that forced her - and countless scores of others like her, each talented, each brilliant - to build lives far away from the toxicity of Pakistan.
Dr Mavalvala’s successes are entirely her own. The truth is: like the success of most Pakistanis abroad, hers came despite, not because of her home country. You don’t get to claim them as yours because it’s now convenient to do so. Pakistan’s unquenchable thirst for a “positive image” at the expense of truth doesn’t give us the right to take credit for the brilliance of people from the very communities the country does everything in its power to annihilate.
