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An Optismistic Outlook

ResilienceGlobal Beat

On August 14, 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was sworn in as the first Governor-General of a new country, the Dominion of Pakistan. At the time, the odds were completely against the new country. Over 10 million people migrated from their homes, and violent massacres were frequent. The Pakistan Armed Forces were equipped with obsolete weapons and had no infrastructure. To make matters worse, on October 22, 1947, Pakistan went to war with its much larger and militarily superior neighbour, India.

To many it seemed as though the new country would not survive long. Fast forward seventy years, and Pakistan is still standing tall. The Pakistani Stock Exchange was ranked as the fifth best performing stock market in the world, and its Armed Forces as the sixth largest. Pakistan has been elected onto the United Nations Security Council seven times. How did a country that started out shakily become such a respected member of the world community? The answer lies within the attitude of the Pakistanis.

At a young age, Pakistani children are taught to be grateful for what they have. We are taught to always look at the bright side of the situation. Pakistani cricket is a good example. Cricket is a sport that is loved by a majority of the Pakistani community. The Pakistan Cricket Team has recently won the Champions Trophy. But compared to most of the cricket-playing nations, Pakistan lacks easy access facilities that make playing the game possible. However, instead of giving up their favorite sport, Pakistanis adapt to the situation. They play on the street, and if a street is too busy, they simply fashion their own cricket ground using bricks as boundaries and make their own pitch by using water to firm up the sandy ground. Most of the top-flight cricket players started out by playing street cricket. This persevering attitude of the Pakistanis has produced some of the most talented cricket players in the world.

On Jan 29, 1926, in the town of Jhang, a child named Abdus Salam was born. No one knew that this boy, who came from a poor family, would become the 1979 Nobel Prize laureate for theoretical physics. In Science and Scientists in Developing Countries, a collection of interviews from Abdus Salam, he speaks of the hardships that he had to go through to become a theoretical physicist. Without Abdus Salam, the electroweak theory, which is a fundamental part of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, would never have been developed.

Pakistan has some very prominent issues that its citizens face on a day-to-day basis. According to The CIA World FactBook, it is 171st in the world by GDP by capita, coming in below the United States, China, and Russia. But according to the Happy Planet Index, Pakistan is ranked 36th, above all three of these developed countries. The Pakistani sense of optimism and positive outlook has made Pakistan one of the world’s strongest growing countries.

Khawaja Mustafa Shah is a sciences student at Bay View Academy in Karachi. He grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. He has completed an internship with Family Education Services and is pursuing one in SIUT (Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation).

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Art by Jaden Flach, Brooklyn

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Art by Jaden Flach, Brooklyn