Hope is less of philosophic notion and more of a reflection of a mindset that conceives the future as a possibility. A special gift humans have is to have a sense of possibility which is linked with awareness of time. In other words, it’s linear time as an experience that makes us aware of what was, what is and what would be i.e. the past, the present and the future. Apart from our tool-making ability and language, what defines us, Marx thinks, is our capability to have an imaginative construction of the future. It’s not that everything planned is realised or achieved but to have a blueprint of the future is what can create continuity with our present and past as well as a break from them. Development in human society depends on such a dialectical paradox. Cutting the fat of the past and the present while blending them with the intended future have had great cumulative effect on our historical development. Hope is the belly that feeds the embryo of the future, the future we plan to have. A character who seems to be an old man in one of Brecht’s poems shows how hope keeps a lost man going: “He strode down the street with his hat tipped down! / He looked each man in the eye and nodded / He paused in front of every window (And everyone knows he is lost) / You ought to have heard him explain that he’d still got a word or two to say to his enemy / That the landlord’s tone was not to his liking / That street had not been property swept / All the same he still intends to build a house … ” The man is on the edge of a precipice but he still intends to build a house. Building something or other in the future is what keeps us going. To have hope is as important as realising it. Perhaps even more. Death of hope is the death of the future. Sadly, in our society people, mostly young ones, appear as if they are bereft of hope. It’s not their choice but rather a choice forced on them by the objective conditions created by our state and society. The post-colonial state is worse than the colonial state in the sense that despite being run by the people who belong to the same stock as people, it has become more extractive to meet its bloated needs; the needs of maintaining the inherited colonial power structures and those of the new local elite that claims to represent a broad spectrum of so-called national interests. To use a local idiom, the state is like a lady whose bust has become heavier than the rest of her body. The society’s leaders, the so-called elite, collude with the managers of the state and provide them with socio-political protection against their excesses. The managers in turn provide them with a legal cover to exploit the people with no check at all. The business of the state and the elite offers a spectacular display of unfairness at all levels. A recent example will suffice. In the situation of our current economic crisis, legislators give themselves up to 900 per cent pay raise and bureaucrats decide to buy luxury vehicles for themselves with billions of rupees. And still they have the guts to pontificate to the people, who find it hard to pay their bills, on the merit of making sacrifices for the nation which is nothing more than a conglomerate of the wealthy and state functionaries. The state unabashedly caters to the rapacious needs of the elite. And the elite openly defends predatory bureaucracy that has an insatiable lust for power without being accountable to the public who pay for their costly upkeep. The people are thus ruled by ‘a casino full of rapacious capitalists’ and bureaucrats puffed up with self-importance, unaccountable to the public. Sandwiched between the two, the public has lost hope. That’s why people at large try to leave this country. They feel compelled to do so because they see no prospects of a secure future for themselves. Such a thought especially weighs heavily on the mind of young people who have a long way to go and dream dreams. Raising funds after selling whatever their families have they end up paying millions of rupees to the ‘agents’, human traffickers, who arrange their perilous journey to the western lands on circuitous routes. This illegal journey or an attempt at irregular migration often ends in a tragedy on the land or sea. The young men in their desperation pay for their death. Only once this young country experienced a season of hope in the late 1960s and early 70s in the both wings of united Pakistan. This upswell found its expression in the rise of Shaikh Mujeebur Rehman’s Awami League in East Pakistan and Z.A. Bhutto’s People’s Party in Punjab and Sindh, and Wali Khan’s National Awami Party in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa (erstwhile NWFP) and Balochistan. All three had left-leaning blueprints for the transformation of the country’s power structures that awakened the hope among the masses for a better future. Unfortunately, dreams of better days came tumbling down when the party with a clear majority was denied the right to govern the country after the general elections of 1970. The story of how it led to a colossal tragedy is known to all of us. It has been a bumpy road thereafter that led us from darkness to darkness. Sadly, the ordinary mortals of the present generation see no light at the end of the tunnel because of the existing collusion between the state and the elite that protects elitist privileges and proudly displays opulence of the ruling clique. But the death of hope would inevitably lead not only to the loss of human potential but also to the enervation of the state that is as good as dead if it fails to ensure the conditions necessary for the realisation of its citizens’ aspirations. —