Dear Dream Land!!!
Whenever, in my varsity years, I eared
air planes mightily droning to the sky, I always dreamt someday it would take me
to you; “The Land of Dreams ". Like hundreds of youth in my country,
I myself decided to get locked in the jaws of world's super power ' The United
States of America.' Fortune tailored the tides to fit in the size of my
sea vast dreams and with a commendable score in TOEL, I swiftly robbed
scholarship in one of the renowned universities. My stamped visa was the very
first, to unlatch the door to the atlas of my dream land. Then the moment
finally arrived and I stepped to the threshold of my fantasy Dream Land:
Florida. Its ingress cornered by thick boulevards sung the song of American
Dream coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and
richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability
or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. The
subways narrated me the story of America’s Declaration of Independence and I
firmly clung to the belief that I being an immigrant was going to sip deluge of
“liberty, Peace and Pursuit of Happiness” which always attracted me
magnetically toward the country.
Days went by, and America started to unveil Her
in front of me. It bared her chest and I realised behind those robotic- alleys,
highly-lit streets and technologically advanced mechanised buildings, she was
as raw and charred as an Orient woman. The scholarship which only the cream
students in Pakistan earn was in other words "Aid”, a kind of charity to
buy talented brains like me. The truth of belonging to a "Poor
country" and a student studying on “Aid and Funds” shattered down my inner
pride. To my surprise, the freedom only lived in museums and was as paralysed
as “Statue of Liberty” which even can't save herself from pattering needles of
meek rain droplets. My scarf was mocked, my sense of styling was bullied and I
was sniffed by bulldogs for making sure I carried no explosives. Racism gulped me down like hurricane does with
cotton fields. I started suffocating while breathing the air of Democracy with
all its legitimate trappings to ensure rights of minorities The war against
this crude Otherness taught me to overlook drunkards stopping by me, snippets
sitting close to the rooftop of the building allocated to Asians, a queue of
cameras to monitor my movements and yes an invisible steel barricade to limit
myself from the native Americans – I overlooked them all despite having
countless kicks of this system on my nerves. The culture of peace which the
state holds roofed my fears with a garment, which with when I cloaked my feet ,it
bared my head and when I managed to cover my feet , it left my head whole
naked. I genuinely lost equilibrium of my own identity as nothing was more
painful than being treated as a citizen of “Third world” who are labelled as “poor,
criminals and terrorists. It is said, for surviving in a battlefield one can
even compromise on pork but I was forced to eat delicious cuisine from those
hands who have murdered trillions of my ancestors since the time of
colonisation till today.
. I have turned into a dystopian xenophobe or an imprisoned bird who is hoping for the future which is
never going to dawn as the womb I have selected has never accepted me being its
child. In this “Land of Dreams”, the past has been sold to buy a stranded future.
On the contrary, I prostrate to “Present” and no deity of this name exist here
at your place. It’s time to fix the errors I have committed in Past.
Good Bye Forever….
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