Subcontinental Divide

from Saathee Raleigh June 2021

Increase USA Knowledge

Who Do You Think You Are?

Subcontinental Divide by Ahsen Jillani

I was born and got my early education in an era where science was starting to determine our destinies.

Modernism kind of collided head-first with everything from religion to conservatism to colonialism sometime after WW-II because America emerged victorious and its PR prowess was newly battling with the rising threat of socialism and communism.

A fresh-faced technocrat PhD fresh out of the University of Chicago, my dad was one of the few early culprits who brought a secular philosophy to a country barely 12 years out of British colonial rule. Truthfully, as he chaired the sociology department at Karachi University straight out of college, I don’t have a single memory of participating in a religious ceremony of any sort (other than my circumcision, at age 4, which I still don’t want to discuss due to trauma).

We actually could have been any family in America in the ‘60s. While the Pakistani President Ayub Khan was entertaining Jackie Kennedy and presenting her with race horses, we were traveling around town in evenings going for ice cream and burgers, my dad and uncles were having beers and watching American shows, and weekends, we might go to the beautiful Arabian Sea coast or the aquarium before driving to the drive-in for a western film.

Religion technically didn’t exist in our lives. Religion actually was on vacation in the West as well, as America struggled with moral and ethical issues like civil and voting rights, and the raging Vietnam war that practically

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