The “GupShup” Culture

One evening I approached my mother and asked her, “When I am home and studying over the weekends I observe that you and my father spend your entire weekends conversing with my sisters, you engage in “gup” and my father reiterates the same old war stories and the same old jokes”. My mother observing that I had just got done with a grueling day of studying remarked “Don’t worry your days of engaging in ‘gup’ will come as well”.

I became very upset with this remark to which she said, “You are behaving like I cursed you”. At this point memories of growing up as a Pakistani came flooding back to me. I saw visions of young men hanging around mosques and “Pan Shops” smoking (or hiding from their elders and smoking) and chewing “Pan” and engaging in “gup shup”. These were men who ranged in age from their teens to their late twenties.

It is indeed an accursed culture, which spends the valuable god given time allotted to them in engaging in small talk. Cultures that are comparable to such benighted customs are the cultures of Latin America and Southern Europe and Africa and parts of Asia. These nations have several things in common, they are backwards, they are dirt poor they beg others for monetary aid and envy the rich. In short these cultures are the cultures of “gup shup” who take pride in “shooting the breeze” rather than work, or pursuit of knowledge and wealth.

One might argue “but this is what our elders engage in so let them do so are you not disrespectful when you correct those older than you”. To this I say that though it is wrong to be disrespectful it is a greater wrong to abide such sins. It is indeed a sin if were to waste our time engaging in gupshup and in exchanging rehashed stories pretending as though we are sitting on a mountain of wealth. Even if we were sitting on wealth we are afflicted with mortality and disease and other insecurities that require our immediate attention.

Secondly elderly people in our culture behave like paraplegics who sit on their verandas awaiting death whereas the seventy and eighty year olds in advanced societies are often more active and vigorous athletically and intellectually when compared to our youth. Even the octogenarians of developed countries do not spend their time in “gupshup” for days at a time.

Children who are born of such a culture when removed from them often find themselves haunted by feelings of loneliness. These children are also quite often thoroughly indoctrinated in the prejudices and stereotypes of their culture. It is a good thing to be aware of your cultural prejudices and stereotypes particularly if your culture is truly superior in the arena of science, medicine, law, economics and space technology. But if your culture is already stagnant then engaging in more rehashed stories of past glories will benefit little. Instead we will find that inferior races by dint of hard work will overtake and overwhelm our people.

Harbingers of such days are evidenced by the defections of some of our actresses and some of our journalists who are deserting our country to speak in favor of India (or a reunion with that country to the delight of many Indians who may covet our human and natural resources). Granted these “Pakistanis” were liberals but even liberals did not have such audacity in the early 1950s when the technological and knowledge gap between India and Pakistan was not so gaping.

If Hitler were to discover Pakistan at this point and time in history he would have given up on his contempt and hatred for the Jews, Africans and homosexuals and would have made Pakistan the target of his “final solution”.

What should be our solution to this problem? More and more of us are moving out of our comfort zones to countries in the west where they hear this more often “I was told this is the land of milk and honey but we have to work very hard to make a living”. I observe many of us learning from the local populations of the western world.

Although conversations and interactions are prevalent in western society the time for “socialization” is often relegated to a few precious hours on certain weeknights and weekends. Usually people are engaged in work or study and in acts of increasing their productivity.

If we are not ourselves productive and if we divert our energies towards world conquest and enslavement through religious indoctrination we will often find ourselves as the aristocrats and feudal lords of today and like the Mughals of old: they live off the hard work of slaves and inferiors whom they control. In doing so they make their environment and their world an ugly place to live where there is domination of the master and submission of the slave, misery of the subjugated and contempt of the controlling, hatred of the poor and fear of the subject. One has to look at the culture of a “Nokar/Nokrani” in Pakistani society to see evidence of the above.

If our lives have a noble purpose and our energies an admirable object of attention, if we are driven and motivated by dreams and passionate about our professions and our calling, if we have a desire for accumulating wealth and gaining technological mastery and if our lives are dominated by these desires as opposed to desires related with partaking in a rate race or envy we will automatically find little time for such vices as engaging in “gupshup”.