Circular History Of Pakistan
By Asim Imdad Ali

This book s central thesis is that our cyclical
political history is, in fact, like a short movie clip, set on a time-loop,
that creates a perpetual dejà vu for those in the theater. Every political
scene has been enacted before and is being re-telecast repeatedly. We are stuck
in circular time and history and have not found our Nirvanic moment to follow
the alternative trajectory of linear growth and development. The first part of
the book, Our Circular History , recounts our political journey of a recurring,
predictable, painful, and vicious decade-long Samsara of cyclic birth and death
of order and freedom. This bird s eye view shows how the same episodes keep
happening with mind-boggling regularity, and how each of our institutions is
responsible for our entrapment in circular time and history. The second part of
the book, Chronicles of our Times , narrates what is currently happening in our
polity. Our circular political past primarily shapes contemporary events, but
we also mimic what is currently happening in other parts of the world, where
new weaponized and micro-targeted social media has facilitated the trend of
cartoon-history and political jokers. The last part of the book, Future
Panoramic Realities , uses a broad angle lens to view developments in the
Indian subcontinent, in Eurasia, and in the wider world. We cannot escape our
Malthusian dilemmas, without redefining our national priorities, our Hobbesian
snare. Without that shift away from geo-rentals and geo-politics, we may not be
able to escape our entrapment in vicious cycles, or even downwards spiral. The
key to an endless growth cycle is investment in innovation, knowledge, people,
and creativity. That is the only real virtuous cycle: without that, there can
only be one-off spurts of growth. Only by investing in geo-economics, people,
knowledge banks, and critical technologies can we join the virtuous growth and
development cycles.