For PTI: Is Honesty Enough to Govern Effectively?

Writer is an aspiring journalist, student of International Relations and tweets at @saqibtanveer

The 30^th October’s melodious jalsa of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) turned the whole spectrum of traditional politics in Pakistan. That jalsa motivated the youth to take active part in politics, use of social networking sites increased manifold, politicians joined twitter and facebook to interact with the public, hash-tagging and trending of Pakistani politics started, the sphere of street-corner politics shifted to the cyber sphere and above all the politicians started focusing on youth. In short, PTI’s jalsa was a game changer.

PTI has risen to dominance in the last twelve months or so. People and even several politicians have been joining PTI irrespective of any ideological relationship, though Imran Khan claims otherwise. Ideological gap between the members of the party can be judged from the fact that PTI is a party that contains people from the left as well as from the right. A recent incident when the President of party called Hafiz Saeed a propagator of peace, it was not taken well within the party itself. PTI right now is disjointed and does not have a common mouth, even Imran Khan admits that himself.

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Moving Towards an Open Source World

The recent initiative of the World Bank of Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is more of a revolution of its own kind. We are living in a world where even a cough of an elite is protected by copyrights. Patents and copyrights are the tools which the elite class use to make money and hence bar the road of academic & technological development.

Lately there has been an evolution of GNU General Public License software and other items have emerged on the market. Linux, Ubuntu and Joomla etc are the most significant examples where open source technology has been provided and thus a significant amount of development has occurred in these horizons helping people to innovate and get the best out of technology.

The most significant argument in favor of copyrights is giving the credit to the original innovator and giving all the due profit to that person. But that same law has been exploited by global corporations all over the world. The most significant example we have is of Microsoft. Bill Gates has increased his fortune tremendously with the help of copyrights and now all his charity and effort to become noble, that all is due to the blessings of patent and copyrights.

Education and technology should not be someone's property. It has to be universal and should contribute towards making the lifestyle of people more convenient rather than making them expensive and unreachable by copyrighting them.

Doosron Ko Naseehat, Khud Mian Fazeehat

Whenever one tries to propagate or share an idea with someone, the first question posed to him is that first you act on it before propagating. There can be no two ways about the fact that one should act first on what he propagates but mostly we use this argument to nullify the idea presented by that person.

We do not emphasize and put our focus towards the idea of that person and just brush it aside by proclaiming the proverb "doosron ko naseehat, khud mian fazeehat". We should at least ponder on the idea regardless of the actions of the person. Eleanor Roosevelt once said: "Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people."

Our rigidity just does not allow us to accept others ideas as it threatens the ideals of our whole life. We believe that the life we have spent on certain ideals should not be challenged, even if they are wrong, as it will make our whole life a lie. We are afraid of that.

The day we open ourselves to truth and vow to follow the life of truth, revolution would not be far away.