Dare You Ask Why?
The vocabulary box given to young girls born in the late 1980s in Pakistan had many words to play with – dolls, sleep, cry, eat, pink, white, Ami, Baba, hello, bye. And as they would grow, more words would be plopped into the box or sometimes slipped into it when they were sleepy or too busy to notice – work, kitchen, care, compromise, weak, patience, strength, clean, sacrifice. Why - a word that I only realized is essential to grow and develop and learn and understand was really discovered in university, and I am forever thankful to LUMS for teaching it to me. The skill and art of questioning. We aren’t encouraged to question, generally, and the more check boxes ticked against your name, the further they put the word away from you – female? Two rungs up the ladder; Pakistani – three rungs higher; young? Two rungs up. Wait, did you say female? Let’s just put it up where you can’t even see it so it’s more comfortable for all of us. We were taught it is ...