by Maria Bratikova, AC Team

Among the countries in Asia, we are a country that seems to be moving in a circle, a very tight circle.We’ve been overtaken by our neighbours by leaps and we are eating their dusts. 

We used to be the most literate in the region. Of course, we did not hear much of  China then because of the bamboo curtain that blurred our visions. We got students from all over the world visiting and studying. We used to be a lot more positively viewed from all points around the globe. 

 Now?

I get this conviction that what we need as a people is another Martial Law. I remember a lull in criminality and a lot of discipline during those years. We are today rambunctiously  one-upmanning (corruption in truer  terms) each other that it had become our  favourite activity – at par with bashing each other for the pettiest and most trivial of reasons. It is insane. It makes one cry.

We are where we are, stuck in limbo, because we have no discipline, we are materialistic, we are indolent. We worry about genderising ourselves. We take pains pretending to be cats even if we know we are rodents. We buy that iphone at almost 50 grand but ignore the big holes in our roofs that keep the sun and rain in. It is more important for most of us to drink a bottle of big cola that costs more than a kilo of the staple rice.  We stretch our curly hairs and curl our straight  hairs. Jesus. . . we swarm beauty pageants like ants to a slop of honey. We don’t need them, we are beauty-pageant materials in our own unique ways. We boo our athletes ( who can distinguish whom is being booed on the outset?) before a game starts and blame every other dick because our players lose later – how is that for pep talk?

We got big cars for our narrow streets. 

We need to do something. If we want to change, the change must come from us. We have to want it, work for it, do it.

We cannot just talk it!