We Have to “Do the Math”
Math is an alien subject for us Pakistanis. You might disagree, though. Isn’t Math all about calculating our salaries or how many shares our “advocative” posts received on social media? Wrong! Math is something that we have mistreated so badly that we can see the consequences in daily life.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, an eminent German Mathematician, called Mathematics the “Queen of science.” But you know what the irony is? Women do not want to study Maths at all. Now, without you calling me out as a bigot or misogynist, you can simply do a web search to find out that women are definitely behind men in the field of Mathematics.
But everything is twisted in Pakistan, right? Pakistan is a unique place where both men and women don’t want to consider mathematics a subject. For those who do get enrolled in Math-intensive fields like Engineering and Computer Science, you can interview a couple of them just to find out that they are just as ignorant of the essence of Math as a layman.
What is the reason to even think that highly of math? Yes, good question. Math has enabled you to post relentlessly on Twitter. Math allows you to take selfies and feed your narcissism. Math has taken humans to the moon, an achievement that is the pinnacle of humanity for some people. Math allows you to print the shiny passports that take you out of this country called Pakistan (many people are rooting for the day when they can quit this country), and the list goes on!
Listen, math makes you a critical thinker. But we really have a shortage of these in our country. Logic, a word overused by College commies and Madrasa revolutionaries, develops only when a person “Does the Math.” I don’t know where the feminists are without knowing that girls are criminally being taken away from STEM education or how a fundamentalist sleeps at night without recognizing that his good old “Golden Age of Islam” is nothing without advancement in Math.
I am dumbfounded by how no one talks about math in Pakistan. Some of us strive to push towards material pursuit but don’t seem interested in studying or discussing Maths. To drive my point home, unless we teach Pakistanis to study on a deeper level by understanding the world through Maths. We’d be left with poster boys and girls who either relentlessly follow their university professor or believe everything that’s posted on YouTube or shared on WhatsApp. A void of thought with no “logical” thinking!
