Like I said the time-frame doesn't mean a thing if the element of choice is there & it is ! When I said 'they decided...' I wasn't talking about a deliberate decision by a panel of individuals gathered around a camp side fire deciding on Pashtuns or Punjabis as their nation's name & Pashto or Punjabi as their language's name; it was a subconscious decision by an emerging society that in turn emerged out of another society whereby the society as a whole, unknowingly & without deliberation, decided that they've got a language of their own, a culture of their own & a value system of their own & hence they continued to flock together around one another till a time came when this flock grew a sense of collective consciousness & decided to call themselves a Nation ! I say again that this 'decision' was unsaid, the change wasn't felt & it was anything but deliberate but it was a decision at the end of the day - This lies at the very heart of the anthropological evolution of societies & cultures.
You can choose to be an Arab, a Sudanese or a Martian for it is the same choice any of those cultures & civilizations made but in your case your choice would be deliberate, sudden & very much felt ! However it would not be, at the same time, something which is socially acceptable because of this innate notion as if a 'race or a culture or a linguistic group' is some sort of an exclusive group that needs to be exalted at least till such an extent that it gives rise to the sense of Nationhood ! What baffles me is how hollow that argument of exclusivity is whereby the culture or civilization under question is, after all, the progeny of some other culture or civilization before it & would, in turn, give birth to some other culture or civilization after it, that it is ever evolving, ever absorbing & at each instance in time its so-called originality is slowly being ebbed away through the influx of some other culture or civilization through the same subconscious choice that their ancestors made a few hundred or thousand years ago !
So, the way I see it, it comes down to one thing & one thing alone - Choice; subconscious or otherwise. You choose to be who you are but don't bet on others taking you seriously because of the above !
Of course they did but if Mr.Yousaf & Mr.Marwat Khan Lodhi were the first Pashtuns then they must also have been something before that & their first ancestor in turn would be something else & so on & so forth back to beginning ! The point I'm talking about is that our races, our ethnicities, our nations etc. are make-belief that we attach so much importance to that at times we're willing to kill or be killed over them without realizing that these are, at the end of the day, created identities just as all identities are.
everybody wants to be you. What is the secret of your charm???
