Here's how Pakistan can try and solve its image problem

[ito]

What image do you have? Killing and raping minorities? Women getting gang raped in broad daylight on a public bus? PM Modi who is a known killer? You have nothing to be proud of. Get off the high horse. Like I said, stop judging others and take care of your own crap. You got a lot of crap to deal with.

Take your trash somewhere...I am not the correct person to argue on trash.

 

[maximuswarrior]

Take your trash somewhere...I am not the correct person to argue on trash.

That's right. You got nothing to say because you cannot defend your lies. The whole world knows your true face and it is ugly. Now pray that Trump wins the elections so that you can take care of Pakistan. LMAO

 

[ito]

We don't say things like Supa Powa or Incredible India.Pakistanis are the most self deprecating nation in the world which can be seen on any fb page comments section,news and even on Pakistan Defence

Only self deprecating will not do. When Jyoti Singh was raped on which the document was made. Whole India moved with her. It was in a way India's arab spring. How many such protests happened in response to honor killing or acid victims in Pakistan?

Anyway, Pakistani image is not my problem. I am out of this thread.

 

[DJ_Viper]

Let’s face it, Pakistan has an image problem.

Every year we seem to make a new ‘worst place in the world for’ list and as luck would have it, Pakistan is consistently in the top 10.

This year alone, we’ve been named the second worst country in the world for women; the eleventh most unsafe country in the world; the fourth worst for journalists and third for overall worst reputation.

Granted, the deciding markers and selection criteria for these rankings are often arbitrary and simplistic at best but they certainly accumulate to paint a picture of Pakistan and this picture is tinted to reflect the nation’s worst attributes.

Sir, at this point, with the past few months of US media screaming that Pakistan has become an investment heaven, the image of "old Pakistan" is disappearing very fast. I have a few friends from Pakistan and I've heard their daily stories all the time with regards to their experiences of locals when they tell them they are from Pakistan. They, for the past few months, feel a big change when they introduce themselves from Pakistan. Its similar to how Indians are looked at.

The only major negative thing or two about Pakistan are: 1: The intense political drama that makes the country look like it has politicians from the 1800's, and 2: The association with certain elements that are bad and support terrorists, etc.

If these can be fixed, I think the remainder can take care of themselves. I went shopping last week and was pleasant to see very nice FILA shirts, hats and jeans, all made in Pakistan. So everything I bought, had a made in Pakistan on it.

I asked the girl who helps with sizing, etc, that I've not seen so much stuff from Pakistan before. She turned out to be the store manager and knew their inventory obviously and associated consumer response. Her response was "they make the best clothes in the world". I wouldn't have expected such a smart response with authority from a blonde hair, blue eyed girl. So this should tell you, the image is changing rapidly. Just the two things above need to be fixed. Thanks

 

[maximuswarrior]

Only self deprecating will not do. When Jyoti Singh was raped on which the document was made. Whole India moved with her. It was in a way India's arab spring. How many such protests happened in response to honor killing or acid victims in Pakistan?

Anyway, Pakistani image is not my problem. I am out of this thread.

LOL Yep, when bad things happen in India it is an Arab spring like experience and the people stand up bla bla bla Even negativity in India is somehow supposed to be good according to you. I like it how the Indian nationalist bends negativity into something positive. Whatever dude.

When bad things happen in Pakistan the whole country is to be blamed and the image is bad. We get it.

Dude, you can take your duplicitous lectures to Modiland. We don't care what an Indian nationalist thinks. You can believe in your own fairy tales.

 

[SarthakGanguly]

Sharmeen Obaid made scores of enemies with in Pakistan because of this film.

It is a very positive film. Just watched. There is nothing controversial IMO.

 

[MadDog]

Let’s face it, Pakistan has an image problem.

Every year we seem to make a new ‘worst place in the world for’ list and as luck would have it, Pakistan is consistently in the top 10.

This year alone, we’ve been named the second worst country in the world for women; the eleventh most unsafe country in the world; the fourth worst for journalists and third for overall worst reputation.

Granted, the deciding markers and selection criteria for these rankings are often arbitrary and simplistic at best but they certainly accumulate to paint a picture of Pakistan and this picture is tinted to reflect the nation’s worst attributes.

Whether or not we acknowledge it at the national policy level, image matters. Perhaps more than most things because a country’s image is its leverage and Pakistan is desperately lacking in leverage at present.

Recent tensions with our neighbour India serve as a perfect example to illustrate this problem. While the Indian media has adopted the loosest possible definition of journalism in the past month covering the Uri incident and what followed — doing its utmost to push the two nuclear states deeper toward a clash — much of their success in garnering international support has been due to Pakistan’s deplorable reputation as South Asia’s perpetual problem child.

The militancy tag, which follows Pakistan around the globe cannot and will not be shed by denying we have a problem. Or by failing to arrest known militants and penalising critics instead.

There are obviously varied policy measures that need to be pursued by different government and civilian bodies in this regard, but overall Pakistan needs to start focusing on a soft policy approach that at the very least, complements if not counters its standard chest thumping and foot stomping about military might to anyone who will listen.

Yes, we have a bomb — we also have a starving, illiterate population.

Now, if we could only apply the same mental gymnastics we used to convince our population that our military might trumps their basic need for food, clothing and shelter — to convince the international community about our stability regarding the ‘use’ of that aforementioned bomb, we’d be all set.

The concept of soft power was originally penned by Harvard academic Joseph Nye in these words: “Power is the ability to get what you want from others and you can do it in three ways: you can do it with coercion; you can do it with payment or you can do it with attraction and persuasion. Coercion and payment I call hard power, the ability to get what you want through attraction and persuasion is soft power.”

Ironically, this soft power strategy is one that our neighbours have perfected over time. So much so that India’s international ‘feel good yoga, land of spices, dance numbers and IT experts’ image is often enough to detract from its current reality under Modi.

It takes the international community a while to wake up to Indian atrocities in Kashmir but there is little convincing needed to push the ‘militant Pakistan’ angle on a global level.

This is perhaps because Pakistan has desperately failed in cultivating its own cultural tools at a similar scale or acknowledging and appreciating its strongest diplomats and universal ambassadors: its artists.

Art and those who wield it are perhaps Pakistan’s greatest arsenal in countering its current image crisis. This doesn’t mean pretending our problems don’t exist or scapegoating people like Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy or Malala Yousufzai for shedding light on them, but recognising that Chinoy’s Oscar and Malala’s global campaign for girl’s education are a win for Pakistan and an acknowledgement of Pakistani citizens who still care about the challenges the country faces.

Chinoy’s so-called anti-nationalist film has probably done more for the cause of addressing honour crimes than most policy makers have managed over decades. It has precipitated three different types of legislation addressing gender issues in one short year.

The fact of the matter is that if one is to acknowledge artists, educationists and activists as ambassadors then that needs to be followed by the recognition that these people cannot be told how their work should manifest.

Hard places breed certain kinds of artists all over the world and their art is all the more powerful because it acknowledges the truth of its origins rather than shying away from it.

This is why India’s decision to deport our actors and its ban on screening films with Pakistani actors is particularly aggressive, unprecedented and tragic.

In times of conflict, art is supposed to serve as the final avenue for peace. Cultural exchanges are the only corridors to create understanding and foster friendships between fractured peoples. Closing these doors means closing oneself off to all possibilities.

It is almost as if our governments are propelled by the fear of people meeting across these achingly similar cultural traditions that centre around shared music, poetry, language, history and food.

As if Fawad Khan being appreciated for his role in Karan Johar’s latest film will somehow be an acknowledgement that he is not so utterly ‘alien’ in contrast to his Bollywood contemporaries.

For some, this contrived kinship might even translate into genuine friendship and wouldn’t that just fracture every story we have been telling ourselves about ourselves since our country's inception.

The stories we tell ourselves and the stories others tell about us matter. Pakistan needs to tell stories about itself that actively counter the one story the world knows it by.

This does not negate the fact that Pakistan suffers from militancy, terrorism, corruption and a host of other problems. It does. No one knows this more than Pakistanis themselves.

However, we also know that this is not all we are. In her talk, “The danger of a single story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says: “The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

Our story is one marked and framed solely by aggression and our response to it. For some reason, for the past few decades the world seems to collectively have bought into the idea that the definition of a super power is quite literally just that: an overt, outdated and outmoded expression of 'masculine' aggression.

Perhaps this is why one of our go-to insults for everything ranging from border skirmishes to wife-beating is to taunt men with the phrase “choorhiyan pehen rakheen hein.”

This is not to say that military might is not a significant variable in the power matrix for a country like Pakistan; however we seldom stop to weigh its importance against poverty, education, healthcare or human rights. All these matrices collectively constitute identity which goes on to frame ‘power.’

Who is to say that America’s influence around the world is solely because of its military might and not also because of the sheer volume and velocity at which it exports its culture through Hollywood, fashion, fast food and its university education?

In this time of contrasts and boastful comparisons, the question arises: which identity markers does Pakistan grade itself by and how? Perhaps it is time for us to hedge our bets and work on self-improvement over whining about the hand we are being dealt.

A few years ago, when the United Kingdom was considering cutting funding for humanities education, hundreds of students took to the streets bearing the slogan “Give us back our Humanities”. Pakistan has never really cultivated its humanities and it is essential that we do so now.

In negotiating with narratives, so many problematic and intolerant elements can be countered by funding the arts. Languages, poetry, architecture, textile, and literature are our only real inroad to self-exploration beyond the status quo.

We need to invest in small businesses, embrace our artists and musicians, fund literature and art programmes to ensure that Pakistani students can represent parts of our identity that reflect our diversity, tolerance, innovation and beauty rather than the reactionary rubric of an isolated state that has no interest in being part of the world.


http://www.dawn.com/news/1295024/heres-how-pakistan-can-try-and-solve-its-image-problem


All the Pakistani friends in this forum are more educated than avg Pakistanis. But I think this great problem does not touch them unfortunately. I found no meaningful discussion on what is the way out among Pakistani friends in this forum. Many less important things are getting undue priority here

No concrete plan found in national leadership level too

They miserably fail to identify and prioritize the national issues

Lets have an intellectual discussion.
The image problem is with the entire muslim belt ranging from Pakistan to Morroco. An average western person doesn't know the difference between various muslims , they think all muslims are arabs and war ravaged undeveloped aggressive irrational states. The perception is because majority populations of these states are muslims.
Pakistan has a peculiar position among muslims , since the nuclear dimension in the eyes of an average westerner compounds the misperceptions buttressed by the geopolitics of the region since 1980's. Other facts such as being unsafe for women, you see all the lists will have the developing states, including India in top positions , the reason being perception of an average westerner. One can see the frequent use of the world "Delhi to be the rape capital of the world" yet there tons of more rapes in US alone, let alone the western world.

The religion has so much impact on the western mindset, that while Turkey played a significant role in East European affairs , Czar Nicholas referred to it as "sickman of europe", just to show his contempt and hatred. After being secular and liberal when Turkey eyed membership of EU, Europeans resisted and Sarkozy is on record saying "I will not tell French school children that Europe's borders extend to Iraq and Syria". Such was the contempt even for a secular westernized democratic country, just becuase majority of its population were adherents of a particular faith. As a result Turkey reinforced look east policy and now its regional power projection has increased manifold in recent years.

Agreed, soft power projection is indispensable in today's world and India has done it in the form of Bollywood. But it can't be denied also that alot of North Indians have been avid viewers of Pakistani dramas since 1980's and even now both countries played each other's serials in their countries. Pakistani designers have opened outlets in India and there are numerous articles explaining, how it has brought a change interms of local Indian designers adapting to new tastes. Every country has its respective soft power , Pakistan has a lot of potential keeping in mind its multi cultural and multi linguisitic society. Pakistan's Pushtu movies dominate the cinema industry in Afghanistan. Simmilar goes for Turkish serials being popular in Pakistan. So the list goes on and on, Pakistan for this intended purpose has also been working on a revamped culture policy for soft power projection.

However the concept of soft power projection will do little if the perceptions in west are wrong. Russia can be one example, despite opening up, developing , adopting democratic principles, having highest number of billioniares in the world, today still has a draconian image in western media. These perceptions will change and evolve with time as world gradually shifts from a unipolar state to a one with multiple power centers.

 

[maximuswarrior]

Soft power, image etc. doesn't mean a thing. Not a bloody thing. Ask Syria, Iraq and others who have been reduced to rubble. Their people have become orphans in their own country. Power is the only thing that the world understands. Eventually, it is the only thing that counts. History doesn't lie.

 

[Tom M]

These burger elites don't know jack sh!t about Pakistan. They are part of the problem. Handing out vague lectures about Pakistan's problems is just a convenient way to vent frustration. Frustration about things not going as they prefer or have imagined. These people live in their comfortable surrounding. They don't have any connect with the vast majority of Pakistanis who face hardships on a daily basis. If anything, the elite is the problem in Pakistan. They support and protect corruption. Paid content writers spew any nonsense as long as they are paid. These are the "educated" people who have let Pakistan down time and time again. Today, they are shedding crocodile tears about the image problem that Pakistan has. Too little too late.

These burger elites have one agenda and that is to tow the US line. Just follow US orders and everything will be fine. That is their ultimate solution for Pakistan. Outsource Pakistan in its entirety to the US and India. That means, let your people get mass killed in US drone strikes. Survive on US aid with stringent conditions. Ditch CPEC and China cooperation. Allow Bollywood to flourish in Pakistan and put a dot on your forehead. All image problems will disappear on a whim. Too bad they can't have it their way.

Pakistanis feel proud. Pakistan has its fair share of problems, but we are not going to be lectured by some delusional burger elite about our image problems. We have a neighbor where rape is rampant, women's rights are virtually nonexistent and hostility against minorities is on the rise since Modi's rule. Yet, nationalist Indians claim to be on top of the world. Burger elites are insecure. Burger elites want to copy another identity. Burger elites can embrace another culture or country if they feel let down by Pakistan. Pakistanis aren't going to overhaul their traditions and beliefs to accommodate a bunch of insecure burger elites.

Today the burger elites have been shunned and red faced by their own Aman ki Asha Indian allies. Pakistani actors are ditched from India and all these burger elites can do is lick their wounds. Whilst Indian nationalists and Indian actors fully support their army in their transgression against Pakistan the burger elites are too busy worrying about their image.

Exactly, mate.

 

[my2cents]

it's simple. there is nothing as image. it's just politics.
for example if we leave china and become US puppet our image will become good in west automatically but our image will remain same in india. if we leave kashmir, give our nuclear bombs to india, disarm our army, our image will be built in india only and our so called image will remain same in west.
why was the image of india suddenly became better after US saw a big market in india despite the fact that a person not allowed to visit US became prime minister?

Are you going to tout the same old line about Modi for eternity. This is not about India but your own image that you portray to world that shapes their perception about your country.

 

[Trisonics]

Here is one way how to spoil an image of a nation:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...enage-daughter-for-staying-at-male-friends-h/

 

[maximuswarrior]

Here is one way how to spoil an image of a nation:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...enage-daughter-for-staying-at-male-friends-h/

Sure. You just blame an entire nation and hide your flags while you at it. Just take care of your own misogynistic society.

 

[MadDog]

Sharmeen Obaid made scores of enemies with in Pakistan because of this film.

No on the contrary she held numerous meetings with PM and hence was the prime force behind honour killing bill passed by Parliament !!!

 

[Trisonics]

Sure. You just blame an entire nation and hide your flags while you at it. Just take care of your own misogynistic society.

Pakistanis give their nation a bad name and no! I did not blame all Pakistanis but well educated ones like this doctor do make a culture stand out amidst other examples. As far as society in India is concerned, it's irrelevant since the article posted here reads, incase you missed it, --
What Brand Pakistan can learn from Brand India

 

[PAKISTANFOREVER]

some of the post by some Pakistani members is exactly the point the writer is talking about.they dont even understand that,sorry state of affairs.

You people are not in a position to criticize Pakistan. You are taking as if you nation is a superpower whereby each of your citizens has a living standard comparable to that of Germany and Monaco. Reality is that between 30-40% of the ENTIRE Earth's most severely malnourished and extreme poor are part of your nation and race:

http://m.firstpost.com/india/shocke...t-of-worlds-malnourished-children-916359.html

http://m.firstpost.com/india/shocke...t-of-worlds-malnourished-children-916359.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-28735449

http://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-e...al-health-india-much-worse-previously-thought

Before you criticise Pakistan, get your own house in order first and solve your nation's above problems. I'm sure that's far more important if your patriotic about india than Pakistan's image problem.

You worry about india, we'll worry about Pakistan.

Pakistanis give their nation a bad name and no! I did not blame all Pakistanis but well educated ones like this doctor do make a culture stand out amidst other examples. As far as society in India is concerned, it's irrelevant since the article posted here reads, incase you missed it, --
What Brand Pakistan can learn from Brand India

One thing we can learn is to make sure we don't have between 30-40% of the ENTIRE Earth's most severely malnourished and extreme poor in our nation and as part of our race:

http://m.firstpost.com/india/shocke...t-of-worlds-malnourished-children-916359.html

http://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-e...al-health-india-much-worse-previously-thought

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...591/India-accused-of-poverty-smokescreen.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6161691.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-28735449

Don't worry or comment about Pakistan's image or other problems. You have far bigger and more urgent problems to take care off. Pakistan is not your problem. We'll worry about Pakistan, you worry about india.

it's simple. there is nothing as image. it's just politics.
for example if we leave china and become US puppet our image will become good in west automatically but our image will remain same in india. if we leave kashmir, give our nuclear bombs to india, disarm our army, our image will be built in india only and our so called image will remain same in west.
why was the image of india suddenly became better after US saw a big market in india despite the fact that a person not allowed to visit US became prime minister?

Best way to solve Pakistan's image problem is to completely dismantle our nuclear weapons program, shutdown the CPEC initiative, roll back our military and advanced weapons programs, disband our military, let the indians/americans invade and massacre millions of our citizens and make Pakistan a "Success" like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. There you go. Pakistan will now be loved and cherished by the "international community". The treacherous liberals in Pakistan will be happy I'm sure.