An Uber driver of French-African descent in NYC was ranting on about how a brown man rejected him for his daughter because of his skin. He said he wondered to himself:
“WHAT! Are you white yourself? You are half white, half black.”
While laughter split through the car, everyone later realized how wittily this man had stomped over our racist and colonial tendencies. Owing to a colonial past, our own history is a battle of the skin tones. It is a struggle to become a progressive nation amongst religiously sanctioned, cultural limitations. It is a tension, between an attraction to the apparent glamour of the geographic west, and a burden to stay true to the “Eastern” roots. The battle is between the colonizer and the colonized.
There is something about the very word ‘Colonialism’ that piques the interest of our well-read citizens. It is as if the word sets off a series of synaptic responses, as we rush to quote Edward Said on his conceptualization of ‘Orientalism’ . A resentful sentiment, and rightly so, wafts through intellectual circles as we sit in our air-conditioned lecture halls and drawing rooms to abhor the “gora” of the injustice inflicted in all spheres. With the railway system as their quintessential representative, the moderates amongst us struggle to balance the pros and cons of British colonialism. For them, colonialism has reaped undeniable benefits. Then, there are the apologists of colonialism. A wholly different set of people, who wish to see nothing but the positive attributes of the British “civilization” . Passing colonialism off as a necessity, this group is inarguably, the least in touch with the realities of the colonial enterprise. The conundrum isn’t whether one perspective on colonialism is right over the other. Rather, it is the well-read set of people who fail to connect the word and the world. Ironically, even with the scale of civilizations thesis etched into our brains, we practice selective denunciation of our colonial legacy.
Our dealing with colonialism is selective in a lot of respects.
Right where we discuss the heinous firangi , stands a small girl holding an equally small child. All the while we sit comfortably on our lavish sofas, pursuing our intellectual thirst. Right outside our gated colonies, we beam with pride at the salutes we receive by the guards. Just because the British taught this etiquette. Right in our hospitals, a sewage worker dies, because the doctor is sitting too high on his purity horse to recall the significance of a Hippocratic Oath. 
We are quick to attack Indians on their reprehensible caste system. The traditional caste system, with five rungs of social classes, is often considered to be the only caste system there is.
“Clearly it is India’s problem!”, is the mainstream response.
This makes the caste system seemingly far removed from Pakistan’s social concerns. To follow this line of thought is to fall prey to the notion that following colonialism, we have curated for ourselves an entirely unique culture. That too, within 70 years of independence (what an incredible feat that would be!) . Or more fallaciously, taking to this idea is to assume that all Hindus crossed the border in 1947. This means that we think caste is India’s problem and that nationalism leeches off of religious fervor. There is no surprise at the assertion that the colonizer constructed caste to his advantage. This was done with the intention of appropriating labor as he went along. The ‘untouchables’ became a vast category encompassing all from sewage workers to domestic workers. We pride in ridding ourselves off the white man and his “immoral influence” . We might not call them Dalits (untouchables). Yet, the young girl taking care of our children or the servant slaving over a hot stove for us, have their utensils separated, all in the name of keeping lower social classes at a distance. Or in other words-“ Aukaat mein rakhnay keh liye” . We pride ourselves in ‘providing’ for these people, notwithstanding our own dependency on them. Bearing alarming similarity to the white man’s burden, our own supremacist tendencies are silenced by the logic of being same skinned. That is, high horsed benevolence is only justified if carried out by similar brown skins. But God forbid a foreigner in our guarded communities employs a brown skinned domestic worker, then all hell breaks loose. Our romance with the colonialism is like the stop and shop at the gas station. It’s fleeting in nature, as we pick what we like without critical thought. This makes it easy to throw out the window should it creep into the confines of our self- customized logic.
The actors may change; narratives do not.
But, logic certainly does as best to our own needs. The colonizer is not gone. He lives in us, thriving stronger than ever as we continue living in our intellectual bubbles.
The Uber driver was correct in pointing out our fascination with colonialism. We are complacent in propagating social segregationist behaviors. Most of us are subtle in our colonialist tendencies, but surely there. We may be spewing words out of theoretical works on colonialism. However, the inability to critically reflect on our own hypocrisies is perhaps the biggest deterrent in the quest to change our social problems.