PAKISTAN`S successes are individual, its failures collective. Take mountaineering: a young mountaineer Samina Baig conquers Mount Everest in 2013. In exploration, Namira Salim reaches both Poles the North in 2007 and the South a year later.

Dr Abdus Salam wins the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979. Seventeen-year-old Malala Yousafzai joins him as our latest and only other Nobel Laureate.

In squash, Azam Khan, Jahangir Khan and then Jansher Khan; in tennis, Rashid Malik and Haroon Rahim (then 15) both play in the Davis Cup, and later Aisam-ul-Haq reaches the men`s and mixed doubles finals of the 2010 US Open Championship.

Even in team sports, individuals outshine their teammates. In hockey, Islahuddin, Samiullah, Kalimullah, not to mention Hassan Sardar. And in cricket, most recently, Younis Khan scores three successive centuries against Australia and his teammate (and captain) Misbah-ul-Haq knocks a historic lightning 50 runs off 21 deliveries.

In every case, their achievements began where the dreams of others ended.

And yet, Pakistanis disintegrate when required to act in concert. The harmony that should rise from voices singing in unison too often degenerates into a rasping dissonance.

It will take social scientists decades to analyse the causes. Meanwhile, we in today`s Pakistan live with its effects.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the governance of our country. Perceptibly, the nation is collapsing under the burden of collective incompetence. Those who lack power clamour for it. Those who have it treat it as a bauble. They use it to play out their fantasies.

To them, governance is less a responsibility than a heightened form of institutionalised condescension.

We hold a high opinion of ourselves, as individuals and as a nation. A truer measure is always the esteem in which others hold us.

Compliments from one`s friends are no achievement. Respect by one`s enemies is better, but ephemeral. Being courted by foreign investors nowadays seems to be the highest form of economic flattery.

Every government has used investors` conferences to showcase Pakistan as an investorfriendly haven. They have solicited foreign investors at the front door while their own citizens scurry out of the back door to secure their funds abroad in Swiss banks, in London`s real estate, to buy nationalities, or to place their assets anywhere but in Pakistani banks. It is said that one canny political entrepreneur has squirrelled his wealth beyond the pale of repatriation, in Israeli banks.

And yet we persist in organising investors` conferences. These have become like GUM, the huge state-run departmental store inMoscow`s Red Square during the time that Soviets ruled Russia. Then, its window displays enticed Muscovites with a display of consumer goods crocl(ery, clothes, appliances, haberdashery, and furniture, one of everything except that every shelf inside was empty. What was on show was not available. There was nothing in stock. GUM became notorious for advertising what it did not have.

Our latest International Investment Conference, held in Islamabad in October 2014, must have been organised by bureaucrats trained in marketing by GUM.

Foreigners were invited to invest in two mega corporations one a failing PIA, even though many attendees must have travelled to Pakistan by every international airline other than PIA. And the second, inexplicably, Pakistan Steel Mills. No one could have missed the irony. Even while Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Islamabad was touting PSM as an irresistible investment opportunity,PSM`s ovens and furnaces in Karachi were cooling to a halt, its coal bunkers as empty as its coffers.

Punjabis in the audience with a feel for history must have remembered a similar situation of state bankruptcy that occurred in 1846. Following the First Sikh War, theBritish levied a fine of Rs2 crores upon the defeated Sikh Darbar. Not one notable who had benefited from Ranjit Singh`s largesse came forward to contribute. Henry Lawrence regretted that given their private wealth, they could have redeemed the debt easily, had they `a spark of patriotismif their selfishness had been restrained by the commonest gratitude or shame`.

Patriotism is an expensive commodity. Not everyone is prepared to pay the price.

Certainly 60 Pakistanis did so on when, on Nov 2, they were blown up by a sole suicide bomber after they had watched the flag ceremony at Wagah border.

In October 1984, the terrorist IRA targeted Mrs Margaret Thatcher in a bomb attack in Brighton. She survived. At the Conservative Party Conference later the same day, she described it as the day she was `not meant to see`.

One can only salute the involuntary sacrifice of all those who embraced martyrdom at Wagah, and the conscious courage of those who, the very next day, challenged terrorism by attending the same ceremony, a ceremony we Pakistanis were `not meant to see`.• The writer is an author and art historian.

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