Inaugural address on the occasion of commissioning of permanent TV Centre at Lahore on December 21, 1972

While it gives me pleasure to be here today to commission the first truly professional television Centre in Pakistan, I should like to say at the outset that I come with a certain sense of disappointment in what I have seen in the last twelve months. The urgency and priorities of national reconstruction have not found as eloquent an expression on television as the hour demanded. I know there have been reasons for the short-coming —lack of technical resources, and trained manpower, and finances. But the disappointment has persisted, and the lesson we must all draw from this fact — not only those in television but in every area of life and endeavor in Pakistan — I that somehow, very soon, this nation must learn to use its talent for innovation and enterprise to overcome difficulties and problems, in spite of the lack of resources. Sixty million minds, thinking concertedly, can solve the most intractable problem. Sixty million pairs of hands, pulling together in concert and harmony, are the best natural resource that any nation can ask for.

Look around you at the kaleidoscopic world of today, and you will see that rapid change is in the very nature of progress. The old and reactionary concept of “gradual development” has been overtaken by events, and rejected by oppressed people everywhere. There can be no change without impatience. There can be no progress without urgency.

Not just today, not only when I took upon myself the responsibilities of Government twelve months ago, but ever since, as a young man, I become aware of the social and economic plight in which millions of my countrymen have lived, I have had a vision of the Pakistan which one day we must build, and which we can build.

I have a vision that one day the fields in our countryside will blossom with abundance. The rolling fields and orchards and village squares will ring with the songs of happy children, children with the color of blood in their checks and with books held proudly under their arms. In the streets of our great cities, we will no more have to live with the shame of children in rags, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, children debasing their parents and their society by begging, to keep themselves warm and fed. I have a vision that this day will come.

The day will come when the sixty million people of Pakistan will no longer be as beggars in the streets of the world. They will work within a system which gives to each because of his rights as a human being and not because of the circumstances of his birth. They will be strong in their faith which brought them together in one nation. They will be proud of their identity, and confident in their ability and strength to shake the foundations of ignorance, poverty and disease. With their own endeavors, our people will redirect the flow of history.

We will build a society in which the old values of greed and self-advancement will be replaced by a common concern for the welfare of the whole community. We will build our monuments to our contemporary civilization. Institutions of learning, factories and dams, atomic reactors and television centers — these will be our Taj Mahals of the 20th century.

I have a vision that this day will come, and I have a programme whereby this day will come soon. For my part, the programme consists of ensuring that the economic, constitutional, social and administrative conditions are created within which human endeavor has the opportunity to be transformed into productive and creative endeavor. My part, my Government’s role, is to provide secure unshakable foundations for the building of a prosperous future. But the nation-builders will still have to be made by people themselves. Too long have we lived with the fatalistic and superstitious belief that prosperity is a butterfly which one day will come to rest of its own accord in our immobile laps. These attitudes are the attitudes of people who live in a state of despair. I say to you that, in spite of the ordeal and the trauma through which our people have lived in the recent past, today there is no call for Pakistanis to exist in despair. The dangers to our identity and to our progress no doubt continue to surround us on all sides and from within. But this nation has endured in these last twelve months. I say to you that, if you so decide, this nation will endure also for the next twelve centuries and more.

Therefore, I have a vision in which I want my fellow countrymen to share, so that when each one of us is asked the question, he may say: “we have a vision.”

In coming here today to commission this handsome and professional Television center, if I do so with a certain sense of disappointment from the past, I also do so with hope in the future. The young men and women who work for Pakistan Television as Producers and Engineers and the rest, are not ordinary people doing a job and earning a livelihood. They are the missionaries of this age. They are the people who must carry the message of work and hope across the land. They have volunteered to bring up a nation of educated men and women, to teach the neglected manhood of our villages and our slums to read and write, and thereby to learn to lead a better life. They have volunteered to communicate to all our countrymen a sense of purpose for the future. To help drive and motivate and guide our nation into the vanguard of the modern age.

You who wield the cameras today and transmit the message beyond these studios, are the catalysts to progress. You above all must share in the vision for the future, because you have to reproduce the sounds and pictures of this vision on your Television screen, to inspire our country men to ever more exalted endeavor.

This nation needs many thousands of trained teachers to man schools and colleges throughout the country. Training them will take time. You in Television can take their place today, and one teacher in one studio can become the guide and mentor for school-children on whom the sun never shone before.

This nation needs many thousands of experts to teach better farming, to tell our mother how to bring up healthy children, and to show our people how to share in the people’s works programme. Producing the thousands of expert cadres will take time, but you in Television can carry the same message into every village community. You have the capability to bring our people into one common fold to participate in the great experience of building a vibrant nation.

I am particularly pleased and proud to hear that this permanent Television Centre has been built entirely by Pakistani engineers, and that all the sophisticated equipment which I have today been shown has been installed and commissioned entirely by young Pakistani specialists trained in our own Universities. I am proud that in the last eight years we have had to rely on no outside expertise. If during these years you have made mistakes, there is a virtue in such self-reliance and in learning from you own mistakes. But still you have created only the facilities for good Television. I would like to see you develop your capabilities to create good and purposeful Television for the people. You must apply your minds to telling us how the benefits of your programmes can be made available to those who still cannot afford to buy a T.V. set. Television must be for the whole community, and especially for those who have in the past been deprived of all the fruits of progress, or else Television will have failed in its value, no matter how good the programmes.

My Government is impatient to move forward, because I am a man who is impatient when confronted with the manifestations of human misery. Therefore, my Government will encourage and support any activity which contributes to giving my countrymen their place in the sunshine. Pakistan Television must grow with all speed into a truly mass medium. I am particularly glad to note that when this has been achieved, the old priorities will be reversed, and general purpose entertainment will give place to an increasing emphasis on educational television and the social education of our people.

I am also interested to hear, as you will have been that tomorrow Pakistan Television enters the era of Satellite Communication. First, this is evidence of the increasing emphasis which we are giving to harnessing the benefits of technology to create a better society. But my second reason for being pleased is more significant in the context of our place in the world society. In some ways our people do not seem to share in the common experience of mankind in social, cultural and technological advancement. It is a virtue to be self-reliant, but it is not a virtue to deny oneself the benefits of the experience of other peoples and cultures. It is my hope that the introduction of satellite transmissions on Television will become a symbol of our increasing interest in the cultures of other lands. If we wish to teach other peoples about ourselves, we must be equally willing to learn from what they have to offer.

The lesion of history is that there is no such thing as uneven progress. If any sector of our society or our economy is neglected, the entire front of national development will be retarded. Therefore, my fellow countrymen, my fellow nation-builder let us march forward together in unison, and with confidence.