By:Dr. Nasser Hussyn Bukhari
Published by:ANI News Agency
Some wounds leave no mark. They arrive as a story, repeated until it feels like truth. A young mind fed grievance inherits a lens through which achievement and failure are pre-judged.
The most corrosive version tells a child that his language, ethnicity, or city makes him inherently superior, and that another's success must be privilege or conspiracy. It flatters but it is a slow poison, dissolving self-reflection and inflating a superiority the world will eventually puncture.
The recently announced MDCAT results in Sindh hand us an uncomfortable mirror. Once again the temptation is to politicize what should be celebrated: intellect bows to no city, language, or bloodline. A student from Karachi can excel; so can one from Tharparkar, Larkana, Shikarpur, or Badin. That is what a fair contest is designed to expose ,not one community defeating another, but merit trampling the borders society insists on drawing.
Confidence and superiority are opposites wearing similar clothes. Confidence says: I can compete with anyone. Superiority says: I should not have to. One breeds preparation; the other, entitlement, which does not survive contact with reality. Intellectual humility seizes up when a group is told it is simply smarter, why study someone already judged inferior? Worst hit is character: respect, empathy, and the grace to accept defeat.
Nowhere is this clearer than in medicine. A scalpel does not ask what language its wielder dreams in; disease never asks whether its host speaks Sindhi, Urdu, or Punjabi. The hospital is a meritocracy, and education must prepare young people for that reality, not mythology.
This is why an examination's integrity matters more than the seats it allocates. A credible test teaches what no lecture can: your effort is measured by the same yardstick as everyone else's. Sindh's published answer keys and grievance channels deserve credit, though credit is not immunity; a fair system stays open to challenge. Institutional doors, not political shortcuts, cultivate something rare: belief.
India's NEET-UG exam was consumed by leak allegations; the Supreme Court found leaks in two districts but no systemic failure. The lesson is once students suspect an exam is rigged, merit's psychological floor gives way and Sindh's teacher-recruitment testing, alongside Punjab's parallel shift, suggests a broader reckoning with merit nationwide.
The deeper danger has nothing to do with ordinary political disagreement, healthy in any democracy. It is what happens inside a mind taught to explain every failure through the same borrowed script. A student who fails and asks, what must I improve, is already growing. One taught to see failure as conspiracy may never ask whether someone else simply prepared better. That question takes humility and humility is where real learning begins.
It would be a mistake to lay this failing solely at Karachi's door, as if its youth were uniquely vulnerable to grievance politics. Karachi's students contend with overcrowded classrooms and civic neglect no less real than rural districts' burdens. The narrative of inherited superiority is not a Karachi disease; it is a temptation available wherever failures are blamed on someone else. Every district needs functioning schools and trustworthy exams, not mythology.
Political parties are entitled to criticize governments; journalists to interrogate examination boards. No one is entitled to convert a generation into hostages of a grievance narrative for a news cycle. A politician may gain short-term advantage by blaming a student's struggles on others, but the bill comes due decades later, paid in stripped humility.
The MDCAT results invite us to rethink the culture around education. A rural candidate's triumph should sharpen an urban one, not humiliate him; an exceptional Karachi performance should inspire, not indict. Merit does not ask where you are from only what you can do.
Sindh now holds the chance to make that principle load-bearing, in admissions and public hiring alike. Transparent exams and unbending standards can rebuild a generation's faith that the system is not rigged and once young people believe the system is fair, they begin to believe their effort counts.
Political leaders carry a responsibility easy to forget in a news cycle. They may contest elections and challenge institutions without limit, but must not manufacture despair in young minds as a tactic. A student is not ammunition; his future is not a battlefield for someone else's war.
This is where a credible examination system stops being housekeeping and becomes nation-building. When the same rules bind everyone, the state tells its young citizens something unmistakable: your effort matters, and you will be judged like everyone else. Sindh should treat transparent examinations as the opening clause of a new contract with its youth.
A narrative built on ethnic or linguistic superiority survives only on distrust. It needs young people to believe the game is permanently rigged, and that identity alone guarantees reward. A genuinely fair system starves that narrative quietly, replacing suspicion with evidence and entitlement with earned achievement.
This, in the end, is the real contest: not Sindhi against Urdu-speaking, not Karachi against the districts beyond it, but fairness against manipulation, merit against entitlement, and hope against every narrative built to imprison young minds. A false narrative can offer a generation the illusion of superiority and hand its architects a temporary dividend, but illusions do not survive a level playing field. Merit will outlast mythology, and where the field is level, no manufactured grievance can hold a generation's future hostage.
