Is the mind most powerful weapon in the world?

Recently I got a chance to watch a movie named “the imitation game” and was really thought provoking. The whole movie was based on the biography of Allan Turing a mathematician who became a cryptographer for Britain during the Second World War when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. The title of the film quotes the name of the game that Allan Turing purposed for answering the question in his 1950 seminal paper “computing machinery and intelligence” that “can machines think?” He in that movie tried to analyze the machine “Enigma” through which Nazis use to send coded messages. Humanly, it was nearly impossible to break the enigma codes to decode the messages if they would have tried for even 20 years to decode it. So between all of the chaos Allan Turing came to an idea of making a machine to analyze another machine. Machine vs machine and not machine vs humans.

Consequently at the end, he and the team managed to decode the coded messages and lessened the duration of the war by two and a half years by saving the lives of millions of people. The time when armed forces of two major entities were just fighting and shedding blood because they were ought to do that a man came in rescue to invent a machine that can more or less think like a human or say a bit differently than humans in a chaotic and catastrophic situation. We see that many of the inventions or discoveries were made in a very calm environment but seeing an invention that laid the foundations of contemporary digital computer in such hurry and in a pressured situation made me think on a profound phrase “Necessity is the mother of invention” if we start thinking differently or on a different domain but most importantly in an effective way.

The main reason for a downfall of our nation is that we have stopped thinking differently. We have stopped doing that does not seem normal. We have become like the Bromides the followers and not the leaders or pioneers of something innovative. It is true that we cannot be good at many things but the things on which we are good at can be polished more to break the contemporary enigma of cultural taboos that are holding us back all from being different. One has to live a life others perceive as abnormal to make the rest of the world lead a normal life. The states of the world still believe in holding armies and territories to protect themselves but the only weapon that can protect the world is the mind that works in a most rational manner.

In Pakistan all the students sadly are being treated and taught as a herd and not as individuals, none of the teachers would tell them that you can only stand out if you will be different. Pakistan has produced just two Noble Laureates first is the scientist Abdus Salam, who won the physics prize in 1979 about whom you would hardly know because the religious extremists won’t let you admire that achievement of him and nor even encourage you to look up to him, second one is Malala Yousafzai, that’s it! We are spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on traditional armies and weapons to defend and protect ourselves but not on a weapon that can lead us all to a better world. We need to make us realize that we have our minds even if we don’t have an army.

AUTHOR: HIRA ARSHAD