Decade-long job search of graduate Sonia Masih yields to 'discrimination'

National Minorities Day: They casually tell us that our father was a sanitation worker, and so will I and my children be for life, says Sonia Raheel Masih, a Political Science graduate from University of Peshawar. After a decade since her degree and her post-marriage migration to Karachi, Sonia’s painstaking journey to define herself with her qualification and aptitude almost comes to a tragic close in the face of the class and religious “discriminiation” she faces to date.

The 31-year-old mother of four now settles with tutoring neighbourhood kids and few house-help gigs to make enough for bare essentials. “You can find my résumé casually collecting dust in many offices and outlets,” she says with her wavering spirit to still land a decent job that she can be proud of.

I don’t mind if my qualification and aptitude are the reasons I couldn’t land a job yet, because I have confidence in myself to improve these things, Masih says. However, she adds that if my religious identity and family background, sanitation workers’ household, are rubbed on my face “I can’t do much here then, can I?”

On National Minorities Day, August 11, her story is a reminder there are people we may have failed vis a vis the hopes Muhammad Ali Jinnah pinned to Pakistan, a country carved for and by minorities of the sub continent.

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