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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about neo-colonialism. Not the type that ships armies across oceans and plants flags on foreign soil. No, this one’s subtler. It wears tailored suits, hosts development conferences, offers loans with polite strings attached, and sells dreams in dollars and euros. Neo-colonialism doesn’t need to occupy land—it occupies minds.

And that, right there, is the real prison.

We inherited more than just borders and bad bureaucracy from the colonizers—we inherited ways of thinking. Deference to power. Worship of whiteness. And a deep, insidious shame about who we are.

Take a walk down the posh streets of Clifton in Karachi or the tree-lined boulevards of Islamabad’s F-6. You’ll meet the Burger class—named not after the food, but after the lifestyle. Western-educated, English-speaking, yoga-practicing, cold-brew-drinking elites who often feel more at home in Toronto or Dubai than in Lyari or Larkana. They’re the children of the post-colonial aristocracy: landed families who traded in their British allegiance for American dreams. The accent may have shifted, but the power structures remained.

This is the aristocracy of the subconscious. The mindset that says English is superior, that local is “ghetto,” and that anything made in Pakistan is automatically suspect. It’s the servant pressing the elevator button for you. The local aunty asking if your daughter’s gotten “dark.” The uncle in the drawing room mocking Urdu drama for being “too desi.”

It’s not that these people are evil. They’re not. I know them. I am them in some ways. But they’re part of a deeper sickness—an inherited inferiority complex that colonialism etched into the soul of nations.

But here’s the thing: blaming the West for everything is easy. It’s also lazy. Yes, they exploited us. Yes, they looted our lands and minds. But we’ve had decades to find our own voice—and too often, we choose mimicry over authenticity. We polish our British accents but neglect our mother tongues. We import solutions while exporting our problems.

That’s the trap. That’s the prison. And that’s why Bob Dylan’s song, It Ain’t Me, Babe, echoes so deeply for me right now.

“Go lightly from the ledge, babe
Go lightly on the ground…
It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe…”

He could’ve been speaking to all of us—waiting for some foreign savior, some IMF deal, some Western validation. But it ain’t them. It never was. And it shouldn’t have to be.

Freedom won’t come from blaming or begging. It’ll come when we start telling our own stories, raising our own children to love their skin, their soil, and their languages. When we stop looking outward for approval and start looking inward for truth.

The neo-colonial world may sell prisons of gold, but they’re still prisons. And the key, inconveniently, has always been in our own pocket.

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