What dismissiveness and condescension!
Let me show you why it is both unwarranted and far more revealing of yourself, than the actual content of my text !
Firstly, pray tell, why do you assume this article was written as part of a study in sociology or anthropology? Did I say that I was writing from such a perspective or assert that my 'sample' was representative.?
Of course not.
It's kind of ridiculous to create your criteria and then hold my writing. to it. Arrogant too. But... you are performing to type ... yawn... easily recognisable - more on that, in a minute.
If you are familiar with the term' personal essay', then you must be aware that different criteria are applied to personal essays, than to those written in academia, within the rubric of the social studies.
A personal essay, in case you are not aware, describes an important lesson gathered from a writer's life experiences'.
Now kindly reread the subtitle.
Can you get off your high horse now, or are you congenitally stuck to it?
I feel you are merely revealing your white supremacist streak ... If Pakistan is a backwater of awful squalor etc etc... it is in no small part due to the vicious British looting of some 43 trillion dollars worth of wealth over the course of 200 years, during which they were systematically and with all brutality, destroying the unity that lead India to have some 25 percent of the world's trade before the Palefaces dug their claws in. Famine does not create genteel ways. Perhaps I should leave you with hunger pangs for a month or two and see just how 'squalid' you would come?
What's truly ' backward' is the brutality of those whose crimes against humanity you seek to erase by ignoring them. But then again, I guess you are one of a kind.
Did it hurt you, that despite all the forces ranged against the Brown, South Asian woman, and despite all the privileges inherited by kindly Quaker, white woman, Kitty, the Brown older women is living well and the white women was (sadly, despite my efforts as her friend) withering under the neglect of her less civilised children and socially irresponsible and uncaring white neighbours?
