Today, Pakistan is celebrating its 61st Independence Day. But for an indication on how the country has been faring, 15 minutes before midnight, a suicide bomber struck a police station in Lahore, leaving five people dead and dozens injured.

So where do we stand, over six decades later, and what does it mean to be a Pakistani?

We stand on the precipice of a ever-crumbling mountain, hanging on by a rapidly fraying thread. That thread is constantly fraying for reasons more than one, but the questions that I and many of my friends have been grappling with is who are we, and will this country even survive a year from now?

So what does it mean to be Pakistani? We are divided on what province we belong to, what religious sect we follow, what city we live in, what version of Urdu we speak.

It wasn’t this way. No one used to care, we just knew that we were Pakistani. Thanks to the policies of our former rulers, our ethnicity and religion now comes before who we really are. And this question is not going to be answered anytime soon, as each successive government fails to realize or perhaps does not want to address the issue of identity.

And whether this country will survive or not - even the option to answer that is not in our hands. Pakistan’s breakup has been already mapped out by one too many think tanks, as we fight insurgencies after insurgencies, failing to address the issues that really matter - resources to provinces, provincial autonomy, a weaning away from our Western allies..the list goes on.

So on this Independence Day, as I sit watching speeches on television and endless national songs, I am reminded more than ever, how patriotism has become a storage item, to be dusted off and taken out of the attic every 14th August and paraded on television, while the Pakistani nation looks on and tries to remember what it was to feel like this country was ours, truly truly ours.