Pakistan and the prisoner of Centrail jail

Funny it may seem but experimenting with highly-dangerous and psychotic criminals is not such a good idea after all. The experiment with the element 'Z' turned out to be one of the worst manifestations of the claim above. While elsewhere criminals are regarded as a potential threat to  the entire system we Pakistanis have proven, with a generosity beyond measure, the same untrue. the results though have been disastrous and in some cases beyond repair. 'it is a bloody mess' are the words that come to my mind as i lay back thinking of how to spit it out so that it doesn't come across as a mean piece of writing. But sadly writing words like ' chaos', 'disorder' or even for that matter 'calamity' doesn't quite give the scope of the tragedy. Am i being too pessimistic? hardly so!
after spending years in the Central Jail, Z seems to have escaped in an almost Sirius-like manner(BINGO! by turning into a giant black dog) and has taken over the nation. Most of us are still baffled as to how this tragedy struck us and there is no explanation that makes sense as to why we let this happen. I have  grown up in a country where the military is the strongest political force (paradoxically) which has a mega-influence on all state matters, including those who take up their roles as mannequins on the political front. These puppets only manage affairs like education, economy(limited control of course), health (actually makes me laugh) and trivial affairs of state management while the military decides everything else from the foreign relations to the internal threats and takes all the major decisions on behalf of the state.
what frustrates me is that if the military is such a power-hungry, egotistical, controlling setup, the least it can do is to give us a competent set of puppets. But hang on if they give us a working government, that very government would ALSO end up questioning the very setup that brought them in. So people like Z and people like R Malik, Y Gilani and B Awan end up in post of high power with zero degree of competence as their primary concern is NOT to work for the people but for their own interests.
There are inherent flaws in this system that need to be changed. If people like I khan are brought to power they will have to deal with these flaws first and then move on to solve the bigger problems. I doubt if any country would be able to function with two parallel systems of governance, in such a case probably anarchy might be more suited !

pakistan and the deathly hallows

i sit here watching 'the most respespectable show' while half my country is destroyed by floods while the other half living in fear from dengue and i cant stop wondering what went wrong. year in year out all i can see is devastation and destruction, cries of the ones whose children were killed by suicide bombers, moans of the ones whose men were killed in Waziristan, tears of those whose houses were submerged in water and they sat atop broken litter and junk, their animals dead and homes left as twigs and mud. the earth quake of 2006, the floods of 2010, the dengue of 2011? where is the 'pakistani dream'? where are all the promises that were made? Political strife, cultural disorder, social corruption and on top of all that natural disasters? where is this country heading to? or is it that like illnesses it has to get to the worst condition before it becomes better? i am neither too sure nor too optimistic and to be honest its not just me; we as a nation have lost all hope. J.K Rowling said "a grim mood has gripped the nation" in one of her books and i find that to be very appropriate here, are the death eaters taking over? is it 'voldemort' who is responsible for all this distress. in our case the voldemort might very well be the 'you-know-which-country' and the death eaters our own leaders under the 'imperius' curse.
This is high time that some one takes over and brings about some sanity, its time that things start getting better, its time that we stop suffering. But how? by writing notes? by talking boisterously in tv shows? i am afraid not. It time that we stop talking and start doing, ironic it may seem that while I am writing this article i ask you for action, But sadly thats how it is. I believe that the 'order of phoenix' has to step in now and take control of the things. we need the 'cricket captain' to step in and solve it all for us probably.

on hypocrisy

It is a stark display of two-faced behavior, a blatant hypocrisy when we talk about our relations with India with India as opposed to those with the Indians. When we got rid of the British raj and found a country for ourselves on the basis of religion, the two-faced-nation theory played the major role. We hated each other’s guts for the religion we followed. However, we notice that when Hindus come here we welcome them graciously, when Hindus are stuck in a problem, case in point the M.V. Suez and the pirates episode, we feel proud of helping them, when we go to India we face a likewise behavior. From the taxi-drivers who refuse to charge fare to the open-heartedness of our ‘Indian brothers’ who force us to live in their homes we see a display of such brotherly feelings that can’t be expressed in words. However, when we think of India as a country we get these strong, equally inexplicable, feelings of such abhorrence that are almost inhuman and this feeling of hatred is matched by the people living across the border.
This makes a lot of people wonder how we are able to manifest such disparate feelings at the same time. Are we ambivalent about our feelings? Or is it merely the fact that we have been led to believe that we should detest each other? is it the presence of political tensions that have been imbued through the international community for their own interests? are we just hypocritical about our feelings? It’s very difficult to identify which one of these is true. I believe that it’s an amalgamation of all these that results in this two-faced exhibit of sentiments.
One other factor to note is that the anti-Hindu sentiments are the one on which most Pakistanis feel unified; other than that, over the past 60 years, we haven’t seen any other major issue that unites us so well. Therefore, it logically follows that we just hate the Indians for the mere sake of hating someone together as a nation. I am, however, of the opinion that these sentiments are never going to get us anywhere, except being a major burden on already thin budget.People on both sides of the border respect each other, and only the so-called political tension that has been instilled in us, the ‘other-ization’, the belief that we can’t live peacefully, is the reason that our relations with India are so taut. We need to respect each other, we need to address other important issues that we are both facing and ideally we should collaborate with each other. Both countries have faced the same humongous problems since the partition like education, health and poverty.
Shouldn’t our aim be to solve these problems? Shouldn’t these problems unite us as nations? Do we actually need the fear of a war to unite us? on the contrary no war ever unites nations for long enough. 60 years of solid hatred, I believe is enough, it’s time to move on and look at the bigger picture and our bigger problems. Our peaceful co-existence would not only stabilize us but also give us the strength to move on and shape a better future for the generations to come.
friends or foes?