The Paradox of Independence

It is so naive of us to think of our nation as being free, it is almost hilarious when i see our youth celebrating 14th August with the so called “riwaiti josh-o-jazba” and it’s insane when our leaders tell us that we are sovereign. Bound in the shackles of slavery, entwined in chains of servitude, we are nothing but a horde of animals being driven by external forces. It is saddening to see that even after 65 years of 'dependence' we haven’t learnt anything! Nations elsewhere are progressing rapidly; we are being driven in to the abyss of destruction. Call me pessimistic, call me ungrateful or call me unpatriotic my notions of celebrating are not limited to updating my facebook status, riding bikes or delivering empty speeches.

Instead of spending all that money on flags, we could have bought many starving a delightful meal, instead of burning all that fuel we could have gifted some poor person who travels miles in torn shoes a pair of slippers. But NO we have to make the world record by making the biggest flag! Independent nations don’t need to prove that they are independent; it is almost as if we are in some sort of complex and we try every year to prove to ourselves that we are free. It is of course healthy to come together and celebrate! But the question remains: celebrate what? 65 years worth of failed governments? Our millions of poor people? or the load shedding?

I am at a loss for words when I see our prime minister ‘assuring’ people that Pakistan is an independent country. You don’t need to assure that sir, the fact that you are there in that PMs Chair is proof enough of my freedom!

It has been almost three years and I have gone status-less on facebook, have stopped wearing a badge, stopped buying jhandis and flags because I think that this is pointless! Instead I believe a better idea would be to give away that money! Oh right! What good will a hundred rupee do to a poor person? I am sure that is a ‘valid’ concern for most of us, what we don’t consider is that

a)      A hundred rupee note buys 20 Rotis (surprise that can actually help a starving family)

b)      If we do this collectively it can actually help

As an economics major, one thing that attracts me about Islam is the Zakat/Sadqa system. There is a perfect trickle-down effect in the economy that helps with the rotation of wealth. Pakistan, I am sorry ISLAMIC republic of Pakistan, was supposedly a country based on Islamic principles, sadly we couldn’t even apply the most pragmatic ones. There is still time to reconsider our values and our priorities; else we will be celebrating a hundred years of our Independence with the same Josh and Jazba without achieving anything substantial! 

SOLD! price: one laptop

An excellent ploy I say-giving laptops free of costs to the students of Punjab! I mean I am just impressed! There used to be a time when we used to buy entire villages for just a plate of 'daigi biryani' and bottles of coke! What has it come to now? Laptops! But yeah that's understood even the cheap whores standing on the roadside charge more with time and we are no less than them whores now!

give me a laptop, plaster a sticker of 'SOLD' of my forehead and move on- the line is pretty long you may have to sell half your empire to buy them all. But no wait! Wait! Wait! wait! They are giving us something that was always ours! RIGHT? But why would I want a laptop if my family doesn't even have access to the basic necessities? In fact where am I going to charge the damn thing! 12 hours of load shedding later? Why of course!

Inflation has hit the nation!

Even them politicians face the toll! Imagine! If my mom goes on shopping and instead of buying food for the month she buys a shiny toy for me I would be happy for a few hours but then eventually I will scream for food! You get the analogy? Why of course we are all so smart! We all get it but we will still be SOLD. No?

A better thing to do to win our hearts would be to actually give a DAMN about us! Solve our basic problems! Food. Water. Electricity. Education. Health. and yeah then if you have some left over funds you can buy us laptops. One major problem with our politicians today is that they are trying too hard. Imran Khan has such an impressive following not because he is giving out candies! It’s because there is substance to what he actually says! Others need to take a leaf out his book!

Load shedding tears

Dil jis ko diya who england chali gayi

Pyar jis se kiya woh Italy chali gayi

Dil ne kaha khudkhushi ker lo

Hath switch mein diya tu bijli chali gayi





When the federal minister for water and power Naveed Qamar announced to the awestruck nation that there would be no more load shedding from 7th February onwards, I was one of very many to believe this farfetched remark. It is fascinating to note that from that day on, instead of there being no load shedding, it actually has picked up to an extent that was never seen before. Abbottabad alone, the city where I sit writing this seemingly frustrated piece, witnesses over 12 hours of load shedding each day. The capital of KPK, Peshawar, observes an outage for every alternative hour of the day.

Were it a true democracy and its Minister would have broken such a blatant promise, there would have been questions asked, the minister would have been held responsible for hoodwinking the people. But no! Welcome to Pakistan, welcome to country where we accept without questioning, welcome to a nation that can be swindled by anyone and everyone, be it the military, be it the corrupt politicians or be it criminals, welcome to Pakistan. The way this country is being run, the way it is being exploited is disheartening.

Most disturbing is the attitude of our people towards the entire predicament. Instead of going out on the streets, protesting, they laze in front of warm fires making up such forward messages as written above. True they are bored but they are not this helpless, no nation can ever demand their rights by ignoring the problems that they face. It is time that the nation should act in a way befitting a democracy. We will forever remain a developing country (read failed state) if we do not, ourselves, do something to save this country. Load shedding is one of many issues facing this country, united we can deal with them, but by ignoring and disregarding them completely we won’t get anywhere.

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?

who let the dogs out

While most countries move forward with the passage of time ours seems to move in the backward direction with each passing day. With times the countries stabilize, we however have decided that nothing can change. Countries like China, Malaysia and numerous others, which were liberated in almost during the same era, have gone through massive constructive changes, we have seen nothing but a country put into the reverse gear since the death of its liberator. Three marshal laws, several failed democratic governments later we see our country on the list of the failing states. 12th on the failed states list to be specific.

And why shouldn't we be there? Pessimistic though it is, it is true. While I sit here writing this article, sweating, and in a foul mood millions in my country can’t even afford the basic facilities of health, education and shelter. They wait earnestly for someone to tell them that they might just survive, that they might just make it. Unfortunately, it’s not even just a lack of resources; it is the general attitude of the people. Somehow we have all internalized that this country is going to the dogs anyways and like hungry dogs we should all fighting for a bigger share. We keep blaming our leaders for their follies, but what we do not register is the fact that these leaders have come from amongst us.

Yes, one can certainly argue that our leaders are a different class altogether: landlords, industrialists, military personnel. One can also argue that since the creation of Pakistan, it has been run as an oligarchy, the power changes hands very rarely and even if it does its still influenced by a certain echelon. The stratum that reigns over this country, its constitution and its judiciary is the one that has more riches. As the wealthy keep getting wealthier their influence grows and it’s only the opulent class who can run for elections so it follows logically that they are not the true representatives of the population. We are a country where the middle class is fast diminishing, and that truly is a dangerous sign. It is a harbinger to the difficult times ahead. The unidirectional flow of wealth is creating a plethora of problems today which will have devastating effects for our future generations, if there are any. 

The solution to this predicament in my humble view is a just distribution of wealth. One might wonder how we might snatch and distribute in an egalitarian manner from this insanely corrupt, self-centered and egocentric pack of ravenous wolves. The answer lies in the method that was adopted millenniums ago: taxation. It is true that this is easier said than done and it is almost impossible to collect it from the most influential class of people of the country and it is also true that it would be imprudent to let the wealthiest class of the country off the hook since they are the ones which would make a significant contribution to the collecting tin.

We therefore have to tweak the system in such a way that wealthy can be taxed. We need to enforce tax on those who always shy away from it through proper check and balance. The proper distribution of wealth might allay some of the problems that this country is facing, it might appease those who are hopeless and it might make those optimistic who have lost all faith in this country and its future.

http://www.pakistantoday.com.p​k/2011/07/our-political-woes/