City of extremes


June 11, 2010

KARACHI: This is with reference to Tazeen Javed’s article “City of extremes” (June 11). If Cyclone Phet missed the shores of Karachi it was one less cause for misery for the city's poor. These people are being pushed aside because they do not fit into our materialistic and capitalist world. For many years now the amount allocated to education by successive governments has stayed at two per cent of GDP. No wonder half of our adult population and two-thirds of our women are illiterate.

No mother wants her son to push a donkey cart or be a hawker when he grows up but most poor families have no choice but to make their children work. This also perhaps happens because paradoxically the larger a family the more compelling the cause for the children in it to find work.

Can we survive by pushing the poor to the shanty towns and slums? Can we blame them for having orthodox views, for joining madrassahs, for understanding religion only as the maulvi understands it? It is these people who join extremist organisations and become indoctrinated.

We plan and conduct military operations against them. We try to bomb them to extinction yet we do nothing about the nurseries that produce them. We need to give them good teachers and set up a quality educational system that encourages analytical thinking instead of rote learning. This is the only feasible way to win the war against extremism.

This is also not a war that any general will be able to claim he won by employing superior military strategy. This is a war of our existence that can only be won by visiting and reshaping the minds of all the poor that live below the poverty line — and they are increasing in numbers by every passing day.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 12th, 2010.

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