Boom boom bang bang

There are better ways of conducting population control. The strategic use of a prophylactic, for example. Just taking a moment to snap on a rubber sheath can save us all a great deal of trouble. As would increased investment in television entertainment. Maybe if we had something better to distract us than a parade of desperate desperados trying to woo a middle-aged actress, we might take a break from the incessant birthing. A quality sitcom called “How I Met your Maulvi” perhaps, or a new reality TV show in which all the talk show hosts are forced to watch reruns of their own self-important, narcissistic programming with their eyeballs taped open. It’ll be difficult to get in the mood for passionate love making after a few episodes of that. Even something as simple as constant electricity would greatly limit the population growth. In the dark, we can all fool ourselves into thinking we look great and our partners are famous celebrities. Try that with the unflinching honesty of light. Once you look down at the roiling and rolling expanse of quivering fat that defines most of our bodies and then look up at who your parents forced you to marry when you were too young and desperate to protest, maybe a coherent argument for putting off that eleventh child will urgently reveal itself. Instead, bored, rushed and in the dark, we collapse against each other like a nation of confused dominoes and nine months later the population graph takes another sharp upwards swerve. The pressure to deal with the problem of population then falls on the exhausted and knotted shoulders of our beleaguered politicians. Is it a wonder then that their only solution is to kill all of us?

It is entirely too coincidental that the latest surge in murderous violence erupted around the same time that a UN study showed Pakistan well on its way to becoming the fifth most populous country in the world, adding an impressive 3.6 million people on an annual basis. Faced with statistics like these, the politicians have taken it upon themselves to try to balance the scales by killing around the same amount each year. It is a brave decision, made all the more impressive with their attempts at disguising such selflessness by pretending to hate one another. As the PPP, the MQM and the ANP re-enact scenes from a Quentin Tarantino film by pointing guns at each other at the same time and then all pulling the trigger together so that the resultant explosion of blood, gun powder and brain matter drenches all in their vicinity, we should applaud their commitment to performance. After all, who can actually believe that this much murder can be committed over something as transient as power. Sure they say this is because the sitting government wants to limit the authority of one of the local parties that is in a turf war with an ethnic party so that they can each guarantee greater representation and governance. However, that farce of a cover story ran its course ages ago and to keep repeating it now is like being stuck watching a game of dumb charades long after everyone guessed the name of the movie. Nor can it be the long suspected reason of each wanting greater access to the financial resources of the city of Karachi. After all, they have stolen so much over the years that at this point even their immense appetites have to be glutted. Otherwise, we have to consider their greed and propensity for evil as limitless as a black hole that can swallow entire galaxies and that’s just too incredible to contemplate. No, the only truth can be that they are killing us to save us from ourselves. So everyone please stop procreating. Give our exhausted murderers a break. If you find it too difficult, just think of their faces. Nothing kills the mood as effectively.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 14^th, 2011.