The calamity we call life

At this point, I am reading the morning paper for mere laughs. I think the politicians and the bureaucrats themselves don’t believe the things they say. It is hysterical. An example (I will paraphrase it to avoid a potential law suit), person A paid a surprise visit to person B — both office bearers — where the latter assured the former that the refuse of the city will be cleaned up in 7 days, launching a cleaning drive across the metropolitan.

Now, anyone who has lived in this city long enough knows this city hasn’t been cleaned up since after Musharraf decided to hang his gloves. Make what you want of that.

As I was saying earlier, read the paper every morning. It will help you get off to a wonderful start for the day. The journalists at this point might have had enough too. Those hard-working individuals are just trying to get bread on their table but what else can they do?

And don’t even get me started on the bureaucracy and its workings. Unpopular opinion but let’s minimise the size of our bureaucracy. They have their hands tied anyway so why spend a huge chunk of the country’s budget towards them?

Here’s the thing, let’s shrink the size of the bureaucracy by 60% and see if that makes any difference to the functioning of the state. Either positive or negative. As Dave Mustaine of Megadeth puts it “secret bureaucracy is just a lie. A devil’s henchman in a suit and tie”. Apt words coming from a man who writes music for a living.

Each morning, I read a beautiful passage authored either by Franz Kafka or some lucidity penned by Richard Dawkins. Once the world seems a little too stormy and turbulent for my own liking, I jump to skimming through our local newspapers and it always cheers me up. Tragedy has its own charm, of course.

But then, happiness suddenly flows when the weather channel says it’s going to rain next week. Elated, I decide it’s going to be less melancholic. And this elation was reinforced by a news piece which said “Country X to ensure free flow of its drainage system to ensure water doesn’t accumulate on the streets”. And just like that, I smiled and went about my business.

Rain has been falling in Karachi since Karachi came into being and each time it rains, somethings, like taxes, are inevitable. Clogged drainages, horrible water accumulation, urban flooding, no electricity, no Wi-Fi and people getting electrocuted. And this happens each year. And each year, we are told that a plan has been devised to ensure none of this happens again. And yet, all of this happens again and even more.

Country X also has various roads dug up where the state has installed new state of the art water drains. But I am optimistic. Once they complete the installation, they’ll dig the roads right back up because country X’s natural gas supplier will come out of its slumber thinking it probably forgot to put the gas pipelines in.

To be fair, I am probably being a little too cynical. Things take time to get improve and get better. It’s been only 75 years, maybe 75 more and we’ll rid ourselves of slow drivers who carry a profound passion of driving in the fast lane and those who honk as soon as the traffic light turns green. We’ll also boycott the perpetrators and their products.

We’ll wait. Speaking of boycott, let me throw my MacBook out of the window.