Blow your trumpets, Gabriel

Amongst the chaos that has transpired since the last time I wrote, I considered it necessary to highlight some of the most ironic yet unfortunate news headlines. If you carry strong political opinions, look away. Or don't. Morality, just like values and principles, is subjective.

Starting off, we've all heard of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit being hosted by Pakistan in Islamabad. The idea behind the summit has been to encourage, inter alia, economic ties as well as to facilitate coordination between a number of countries.

This is where the story becomes a little unsettling. While the summit was being hosted, all businesses and schools remained closed in the capital. Try reading that with a straight face.

In order to facilitate a meeting wherein economic activity was being encouraged, the city's businesses remained closed 'for security purposes'.

How does any reasonable man make sense of that? I am no bright bulb but even I had trouble coming to terms with that.

In other news, a sharp-minded, astute politician in Karachi has identified certain roads, which he believes, should be cleared of encroachment. Have we heard this story somewhere? Remember the anti-encroachment drive led by a master of the law and constitution?

Razing structures and going as far as clearing the Empress Market? It's the same flavour of ice cream being sold in a different packaging. Nothing will change. To clear roads of encroachers, you need to facilitate them elsewhere.

We lack the infrastructure to facilitate our small retailers and small businesses. You'll clear the encroachment today; they'll be back here tomorrow. They don't own 500 acres of land. These are hardworking people who actually work for a living. Try working for a living sometime, it has its own thrill.

Also, remember how everyone, blinded by their unguided and unfounded nationalism, began contributing to the Diamer-Bhasha funds? Well, sorry to break it to you my patriotic men and women of the country, the funds, equaling around 20 billion rupees, have been transferred to the public exchequer. Only God knows what will happen to that money now. My guess is as good as yours. Will the dam be built? I'd rather not say. Education would've provoked our people into thinking and making informed decisions before they started contributing blindly.

Speaking of education, 94 public schools in Karachi, Hyderabad, Thatta and Sujawal have been placed under the supervision of 37 MPAs of the province to oversee their smooth functioning. Interestingly, the minister has termed this move as a 'serious effort towards education'. Again, I wouldn't want to say something that will land me in trouble but what I will say is, really? Is this the best they could've done? The state of education in the province has been in a shambles since as long as I can remember and they think placing these schools, which may already be ghost schools for all we know, will make things better? And to add to it, they're terming this move as a 'serious effort towards education'? So, you're saying, all the efforts towards education since the past decades have not been serious enough? What have we come to!

I am not being cynical but the trajectory that we're on will lead us nowhere. We've been stagnant since we started and with these attitudes and with such men leading us, we're better off leading ourselves. There is no progress, we still don't believe in research, our internet isn't free, we continue to suffer from glaring human rights violations (don't even get me started on that) and our economic condition has gotten bad to worse. We're a country that is currently living on loans and aid, while boycotting brands of those we take aid from. Maybe hypocrisy continues to be our biggest enemy after incompetence.

Talking of incompetence, has anyone been to the wax museum lately? I heard it's housed in a fancy building in the capital where men in suits take a stab at destroying our country every day.