250 million unpeople

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Sometimes I feel like donating money for buying a large sign, which should be displayed at every international port of entry into Pakistan. It will read "We Welcome You To the Land of 250 Million Unpeople And Counting". George Orwell's unpeople might be in a better position than the citizens of today's Pakistan. If they are drowned after some migrant carrying boat capsizes, nobody cares, least of all the country's rulers. If they disappear maybe because the earth swallowed them, the fellow citizens have become mentally numb to it now. Their lives and their passports are in a tight race in winning the worthlessness competition. One media personality very wisely said that it seems as though happiness is not going to be the fate of this nation anymore. The biggest happiness we as a nation experience is when we hear the news that the IMF will finally give us more loans, which in reality means that every citizen will be under ever more debt from a global control hawk, whose cash might be limited but whose choking and arm-twisting powers are not.

A man committed self-immolation on the premises of the Lahore High Court. I wanted to research the facts before writing about it so I googled it. I was shocked by seeing how many self-immolations have been attempted by countless among the 250 million unpeople. Mohammad Asif Javed isn't the first one and surely wouldn't be the last one either. He survived the burns but he is just another citizen of this cursed nation who tried to change his life by ending it. Awaiting justice from a system that perhaps thinks that it is merely a title given to legal experts after they pass certain exams, the poor man finally gave up, doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze. People rushed to save his life but what they didn't realise was that living is hard for these people, not dying.

The poor lad must still be in a hospital somewhere coping with his injuries. When he rejoins the society, his hopelessness would be amplified not because he would now be a man with burn injuries but rather by the kind of response the justice system had for his little act. Instead of looking into the potential avenues of improvement in their own work, which is how any sane system would have reacted, the Lahore High Court Chief Justice asked how the gasoline made its way onto the premises of the court.

The man attempted to end his life. However, the Justice with a capital 'J' did not venture into asking how to address the other word with the same spelling except with a small 'J'. A normal human being would ask why someone would try to end their life and in such a manner instead of asking how they smuggled the tools for it to their office premises.

It just reminded me of interesting memes I came across once. It was about a honeybee. The meme said that while we humans may or may not enjoy consuming honey but that we should know that a honeybee gave its life in the making of that spoonful honey we consumed in an instant. To us it is just a spoon of honey, but to the honeybee, it is its life's work. Perhaps that analogy isn't very well suited because Pakistani lives, especially the lives of the poor, are not even equal to that of a honeybee's life. A honeybee can at least make a lot of noise, a luxury not afforded to the 250 million unpeople.

And the 250 million people who do not matter should not get upset over the cricket debacle because here is the thing: sports is a reflection of how happy and healthy a society is. Let me repeat – happy and healthy. Can you use those two words in the same sentence with the word Pakistan?