Ban clothes also

LAHORE: I congratulate the government and Interior Minister Rehman Malik on successfully ensuring a peaceful and incident-free Eid for Pakistanis by shutting down mobile telephone services in four major cities. I think they should take this experiment a step further and consider the following humble suggestions for the future.

1) Ban all clothing. No clothes, no hidden suicide vests, no blasts. This will promote equality amongst the masses as the rich will no longer be able to flaunt their fancy threads and the poor will be saved the public display of their tatters.

2) Ban all watches and clocks so they cannot be used in making time bombs. In any case, it isn’t as if our nation will miss much in way of punctuality.

3) Ban all vehicles. This will create a logistical nightmare for the terrorists and even if they succeed in their nefarious designs, getaway will be impossible.

4) Ban television, movies, computer games and the internet. After all, aren’t these where the terrorists get their ideas and plans from?

5) Increase loadshedding of electricity, water and gas by at least four to five times. Chances are that terrorists will get so frustrated, the will make mistakes that will either get them caught or blown to kingdom come. Moreover, due to lack of electricity, the terrorists will not be able to charge their mobile telephones so there won’t be any need to shut down mobile services in the future.

I hope that the government will consider these suggestions and will publicly appreciate me like they appreciated the water-kit car engineer. (Where did he disappear off to, by the way?)

Adeel Ahmed

 Published in The Express Tribune, August 23^rd, 2012.