Cloud Cuckooland

Pakistan has become a Cloud Cuckooland where reason and rational are termed conspiracy, responded through rage.

If this is not Cloud Cuckooland what is it?

As if the car that ran on water and which was touted as a great technological breakthrough, not only by our all-knowing and arrogant TV anchors, but also by our leading bum makers was not enough, the vice chancellor of Pakistan’s best-known university has lent his sagacious voice to the conspiracy theory that the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad on the night between May 1^st/2^nd was a fraud enacted by the Americans.

Inter alia: ‘Pakistan’s intelligence agencies exhumed the body of Osama Bin Laden and handed it over to the United States (US) in 2006 after conducting DNA test while the recent Abbottabad incident had been fabricated to pressurise and defame Pakistan’. The VC said this while addressing a ‘special seminar organised by PU Academic Staff Association (PUASA) on “9/11 and World War III”’.

So then, everybody and Charlie’s Aunt are wrong: including our ‘intelligence agencies’; the brass hats who are even today attempting to wipe the egg off their faces; Osama’s wives and children who saw him being killed; the Abbottabad Commission which has suddenly got tongue-tied as the extent of the shemozzle becomes apparent; the commentators; the various hospitals where his latest wife was bearing him four children while in hiding in Pakistan including two in the government hospital in Abbottabad, post-2006. How Osama begot these children after he had died in 2006 according to the professor, only he can tell us.

So, everyone is wrong and Professor Mujahid Kamran is right. In which case of course, Dr Shakil Afridi was wrongly apprehended and sentenced actually for working for the Americans in helping trace Bin Laden, but in fact under charges that had nothing to do with Osama’s eventual unearthing; our brass hats were wrong in venting their fury on the Americans for carrying out the raid because they had already handed his body to them in 2006; Hussain Haqqani was wrongly implicated in a case of possible treason: no finding Osama; no red faces in GHQ; no danger of a coup; no Memo to Mike Mullen; no ‘Mammogate’.

Professor Kamran is a serious academic and obviously has information no one else has: I would urge him to let the nation in on what he knows about Osama’s body’s handover to the Americans in 2006 by our ‘intelligence agencies’ and put history right. He will have done a great service to Pakistan and its hurt pride and ‘violated’ sovereignty. All is well that ends well. Thank you Professor.

Staying on message about this being Cloud Cuckooland, we now come to the not-so-curious case of Agha Waqar who belongs to Khairpur in Sindh and became an instant media celebrity on our leading channels, pumped up by support from the senior and junior fathers of our bum, Drs AQ Khan and Samar Mubarakmand. No matter what sense Drs Pervez Hoodbhoy and Attaur Rehman tried to talk, they were drowned out in a cacophony orchestrated by the Ghairat Brigades shouting out loud about how an eminent Pakistani scientist (yes, Master Agha Waqar, none other) was being denied recognition by the cabal of anti-Pakistan countries/agencies: America/Israel/India; CIA/Mossad/RAW, because he had exploded all the myths put forward by Jew and Christian scientists.

Let me quote from Pervez Hoodbhoy’s article “The water car fraud” that appeared on these pages on August 2^nd, 2012: “So, what is the problem? It’s that the laws of physics, in particular a fundamental scientific principle known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, impose inviolable constraints. Every machine constructed anywhere uses the Second Law. This is something that I learned in my first year as a student at MIT and have taught for 40 years. No serious scientist would dream of challenging the Second Law. Agha Waqar Ahmad’s ‘water kit’, if one believes science to be right, simply cannot work. What the inventor, the ministers, the anchors and scientists claim on TV is wrong.”

On September 4, 2012, exactly two days after Dr Hoodbhoy’s seminal article, it was reported by an English language daily that Waqar was a crook and a bank robber to boot who was in the Sindh police service since many years but had not ever reported for the various duties he had been deputed for. And that he had been arrested and charged with armed robbery and possession of illegal and unlicensed arms. Curiously, we have heard nothing further about this crook and apparent criminal, his ardent supporters on the TV channels quiet as hibernating dormice.

I suppose flying the banner of the Citadel of Islam whilst proclaiming the crook’s great discovery, they are dumbstruck just as they were when the Americans flew into Abbottabad and took out the most wanted man in the world. It is cruel, I know, but one had the most fun seeing them sputter with impotent rage at those they were used to praising to the skies. Still staying on subject that this is Cloud Cuckooland, why does every third-rate crook and imbecile who dares to blaspheme our Holy Prophet (pbuh) rile us up so much that we set fire to our own country? That Nakoula fellow who, too, is a crook and former jailbird, strung together a disgusting, filthy, scrappy film, and we are killing our own selves? As far as I am concerned it has only made my love for my Prophet (pbuh) that much stronger; but I would not force someone to close down his business to protest as happened in Hyderabad, and then have a case of blasphemy registered against him.

The saddest, most absurd, almost terrifying part is that the police at the highest level say there is no case of blasphemy against the man but that it was nonetheless registered against him because the crowd ‘forced’ the police to do so. Where are we headed friends? Did anyone stop to ask if the man was waiting for a new shipment of perishable goods? Did anyone bother to ask if he was going to soon shutter his shop and go home to tend to his sick mother? Where are we headed, for God’s sake?

We are dead in the water.

Yes we are: more people who wrote comments on the report about Waqar being a crook believed it was all a conspiracy to malign him.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 21^st, 2012.