Death wish

This ‘land of the pure’ appears to have a death wish, it is pertinent to suspect that very few nationals honestly care

This ‘land of the pure’ appears to have a death wish and it is pertinent to suspect that, just possibly, this has always been the case as, correct me if I’m wrong and I know you will, very few nationals honestly care for it above passing displays of patriotic fervour every now and then. Sure, they care for what they can get out of it but not for the cohesive whole it could have, maybe still could be. Perpetually harking back to Quaid-i-Azam’s vision does nothing but further sour the milk of possible progress as the great man’s dream has long since turned into a nightmare by the very people he dreamed it for.

Peace, prosperity, equality irrespective of colour or creed, never got past the starting gate and never will unless the people, not the current crop of ‘rulers’, get off their collective butts and do something about it. All the recent talk about revolution has, like always, been carelessly pushed on to an invisible back burner to simmer until, as always, it eventually evaporates into the nothingness it always was. Yes…change is urgently required.

Who cares if people are homeless and hungry as long as it isn’t themselves? Who cares if half the city is without power as long as it isn’t their half and they have generators on hand if it happens? Who cares if millions of taps run dry as long as they have access to water and who cares that millions of children remain uneducated as this state of affairs ensures the cheap labour of tomorrow? The answer to these questions and many more of a similar nature is, quite simply, very, very few if anyone at all and even they do not care enough to alter the status quo.

For a country to pull itself out of the miasma we so complacently wallow in takes two basic things: education and guts. The educated elite, however, much prefer the relative ease of business to the exhausting challenge of honest, above board politics, thus leaving the field clear for people of questionable intelligence and exceedingly sticky fingers to milk what remains of the country dry. If, this is a very big ‘if’ indeed, Pakistan is to have even an outside chance of regaining its position as a viable state then the educated among us need to remove their heads from the proverbial sand, rattle their brains into action and their claimed intelligence into first gear and politicise themselves 100 per cent in the right, above board and transparently honest direction. These are, like it or not and they probably don’t, the only ‘class’, a word, unfortunately, which cannot be avoided, who can, at this crucial juncture, stem the terminal rot that has plagued the country since the day of its inception. Do they, however, have the guts?

Published in The Express Tribune, November 9^th, 2010.