A totally senseless killing

I can't see a united front against this menace. Pakistanis are not the Viet Minh, Nawaz Sharif is not Ho Chi Minh

One picture is worth 10,000 words. So goes an old Chinese saying. This is also true of cartoons which I invariably look at before turning to the daily chronicle of fresh disasters. The drawing which appeared in The Express Tribune two days ago by Sabir Nazar, after the slaying of members of the Ismaili community in a bus, was a telling commentary on the way the czars of the Islamic republic express grief when disaster strikes. In case you missed it… a finger is pressing a key on a laptop and the terse message that appears on the screen is, “We condemn attack on the Ismaili community”. The finger might have belonged to the prime minister or the minister of defence or the bloke in the computer room who is in charge of ‘Programmed Messages for All Occasions’, and had just been given the nodding wink. What makes the event even more sordid is that three terrorist groups have competed for responsibility for the massacre, as if there is some kind of virtue in achieving notoriety by slaughtering harmless men, women and children. Jundullah, the splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, the Islamic State and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan made a bid for glory. The response to the highly organised massacre — which horrified the citizens of Karachi — evoked the same kind of official reaction: “Terrorism will be crushed. The nation must unite against terrorism.” And from a different quarter: “RAW is behind this. The Mossad is behind this, RAW and the Mossad, working in tandem, are behind this.” Right. The army chief is conducting the inquiry and one can never doubt his sincerity or determination to stamp out the menace. But… terrorist attacks are continuing and will continue and nobody really knows what to do about them. I cannot see a united front forming against this menace. Pakistanis are not the Viet Minh. And Nawaz Sharif is not Ho Chi Minh. There are too many fifth columnists operating against the national interest. We are no longer sure if we can trust our western neighbour.



It is bad enough living in a city where there is a desperate shortage of water and nobody appears to be doing anything about it. We are all familiar with the tussle going on between the blokes who generate electricity and the blokes who supply water. It involves a simple matter of non-payment of dues. Of course if the angry citizen of this city were to have his way he would lock the two CEOs and the chief minister in a closed room without a window or a fan and with an empty water jug and hide the key until the issue was amicably resolved. It’s also bad enough when one can’t get anything done in official circles without paying a bribe.

And the funny thing is, when people pay for an internet connection, there is no guarantee that the link is going to work, and when it does, the service is so slow that by the time the Google page flashes on the screen, K-Electric invariably decides the time has come to do some maintenance work in one’s area — which means, of course, that I will have to wait at least six hours before I can listen to my collection of Fados and Zarzuellas. If this is not enough, rumours are circulating that Islamabad is toying with the idea of tapping our phones and peeping into our emails. If you’ve nothing to hide and you are not breaking the law you have nothing to worry about. Or have you?

Published in The Express Tribune, May 17^th, 2015.

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